Uh, OK.
Journalist friends of mine say of all the people that do journalism,
war photographers are the craziest.
Can you talk about that?
Well, the problem with war photography
is that there's absolutely no way to do it from a distance.
You have to be close.
You can't do it from your hotel,
you can't do it from across the street, across the bridge.
You have to be there.
There's really no substitute for that.
So, you have to figure out ways to get in the midst of things,
no matter what's happening.
And you have to suspend your reason sometimes
to do that and I think that's where that reputation comes from.
Name a country torn apart by war in the last six years or so
and chances are Chris Hondros has been there.
He has worked in most of the world's major conflict zones
since the late 1990s.
Iraq, Liberia, Kosovo.
Through the lens of his camera, Chris Hondros has taken...
Pulitzer Prize nominated war photographer
Chris Hondros for Getty Images...
Chris is a staff photographer
for the international photo agency Getty Images.
He's just returned from his ninth stint in Iraq.
I'm not one of these people that got into war photography
for the rush.
I'm not into adventure sports or anything like that either.
I mean, I believe in photography, I believe in the role
that journalists and photographers specifically play
in our whole system of international conflict
and how we resolve differences.
We have a role to play and I would like to be involved in that.
Well, I'm gonna guess this is maybe the earliest picture
I've got of Chris and this is me taking this photo
just like, "Here I am in high school" and, lo and behold,
there's the guy who would end up being my best friend.
Pretty young, Chris.
Um...
This is a tiny little portion
of all of the experiences that he had throughout his life.
Experiences that practically no one in the world
has ever had.
He had a front seat to every major world event
of the last decade.
He was my best friend but that doesn't even begin
to scratch the surface of how I felt about him.
And there's an instinct that I've got that
parts of him are still out there somewhere.
That parts of him can be found in the people
and the places that were important to him.
Some of the most powerful, in my opinion anyway,
some of the most powerful pictures
that you've taken were in Liberia and it just seems to me
in looking at them that you had a deeper connection
to what was going on there. Am I right?
I was quite fond, yeah, of Liberians and Liberia.
I was passionate about that war I think
because it was a war that could be really easily prevented.
You know, there were things that the international community
could have done that summer that would have prevented
the caustic situation there.
Chris had a very firm belief
in what he wanted his photography to be about.
I could drop him into any situation
and I didn't have to explain why he was there.
He believed in the power of shining a light
in places that otherwise would be dark.
In 2003, I was covering what ended up
being the climax of the Liberian civil war in West Africa.
The rebels were starting to move in towards Monrovia,
towards the capital, trying to push Charles Taylor
out of power, and you know, we were hearing about a lot
of attacks on civilians, atrocities, massacres.
And we were going and trying to verify this stuff.
I met Chris, I was helping him out going to the frontlines
to cover a war that we were dying,
we were killing each other.
Chris left United States that is more peaceful
and came here to tell our story
and I can recall the risks that he took.
Photographers always want to go where there is shooting.
They say, "Why is that shooting going on?" They say, "I want to get there."
The armies on both sides at this point
had just broken down into pure militia.
They were mostly shirtless, a lot of child soldiers.
Bullets flying everywhere.
We'd see children
as young as seven, eight, nine years old with AK-47s.
These kids were starving, hungry, hopped up on drugs
that they'd been given by the commanders.
There was an element of real madness to it.
There was one particularly bad day when I had been out,
I'd been caught in this mortar barrage,
and I remember running, trying to get back
to the hotel because it had a thick concrete ceiling
and I thought I could hide in the basement or something and be safe.
A few minutes later, the school across the street
was hit with a huge artillery shell.
There were all these civilians packed into the courtyard,
they'd been taking refuge there and the shell dropped
right in the middle of them.
And Chris ran into the hotel and he grabbed me
and he said, "The school's been hit across the street,
we've gotta go over and photograph."
And I was so shell shocked I was like, "No more, I'm done, I can't."
I just, sort of, cowered in the hotel, I couldn't go back out.
He went back out into it.
He photographed the whole thing and he helped get people to the hospital.
You learn how to face your fears, I guess, in these situations.
I mean if you don't do it, you've wasted all your time, right?
I mean, you've spent all this time and difficulty
getting to these situations to do the work
that you feel that needs to be done
and if you don't go that final mile to actually perform
under the stressful situations, then you've wasted all your time.
The frontline of the war for most of the summer
was this pair of bridges and rebel troops
were on one side and the government troops were on the other.
And the first couple days that that area was the front-line, I ventured down there.
We were with the government soldiers
just before they were about to charge the bridge and I thought
it would be way too dangerous to do those.
It was just exposed, nowhere to hide, nowhere to duck,
bullets were flying everywhere.
But something clicked in me at the moment
when I was thinking about it and just as they were about to charge.
You know, I kind of realized at that moment that my whole career
as a photographer in a way had been leading up
to a moment like that.
And that the picture was on the bridge,
it wasn't 50 feet away from the middle of the bridge,
it was on the bridge.
There was no shortcut to that.
This is the iconic photo.
You know, and Chris at his best which was often,
he had the ability to kind of find those photos.
I think when I first saw it, it was immediate concern for his safety.
I was just like, man, he's getting close.
The thing you have to understand in a situation like that
there's still probably bullets flying.
You're worried about being exposed.
And being able to keep a presence of mind
to really focus on the subject,
to frame the subject, to get that kind of pinnacle moment
is really pretty damn difficult.
When you'd hear him tell the story about
how dangerous that bridge was and how much metal
was flying around and you think, to make this graceful photograph
amid all that is just amazing.
And it's one thing that it happened,
it's another thing that there's another person documenting it.
One of the most compelling photos
from Liberia is the very young Liberian soldier
who is jumping for joy, he just hit his target.
