04.01.11
Tim Hetherington speaks to Jon Levy
Tim Hetherington is a British photographer who now lives in New York. I have known him from 1998, the time we shared an office together in Great Portland Street in central London. He was a photographer striving to negotiate his way between photo agencies and assignments and I, newly returned from the US, was in the process of setting up 8 Magazine and running the fledgling website Foto8.com. Together we would share ideas and points of view on the industry we found ourselves in, alongside our personal theories of what mattered and what counted in photography. Our little office was a safe haven for us to invent and test out our concepts and to this day I feel in the outside world we retain a lot of the independence and subversive ideology that we enjoyed so much at that time.
With the passage of time, some 12 years on, naturally much has changed but also a great many of the fundamentals of what Tim was about then remains today. He is still fiercely independent, tenaciously determined and always a free thinker and innovator in how he works and who he works with. Alongside these qualities he does possess that most valued asset of all good photographers, of never being satisfied or becoming complacent. I think it was the great Philip Jones Griffiths who said, “Self praise is no praise at all” and it is this attitude that continues to propel Tim Hetherington onwards towards new successes and the accolades that accompany them.
For his innovative approach to storytelling with visual narratives using the nascent new media in the late 1990s, Hetherington received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts which allowed him space to broaden his photographic discussions amongst other creators, designers and visual artists. For his dedication and knowledge in Liberia, where he spent some five years living and covering the eventual overthrow of the Taylor regime and installation of the UN brokered ceasefire and government, he was asked to report to the United Nations on war crimes in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And for following his ambition to be the kind of photographer that he admired most in many others, by covering a difficult subject like warin a meaningful way, he was awarded the World Press Photo of the year. So it is no surprise to me then to receive a call from Tim in late January this year from an awards after-party at the Sundance Film Festival in Colorado. Amidst the background din of a raging party I heard from him that his new project Restrepo, a feature-length documentary film about a platoon of US soldiers on a remote hillside in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan, had won the Sundance Best Documentray Film Award. I am still yet to see the movie but I have kept up-to-date with its glowing reviews and screenings across the United States.
Now, as the movie is due to open in the United Kingdom in October, Hetherington prepares for an exhibition at the HOST Gallery of his photographs from Afghanistan and the launch of the book, Infidel, published by Chris Boot, about his experiences there.
I managed to catch up with Tim between his rounds of press interviews and promotional appearances to talk about where the photography we knew back in Great Portland Street has led him and where, in this day and age of multi-discipline documentary work, a photographer should see themselves. Reporter, documentarian, artist, film maker or visual communicator? Tim Hetherington seems comfortable in all of these guises...
JON: Following your success at Sundance with the award for best documentary, you have been travelling to promote the distribution of Restrepo. How has that been?
TIM: Well, we sold the broadcast deal to National Geographic in November last year and we signed the deal for the theatrical (cinema) distribution post-Sundance with National Geographic Cinema Ventures. We’ve had a really good run at the theatres, considering that in general people think that documentary war films don’t have any theatrical possibilities.
JON: You said to me a few weeks back that for these past months you’ve effectively stopped being a photographer, producer and maker of new work and really you’re a full-time film promoter. Is that accurate?
TIM: Yes, but at the same time I have been photographing for Newsweek in the past few days and I’ve got a portrait job lined up, so it’s refreshing to come back to making photography. But you’re right, in terms of my long-term documentary work that I’m known for, I’ve got a pretty clear slate at the moment – for the first time in 10 years. You’ve known me all that time and I’ve either been working on Training for Tomorrow, the healing sport project in Liberia, or the blind school project in Sierra Leone or following the rebel takeover of Liberia or, most recently, the war in Afghanistan; it all overlaps. The Liberia book [Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold published by Umbrage Editions] came out in 2009 and I was working on it in 2008 when I was in the middle of editing Restrepo. The Liberia work was started while I was finishing off the healing sport work. It all overlaps. But finally I have come to this point where I have some irons in the fire, small documentary projects, and I’ve got a clearing which I’m really happy about.
JON: It seems that for 10 years there have been two or three really concerted phases where you take on projects and do them to the fullest, like the time you spent living in Liberia through to the culmination of the Liberia book. When you take on something in its entirety like that, do you see it culminating in a film or a book or something tangible at the end of that period of time?
TIM: I don’t know if I necessarily set out to decide what it’s going to be. I’m not that rigid in my outlook. Obviously if you’re a filmmaker you’re going to make a film, and most photographers want to have a show and a book. But I’m not that rigid about what something is going to be. If you look at the Sleeping Soldiers film installation project, that came out of Afghanistan. When I was making the work I had no idea that this would emerge, although the idea of making a sound immersive exhibition had been in my mind for some time. [Sleeping Soldiers is a five-minute, three-screen projection and sound installation mixing photographic views of soldiers asleep in their bunks with film action from the frontline. It was first shown at the NY Photo Festival in 2009.]
