Navigation

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington, 40, died yesterday during a mortar attack by forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi in Misrata, Libya. Peter N. Bouckaert, from Human Rights Watch, in Geneva, reported to Vanity Fair that “three other journalists were also hit … Getty photographer Chris Hondros [who was seriously wounded and later died]; photographer Guy Martin, of the Panos Agency, who is [still] in very serious condition; and a freelancer, Michael Brown, who is slightly wounded.”

Hetherington made the Sundance-winning documentary Restrepo, which my interview with him below covers. I seem to remember during our hour-long phone conversation that he was down-to-earth, a lovely guy, and very keen to tell me everything he had been doing to get Restrepo made. Also, I remember how excited he was about the technology of digital film capture as a tool to enable him to continue his work, and it was this enthusiasm which made talking to him so enjoyable.

As I speak of it now, I remember, for instance, that Hetherington first recorded footage that would eventually become Restrepo at too low resolution, and then had to go back home to pick up higher resolution cameras, learning the new technology on the hoof, as it were, in order to make the work.

Restrepo received an Oscar nomination and was generally well reviewed. Soldiering and the death of medic Juan Restrepo, who gave the film his name, was interpreted by Hetherington and co-creator Sebastian Junger though a familiar narrative of bravery, volunteerism, sacrifice, and witnessing. I’d have liked to see Hetherington step away from this normative photojournalistic role. It’s true that the realist mode of photojournalist film-making has benefits: you can pick out a tendency that might be used, provisionally, to orient an otherwise incoherent field of international photojournalistic practice. But for all its apparent diversity, much of today’s photography still conforms to four or five formats, or modes. The over-large photograph and the even larger projected image, moving from the billboard to the gallery, often treated digitally, blurring the line between cinema and photography.

Restrepo is placed at the margin between fact and fiction, and this is also true of photojournalism, whatever its claims to truth (Hetherington said that his film was ‘pure’ reality). The film’s structure is absolutely linear apart from the Juan Restrepo flashbacks: the soldiers get in the valley, they do the year, and then they leave. When a soldier dies later in the film, the body is anonymous and abused, signifying a reality of everyday subjection, and we are not allowed to see it – nor is Hetherington really able to film it and instead focuses on another soldier’s grief, thereby allegorising the death. Yes, questions of identity and difference are explored, but as is the case here they are not fully allowed into the format unless in the form of allegory. In this way, complicated realities of the present are reduced to myth. Juan Restrepo, killed on the first day of his tour, is a figure we see fleetingly, or else hear about through anecdote, and it is his company’s memory of him, if only in the film’s narrative logic, which most binds them. In the film sensation rules, a sort of perverse logic which thrives on violence and to some extent sex in the form of male machoism – the photojournalist as soldier. Roger Tooth, head of photography for the Guardian, said this in a recent article:

‘war remains the last frontier of raw reality. To the photojournalist, this has to be the ultimate attraction, even if it means facing the kind of dangers that normally only soldiers are exposed to.’

Only most people just half-believe the myth, while the other half half-believe in the power of photojournalism to describe the world non-judgementally. In fact you can say that we live entirely on a whole system of predictive mythologies that actually are all we have to give our lives any meaning. Or, as the poet W.H. Auden expressed it,

‘Our intellectual marines, Landing from little magazines, Capture a trend.’

Restrepo, like much of the media landscape, is saturated with violence or its threat. Any hint that characters are trying to establish a more meaningful psychological circuitry is completely overwhelmed by the perverse entertainment landscape of the film. Projected images wash over you in immersive experiences of cinematic delirium, in which representation and space, media and body are no longer felt to be distinct. Restrepo works to engage you in a new intensity of spectacle in photojournalism that has been made possible by the latest digitalisation in photography and technology, with affordable, high-resolution DSLR cameras that film as well as take photographs, but often in a way that acclimatises us to it ‘aesthetically’. As photography theorist David Campbell points out, with reference to an image of an RPG explosion by the Reuters photojournalist Goran Tomasevic,

‘pictures like these are what a British cabinet minister called “emotional optics” – visuals that prompt affective responses to international events.’

Likewise, with Restrepo you briefly enter into the world of these American soldiers in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, then you switch off and return to the business of making your supper. This disconnect between war’s brutal reality and everyday life is reflected in a recent BBC interview with Tomasevic, who said:

‘I don’t have any problems stepping back into my normal life; not at all. I just go out, eat a couple of steaks and drink a lot of beer. I check out the football and I’m happy.’

This shallowness of quick entries and exits, probably crucial to a war photographer’s physical and psychological survival, is found in Restrepo. The Americans’ – Hetherington’s, ours – knowledge of the Afghans is limited to a sortie to a local village, and an out-of-place pep-talk by the group’s captain to sitting, henna-dyed, bearded Afghan elders staring into space, worried more by their dead cow the Americans have shot for fun, than the integration language of the US Army. (Similarly, Auden’s knowledge of ‘the workers’ was limited to a jaunt with the Gresham School Sociological Society to a boot factory in Norwich: yet he was clever enough to write some good poems.)