That picture, I'm still not quite sure
what it means, you know, it has an ambiguity to me
that is still kind of, I'm exploring, I think.
Does it celebrate war or is it something else?
I think a lot of different people would bring different things
away from that picture
and even I haven't quite figured out what it all means.
I remember looking at all the pictures that came out of Liberia.
It was mayhem.
And I think Chris spent a lot of time through his actions...
...deeply empathizing with people and their conditions.
And really wanted the world to empathize with their conditions, too.
There was about maybe 10 photographers
that pitched up there, and we started saturating
the news with images from the war.
Suddenly, the UN got involved and held hearings
and started assembling a peacekeeping force.
I mean, there was a real cause and effect.
Did Chris ever talk to you about why he felt
it was so important to go cover these conflicts?
Well, I told him a few stories you see when they were children, you see.
And they always said, "Mom, tell a story about your childhood," you see.
So, in the evenings I would then tell them stories the way I grew up.
You see, it was totally different than it was here in the States.
Four thousand planes smashed the Atlantic wall...
When the war started, Second World War,
it creeped closer and closer into the small towns.
So I told him some stories.
Planes being shot down, and then they were burning, you see,
and then people jumped out and things like that.
How 'bout you, Chris, what scares you?
Nothing.
Sure.
Yeah.
But what really scares you?
Nothing really does scare me.
He was always a very independent, self assured
already when he was small.
And I don't know.
Maybe genes, maybe, I don't know.
You knew that he was going to be
a photographer, right, I mean, was it clear to you?
Uh, yeah, he was always talking about that.
My husband was very, very upset and I told my husband,
I said, "Zip it, whatever he wants to do, he will do
and leave him alone."
It was very important to me and I said, "You have the opportunity,
you have the means, you have everything here, what we did not have."
You see, I grew up in the turmoil there.
What we did not have.
I said, "use it."
Chris and I were so intent on becoming journalists
that we oftentimes would try to skip ahead
of what we were learning in college and just go out and do it.
Our first assignment together
was to cover Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993.
He calls me up and says, "Come on, let's go cover this for the student newspaper."
We arrived in Washington without press credentials
or even the proper attire to be able to get into
an inaugural ball to get the story
that we needed, so Chris managed to bluff his way
into securing a pair of all-access passes
and I managed to break into my dead uncle's wardrobe
and steal a couple of hugely oversized shirts
and sport coats.
But we ended up getting into the ball
and getting the shot that we needed,
so it worked out perfectly.
Chris hired me as an intern after I got out of college.
I immediately saw, I was really surprised how young he was.
I mean, here's a guy who's my age.
He was chief photographer at a paper.
Um, however small the newspaper was, he was still running the show.
You know, police scanners always on next to his bed,
chasing every single bit of spot news that there was out there.
The first very sophomoric thing a young photographer does
is look at National Geographic and say,
"Oh, my gosh, I could shoot those pictures."
Chris was pretty adamant that he was gonna go shoot those pictures.
And that he was gonna figure out the transit route to go do that.
Working in a small daily newspaper in America
to going and covering international wars
is a pretty big step and there's no instruction manual
to kind of tell you how to do it.
Just to sell everything and go off to Kosovo
is a bit of a risky move, but we were ready to make that jump.
Being really ambitious, young, inexperienced,
you don't really have the proper idea of how much danger
you're putting yourself in and it's very common
to just think that nothing can happen to you,
that you're an observer and somehow that protects you.
But when there's actual combat going on,
that is the only thing that teaches you,
this is what it really means to be here.
This is where you really start to see what people are made of
and I could see what Chris was made of and was clear that this wasn't gonna be
the last trip to Kosovo or any other place for him.
Well, to be very honest, he was there three times, I heard.
But we only knew of one time.
He said, "I didn't want to worry you guys."
I was always trusting his judgment, you see.
So, when I didn't hear from him for two or three weeks or so,
well, he was busy.
Getty Images wanted to start a news wire service.
We were looking to make a splash,
we were looking to make our mark in the news scene.
He brought that higher level of photography with him.
It really influenced all the other photographers
who were working with Getty at the time.
You could call it the "Hondros effect".
The early days of Getty,
we were really the only wire that was doing something,
trying to do something different
and kind of fresh and certainly more creative
in a broader interpretation of what a news photograph
is and can be.
The absolute key for us in starting our news business
was that we wanted the photographers to tell the story.
And in talking to Chris, that's exactly
what he was doing and what he really, really wanted to do.
He wanted that flexibility and that ability
to tell the story the way he saw it.
And for him, the story was always about
the people being impacted by the conflict
or by the disaster as opposed to the disaster itself.
We have a breaking news story to tell you about,
apparently, a plane has just crashed
into the World Trade Center here in New York City.
It happened just a few moments ago apparently.
The morning of September 11th, I got a phone call
from Chris saying, "Turn on the television set."
...a great deal of concern.
"You've gotta quit your job today,
you should come to New York tonight."
I was holding a baby bottle or changing a diaper or something
and I thought a lot about how
our lives diverged at that point.
I'll never forget it was some days after 9/11
and we were, you know, all in the office, we were working crazy hours
and suddenly I get word that Hondros is on a plane to Pakistan.
And I just said, "What?"
I hadn't even thought about Pakistan.
He was probably a half step ahead of us
in terms of where was this story going next,
where was this gonna be happening, so, usually,
he would just call in the morning and say,
"Hey, this is what I'm doing rather than wait
for anyone to go and send him anywhere."
Really, inevitably, that moment was the beginning of Chris just going.
There was nothing to turn him back and for the next 10 years,
that's all he did, he went.
From then on, I was seeing Chris' work on
the cover of every newspaper in the world.
Do you know what spot news is?
You know, spot news is car crash, bomb blows up...