JON: Do your projects then become a combination of a response to the place, the story and the kind of material you collect on numerous visits as well?
TIM: There’s a reason why I prefer to work over long periods. It’s important for me to take pictures, think about them and go back. I work in a pretty organic way and the process involves really responding to the place initially, and then responding to the pictures I make. I look at the pictures to discover other visual possibilities. In the old days, photojournalists who were working abroad, for example on assignment for LIFE Magazine and such, they would ship their films back undeveloped before having seen the images. What they produced would never affect what they shot in the field. With Liberia, I was able to photograph and then take the months off in the process of developing the film to look at the contact sheets before going back to Liberia and living there and thinking about the project.
There are two different responses. My first is to the place itself. That is what all photographers do: go, see something and respond to it and make photographs. I also make work that’s in response to looking at the work, which is a really important part. When someone asks me to do one trip for them, that’s fine, but it isn’t how I work. Like the British Council project I completed on landscapes in Arabia. It was a proper process of going to make work, coming back and looking at it and thinking about it and then going back again. And often a real part of the work will come out of one picture or one mistake. That’s how the Sleeping Soldiers piece started, with one picture that intrigued me and I was like, well, that’s interesting.
JON: Is it fair to say this way of working depends on the place being of interest to start with and then, without preconception of what the project should end up being, you are able to draw on multiple tools and methods that you can use to approach making the work? A toolkit of sorts?
TIM: When I went to Detroit the other day, in my bag I had a toolkit of equipment. It makes things difficult sometimes, working editorially on commissions, so I’ve devised a streamlined editorial way to work which doesn’t require too much analysis because you don’t have much time these days on assignments to go back and forth due to budget constraints. Normally in my toolkit I will have everything from film cameras, digital cameras to video cameras and sound recorders. I take a variety of stuff.
JON: That’s your physical toolkit but isn't there also a toolkit of ideas that actually grows and replenishes itself and gets replaced by different concepts as you go along? Recently you were talking about being in a “post-photographic phase” so I guess photography itself is not an end in itself, does that allow you to choose to use whatever tool and approach best fits the story?
TIM: Completely, I think you have to. In responding to the work I’m making, I’m thinking about form as well. This is why it’s difficult to do everything in one trip. It’s almost too much. You miss out on all the possibilities of making work on the web. In Detroit I made an animation for GQ as well as doing the photography but of the other ideas I had, I didn’t have enough time to see them through. Because of multiple platforms, working in more than one trip and responding to the work is a way to think, “OK, I can do this with this type of work, and this would look really good on the web and I would need therefore to do this”. And that’s how I need to build it and go back a second time. The first trip is almost like a sketchbook. I prefer it like that.
JON: You’ve mentioned to me in the past about being versatile, being open and accessible to differing roles you may take on as they are needed to develop a story. Is being a film promoter today, for want of a better word, an extension of that?
TIM: What has been really interesting about doing the film in the US, has been the distinct phases of people seeing the film. There are distinct sectors of society that it reaches and therefore the discussion of the film changes. For example, when the film first opened there were reviews from the cinematic press, the critical documentary world. That is the first wave. The second wave is when you start to reach the soldiers and military communities around the country, an audience that normally wouldn’t go to see a documentary. They are very difficult to really reach with anything produced by the civilian world about their experience – things like The Hurt Locker may be so off the mark for them. So we have the art house people seeing the film and then we have the military and the third was an attempt to enter into the political debate, because each time the film does the rounds, the media oxygen is being used up. Where I am at the moment in talking about the film is its potential to create a paradigm shift in the discussion about the war. In America, the subtext of discussion of the war is completely polarised by political rhetoric. If you question the war you’re somehow being unpatriotic, that’s how the far Right sees it. And the far Left is almost saying, if you don’t morally condemn war then you’re a coward. But both of those viewpoints are very unhelpful actually being in the here-and-now and working out how to move forward practically. The paradigm shift with this film is that I’ve been saying to soldiers and soldier communities that it’s not unpatriotic to question the rational for the war. In fact, it’s in the interest of the soldiers that we, here in America, discuss the war. How do we know that pulling out of Afghanistan in a year is in their best interests? Maybe it’s unsafe to do so. You’re right to say the film has opened up new roles for me so it’s right to reflect where it’s at and keep the dialogue going.
