Tim Hetherington was very obsessed with time. This was his issue with every photography assignment and the main topic of discussion: How much time did he have? He could never understand that a writer was allowed to deal with a subject for an hour, while the photographer had to shoot on the sidelines for 10 minutes here and there. When I dared to rush him, he would say, “Stop, stop.” He had important work to do. He absolutely refused to be rushed.
Tim and I were colleagues when we were at Big Issue magazine in the late 1990s. The editorial office was like a dysfunctional family: Everyone was fighting for their own corner and mostly learning on the job. For some of us it was home, but Tim was passing through to reach wilder places and greater victories. He joined rebel convoys in West Africa, billeted troops in Afghanistan, and recorded the first green shoots of the Arab Spring. The quartet won a World Press Photo award and received an Oscar nomination for the war documentary Restrepo, about the 15 months they spent with US writer Sebastian Junger in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. His approach while on duty was systematic and deliberate. He continued everything in life at full speed. It was as if he was running against his own internal stopwatch, subconsciously aware that he had to make the most of every moment.
The paintings are subtle and emphatic; finds unusual ways to slaughter
Now the Storyteller comes along and makes another change to the timeline, placing Hetherington in history. His photographs and films, diaries and cameras are featured in this bumper exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. Tim’s paintings tell us vivid stories about the men and women on the front lines. But indirectly, implicitly, they also tell us his story. The retrospective guides the visitor relentlessly through the Libyan civil war, from his early work in Liberia to Sierra Leone and Afghanistan to his final days in Misrata.
The stereotype of the war photographer is that of a thrill-seeking loose cannon, chattering away on the sidelines like the crazy Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. But Tim wasn’t like that. He was serious and idealistic, hard-working and principled. He came to conflict through humanitarian work, and this is evident in his paintings, which are more interested in military software than hardware, fascinated by the human cogs in the machine and the relationships between them. So he’s drawn to things that might otherwise be dismissed as minor details: the jaded young rebel with a grenade on the counter; the bullet-headed captain holding a small dog he adopted; Bored soldiers wrestling on the barracks floor. The illustrations in Storyteller are subtle and empathetic. Time and time again they find unconventional ways to go about the massacre.
“That’s why so many photographers were influenced by him,” says Greg Brockett, the exhibition’s curator. “If you talk to people in the industry, they all know his work and think he’s great. When you talk to the public, you see that they have never heard of him. We hope this will introduce him to a wider audience as a communicator, a translator; someone who looks at conflict in visually effective ways, but talks about it in ways they never expected.”
Typically we can say that Tim works at his own pace. At a time when most photojournalists were switching to digital (the early 2000s), he shot color negative film with an analog camera: 10 frames per roll. This forced him to think carefully about each composition, taking him out of the frenetic news cycle and leading him into long-term themed projects such as the sensual Sleeping Soldiers series, in which soldiers at rest are elegantly framed. Tim loved returning to revisit people and places. Best of all, he loved being immersed in a group dynamic. Settling in with Junger in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the duo condensed hundreds of hours of footage to make Restrepo, named after the platoon doctor killed early in the tour.
Today Tim was a typical example. The front line is his legacy. Photographer Stephen Mayes, chief executive of the Tim Hetherington Trust, has mixed feelings about this. “Tim has now reached the point of turning from memories to history,” says Mayes. “History will selectively view us as it wishes, and there is nothing we can do about it. But I think he would have been horrified to be represented as a war photographer. He didn’t define himself that way. The human characteristics he was interested in revealed themselves most strongly in times of conflict. But it wasn’t about war. It was deeper: It was the people.”
I speak to James Brabazon, a frontline journalist who worked with Tim in Liberia. Brabazon recalls his experiences in 2003, which included the Lurd rebels’ advance on the capital Monrovia. Bullets are flying. There are losses left and right. He says 80% of war reporting is logistics. It’s about staying hydrated, staying safe, moving between places, resting when possible. The risk after all this is that you’ll be too tired to pay attention to the story. Focusing on people. To remember why you’re there.
“Honestly,” he says, “I found having to take care of other people boring. I want to say, ‘Please, let me be alone in my hell.’ But Tim was always extremely caring. His curiosity and humanity continued despite everything; no matter how intense, no matter how traumatized. And the events he witnessed affected him deeply. He carried deep psychological damage for the rest of his life. But somehow he could come back and create beauty out of horror. “He could immediately sit down with someone and somehow capture the essence of humanity that exists outside of 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 April 20, 2011, while the team was filming in the besieged city of Misrata, the rebel army was bombed by Gaddafi’s government forces. His femoral artery was cut by a small piece of shrapnel. He bled to death in the minibus a few minutes away from the hospital.
“It’s difficult,” says Brabazon. “I spent years trying not to think about it. I wish I was there. I wish I were with him. Sebastian feels the same. “We are both operating under a strong delusion (or certainty, depending on our mood) that Tim would still be alive if we had been with him that day.”
Tim’s death still feels strange. This leaves the man fixed in time, forever 40 years old, as much a piece of history these days as pictures of the Arab Spring. It also encourages others to speak on his behalf. The unfinished Libyan work is strobe-lit, hyperreal and contains an element of performance. Tim had started taking pictures of photographers taking pictures. He seemed fascinated by the feedback loop of war, the way one image of conflict influences another. Brockett thinks that might be his next goal: a project focused on the battle scene. After all, there’s no way to know.
Tim’s best friends like to joke that the two words they fear most are “Tim would.” Tim would think this, Tim would do that. Mayes says this is ridiculous because no one has a clue. “Even Tim didn’t know. Tim didn’t know exactly who he was. He didn’t know where he was going. “I had known him for 15 years and he was all about this journey.”
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By 2011, Mayes thinks Tim had largely accomplished his agenda. “He had discovered the world. He had researched multimedia. It had recognition, an audience, and an Oscar nomination. The tragedy was that the sentence was cut off with a period at the end. He was about to start the next sentence. “No one knows what will happen.”
Just before his death, Tim shot a 19-minute documentary called Diary. It’s a beautiful piece of work: a free-form, abstract examination of 10 years of war reporting, crossing rain-washed African roads with bustling London streets, dropping us without introduction into the aftermath of a massacre in eastern Chad. The team came to record the remains: broken pottery, charred corn cobs, and a shadow in the shape of a charred human being laid out on the grass.
“Stop, stop,” he says to the African guide trying to direct him, and our photographer from the past stands there like a séance. Brave and clever, domineering and infuriating. That weird bastard kept asking for more time. There were always so many things he wanted to do.