...plane into a building.
The photos from that specific day...
have a lot of impact, a lot of emotion.
But I think Chris was deeply interested in how the story transpired.
What wisdom are we supposed to derive from this?
And I think Chris felt a responsibility to answer a lot of those questions.
When the invasion started,
I rented a SUV and...
and drove across the border into Iraq.
Entering Baghdad when the city was going to fall
would be of supreme historical importance.
You want to be there when that happened.
And in fact, we came across another couple of SUVs
with another couple of Newsweek journalists
who were also hell-bent on making it to Baghdad
before anybody else.
Shot for a few days, no problem.
Followed the main highway that was leading towards Baghdad
which was a long snaking column
of American armored vehicles, hundreds of miles long.
I should have taken my time with it, I should have just stayed back
and slowly inched my way up, but I was a little bit eager
and I'd driven up on day three of the war
about halfway to Baghdad.
You know, it was a very calm afternoon,
nothing was going on, we were just following
a convoy of Marines and there was absolutely no fighting,
there was no resistance whatsoever.
The only disappointment was the Marine unit
that we'd ended up following was being diverted,
so there was another Marine convoy
maybe two or three kilometers ahead
and we tried to hook up with them
which meant traveling those two or three kilometers in no man's land,
so to speak, without any convoy protection.
We are now gonna talk to Chris Hondros,
the infamous photographer with Getty Images.
So, Chris, tell us, what are you thinking?
I'm thinking that I'm amazed that they're letting us drive this deep into Iraq.
On the right side, I remember there was a very large gas station
and I just remember hearing, you know, gunfire,
and I looked over and there was at least 10 to 15 Iraqi soldiers,
all in fatigues, shooting at us.
The tires on the right side of the car were completely blown out
and so we're traveling on rims.
And then we ditched the car, grabbed what we could,
and we're so lost on an Iraqi farm field as night fell for an evening.
It was bad.
Chris was on the phone with his Getty folks
back in New York who were being advised by Marine commanders
to hunker down, dig a hole,
and wait until the morning.
I thought it was a really bad idea because you're basically a sitting duck.
It... It was, uh... It was hard to convince Chris.
He, he was dead set on staying put.
He was in this tunnel thinking that this is what he's going to do.
That's how it's going to resolve itself,
by staying in a hole and waiting to be rescued in the morning.
I kept saying, well, come morning,
everyone's going to be able to see you, including the Iraqis.
They're going to find you,
they're going to follow the footprints in the sand.
I think that sort of convinced him that that was the wrong decision.
When I tell you "convincing", I had to literally grab him by his collar,
by his shirt, and shake him and I was like slapping his face
because we felt like you cannot stay in the desert.
You have to come with us, we're taking you whether you like it or not.
And so, we walked in the complete darkness for 10 kilometers.
Took us about six or seven hours,
and made it to an army staging area.
It also ended my drive to Baghdad
because I lost the truck, I lost a lot of equipment and gear.
So, I stayed with those soldiers who picked us up
for a few days but basically then,
they had helicopters that were going back on refueling
and I got on one of those
with my tail between my legs.
We were stuck in the desert for three days.
There was a raging sand storm.
You couldn't see anything but you could see
Chris Hondros' titanium white, iridescent turtleneck.
You know Egyptian cotton.
So typical Chris.
I pushed it too far.
I thought that we actually just drove on protected light SUVs across the border.
It's incomprehensible to me.
I mean I think Chris and I were really stupid
to get ourselves in that situation.
Photojournalists in order to survive,
we need a level of arrogance and I felt it,
I see it in my colleagues, and I've seen it in Chris.
I have a very good sense that he felt this way.
A very high, supreme confidence in his ability
to survive everything.
A cockiness.
Who doesn't feel that way sometimes.
You cover dozens of conflicts, multiple times,
multiple things and nothing happens to you
or when things do happen to you,
you're able to, like, brush off your pants and walk away.
Chris definitely had a tolerance for risk
that I just don't have.
And I wasn't, I don't know, I wasn't born with that.
He could be, I don't want to use the word "cavalier,"
but he had this incredible optimism.
He was done, he was gonna go home for a while
and chill out and recover.
So I drove him from Baghdad down to the southern border
and we see a sign for the town
where they were shot up and I'll never forget it.
He looks at me, he's like, "Let's just take a spin through the market,
I bet you my SAT phone, we can find my cameras and SAT phone."
And I just immediately gunned it just to, like, 120,
just pretend I never even heard it, Chris, didn't hear it.
I think we was a great coper, if that's even a word.
Because he had such a rich life.
I didn't have to worry about him
because I knew that he was always engaging with people
in ways that let him process what he saw.
Well, Chris is the type of guy that you just became friends with
really fast and he's really open.
And he actually, one of the things that
I didn't really understand about Chris
until much later in our friendship was that the scope of friends that he had.
Whether they're translators, drivers, friends he met along the way,
doesn't matter who they were,
he actually put an incredible amount of work
and energy into staying connected to those people.
And he really had this global presence about him.
Chris is one of these guys that just could really
have the world open its doors to him.
He had a just, always had a smile on his face,
was very curious about everything.
You know, he would just win friends, you know,
and if you're going to be successful at this profession,
you have to have that ability.
Chris was always very interested in relationships.
He would travel around the globe watering,
but essentially nurturing relationships.
He was just like that, and you feel so often
that when you're in these environments and you're, you know, you're sharing,
I don't want to say you're taking, but you're sharing
these moments with people, you get to go home to your life.
And you know you leave these people behind
and their situations that they can't leave.
He wanted to somehow do something about that for people
and give them an opportunity that they would never otherwise have.
Ladies and gentlemen, very warm welcome to Monrovia.
Joseph, hey.
Good to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
-How are you? -I'm fine.