JON: I can see where the film works as a starting point for a discussion that disarms both sides at the same time and hopefully is a catalyst for putting it on the table to be debated openly. Did Infidel, the book, allow you something different than that? And does it have more of your personal feelings on the war than the film?
TIM: Yes, Infidel for me is completely different.It isn’t political either – political in terms of the traditional left and right. The book follows on from the film in a certain way that characterises all of my projects in Afghanistan – a deep intimacy with the soldiers. The book and the film are both empathetic portrayals of the soldiers. What I was able to do to with the book is to produce a book about war. And while it’s not really about sexuality in hetero/homo terms, it’s about men, what I think is a departure from other photographic work. Often, when we’re presenting war in photography, there are two different realms – soldiers as symbols, patriots or shadow cutouts making interesting shapes with their guns. On the other hand, the photo-documentary, medium and large format photography, has focused on missiles, tanks and military hardware – Simon Roberts’ decaying Russian hardware, or Simon Norfolk’s missile launches – suggesting that this is the unseen war machine. What I’m saying with this book is that this is the war machine, it’s not actually missiles and tanks and helicopters. The war machine is a group of young men – train them together, stick them on the side of a mountain and they will kill and be killed for each other. And that’s at the heart of the war machine and that’s something that we as people want to sanitise and we do so at our peril. We forget that it’s made up of young boys that could be your next-door neighbour. Although that’s shocking, that’s the fucking truth. You have to get in the bunker and live with people and be friends with them. Which is a completely different task.
JON: In some ways that’s also a repetition of the way you like to approach things. It’s like getting into Liberia and sitting with a cloth backdrop to take portraits in a street studio as you did and not knowing what it’s for or what you’ll get from it. But it’s about getting into the fabric of the place isn't it?
TIM: My work is as much about me as it is about the experience. My work is experiential, I like to think, through my going out there and having an experience. I am part and parcel of what I photograph and the experiences of that because in some ways I feel that transfers to my audience. I think it’s accurate. This world is made up of people, it’s not made up of artistic renditions.
JON: It strikes me that this is quite a traditional approach – the good side of tradition which comes from the mantra ‘with camera, will travel’ – to go somewhere, see it for yourself and report back on it while it’s happening, rather than analyse it and objectify it after the fact. Do you see yourself as a traditional photojournalist in this sense?
TIM: My technique, in terms of what you’re citing, is journalistic in some ways although the output is not. In many ways my work isn’t journalism because I’m not interested in objectivity. I totally embrace the subjective. You can be honest and truthful to the experience and still be subjective. Also, I have no interest in the traditional journalistic outlets. They are valid outlets and I use them as and when they are present. I work for Vanity Fair and the work that appears in those outlets is shaped and mashed by the organisational politics at work in there. But the bigger vision stuff I’m working towards, like my books or exhibitions, is a mix between journalism and art, straddling the border between the two worlds.
JON: Does this way of working make you somehow more accountable since it’s based on traditional reporting values but made in the first person using whatever media is helpful to portray your subject with realism?
TIM: The discussion goes back again to that of experience. That you can have the most outlandish stuff pertaining to what is war. I have people arguing with me about war and they’ve only had the mediated version of it. I don’t want the mediated version because I’m creating the mediated version and I’m translating it – the real experience, not the periphery, not the pretending that I know what it is.
JON:…And not the chasing around after it because “this is today’s war and this is what people want to hear about todayand tomorrow”?
TIM: I never went to Iraq. I’m not interested in going from war zone to war zone. I didn’t go to Iraq because I was in Liberia. It wasn’t my story.
JON: I want ask you about something I see consistently in many of your projects. The desire to report what’s there and offer it up as journalism on the one hand but on the other the declaration that it’s not an objective account. Yet you do not necessarily declare your own feelings about the place. Is that something you do quite consciously? It seems your own politics or statement is always taken out even though you refer to it as a subjective experience.
TIM: With the Afghanistan work, the statement here is that these guys are quite likable. The book is kind of funny and endearing. It shows that I have a rapport with these guys, that I like them. If you ask a crowd of people, “who thinks the world would be a better place without war?” everyone would put their hand up. I think that any reasonable person would agree to that. This is what drives me insane about the Left. Because the film is not a moral condemnation of war, they get angry with me. But that’s not the point. Saying war is a bad thing doesn’t advance the debate. It’s like saying the sky is blue. Great, but the point is that we’re stuck on the top floor on the World Trade Centre and we want to get off.
JON: I’m impressed with the way you juggle large ideas and understandings by narrowing them down to a real personal experience, one that is just as truthful yet doesn’t proclaim to explain everything in one go.
