MARCH 2011  |  Tim Hetherington, with Hilaire Avril 

Film by Tim Hetherington with editing and sound by Magali Charrier.  A Humanitarian Bazaar original interviewbrought forward from the HELO Magazine archive first published March 2011. The film was made exclusively by Hetherington and Charrier, shown on Humanitarian Bazaar / HELO with their permission before Hetherington was killed in Libya a few months later.

British photographer Tim Hetherington was awarded the 2007 World Press Photo prize for his shot of a shell-shocked American soldier in Afghanistan’s Korengal valley.

He took the picture while spending several months in Restrepo, a remote infantry outpost named after the unit’s medic killed in action. Restrepo is also the title of the digital SLR-filmed documentary he shot with writer Sebastian Junger, chronicling daily life and death on the frontlines of the under-reported war in Afghanistan.

Tim has covered conflict for years. He spent years in Liberia, and months embedded with the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebels who were fighting Charles Taylor’s troops in a vicious civil war, earning him a death sentence by the former 22d president of the tiny West African nation, now in the dock of a U.N.-backed special court. Tim’s work is unique in that it portrays the intimacy of war, the harrowing questions and reactions conflict inflicts on those who fight it, who suffer it, and who report it.

“Infidel”, his photobook on the unit who defiantly inked the name their Taliban opponents gave them on their arms and chests, captures the impact of war on young soldiers (of the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade). Tim has since put together “Diary,” a video-collage of footage from his war reporting rushes which blur into very personal sequences of life out of the field. An out-of-focus landscape in the British countryside seen through a rain-poked train window, the crackling sound slowly melting into child soldiers spraying gunfire beyond banana trees on a red dirt road.

Orders shouted and panicked screams dissolve into the bottom of a coffee cup, slowly stirred somewhere in a London or New York coffee shop, threads of intimate conversation hinting to disorientation and jet lag… The resulting 20 minutes of documentary and artistic cross-dissolving build a visually-stunning portrayal of the subjective experience of reporting wars. To those who have covered conflict and emergency, this is the closest rendition of a correspondent’s mindset since Michael Herr wrote “Breathing Out,” the cathartic last chapter of his book, Dispatches. Tim discussed “Diary” with Humanitarian Bazaar (then known as HELO Magazine) while in London.

Hilaire Avril: Where did “Diary” start?

Tim Hetherington: Well, I’ve been shooting video for some time, but my work has been getting more free in the past couple of years, and also more experimental. I don’t think I’m a classic war reporter. I’m a freelancer, I don’t parachute all over the world, on a tight schedule. When the documentary Restrepo came out, the press characterised me as a war reporter, but I’m not sure I fit the profile. My work isn’t constrained by that tag. With increasing experience, work (and means), I haven’t had to confine myself to play that role. The initial idea was simply to build a visual diary. I kept shooting and adding bits for years, a bit like in the Bayeux tapestry [the 70-metre long tapestry depicting the brutal 11^th-century Norman invasion on England].

I edited it for years and ended up with about 70 hours end-to-end. But I thought that would only be fit for display in some obscure art gallery. It was too indulgent. The spark came when my book “Liberia Retold” [which “entwines documentary photography, oral testimony, and memoir to map the dynamics of power, tragedy and triumph in Liberia’s recent history”] was released in 2009, for which I was interviewed by the BBC.

The journalist was looking into artists and photographers who face ethical challenges. I showed her rushes, and she was deeply shocked by the violence of some of the footage. Her reaction shocked me in turn. What she found disturbing didn’t disturb me at all. I started wondering what covering this had done to me. What was happening to me? After shooting Restrepo, I was wondering, “Where am I in all this?”

I had to try and locate myself. I started working with Magali Charrier, my editor, and we compiled 20 minutes of the footage. It was enough to give a feeling of disorientation, to show the multiplicity of experiences, switching from situations in Liberia to New York, a kind of existential reflection. I was trying to show “what it feels like.”

Hilaire: What kind of reactions did you get to “Diary”?

Tim: We showed “Diary” in a cinema in New York and at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, in the U.K. in 2010, and many people didn’t get it. Laymen, people who aren’t in this field thought it was “weird.” They didn’t expect that. But others told me they were blown away. I think I myself am still processing it.

Hilaire: How did you select the content, out of so much material?

Tim: It wasn’t very systematic. I looked for sequences I remembered from memories. I searched for stuff I remembered I had shot. I didn’t rely on TV edits of my footage because I found that they didn’t convey the feelings I was after. I added the sequence from the hotel (where Hetherington is heard struggling to describe on the phone what he has just shot, back turned on his own camera, at a loss for words). I also needed a family scene, which I shot in the English countryside, with a friend’s daughter.

The basis, the central pillar, was Liberia. I inserted unused rushes around it, and added a spread from different places. I decided to take some stuff out, like footage from Aceh devastated by the tsunami, when it didn’t fit in. The result is “Diary.”

When my Mom came to see it, she didn’t like it. She told me, “You don’t have to justify yourself to people.” But I think she missed the point. I wasn’t justifying anything. I was trying to understand my own work, and reflect on how it reaches people, and how it reaches me. Beyond the news value, does it convey a meaning? I think when it comes to your own work, certainty is often an illusion.

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