Remembering Tim Hetherington, a fearless photojournalist and friend who died in Libya

In the late 1990s, a young photographer joined the ranks at the Big Issue. Tim Hetherington had read Classics and English at Oxford then, after graduating, he used £5,000 left to him in his grandmother’s will to travel the world. Journeying through south-east Asia opened his eyes and changed his life. He returned home determined to tell stories through photography.

His first job was as a trainee at the Big Issue. He’d photograph our vendors and star interviewees, definitely preferring to focus on the lives of those whose stories often went untold.

This work led him to West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria. Places that had experienced conflict, where the people were still counting the cost. He was embedded with the US Army in Afghanistan, then went to cover the uprising in Libya. It was there, on 20 April 2011 he was killed in a mortar attack in the town of Misrata.

Tim Hetherington is now recognised as one of the country’s most important photojournalists. His archive – including the work he undertook for the Big Issue – has been obtained by the Imperial War Museum, and a major exhibition opening this week, Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington, highlights his remarkable talent for revealing the human stories caught up in conflict.

Greg Brockett, curator of the exhibition, talks us through some of his striking pictures:

This work [main image, above] originated with the Big Issue. They gave him the opportunity to photograph the Millennium Stars when they first came to the UK, then he was invited to go over to Liberia and continue that work. That’s where his connection with Liberia started.

He came to know these young people really well. It was his first real engagement with conflict and I think it set this idea that he wanted to treat conflict differently. He didn’t want to photograph it in a way that was similar to the news media, which wanted to get across tropes around guns and violence and trauma.

The Big Issue pictures definitely had an impact on how his work developed. He focused on the consequences of conflict, the human perspective and human impact. I see that early work as being fundamental.

May 2003: A woman carries cassava leaves to the central market in Tubmanburg, Liberia 

June 2003: The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) advance on the Liberian capital, Monrovia, during the Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003)

With Hetherington’s Liberia work, you see his long-term approach. He went back to Liberia and revisited some of the people he had first encountered to give a broader perspective, rather than just capturing the conflict itself.

June 2003: A Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) combatant in Liberia

June 2002: An amputee straps on his prosthetic limb before taking to the field during a friendly football match at a war veterans camp situated on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola

June 2008: Soldiers from the United States Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade during a 15-month deployment in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan 

April 2011: An anti-Gaddafi combatant during the Libyan revolution

We don’t know how he was going to develop this work in Libya. It’s unfinished. It looks as though he was interested in the idea of performance in conflict; the people he is photographing being aware of his presence and how that might affect the scenes that he was capturing.

April 2011: Self-portrait, taken in Libya

This is the last self-portrait Hetherington took. He was an unusually self-reflective photographer, especially later in his career. He was interested in how he as the photographer was influencing the scenes he was capturing. We have brought Hetherington into the exhibition. He’s there as a talking head on video, in diary extracts. People can relate to the decisions, the ethical decisions, photographers sometimes have to make. That is as much a part of understanding conflict as the images and the events themselves.

We’re hearing a lot about journalists and photojournalists who are at risk, doing this incredibly dangerous job they do. That’s part of the narrative. Hetherington was someone working in Libya and he wasn’t the only photojournalist who was mortally wounded that day.

Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington runs at the Imperial War Museum, London, 20 April – 29 September 2024

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play