Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, two eminent photographers and journalists, were killed yesterday in Libya. I’d learned about Tim’s work from Glenna Gordon, whose talent and practice has been heavily influenced by Tim’s own.
Glenna pays moving tribute to Tim’s work here. And on the Lens Blog at the New York Times, former West Africa correspondent Lydia Polgreen tells a story about Tim that’s as worthy a journalistic legacy as I can imagine — one every one of us should always have in mind:
On one of my last trips to Liberia, I wrote about how the new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was determined to fulfill her campaign promise to restore electrical power to her country’s war-scarred capital. The electrical grid had been destroyed, and the only power came from private generators. She had managed to set up a small power plant to serve a hospital and provide street lights. I ran into Tim at the makeshift ceremony to turn on the new, tiny power grid.
All the other photographers jockeyed for position to get a close-up shot of Mrs. Sirleaf and John Kuofor, the president of Ghana, as they flipped the switch to turn on the new streetlights. But not Tim. He stood apart from the fray, Hasselblad dangling by his side.
The picture, he told me, was the light. That’s the story, he said. Light.