Good, good. Thank you for meeting with us.
-Go inside? -Thank you, yeah.
Wow, are these all shrapnel or bullets?
These are RPG and these ones are bullets.
Wow.
I never sort of connected with that fighter,
and as the picture got used all over the world,
people asked me if I knew his story or how old he was,
whether he survived the war, anything like that, and I didn't know.
I didn't realize the impact the picture was going to have.
But my colleague at Getty, Spencer Platt,
ended up going to Liberia a month or two later
and he told me that he was driving around
in an area and saw that fighter you know, running around,
so he was pretty sure that he had survived.
I said, "Well, how do you know it was him?"
He said, "Well, I recognized him from the picture.
And also he had the printout from the weekend pictures
on MSNBC taped to his windshield of his truck, you know.
He was extremely proud of that picture of him in the middle of battle.
So, a few years later, when I went back to cover
the Liberian elections in 2005,
I thought that for sure I should try to track him down.
Said, "Look...
How much education had you had already at that point?
You know there's a line that says, you know,
"If you kill one man, you kill all of humanity",
I'm paraphrasing.
If you save one man, you save all of humanity.
I think that that's the way Chris was.
He nurtured all of his relationships that same way.
I will need you back.
There's so many people here in the church and everything.
"Aren't you worried?" I said.
"Even if I worry, you see, there's nothing going to change."
I cannot tell him, you stay home because I'm worried, you see.
You cannot do that.
Wait!
Smoke it! Down the street, hurry up!
Smoke it! Smoke it!
The only thing that I always told him,
I said, "Please be careful."
A picture is not worth your life.
He said, "Oh, Mom, don't worry, I'm careful, I'm careful."
Most people went to Iraq in 2003 and that was it, the war was over.
Chris went back every single year,
patrol after patrol after patrol.
I mean, very few journalists are in Iraq anymore.
And to me it's incomprehensible.
I understand that on some level, it's extremely dangerous.
On the other hand, it is such a critically important story.
It is the foreign story of our time bar none.
He was dedicated to telling that story.
And he would go when it was 120 degrees,
he would go when nobody else wanted to go anymore.
You know, actually, psychologically, he was figuring this story out
but it would start kind of creeping over the wire,
he was getting closer and closer.
And then just out of the blue, took an image
or series of images that became the defining pictures of that event.
I wanted to go to downtown Mosul,
I was really on him about it and they said,
"Well, we're gonna send you out to Tal Afar."
And I said, "What the hell is Tal Afar? I've never even heard of it."
And they said, "Well, we have a really important mission
going on over there, you're really going to like it."
Usually when they say that, it's gonna be some glacial boring thing.
So I get flown out to Tal Afar, this dusty field base in the middle of nowhere.
I was actually walking up to the platoon leader
and the platoon leader said, "Hey, this is our imbed today."
And I was like, "Great."
I always gave the journalists a brief,
"OK, do me a favor, do what I tell you to do."
"If you don't do what I tell you to do,
I can't keep you alive."
Chris' response was, he's like, "Well,
my first priority's the pictures, man."
I was like, "OK, you're gonna get my ass shot."
But I liked the guy.
I got with one unit that seemed to be pretty good,
the Apache Company.
Anyway they were pretty press-friendly, these guys,
and so we went on a late afternoon patrol.
The streets were empty,
there was a sort of curfew in effect, it was a very tense town.
But a car appeared in the distance
and started coming toward them.
And, you know, they, soldiers in Iraq don't let cars come towards them.
I mean, they just don't let that happen
because of the fears of bombs and things.
Chris and I were, you know, standing there.
I saw Chris taking pictures off to my right
and we heard the roar of an engine,
like "What the hell is going on?"
We knew something was going to happen.
We just knew it.
We gave 'em warning shots, two warning shots.
That's one more than usual
and they sped up.
So company commander says, "Stop that car, somebody stop that car."
So, it was open fire, you know.
And it was 20 guys
pulling the trigger as fast as they could.
We're putting down 18, 20 rounds a piece
into this vehicle before it was a, "Ceasefire, ceasefire."
That's a lot of ammo.
Sure enough, I hear children's voices
as they stopped the car and I knew it was a family.
Back door's open and kids just tumble out of the car,
just one after one after one, there were six in all.
And the parents sitting in the front
were just riddled with bullets and killed instantly.
I was like "Oh, my God.
What did we do, what did we do?"
I saw this one little girl and she had a lot of blood on her face.
She could have been my daughter.
The children in the back were incredibly enough OK
except one of them was shot to the abdomen.
Chris was there, he saw it.
He had the presence of mind to take the photos
and to insist that those images were released
even though the military were not keen on that.
The Major wanted me to hold onto the photos
for a few days, he said, "Yeah, we appreciate
if you didn't send those out for a few days
until we've done our investigation."
And I said, "Well, I have to talk to my boss
but I think, you know, we want to work with you there, Major,
so I think we can probably do something like that.
Let me check but I think we'll be OK."
Again, I'm being very casual, very cool.
And then I stepped out of his office
and ran back to my trailer and hooked up my SAT phone
and got all the pictures and looked at them
and I said "Whoa", I couldn't believe how much
information was there, like the pictures did come out.
"I need to get these back to New York
before something happens."
I mean they have the capability to, like, jam all communications from base
including my personal SAT phone, you know.
And I said, "OK, send, send, send 'em up,
send 'em up, send 'em up, quickly, quickly, quickly."
So I sent 20 pictures,
and then, whew, got them out.
Close the SAT phone, close the computer.
The impact of the Tal Afar photos was immediate, you know.
There had been obviously reports through the war
of things like that happening but there had been
no visual proof if you will.
Those photographs brought a problem that might
have been murky into sharp relief.
They ran globally for days on end.
