At War: South Africa Assails Libya Over Photographer's Death

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First: The Inner Lives of Wartime Photographers

 

Covering conflict is perilous for anyone — reporters, local stringers, the drivers and interpreters we depend on — but photographers are more exposed, in at least two senses of the word. They need a sustained line of sight to frame their photographs; a reliable source is never enough. And they cannot avert their eyes; they have to let the images in, no matter how searing or disturbing. Robert Capa’s famous advice to younger photographers — “Get closer” — translates in combat to “get more vulnerable,” both literally and emotionally.

Back in 2000, Joao and Greg Marinovich, a shooter who was my partner and guide on journalistic adventures in South Africa, published a book called “The Bang-Bang Club,” about four photographer friends who worked together during the bloody death rattle of apartheid. By the time Greg and Joao wrote their account, they were the only survivors. Kevin Carter, a charismatic, talented, addled mess of a man, had run a garden hose from his exhaust pipe into his car and, while smoking a hypnotic mix of methaqualone and marijuana, composed a suicide note. That same year, 1994, Ken Oosterbroek, the grown-up of the quartet, was shot dead in a crossfire in Thokoza township. Greg, who was standing nearby that day, took a bullet to the chest but eventually recovered. After chasing wars around the globe for another five years and being wounded three more times, Greg retired from combat work to write and do less hazardous photography and video documentaries. And that left only Joao, wedded to the life and seemingly invulnerable.

When I called on Joao at Walter Reed Army Medical Center last week — where he is getting accustomed to his new robo-legs and fighting off waves of infection — Greg was also visiting. Most afternoons, Joao straps on his prostheses and circles the physical-therapy room for an hour and a half, clinging to a walker. He’s months from being able to walk on his own, and until then he’s confined to a bed or a wheelchair, attached to a colostomy bag and a stream of antibiotics. His attitude is amazingly resilient. (The first time I visited Walter Reed, I remarked that he didn’t seem to be any older. “No,” he replied, “but I’m a bit shorter.”) Still, the serial operations and infections have made him more somber. As medics came and went tending to Joao’s gauges and nozzles, we spent a few hours discussing the various predicaments of their field, beginning with the obvious mystery: Why do they do this crazy work?

They do it for the most mundane of reasons (to feed their families) and the most idealistic (to make the world pay attention) and the most visceral (it is exhilarating; it is fun) and the somewhat existential.

“It becomes your identity in so many ways,” Joao said. “This is my identity. This is all I’m known for. Nobody sends me out to go shoot beautiful pictures for travel articles, you know?”

Greg, while conceding there is much about the life he misses, implored his best friend to give it up. But Joao hopes to go back to it as soon as he is firmly on his high-tech feet.

“I wish I was in Libya right now,” he declared at one point.

“If this hadn’t happened, or if you were in a position physically, you would go back?” Greg asked.

“If I was in a position to, yeah. Why not?”

“Why not? You’re asking me? I don’t know, what about your family, Joao?”

Joao, who has an endlessly patient wife and two young children, paused for a time.

“The families are very brave,” he concluded.

Perhaps because they are the sharp end of our journalistic spear, combat photographers have long been subjected to mythologizing. The most common myths are that combat photographers are reckless of spirit, or why else would they take such chances, and hard-shelled of heart, or how else could they bear it? “The Bang-Bang Club” was just made into a movie (which played at the Tribeca Film Festival to disappointing reviews), and one of its failings is that it falls for both of these superficialities. It shows the moments of cowboy exuberance — Greg, played by Ryan Phillippe, sprinting across a sniper alley to fetch Cokes for his thirsty comrades — but ignores the exquisite caution, the calculation of every footfall, the patient diplomacy that is more the rule in conflict coverage.

Another scene has Greg, at the site of a massacre, carefully adjusting the lighting so he can photograph a dead child while his girlfriend breaks down in horror.

“Maybe you have to be like that to do what you do,” she tells him afterward.

“Be like what?” the movie version of Greg asks.

“I think you have to forget that those are real people.”

Bill Keller is executive editor of The New York Times.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An essay this weekend on Page 11, about photographers who cover wars, refers imprecisely to Chris Hondros, a photographer who was killed last month while covering Libya’s rebel militia. He was a senior staff photographer for the Getty Images agency, not a freelancer. The essay also misstates the year that Joao Silva was on assignment for The New York Times in Najaf, Iraq. It was 2004, not 2006.

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A Group of Conflict Photographers Runs Out of Luck

It was the photographer Joao Silva, lying in a hospital bed in Washington, his legs blown off in Afghanistan, who confirmed that my close friend was dead.

A Libyan rebel, photographed by Chris Hondros.

A villager in Afghanistan carrying a child wounded in an American attack, photographed by Tim Hetherington.

“I’ve got news for you, brother, and it’s not good,” he said simply, quietly. Tim?Hetherington, a British photographer and co-director of the Afghanistan war documentary “Restrepo,” was killed on Wednesday in Misurata, Libya, when he and others came under fire. Killed with him was Chris Hondros, another good friend and photographer.

They were part of an intimate, informal group of photojournalists who routinely cover war. We are mostly Europeans and Americans, primarily based in New York or Paris, typically working for a handful of magazines and newspapers or photo agencies. The group is small enough — fewer than 100 people — that we refer to each other in conversation by first names only: Yuri, Carolyn, Gary, Spencer, Franco. Of course there are many other such photographers, separated from our group by language or geography.

Though it was unspoken among us, I often mused silently on our group’s extraordinary luck. We covered nearly a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan without losing a single member (though Martin Adler, a Swedish photographer and cameraman who sometimes worked with members of our group, was killed in Somalia in 2006 when a gunman stepped out of a crowd and shot him). Somehow we were spared.

We are not thrill seekers. Each photographer judges the risks necessary to help bring news of these conflicts to the international public.

Six months ago, our group’s luck ran out. First, a land mine destroyed Joao’s legs while he was on patrol with American soldiers in Afghanistan. Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario were held captive with two other journalists and brutalized last month in Libya. And Wednesday morning in Misurata, the incoming fire claimed the lives of Tim and Chris.

Our group is devastated. But talking with other photographers, I’m struck that I have not heard anyone say, “They should not have gone.”

Tim and Chris had experienced hundreds of days of combat; they knew the risks as well as anyone. Yet their commitment was absolute. They endangered themselves so that others might see what was happening in a small port city on the coast of North Africa, a city few had heard of until they showed it to us, until it claimed their lives.