Humanity on the Front Line: Tim Hetherington
A look at the extraordinary life of Tim Hetherington, and the Imperial War Museum's recent exhibition 'Storyteller'
The news today frequently depicts graphic images of global atrocities, to the extent that we’ve become almost desensitised. As journalist George Alagiah puts it, “The search for the shocking is like the craving for a drug: you require heavier and more frequent doses the longer you're at it. Pictures that stun the editors one day are written off as the same old stuff the next.” In the pursuit of making an impact, the norm is to present the most shocking scenes possible.
Tim Hetherington took the opposite approach. Yet his work had an extraordinary impact. He won the best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, World Press Photo of the Year, and was even nominated for an Academy Award.
So how did he manage to leave such a lasting impression on the people that viewed his work, while simultaneously not over dramatising his subjects? I visited the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) exhibition ‘Storyteller’ in London, to understand more about his life and work.
Tim’s approach is based on trust; building a relationship between himself and the subject to the extent that he is almost accepted as one of the tribe. Once trust has been built, Tim is able to reflect a more accurate, nuanced version of reality, often not depicted in more headline-grabbing imagery. Tim went further, got closer and stayed longer. The results were more authentic, covering ‘real people in real situations’, but his approach - operating on the front line of battlefields - carried a huge risk and Tim’s luck ran out in Libya in 2011 when he was fatally injured by shrapnel.
Tim sought out ambitious, bold assignments. In a self-inspired project titled ‘Healing Sport’, he set out to smash preconceptions about Africa and the way in which the continent is reported. He photographed former combatant fighters who formed a football team two years after the end of the Liberian Civil War. In documenting the project he was able to focus on the healing qualities of sport against a backdrop of young men and violence.
“The idea was of Trojan horses, ‘Can we talk about things that people are reluctant to talk about by disguising them in other vehicles?’ Healing Sport was about war… but it was disgusted as sport”. The Healing Sport theme took Tim to other countries and in new directions, documenting how sport can be used to heal and bring communities together, whether that’s a football team recovering from the war in Liberia, or a Kenyan taekwondo team built by a former convict.
The exhibition has been in the pipeline since 2017, when the Tim Hetherington Trust gifted Tim’s archive to the IWM in 2017. “Greg Brockett, the lead curator looking after the archive, interviewed many people who knew Tim and extracted as much information as he could,” explained Stephen Mayers, the Executive Director of the Tim Hetherington Trust. “At a certain point Greg stopped interviewing and withdrew to create a distance because he felt that the intimate involvement of friends and family might have a distorting influence on his work as a dispassionate historian, which is how he approached the exhibition.” It’s this attention to detail in creating such a visually striking and powerful exhibition, that it is rightly being described by The Evening Standard as "The most important exhibition you’ll see all year".
Taking in the photographs, audio recordings and videos, this showcase enables us to understand Tim and his quest to tell a very human story behind the headlines, rather than piggybacking on the more lucrative imagery so often sought by large news agencies. To achieve this meant spending time on-the-ground. He was reluctant to be dropped in to the next war-zone, flack jacket at the ready. He wanted to stay, often for months, to live alongside communities and capture the essence of people and places.
“You hear some photographers that will say that they never talk to people, that it's this objectivity thing. You know what, I’ve got to talk to them.”
In his self-shot documentary ‘Restrepo’, Tim lives with a US platoon in the centre of the Afghan war. It’s a nail-biting watch as the viewer is transported to the front line. It’s raw and gritty and unsurprisingly won him an Academy Awards nomination. “My work is all about building bridges between me and the audience.” he once said. He was in fact, very modest about his photography skills, but he prided himself on giving a voice to his subject and showing us their reality.
In ‘Sleeping Soldiers’, a series of photographs taken from a US outpost deep within Afghanistan, he captures the human side of war, and the vulnerability of young soldiers. These provide an antidote to the more stereotypical ‘bombs and blasts’ war photos. They would only be able to be captured by someone who was absolutely trusted by the soldiers.
There are other insights in the exhibition that reflect Tim’s personality and approach. His notebook is penned in incredibly neat italic, his storyboards are artistic, almost textbook, and there is a well thought-out and meticulous approach to his work behind-the-scenes, with colourful observations and detailed research. He was not gung-ho, but was seeking some structure and theme to his work. Despite Tim’s untimely death, his images remind us of the efforts he made to offer us a fresh and privileged perspective in photographing war.