And then afterward, you know, Chris got kicked out of the imbed.
I just did a book on Iraq, Iraq was my war.
I mean, I spent years there and really covered the war.
And I think the one photo that reached the American public
out of that entire conflict is Chris' photo from Tal Afar.
Something Chris said about the Tal Afar photographs
was that this was something that happened all the time in Iraq,
he just happened to be there when it happened.
And the Tal Afar images, again,
it's just this intersection of lives that, you know,
when it was over, everybody was changed.
I believe that it was a very traumatic event for Chris
and I think that that's probably
what led him to follow up and get involved
with a young boy who came over here for treatment.
That boy who was shot, he ended up being,
on the basis of these photos, he ended up being flown to Boston for treatments.
You know, he did a lot of that stuff on his own
to figure out a way to get Rakan to the US
which is a very difficult thing to do in the middle of a war.
An Iraqi national had come to get help in this country for their injuries.
When you have that connection, you know,
you don't have that connection with everybody
but Chris obviously had that with these people
and he put them on the world stage,
and I think he probably was trying to protect them as well,
you know, making sure that they're OK.
And a lot of us just run through people's lives
and take pictures and we sometimes become famous
for that versus the subject and I think he wanted to make sure
that they were OK.
Chris, you are well known for this remarkable series
of photographs in Tal Afar,
describe the little girl,
this most famous image of the little girl next to a soldier's boots.
Yeah. Her name as it turns out is Samar, Samara Hassan
and she was five years old at the time of the picture.
I think one of the reasons the photo had the sort of resonance
that it does is because it has a sort of empty feeling.
The poor girl all alone in the world now
just standing there in the dark, you know.
Chris was reluctant to talk about details
of his work when he was covering conflicts.
He would much rather talk about his music, for example,
or the latest novel that he read.
Well, I'm sure a lot of people would say this about Chris
but he was able to go to the places
he had gone to and do the work that he did
and still come back and have somewhat of a sane existence.
He knew the cost of war more than anybody but I never saw him talk about it.
You know, if anything, he made light of it.
Sometimes we'd discuss stuff and he'd say, "Hey, you know,
that's just the way it is," and, boom, he was off on another subject
and you think, "Oh,
we didn't have the conversation I thought we were gonna have."
Chris and I would talk for hours and never talk about photography.
Chris talked about ideas.
In a way, that's the power of who he was and the power of his work.
Like, the camera is just an extension of his psyche and his intellect.
He really encouraged me to be more introspective
but also be more aware of the world around you.
There was an intensity there, I mean, you could see it in his work
but outwardly he didn't take himself too seriously.
He had a perfect mix of intensity and levity
because there's a bigger mission here and we'd have to keep focused on that.
I have a career ahead of me, I can't let this kill me,
I can't come out of this so messed up
that I can't work from this point on.
So, while it is jarring to come back and going back and forth,
I do my best, to to...
have a normal life here and keep Iraq in Iraq.
I'm not going to let Iraq get the best of me.
You know, I'm not going to do it.
Hondros.
I've been at this a while, and again, one of the reasons
I've lasted as long as I have is to keep
some level of distance and sanity from the whole process.
So for my part, what's fun in Iraq.
Well, you know, the journalists all stay in this hotel
and we have parties, you know.
There is Joe Raedle.
The penthouse in the Al Hamra hotel
was actually a really nice place to come back to
when you'd been out in the field.
Not a luxurious penthouse but it was a nice penthouse.
Getty Images hard at work.
Everybody knew Chris Hondros. He'd been there forever.
Um, they knew his work.
Wow. Chicken!
- Hondras. -Hondros!
So we all hung out all the time.
Whether it be having dinner together,
we'd have a weekly poker game here and there,
and Chris was a presence at all of those evenings.
Classic Chris told me, "Oh, well, you should come by
the Getty apartment later tonight."
It was like we were back in New York or something.
That's pretty much how Chris was.
Everywhere he went, you know,
he was always trying to bring a sense of normalcy I think.
Maestro, maestro.
Chris called me up and he said, "Hey, you know,
I've got the concert master of the Pittsburgh Symphony
to play Bach's "Chaconne"
which is the single most important piece ever written for a solo instrument
in the history of music... supposedly."
And Chris presented a slideshow of seven years of his work in Iraq
timed perfectly to the movements within the music.
You know, you can't tell me Chris didn't have nightmares about it.
I smell what I smelled that night.
Blood, brains, I mean you ever smelled?
You can't forget it.
Other people came back and they were welcomed back
with, you know, hugs and what not, no, I mean, not me.
I couldn't relate.
All my friends went away.
So who else could I relate with?
So I was like, you know what, let's contact Chris, see how he's doing.
And, uh...
And he came down.
He came down pretty lickety-split quick.
Um, well, you know Chris and I, we're sort of,
we don't even really know what we're going to do
out of this if anything, so just kind of, like,
you know, we're just kind of chit chatting about stuff.
I guess it's irrelevant in that didn't you say
that one of your lieutenants said, "Take that car out?"
Or in that Captain Seabolt did say...
-The captain did. -"Stop that car."
Do you think you were the only one shooting at the passenger?
I feel fairly responsible for the majority of the injuries.
I feel as though I killed the pregnant woman.
I feel that.
I feel I injured Rakan Hassan.
I feel that so that's what makes my...
You don't know for sure though that
yours was the only bullet that hit the wife in this case.
No.
You suspect that but, I mean, a lot of people were firing.
You don't know that for certain.
Every time I go and look at Chris' photos,
I have to see those ones.
Even though I know I'm gonna have nightmares.
I have nightmares every night.
It used to be so bad I'd see Rakan walking down the street.
Did you follow what happened with him after that?
Yeah, he went to Massachusetts I think it was,
and got surgery and now he can walk.