TIM: Life is full of contradictions and that’s the same way I feel about the American soldiers. I like them. They’re really nice guys. The contradiction is that they are also just as conflicted about killing people. In the book there’s a guy who talks about whether he’s going to go to heaven or not and what God’s going to say to him.
JON: In Liberia was it slightly easier to make this judgement? You were kind of comfortable compiling a rogue’s gallery of portraits of people who had perpetrated the killing and assumed political office later on in the government because you knew they were rogues.
TIM: I didn’t go and explore the human side of them, really. I just painted them as being these rogues because I saw that they were in positions of political responsibility. And in many ways I don’t feel that the soldiers in Afghanistan are in that position, which is something that comes with age; age and position. And when you’re dealing with these guys at the bottom of the heap, like these soldiers are, more like the kids were in Liberia, it’s hard to hold them accountable. And that’s the tricky question. When does accountability begin and when does it end? Is a 13-year-old who has killed someone really accountable for their actions? Is an 18-year-old American soldier at the remote Camp Restrepo on the side of a mountain who kills, accountable for his actions? I don’t know. I think what’s interesting is showing these young men in conflict through really nuanced pictures of them. The rogue’s gallery was more of a holding to account, visually showing people at the top of the food chain. In the Korengal, I focus much more on the young guys.
JON: In the Liberia work there was a focus on war graffiti and in Afghanistan you have this war tattooing.
TIM: Two things, two marks bring together these ideas of young men in conflict because I think their experiences are pretty similar. The other thing that was deepened in the Afghan book was a real exploration of male sexuality, male bonding. Liberia was about history. In Afghanistan I looked deeper into the realm of male sexuality, which I don’t think has really been looked at in conflict before.
JON: Is being different also an important facet? Would you always like to bring out a different combination of tools? Whilst we talk, the photojournalism community is gathered for the annual festival in the French city of Perpignan, yet I get a sense you like to be different.
TIM: You can say I’ve worked as an outsider. I guess I am kind of an outsider. I haven’t sat comfortably in any agency – I don’t like being grouped or categorised. I don’t like to run with the crowd for sure. That’s why I liked being in Liberia on my own and in Afghanistan I was on my own for much of the time. That’s why I’ve never been in with the whole photojournalism thing. In certain ways I’ve got a particular voice in the community now and I know a lot of younger kids are looking towards what I say, interested in my work, asking questions. At the end of the day, I think people will still think I’m relevant whether I’m part of the Perpignan photojournalist thing or not. But I do feel like an outsider because I feel that people are resistant to what I’m saying. I find enough allies in what I do to keep moving forward and find support mechanisms. But inside of the community, sure, people are resistant to what I’m doing.
JON: But a part of that resistance also spurs you on, doesn’t it? The sense of an outsider, not left out as such but more forging your own path.
TIM: True. The testament is the work itself and that Restrepo, the film, has been a huge success. And Sleeping Soldiers with its intense mix of media and emotions in a short installation is seen as completely groundbreaking.
JON: You mentioned people looking up to you and asking you for guidance, do you like that role?
TIM: Due to the time I’m putting into promoting the film, I have a limited amount of energy to give out. But it’s nice to think that my work inspires people to think about Afghanistan and talk about it or to think about Liberia. And it’s nice to think that it helps people who are designing communication in the broader sense as well. It disturbs me when people write to me asking, how do I become a war photographer? It’s missing the point.
JON: Can you list a few people that have inspired you and continue to inspire you graphically and visually?
TIM: Gilles Peress, Susan Meiselas and Luc Delahaye have all worked at the sharp end of things. We need visual thinkers working at the sharp end, preoccupied with representation and ethics. Their work stands the test of time. I’m not mentioning people like Jim Natchwey or Don McCullin, not because I don’t think their work is fantastic, but I’m driven more by thinkers in visual terms. These three think about the form.
JON: If you do end up settling down in America, can we expect that you’ll still keep a fresh eye while you’re there?
TIM: James Joyce wrote Ulysses while in exile. And Gilles Peress wrote about his being in America as being outside of your comfort zone. Me being in exile is always a good starting point to making a piece of work. Nan Goldin says you should photograph things that you know, but putting yourself out of your natural surroundings gives you room to think. Liberia completely put me out of my surroundings but I found enough comfort around me to make interesting work. Afghanistan, same thing. In some ways I’ve always felt like a chameleon and that’s partly the way I work, I’m highly adaptable.
JON: I hope you don’t get too comfortable in America then, and stay slightly exiled.
Infidel is published by Chris Boot, price £25.
Signed copies are available to PP readers, postage free in the UK, from http://store.foto8.com (code: PPoffer).
Infidel the exhibition runs at the HOST Gallery in London from 20 September to 15 October.
www.hostgallery.co.uk
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