Tim Hetherington was always so concerned with time. This was his problem on every photography assignment, his main point of contention: how much time did he have? He could never understand why a writer was allowed to spend a full hour on a subject, while the photographer had to shoot around the edges, grabbing ten minutes here and there. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said whenever I dared to rush him. He had important work to do. He absolutely refused to be rushed.
Tim and I were colleagues in the late 1990s when we were both at Big Issue magazine. The editorial team was like a dysfunctional family: everyone fought for their corner and learned by doing. For some of us it was home, but Tim was just passing through, on his way to wilder places and greater glory. He joined rebel convoys in West Africa, stayed alongside GIs in Afghanistan and captured the first green shoots of the Arab Spring. He won a quartet of World Press Photo awards and earned an Oscar nomination for Restrepo, the war documentary he made with American author Sebastian Junger, based on their fifteen-month stay in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. During assignments he worked methodically and deliberately. In his life he started working at full speed. It was as if he was running to his own internal stopwatch, subconsciously aware that he had to make the most of every moment.
The photographs are nuanced and empathetic, finding unconventional routes through the carnage
Now Storyteller comes along to put a further twist on the timeline by stitching Hetherington into history. This enormous exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London shows his photographs and films, his diaries and cameras. Tim’s photos tell us vivid stories about men and women on the front lines. But indirectly, implicitly, they also tell us his story. The retrospective takes the visitor relentlessly, step by step, from his early work in Liberia, through Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, all the way to his final days in Misrata, where he reports on the Libyan civil war.
The stereotype of the war photographer is that of a sensation seeker, a loose cannon, chatting on the sidelines like a demented Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. But Tim wasn’t like that. He was serious and idealistic, diligent and principled. He came into conflict through humanitarian work and this is reflected in his photographs, which are more interested in military software than hardware, fascinated by the human cogs in the machine and the relationships between them. That’s why he’s drawn to what might otherwise be dismissed as minor details: the exhausted young rebel with his hand grenade on the counter; the stubborn captain cradling a small dog he adopted; the bored soldiers struggling on the barracks floor. The images in Storyteller are nuanced and empathetic. Time and again they find unconventional routes through the carnage.
“That’s why so many photographers were influenced by him,” says show curator Greg Brockett. “If you talk to people in the industry, they all know his work and love it. If you talk to the general public, they’ve never heard of him. So hopefully this introduces him to a wider audience, as a communicator, as an interpreter – someone who looks at conflict in a visually impactful way, but talks about it in ways they never expected.”
It is telling that Tim worked at his own pace. At a time (early 2000s) when most photojournalists were switching to digital, he shot color negative films with an analog camera: 10 frames on each roll. This forced him to think carefully about each composition, took him out of the hectic news cycle and stimulated him towards long-term thematic projects such as his sensual series Sleeping Soldiers, with its elegant framing of resting soldiers. Tim enjoyed circling back to revisit people and locations. Best of all, he enjoyed immersing himself in the group dynamics. Located next to Junger in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the pair condensed hundreds of hours of footage to create Restrepo, named after the platoon medic killed early in the tour.
Today Tim has been typecast. The front line is his legacy. Photographer Stephen Mayes, director of the Tim Hetherington Trust, has mixed feelings about this. “Tim has now reached the point where he has moved from memory to history,” says Mayes. “History will selectively view us as it wishes, and there is nothing we can do about that. But I think he would be shocked if he were introduced as a war photographer. That’s not how he defined himself. The human qualities he was interested in were most evident in times of conflict. But his subject was not war. It went deeper: they were people.”
I speak with James Brabazon, the frontline journalist who worked with Tim in Liberia. Brabazon recalls their experiences in 2003, when they covered the advance of the Lurd rebels on the capital Monrovia. Bullets fly. Victims left and right. He says 80% of war reporting is logistics. It’s about staying hydrated, staying safe, moving between locations, resting when you can. After all, the risk is that you are too exhausted to pay attention to the story. To focus on people. To remember why you are there in the first place.
“To be honest,” he says, “I hated having to be interested in other people. I want to say, ‘Please let me be alone in my hell.’ But Tim was always super involved. His curiosity and humanity remained despite everything – no matter how intense it had been, no matter how traumatized he was. And the events he witnessed affected him deeply. He carried deep psychological damage for the rest of his life. But somehow he was able to turn around and create beauty out of horror. He could immediately sit down with someone and capture the essence of humanity that somehow existed outside the architecture of war.
He didn’t know where he was going – I’d known him for fifteen years and he was all about the journey
On April 20, 2011, Tim was filming in the besieged city of Misrata when the rebel army was fired upon by Gaddafi’s government forces. His femoral artery was severed by a small piece of shrapnel. He bled to death in the van, a few minutes from the hospital.
“It’s difficult,” says Brabazon. ‘I tried not to think about it for years. I wish I had been there. I wish I had been with him. Sebastiaan feels the same. We both live under the strong illusion – or certainty, depending on our mood – that Tim would still be alive if we were with him that day.’
Tim’s death still feels strange. It leaves the man fixed in time, forever forty years old, and is today as much a piece of history as his photographs of the Arab Spring. It also encourages others to speak on his behalf. The unfinished Libyan work is flashy, hyper-real and contains a performance element. Tim had started taking pictures of photographers taking pictures. He seemed fascinated by the feedback loop of warfare, the way one view of a conflict influences another. Brockett thinks this may have been his next direction: a project focused on the battleground. Ultimately, there’s no way to know.
Tim’s best friends like to joke that their two most dreaded words are “Tim would.” Tim would have thought this, Tim would have done that. The thing is, it’s ridiculous, Mayes says, because no one has any idea about it. ‘Even Tim didn’t know. Tim didn’t quite know who he was. He didn’t know where he was going. I had known him for fifteen years and he was all for the trip.”
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By 2011, Mayes thinks, Tim had largely fulfilled his agenda. ‘He had explored the world. He had explored multimedia. He had recognition, an audience, an Oscar nomination. The tragedy was that it was broken off with a period at the end of a sentence. He was about to start the next sentence. No one knows what it would have been.”
Just before his death, Tim produced a 19-minute documentary called Diary. It’s a beautiful piece of work: a spare, abstract audit of a decade of war reporting, crossing the rain-soaked African roads and the busy streets of London, dropping us without preamble into the aftermath of a massacre in eastern Chad. Tim has come to document the remains: the broken pots, the burnt corn cobs, and the charred human-shaped shadow lying on the grass.
“Wait a minute, just hold on,” he says to the African guide who tries to move him along – and there he is, like a séance, our photographer from the past. Bold and brilliant, authoritative and irritating. He was constantly demanding more time, the clumsy bastard. There were always so many things he wanted to do.