Uh...
Does...
It does seem that...
he actually was killed in some sort of incident in Mosul actually.
- Who, what, Rakan was? - -Mmm-hmm.
There was some sort of insurgent attack on their house
and Rakan was killed in that last summer.
I thought you might have heard about that 'cause I was published as well.
No.
It was just, they weren't targeted or anything strange like that, were they?
They do seem to have been targeted.
Really?
Yeah, it was, it was a pretty good surprise.
I didn't know.
And it was because of what we had done that he died.
So...
I wanted to apologize.
Um...
No matter how many times you say you're sorry.
Sorry.
If assuming that we have a chance to meet Samar
and her family, would you like us to pass that message along?
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
I never asked Chris if he...
you know, regretted getting involved.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a question for Chris. Yeah.
We all make judgment calls.
We all feel compassion in different ways.
And obviously sometimes the consequences are beyond our control.
And there was a lot of discussion about
whether or not journalists should do that.
Yeah, I think the only people that might be questioning that
are the people that haven't been there.
It's tough to walk away from a little girl
that's sitting in the middle of the blood of her relatives.
We're humans, we're not machines.
So...
When you talk about war being hell, this is what you mean.
It's not just battlefield type of stuff.
When any country says it's going to go to war,
these are the kinds of things that we can expect
because these are the things that happen in war.
Hello, Samar.
Does she understand that my friend was
the photographer who took the picture of her?
You know I always think it's a lot more difficult
for photographers when we get into this business
of we don't want to talk about objectivity,
then certainly balance.
You know, a reporter can go into a situation and say,
"Well, I can always get both sides."
With a photograph, there really isn't
that kind of way to balance the picture.
Do you think about that?
Sure.
Individual photos of course are difficult to balance in that same way.
On the other hand, I think on the whole,
in terms of a body of work, it's possible to achieve
that kind of balance, that kind of fairness.
I think in my work, in Iraq I've covered,
I've been embedded with US soldiers, you know, for months and months on end.
I've been with Iraqis in their homes.
You know, I've tried to cover every part of this story that's possible to cover,
and I think if one looks at my work as a whole,
you see that multifaceted aspect of it.
How do you get these amazing photographs
and go to these incredible places
where you internalize profoundly the human experience?
I would always get a phone call from him
and the conversations that we had very often
were Chris on a mountaintop
halfway across the world, um, lonely.
You know, he was a globe-trotting, gallivanting,
good looking, extremely articulate conflict photographer.
I suppose many women imagined that
this kind of fit their movie line,
but it's a tough life.
Is it hard to have relationships in what you do?
It's obviously difficult, I mean, we travel, mostly because we travel a lot.
You know, when I go to Iraq, I go for about six weeks usually,
and I'm gone at least every...
two or three times a year since the war began.
On the other hand, I don't think it's impossible.
I mean there are a lot of people with consuming jobs
and, you know, to me, holding a relationship
is a personal decision and it has a lot of factors
and this only just one of them really.
I was always kind of nagging him,
I said, "Chris, you're getting older, and believe me,
because I said when you are by yourself, it stinks, OK?"
And he said, "Yes, Mom, don't worry about it."
I don't think that I had too many expectations
upon meeting him, it was through a friend of mine.
He was a bit quiet when I met him at first.
So we had a lot of lunch dates and a lot of first dates it seemed like.
And then all of sudden, we just seemed to find our way.
When Chris met Christina, his fiancée,
I think that he found the opening to the rest of his life
and it was a path that he had been looking for
in some way to justify changing the speed
or changing the tempo of the things that he did professionally.
We were very drawn to each other because we wanted a family
and to live abroad
and to have a very kind of curious exciting life out in the world.
I think he had been through 10 years
of just missing the gear in a lot of ways.
He yearned for a deep connection with somebody
and I think he really had found it with Christina.
He was overjoyed that he had come to that place.
I had a background working with people
that had worked in conflict regions, so there was always
a sense of awareness of the risk
and what's involved but I believe very strongly
in the work photojournalists do
and I was OK with him being away
and we always felt connected
in different ways, so it didn't feel like a sacrifice at all.
It was frustration at Tunisia's youth unemployment that started it all.
Today, thousands of people took to the streets
demanding change in Algeria.
They brought their grievances to the world's attention this way.
Tensions now spiked in Syria.
I remember he had the TV on
and Egypt had just started brewing for a couple of days.
And he was kind of pacing back and forth
saying, "I think I should go, I'm gonna talk to my boss
and try to get there 'cause I think this is gonna be big."
And sure enough, two days later, he was there
and he was right, it was big.
Even while the government was insisting
that journalists were welcome to report freely in Egypt,
at the end of last week, we have now learned that
from the International Committee to Protect Journalists,
26 journalists have been detained
since the end of last week, since Friday.
Seventy-one since the protests began and those
are the just the ones they could count.
I interviewed Chris for my book on Iraq
and he talked in particular about the changing role of the media
and he said, "You know, 10, 15 years ago,
the Western press was something that was courted and needed and today
everybody has their own propaganda wing.
They're putting out their own message
and a Western journalist who's there fact-checking is just in the way."
The number one fundamental change is
if you had a media credential or it said media or press
on your vehicle or on your flak jacket
or whatever, you were safe unless there was an accident.
You were not going to be targeted.
Now it's a completely different story.
On the streets of Benghazi, Libya,
a stronghold of forces opposing Libyan forces
loyal to Muammar Gaddafi are defending their leader.
The city of Benghazi, now the heart of the uprising,
is cut off to foreign media.
Libya is like a black hole, very hard to see inside.
We had crossed a border into a country
that had been shut off from the world for 42 years
and we were there illegally according to this government.
This is not Cairo or Tunisia where you're photographing
street demonstrations, this is deadly mortar,
artillery, and war is no joke, you know.
