MARK ALICE DURANT ON TIM HEATHERINGTON

Earthquake 7.0 and today it is pictures from Haiti that appearon the screens and in the newspapers. A woman buried up toher chest in concrete rubble occupies the center of the frame,patches of sweat and blood wick through the gray layer ofdust that coats her body. Amidst the visual confusion there aretwo maybe three figures next to her: fellow victims, final companions or maybe rescuers, yet she stares at the camera, as ifwe might save her. Every day we are confronted with variationson this theme–someone with a camera is recording and transmitting images from cataclysms, disasters and atrocities.

Accompanied by vague feelings of inadequacy, we routinelyallow pictures of tragedy and violence to filter through ourconsciousness like an unpleasant tasting beverage.What is theresponsibility of the viewer? To send a check, sign a petition,shake our heads secretly grateful we were spared? And what isthe role of the photographer; is it simply to witness tragicevents dispassionately and record them for some abstract ideaof an informed citizenry?

Although the ethical issues of documentary and spectatorshipcan never be satisfactorily resolved, photographers fromLewis Hine to Susan Meiselas have wrestled with the questionsand struggled to redefine themselves as more than justpassive observers. In order to elevate the activity of witnessingabove parasitic voyeurism, photographers need to believe thattheir images can make a difference. Yet that very faith candestabilize a photographer’s determination when nothingseems to change.With his unblinkingly grim and unsentimentalimagery of famine in Biafra, war in Vietnam and civil strifein Northern Ireland, the great British photojournalist DonMcCullin sought to disturb the comfortable middle class whileit sat around the dining room table drinking tea and gobblingscones reading the Sunday paper. Despite his fierce efforts,McCullin’s campaign against apathy was undermined by thepublic's indifference: he began to doubt the efficacy of hisimagery and was troubled by the mercenary aspect of being awar photographer. He has since retreated from the contemporaryworld of violence and mayhem to quietly photograph historicallandscapes.

As if the torch had been passed to someone younger andless damaged by what he has seen, Tim Hetherington seeks tocounteract public torpor and lobby against apathy with hispowerful imagery. And although he claims not to care for photography per se, he has become one of the most accomplishedand interesting photojournalists working today with ongoingassignments with Vanity Fair, ABC and CNN. Hetheringtonloves language and story telling. He studied literature at Oxford University writing his thesis on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. But after extensive travels in India, Pakistan and China, he found that words were ineffective in communicating what he had seen and experienced. Then a friend took him to ascreening of Chris Marker’s San Soleil and it was an epiphany.Marker creates highly discursive essay films that explore themeaning of images in relationship to personal experience andcollective history. Hetherington was enthralled and understoodthat he wanted to be an image-maker. His first step was tostudy photojournalism in Cardiff with the goal of shooting for the local press.

His modest ambitions were easily surpassed because it wasnot long before Hetherington was working inWest Africa.While documenting Liberia’s 2003 civil war he was one of theonly western journalists to travel behind rebel lines as theypushed across the countryside on their way to attack the capital city Monrovia with the goal of overthrowing the despotic president Charles Taylor. Hetherington’s video footage makes up a significant portion of the film Liberia: An Uncivil War and his book Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold was recently published by Umbrage Press. Both projects are important contributions to the post-colonial history of the region.

Liberia may not occupy much space in the collective consciousness of the U.S. but their narratives are intimatelylinked. Perversely, Americans have a somewhat provincial attitudetoward slavery; it is our original sin, a psychic woundthat never seems to heal. No doubt we are still haunted by theconsequences of that Peculiar Institution but its ramificationsleaked far beyond our national borders. Liberia is a legacy ofslavery, founded by freed blacks in the early 1880s. The repatriationof ex-slaves to Africa was seen as an answer for bothabolitionists and plantation owners who feared that the presenceof free blacks in the north would inspire rebellionamongst those still enslaved. The capital Monrovia is namedafter the fifth president of the U.S. and although barely threepercent of the population is descendant of slaves, the conflictbetween them and those who identify as indigenous Africansremains an underlying tension in Liberian society.

