Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer
In April 2011, Hetherington, 40, was killed in a mortar attack while covering the Arab Spring uprising in Misrata, Libya. Hetherington, likely best known for codirecting the Academy Award–nominated documentary Restrepo, about the Afghanistan war, spent eight years as a war photographer covering conflicts from Africa to South Asia. But, as Huffman documents, Hetherington went way beyond photographing the carnage and violence of war to detail the lives of the people affected. He tended to immerse himself in the local life and culture, covering a school choir of blind children in Sierra Leone and spending three years helping the UN track down human-rights criminals in Liberia. Oxford-educated Hetherington used photos, videos, and written narratives to chronicle the lives of people in war-torn areas. Huffman details the life of a man who wasn’t satisfied to record images but wanted to understand the causes behind the war, the histories of conflict, and the individuals—many, adolescents—caught in the horror and drama of war. Through Hetherington’s extraordinary life, Huffman explores a dangerous profession and how one man pursued it with his own personal twist. --Vanessa Bush