When I reached Libya, I knew it was going to bad.
And it became bad very fast.
You never knew where the bad guys were gonna come from,
when, how quickly things changed,
how fast a town or a village or a city
could change hands from being relatively safe
to completely in the control
of the other side and that's what I experienced
when I was captured in Ajdabiya.
The New York Times says that four of its journalists
covering the revolt in Libya are missing.
One moment you're fine and the next you aren't.
And myself and some others from The New York Times
were beaten and put in various jails across the Libyan desert.
I did know that Tyler had been captured.
Didn't know what had happened to them at that point.
We had heard there were refugees outside town
where there had been a lot of fighting taking place.
So, we were wanting to do a story on them.
You know, we were pretty cautious about making sure
that the refugees story we were gonna do
was something that we could safely do.
You sure this is behind the lines of the fighting?
There's no question that we're gonna run into
the Gaddafi forces and we're convinced that,
you know, that it was safe.
And...
we...
ended up running right into the frontline
of the Muammar Gaddafi, um...
army.
Still photographer Joe Raedle went
missing Saturday while covering the conflict in Libya.
They were arrested at gunpoint by Gaddafi forces.
They took us to a holding area which I think was like a 12-hour drive.
The first thing you saw was, as we were let out of our trucks
was maybe 12 people standing with sacks over their heads.
Um...
And then the Gaddafi people all had surgical masks on.
So it was a pretty, uh, disturbing sight.
They made us pick up our gear and as we're going through
these piles of, uh, gear,
they had-- The New York Times gear was in there, too.
I saw, I think Tyler's name on his bag or New York Times
and, uh, so we knew that they had been where we were,
we just didn't know if they had made it out alive
or not at that point.
You were held for a total of what?
Four days.
But, yeah, I'm good, made it out.
Other people didn't.
My driver was killed in the process
of when we were captured and it's hard to process that.
Who's the one who has a bullet just fly past him
and who's the one who gets hit by it and why?
They didn't kill us
but, uh, they certainly put me through some psychological, uh...
somersaults.
You know, ended with them telling me that,
punching me and telling me that I was gonna...
go home in a box, so, you know, that's something that's hard to deal with.
We were able to get him released after a horrible time
and Chris said, "Well, he can't come out and not have someone greet him.
He's gonna need a hug after this and he's gonna need a hug
from one of his friends and colleagues.
So I'm gonna go out there."
So he went.
You know, it's like seeing your brother.
Things will be OK.
I think we try not to think about it
but we all know that that kind of thing can happen
and that the very fabric of the profession
is about risk and danger, so we try not to talk about it too much
but I think when it happens,
when any kind of calamity happens to a member
of the International Journalism Photography Community,
everybody tries to step up and help and be there for them.
When did you learn that Chris was gonna go into Libya?
I knew somebody was going in, you know? So, uh...
I mean, he replaced me.
We had a long conversation in my office
with the two of them, with Chris and with Joe
just in the room next door and it was like,
"Surely this is a warning."
And it was, "No, this is the big story."
He called me and he said, "Well, I decided to go to Libya."
And in light of the conversations we had just been having,
I remember asking him, you know,
"Why are you going to Libya? Come on." You know?
"You were just talking about your wedding,
why do you need to be there?"
I remember saying to him,
"I am tired of seeing AK-47s in the desert
and if I've become numb to it,
how many people have just become numb to it?
And it doesn't even register an emotional response anymore."
Couple weeks later I see the front page
of The Washington Post on my computer one morning.
And I typed on Facebook a little note to him,
"Brother, that is the best damn picture of an AK-47
in the desert I have ever seen."
This is Chris Hondros. I'm in Libya at the moment.
You can leave a message here or email me at hondros@aol.com.
I got a text from Chris that said "Libya?"
That wasn't unusual because he was always trying
to get me to come to Baghdad or Afghanistan
or wherever the story was happening so that we could
report together again.
I'd always said no.
And I had every excuse
that I'd ever used in the past to use again,
and the idea of not going never crossed my mind.
We were in rebel-held territory in Benghazi
and, you know, it's pretty much the wild west out there.
Our days were spent driving from the relative safety of our hotel
to the frontline of the conflict.
And it was about an hour and a half or two-hour drive.
One of the great things about Chris was his ability
to sort of letting your attitude a little bit and lighten the mood.
I remember one day we were driving in the car
and we were heading towards God knows what
up towards the frontline where people were being killed that day
and Chris asked everybody in the car,
"How do you order flowers for a wedding?"
It was a reminder that there was this other life
waiting for him after this assignment was over.
And it was also a way for all of us
to get our minds off of what was to come.
Allahu Akbar!
To say this front is fluid is a serious understatement.
Here we are yet again at the gates of Ajdabiya
which has now become the frontal defensive position
of the rebels in eastern Libya.
These kids are just playing war.
Dangerous for them, dangerous for us.
If you think about it, this is just like,
if you really strip it down,
these are just bystanders, teenagers,
they don't even have weapons, they don't even pretend they have weapons.
Essentially we're standing out here, if you look at it,
clearly with three or four armed trucks.
We're standing out here with three or four trucks
that actually have ammunition,
so, versus the Libyan army who is fully mortarized,
mechanized and armed down the street with who knows how much.
What I was hearing was that it was sort of amateur hour
over there and there were all these young photographers
running around with cell phones and such
and that really concerned me greatly.
I knew Chris and Tim were traveling together
which of course made me feel much better
because one of the most dangerous things you can do
is go into a combat situation with people who are inexperienced,
who don't have medical training,
who maybe are not gonna hold it together.
Allahu Akbar!
There's all this young generation of journalists who were following him
and they were following him in Cairo, you see the pictures on Facebook,
he's surrounded by all these people.
