Tim Hetherington died 13 years ago, killed in the Libyan city of Misrata in April 2011 as fighting raged during the Libyan civil war. Another photographer, Chris Hondros, died in the same attack, and two others, Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown, were wounded. Partly, perhaps, due to his early death at 40, and partly his achievements in other spheres— including an Oscar nomination for Restrepo (2010), the documentary on the War in Afghanistan he co-directed with the journalist Sebastian Junger—Hetherington has since emerged as one of the key names in a new generation of war photographers.
Hetherington’s archive was acquired by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 2017, and the first major fruits of the organisation’s work is this month’s exhibition, Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington. Part of the IMW’s intention, says the exhibition’s curator Greg Brockett, is to help people understand what combat photography actually is in the era of social media, when eyewitness images of conflict can be posted within seconds by anyone with a smartphone.
“We asked ourselves, how do we present this work?” Brockett says. “Pictures no longer stand alone, as images of something that’s happening in the world. Now they are being used in a very different way. Hetherington wanted to get across his own thoughts on what was happening, and use innovative ways of working to present it.”
Accordingly, Hetherington worked on a series of long-term projects, including covering the Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003), and his series Blind Link (2001-05), about the connection between two schools for blind people in the UK and Sierra Leone. The Restrepo film came out of another one, being embedded with the US military in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, which also yielded Hetherington’s famous Sleeping Soldiers series, which the IWM will stage as a three-screen installation.
“What’s great about having the archive is that in Tim’s diaries we have someone who wrote down their thoughts as they were making their work,” Brockett says. “In the exhibition we bring those two elements together for the first time: you’ve got a very thoughtful process side by side with some of the thoughts that went into it.”
• Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington, Imperial War Museum, London, 20 April-29 September