For war photojournalists, the camera is a quasi-gun, a totemic connection existing between the machine gun and the rapid fire rates of top cameras, between the soldier’s instinct and the photojournalist’s. As Tomasevic said (in the same interview):

‘You just photograph by reflex. You don’t know what you’re doing at that time. Then you just check the pictures and you’re like wow. If I didn’t have a Mark 4 [Canon EOS-1D Mark IV, which is capable of shooting up to 10 frames per second], or some other really fast camera, I wouldn’t have these pictures.’

Hetherington was undoubtedly aware of the close relationship between photography and war, its tendency to glamorise it, and the attraction of violence for young men and photographers, himself included. Junger, in Hetherington’s obituary for Vanity Fair, wrote directly to his dead friend:

‘I’ve never even heard of Misrata before, but for your whole life it was there on a map for you to find and ponder and finally go to. All of us in the profession—the war profession, for lack of a better name—know about that town. It’s there waiting for all of us. But you went to yours, and it claimed you.’

It seems Hetherington was very aware of how he was a small link in an immense chain. Junger continues:

‘you [Hetherington] had this idea that young men in combat act in ways that emulate images they’ve seen—movies, photographs—of other men in other wars, other battles. You had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another in the long tragic grind of human affairs.’

The feedback loop went one stage further: Hetherington started rubbing shoulders with movie stars. Restrepo was nominated for an Oscar, and there’s a picture (here in low-res and hi-res) of Hetherington standing near a statuette with the other Oscars’ contenders.

There are practitioners who make good photographs and good films, addressing – cleverly, directly, obliquely – this problematic (of modernisation). Ethnopoesie (a style of expression initiated by artists and writers such as Jimmie Durham and Hubert Fichte and elaborated by others like Gabriel Orozco and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin) can operate as a form of antiphotojournalism, where an archive of lost moments and marginal figures are brought to the foreground.

The term ethnopoesie, a German word for poetic ethnography (from the French poésie: the art of writing poetry, or a particular style of the poet) describes an ethnological literature where you’re not quite certain if the events depicted are an elaboration of the truth. Memoirs fall into this category. So do Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Neither specifically ethnobiography, nor pure fiction (Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe are satires of the generic travel-writing of their day), photography, because of the slippery nature of its captions, is especially prone to fabulation (or fascination?*).

For example, Durham’s piece for the 1992 documenta exhibition in Kassel was a small two-part stone work. Its caption, This Stone is from the Mountain / This Stone is from the Red Palace, was a commentary on the reverence for exhibited works in a gallery. They should not be believed, Durham once wrote.

‘Believe nothing. Belief is an evil, inhuman phenomenon. Humans evolved to question and to investigate; not to believe.’

Likewise a documentary film like Restrepo should never be believed, however truth-seeking its claims are. Truth-seeking is part of the normative framework that strives to increase journalism’s cultural authority by positioning journalists as representations of the collective good. For example, The New York Times called Restrepo,

‘an impressive, even heroic feat of journalism’.

Philip French, writing in the Observer, said the film was,

‘wholly non-judgmental.’

Let’s consider these claims for a moment. They employ a familiar ‘journalist as witness’ argument: the photojournalist is there to show – and therefore reveal – to us, who are elsewhere, something about the nature, the reality, of the world. The trope is repeated by industry: for the keen amateur, the ‘photojournaliser’, there exists a whole industry, geared to encouraging and providing with cameras, equipment, books, magazines, blogs and websites, university courses. It draws its strength from travel literature and the legends of war photographers like Robert Capa and Don McCullin, but with none of the apocalypse of Brueghel, or the ‘doom and gloom’ of the First World War poets. Above all, what is celebrated is a nomadic restlessness, a wanderlust. Hetherington had it too, and if you ever need a prophetic warning for pursuing his lifestyle, look where it got him.

*fascination comes from the Latin fascinum for spell, or witchcraft. Perseus avoids Medusa’s ‘fascinating’ gaze (the enchanting eyes of the snake), able only to counter it by looking at its reflection in his shield. That way he avoids petrification. Junger and Hetherington both have said that without cameras, they couldn’t have dealt with the reality of combat:

Hetherington: ‘I remember, you always say that the one time you were separated from the camera was the most terrifying.

Junger: ‘Yeah, all that camerawork was a refuge from the experience of fear. Just like with the guys having a weapon is a refuge from fear. Like they have something to do.’

Hetherington: ‘They couldn’t understand how we couldn’t be armed, for example. They were like, “How can you do this and not have a gun?” Because they didn’t have the experience of having a camera.’

Reality is too powerful, but Perseus is able to look at a resemblance of Medusa in his shield and kill her. He then puts her head in his bag in order to fascinate and petrify others. Likewise, Hetherington puts his footage in his bag, and makes a film with it to fascinate and petrify us. Reality is objectified, bagged, zipped up and contained.

Michael Kamber’s interview with Hetherington for the New York Times.

Hetherington’s Diary, a short film in a more experimental mode.

Posted 10 months ago with 1 note
Tags: My writing