I don't know, it bothered me that he wasn't working alone.
Too many people around you is a distraction.
Photography is a solitary profession, it should be.
There's a reason for that.
And to be in tune and in touch with your own feelings
and your surroundings and what's going on.
-Allahu Akbar! -Allahu Akbar!
Let's go, Chris.
Wait! Wait! Wait!
The more seasoned veteran photographers,
they see a younger person trying to get into this business
and they might be helpful here and there,
but they won't actually try to like take you under their wing
or care about you as much as Chris did.
He really wanted to, like, make sure that the younger
photographers or journalists were,
kind of, staying together and being safe
and, you know, they felt in a way responsible for us
and that was something I felt real gratitude for
and also I felt like it was going to be OK.
We should probably head out.
Yeah, it sounded kinda hairy.
- What do you think?
No...
Chris was always recalibrating where he stood,
walking around, you could just see the wheels spinning,
he was constantly framing,
you could see his eyes moving throughout the frame.
He didn't get rattled.
He was very aware of the things that could go wrong.
He was constantly performing mental calculus.
And I saw how he had evolved and matured as a photographer,
really at the top of his game
those last couple days when were together.
Yeah.
We have about 45 minutes to make it safe.
OK.
See ya, see ya.
Ooh!
Outta here, no problem.
I last saw Chris on Wednesday April 13th
in the lobby of the hotel in Benghazi.
Chris' last words to me were, "We got you out of here unscathed."
Even the other day with...
I wish I would have held on to him a little longer
when we hugged and said goodbye for the last time.
In Benghazi, there was a frontline.
It wasn't always clear because these weren't professional fighters,
they would fall asleep on the frontline, they would run away during battles.
Misrata was different.
Misrata was a siege
and we were going into be able to cover the humanitarian crisis going on
and arguably war crimes that were happening.
So we got on a boat, a few journalists including Chris and Tim Hetherington.
It was a 17-hour journey.
We got to Misrata and you're surrounded by water.
Regime forces on another side
and a battle zone in the center of the city.
And there's nowhere to go unless you get on a boat
and get out, and even that port was under fire all the time.
It was kind of difficult to find a place to stay there,
so the rebels had like a house to host all the journalists.
There were a lot of us basically sleeping
on mattresses in various spots around the living room.
So on the morning of the 20th, I remember Chris was there
on the couch reading Pride and Prejudice
or something really bizarre in this situation of conflict.
And, uh, I think I left first
and then it was Chris and Tim and that whole group
that decided to go to Tripoli Street.
One of the frontlines of Misrata
was on Tripoli Street.
And part of the road was opened up,
so you could actually, you could drive there
and you could sort of walk around and see the damage.
There was a large crowd of people,
they were shooting in the building.
Apparently, a few snipers inside.
And we'd have guys in the field with light artillery firing into the building.
It was like a very dangerous place to be.
One of the guys who was by my side just got shot on the head.
Last one.
We're ready.
They tried to burn a tire to make them come out.
They wouldn't come out.
This oil is old.
Someone, like, lit a fire in the stairwell
and everybody started running out of the building
because of the smoke.
Hetherington was upstairs...
stuck at some point
and so basically had to climb out of the building on the ladder.
The situation was very crazy for a while
and then it calmed down a little bit because I think they killed these guys
so we decided to go back.
Guillermo, you all right, man?
We went back to the house so we could file our work.
And at one point, the possibility of coming back up here,
I don't know from where, and I said, "Yeah, why not?
Some of the others were gonna go back and, at first I was, like,
"No way, I'm not going back. No way."
You know, and Chris was not gonna go back.
I remember it was kind of a division
between people, of going back or not.
And I think Mike and Chris were not really into going back.
There's been a lot of talk about what decisions went into that day.
I don't think we'll ever have a 100% clear answer
about how things really went down, um, and why.
We don't have the luxury of being able to ask him
why exactly he decided to go back.
So when we arrived in the afternoon,
there wasn't much happening, it was strange.
You couldn't hear shooting, you know.
But you could feel tension.
We began walking by the building
that we'd spent the morning in and then
just maybe 100 feet past the building,
a couple hundred feet, that's when...
mortar came in.
Thirty minutes after the hour,
let's give you a check on the morning's top stories.
The battle for Libya has claimed the lives of two Western photojournalists,
Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington.
They were covering the fighting between rebels and Gaddafi forces
on the frontlines in Misrata.
American photographer Chris Hondros
of the Getty Photo Agency died within a few hours
of receiving a devastating brain injury.
British-born photographer and Oscar-nominated director
Tim Hetherington died earlier in the same incident
in the western Libyan city of Misrata.
Shrapnel from the explosion
killed both British born Hetherington and American Hondros.
Two others were injured.
I have always... I have always been very, very proud of him.
He had a dangerous job but we talked about it many times.
You see, that was his decision, it was his job, he loved it.
I'm still a little bit mad that he had to go,
but I always say he did more living in 41 years
than some men that are 100 years old.
You know I have been a photographer since I was 16 years old.
I have no idea what I would do if I hadn't done this.
Even though as war photographers
you see so much devastation and you see so much of humanity
at its worst, it's to me balanced by the fact that
you also see humanity often at its best.
I've seen such examples of courage and such examples
of human generosity in my work as well and to me
that's been a balance to all the horrible things that I've seen.
In 2003, I was just a photographer, still photographer,
and I actually wanted to become a photojournalist.
Chris Hondros came here to tell our story
that brought that war to an end so I learn a lot.
2005 he came back, we worked together.
He give me this sight and I'm there.
I'm now a staff photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency.
So I always imagining him with the angles I take,
that's always coming into my head.
I feel spiritually that Chris is in me.
I'm overwhelmed with his spirit.