Famous war images have their iconic drama, butHetherington is not interested in what might be called theRobert Capa model in which the photographer attempts to distill conflict into a singular dramatic image. Instead he believes in the cumulative effect of text and images to address the shiftingcomplexities of history unfolding. Long Story Bit By Bit presents oral testimony from perpetrators, victims and witnesses that anchor the often-disturbing imagery.We are introducedto altruistic Liberians and monsters such as Pastor JoshuaBlahyi, or General Butt-Naked, as he was known duringwartime, a character so self-aggrandizing that it would be comicwere it not for his unspeakable cruelty.

Hetherington used medium-format cameras loaded withcolor negative film, a very idiosyncratic choice in our digitalage. The resulting images are simple and compelling, rich indetail and careful in composition; even the more gruesomeimages are thoughtful rather than exploitive. As promised bythe book’s title, the photographs portray a society dissolvingbit by bit, where atrocity and sublime beauty exist side by side.Hetherington slows down the unfolding apocalypse to imagewild-eyed child soldiers and nattily-dressed politicians, graffitiinscribed on the walls of looted government buildings, bodiesby the roadside, young men with amputated arms, citizensfleeing mortar shelling, Monrovia at dusk, and a misty junglelandscape. There is a heartbreaking image of a young girl,fearful resignation marks her face as her hands rests on herchest, her delicate, sacrificial figure bracketed by her interrogators, a young man with a “Too Young To Die” T-shirt and therebel commander known as “Black Diamond” sporting a leopard print coat.

Hetherington believes that photography is depleted in itstraditional form. This is not some theoretical conceit but anacknowledgement that the production and distribution ofimages are rapidly shifting. It is not enough for a photographerto make the pictures; considerations of who has accessand how images are experienced must also be addressed, animage-maker must find new audiences and new forms of presentation.A primary example of this approach is the installation “Sleeping Soldiers” initially presented at the 2009 NewYork Photo Festival. Consisting of three adjacent screens,“Sleeping Soldiers” is a sensual, visceral, emotional and psychological immersion in both still and moving imagery gathered while Hetherington was embedded with a marine unitfighting in the remote Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Thecentral motif is a series of photographs of young men withheads upon pillows, tucked into their cots, often embracingthemselves in slumber; faces temporarily free of anxiety, terror,grief or boredom. Meanwhile the sounds and images of battle;helicopters overhead, puffs of smoke in the hillside, the rattleof machine guns, build in density to clog the dreams of thedormant warriors.When the fragmented triptych finallyresolves into a full-length image of a soldier stretched acrossthe three screens, echoes of the dead Christ resonate.With itsmontage of violence, grief and slumber, Hetherington has created a contemplative space that exists somewhere between themeditative still image and the agitation of movement, between documentary reality and subjective truth.

While working in Afghanistan, Hetherington developed acollaborative relationship with fellow Vanity Fair contributorSebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm. Together theyshot, edited and produced the feature length documentaryRestrepo that will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival inJanuary 2010. Restrepo purposefully avoids explicit politics; itdoes not feature interviews with generals and politicians aboutgeopolitical strategy. Instead it focuses on “one platoon, oneyear, and one valley.” Hetherington and Junger describe thefilm as entirely experiential from the point of view of a smallgroup of soldiers deployed in one of the most dangerous, barren and unforgiving outposts in Afghanistan. The film isunflinching, unsentimental, and serves to remind us that nomatter what our politics, we are paying the taxes that insertedthese young soldiers on this hostile mountaintop and as citizenswe ought to acknowledge that terrible responsibility.

Despite the countless treacherous situations he has survivedand tragedies he has recorded, Hetherington does not consider his photographs the macho souvenirs of personal daring that serve to reiterate the myth and the cliché of the heroic war photographer. Bristling at generalizations of the photojournalist as some privileged outsider, Hetherington believes it is necessary to give oneself over to the moment, to be completely openphysically and emotionally in order to make an honest image that somehow begins to portray the almost incomprehensible moments that constitute lives in crisis. Heroic or not, it seemsinevitable that observing human cruelty would be spirituallydamaging. A passage from Long Story Bit By Bit, describes aLiberian woman as having a “twisted moral compass” from the ghastly things she had seen and suffered.

One wonders if thismight be also applied to Hetherington himself. He struggles with the concept of a benevolent force in the universe, suggestingthat like James Joyce, he tends to think that God might be ambivalent about his creation. Regardless of God’s mixed feelings,Hetherington understands that it is important to communicatethe difficult things of this world if for no other reason than as a gesture toward a shared humanity.