Tim Hetherington

EARLY yesterday morning I tried calling my photojournalist friend and colleague Patrick Barth, with whom I have worked for many years covering the world’s war zones.

I needed to talk to someone who would understand, needed to share the sense of loss that came with the terrible news that our friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington, along with American photographer Chris Hondros, had been killed in the Libyan city of Misrata.

I sensed the news would hit Patrick hard, given that he had known Tim since their student days studying photography in Cardiff and then during a year spent training as cameramen and film makers in the United States.

On holiday in the remote Galician mountains of Spain with his wife and two children, my telephone call was the first Patrick had heard of Tim’s fate.

“It makes you wonder whether it’s all worth it,” he pondered after a long pause. His wife he said had been glad he hadn’t gone on assignment to Libya. Maybe Tim’s death is where we should draw the line, he suggested. No story is worth a reporter’s life, I’ve often heard colleagues in war zones say. It’s often struck me as odd how that remark almost always comes at the end of a long day during which, ironically, they have done just that – put their lives on the line for the words and pictures of a story.

Much as it may surprise people, most war correspondents are very cautious, calculating individuals. Tim Hetherington was like that. In my encounters with him, never once did I perceive the slightest hint of someone who was gung-ho.

Having read English literature at Oxford, he was as articulate and eloquent with words as he was with photographic stills and moving images. An artist or poet rather than a journalist you might say.

Tim was also stunningly brave and resourceful, getting to places, people and the heart of a story in a way most of his peers shuddered at the thought of.

Who else would think of living for weeks in the West African rainforests with Liberian rebels as they moved to overthrow the regime there. Who else but Tim Hetherington, would return time and again over the course of an entire year to document the lives of a single unit of ordinary American soldiers in one of Afghanistan’s most volatile hotspots, the Korengal Valley. The documentary film, Restrepo, that emerged from that remarkable effort not only won Hetherington an Oscar nomination, it gave a unique insight into the lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. That was his gift. Never have I seen a film that better brings home the fear, mundanity and surrealism of life on the frontline.

The last time I spoke with Tim Hetherington was a few weeks ago in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

Before that, our paths crossed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley when I spent some weeks with a US Army air ambulance unit flying wounded out from the frontlines around Restrepo and the other firebases there.

Yesterday’s telephone call with Patrick Barth about Tim’s death was the second time in the last six months that we have shared bad news about a friend and colleague.

Last October Joao Silva, another war photographer with whom we had worked, lost both legs in a landmine explosion in Afghanistan.

“What a sad time, and a hellish price to pay,” was how Patrick summed it up. How sad indeed.