by Tim Hetherington used to be so hung up on time. This was his question for every photographic assignment, his main bone of contention: how much time did he have? He could not understand why a writer was allowed a full hour with content and the photographer to shoot around the edges, grabbing 10 minutes here and there. “Keep going, keep going,” he would say, whenever I wanted to hurry him along. He had important work to do. He absolutely refused to be rushed.
Tim and I were colleagues back in the late 1990s when we were both at the Big Issue magazine. The editorial office was like a dysfunctional family: everyone fighting in their corner and mostly learning on the job. For some of us, it was home, but Tim was just passing through, bound for wilder and more glorious places. He joined rebel convoys in west Africa, formed alongside GIs in Afghanistan and accounted for 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 US author Sebastian Junger, drawing on his 15 months embedded in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. When assigned, his approach was methodical and deliberate. In life, he went on things at full speed. It was as if he was running to his own internal stopwatch, subconsciously knowing that he was going to take advantage of every moment.
The pictures are nuanced and empathetic, finding unconventional ways through the deadness
Now Storyteller comes to add another twist to the timeline by placing Hetherington in history. This bumper exhibition, at the Imperial War Museum in London, features his photographs and films, journals and cameras. Tim’s pictures tell us vivid stories of men and women on the front line. But indirectly, implicitly, they also tell us their story. The retrospective guides the visitor relentlessly, step by step, from his early work in Liberia, to Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, all the way up to his final days in Misrata, covering the Libyan civil war.
The stereotype of the war photographer is a smear candidate, a loose gun, crying on the sidelines like a demented Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. But Tim was not like that. He was serious and idealistic, diligent and principled. He came to conflict through humanitarian work and shows this in his paintings, which are more interested in military software than in hardware, which is interested in the human wars in the machine and the relationships between them. So he draws on things that might otherwise be dismissed as details: the young rebel knocked with his hand grenade on the counter; the bullet-headed captain who kills a small dog he has adopted; the bored soldiers wrestling on the barracks floor. The pictures in the Storytelling are nuanced and empathic. Again and again, they find unconventional ways through the pile.
“That’s why so many photographers have been influenced by it,” says show curator Greg Brockett. “If you talk to people in the industry, they all know his work and think it’s great. When you talk to the general public, they haven’t heard of it. So hopefully this will introduce him to a wider audience, as a communicator, as an interpreter – someone who looks at conflict in ways that are visually impactful but talks about it in ways that they would never expect.”
Usually, Tim worked at his own pace. At a time (the early 00s) when most photojournalists were transitioning to digital, he shot color negative film on an analog camera: 10 frames on each roll. This forced him to think carefully about each composition, lifted him out of the frantic news cycle and inspired him towards long-term themed projects such as his sensuous series Sleeping Soldiers, with its elegant frame of servants at rest. Tim loved going back around to visit people and places. Best of all, he liked to immerse himself within group dynamics. Embedded alongside Junger in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the pair consolidated hundreds of hours of footage to make Restrepo, named after the platoon medic who was killed early in the trip.
Today Tim is typing. The front line is his legacy. Photographer Stephen Mayes, executive director of the Tim Hetherington Trust, has mixed feelings about that. “Tim has now reached the point from memory to history,” says Mayes. “History will selectively look at us the way it wants and there’s nothing we can do about that. But I think he would be horrified to be represented as a war photographer. That’s not how he defined himself. It was the human qualities he was interested in that showed themselves most strongly in times of conflict. But his subject was not war. It was deeper: it was people.”
I speak to James Brabazon, the frontline journalist who worked with Tim in Liberia. Brabazon recalls their experience in 2003, covering the Lourdes rebel advance on the capital, Monrovia. Bullets flying. Casualties left and right. He says 80% of war reporting is logistics. It’s about staying hydrated, being safe, moving between locations, resting when you can. The risk, after all, is that you are too exhausted to pay attention to the situation. To focus on the person. Remember why you are even there.
“To be honest,” he says, “I’m attracted to it, because I’m interested in other people. I want to say, ‘Please, let me be alone in my hell.’ But Tim was always very busy. His curiosity and humanity lived through it all – no matter how hard it was, how traumatic it was. And they affected him greatly, the events he saw. It caused deep psychological damage for the rest of his life. But somehow, he could turn it around and create beauty out of horror. He could immediately sit down with someone and somehow capture the essence of humanity that existed outside the architecture of war.”
He didn’t know where he was going – I knew him for 15 years and he was all about the journey
On 20 April 2011, Tim was filming inside the besieged city of Misrata when Gaddafi’s government forces routed the rebel army. His femoral artery was cut by a small piece of shrapnel. He passed out in the van, a few minutes from the hospital.
“It’s hard,” says Brabazon. “I’ve spent years trying not to think about it. I wish I was there. I wish I was with him. Sebastian feels the same way. We both operate under the strong delusion – 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 set in time, forever 40 years old, as much a piece of history these days as his pictures of the Arab Spring. He also encourages others to speak up for him. Libya’s unfinished work is flash-lit, hyperreal and has a performance element. Tim started taking pictures of photographers taking pictures. He seemed to enjoy the feedback of warfare, the way one image of conflict affects another. Brockett thinks this might be his next direction: a project focused on the theater of war. Ultimately, there is no way of knowing.
Tim’s closest friends like to joke that the two words they fear the most are “Tim would be”. Tim thought this, Tim would do that. The point is that it’s ridiculous, says Mayes, because no one understands. “Tim didn’t even know. Tim didn’t quite know who it was. He didn’t know where he was going. I knew him for 15 years and he was all about the journey.”
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By 2011, according to Mayes, Tim had largely fulfilled his agenda. “He explored the world. He explored multimedia. He had recognition, an audience, an Oscar nomination. The tragedy was that it was cut off with a full stop at the end of the sentence. He was about to start the next sentence. No one knows what it would be.”
Just before his death, Tim put together a 19-minute documentary called Diary. It’s a fine piece of work: a free-form abstract exploration of 10 years of war reporting, a cross-section between the rain-washed roads of Africa and the bustling streets of London, letting us plunge 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 silhouette laid out on the grass.
“Keep going, but keep going,” he says to the African guide who tries to move him on – and he is, as the saying goes, our photographer from the past. Bold and brilliant, authoritative and exasperating. He was always demanding more time, the awkward bastard. There were always so many things he wanted to do.
