On the Day Qaddafi Dies, News - And Art - from Tim.

Thursday, October 20 2011

On the Day Qaddafi Dies, News - And Art - from Tim.

Maybe it had to happen this way, that Libyans opposed to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi would overrun Surt, his home city, and parade the deposed and soon-to-die leader at the very moment that photographs like the image above would appear, to remind everyone of how this war was fought, and something of what it cost.

Photographs of the dead colonel are essential documents. They tell much. By the time you will have read this, uncountable millions of people will have seen them, and absorbed the news they contain. More images and videos will likely surface, too, underlining the course of this war, and the dark conduct of many who fought it. But those photographs and runs of video, for all of their power, will never have quite the effect, at least to me, as the much quieter photograph above. Why? Because the last photographs of the colonel, for all their news merit, fall within what might have been expected; they are, in their bloody way, documents of a conclusion that long ago was all but foregone. The image above, by Tim Hetherington, is a record of an entirely different order. It brims with hidden meaning and subtle information about these last brutal months, and it points to clues as well about what happened to the man who made the photograph — so much so that it should be printed and hung on a wall.

Which, as it happens, it has been.

On the Lens blog, Mike Kamber has written a tribute to Tim, his longtime friend, who was killed beside another close friend and veteran photographer, Chris Hondros, in Misurata in the spring. Their deaths on the same day, from wounds caused by the shrapnel from an apparent mortar attack, shook the current generation of Western photographers and correspondents who cover conflict like few other events. Mike’s Lens post today serves as an invitation to see more of Tim’s work, presenting a cross-section of photographs as a means both to contemplate the life and loss of a special man, and to reflect upon the role of journalists who cover war. The exhibition will open this Saturday and run through Dec. 2 at the Bronx Documentary Center.

Jim Estrin at The Times, who co-edits Lens (maybe “curates” is the better verb), sent me the link and invitation to the exhibition today as I toggled between work on Afghanistan and following the fast-moving news from Libya. So I did what any of you would do. I read Mike’s text, and started to click through the 11-frame slide show of Tim’s Libya pics that accompanies the words.

I made it to Image 3, which is pasted again above. And I stopped. Why? Because although few would know it, Tim made that photograph while standing only a few yards from the spot where, later the same day, he would be fatally struck. Though the photograph does not say it, the high-explosive round that killed him landed just to this image’s left, on the very sidewalk that is covered here with leaves and battlefield debris.

Look closely. You want to know something of his war, and how the anti-Qaddafi forces claimed each block? Now here is a document. The photograph sends powerfully mixed but not immediately evident signals. It is laden with contradictory cues. Yes, the man behind the tree is clearly nervous. He is carrying an FN FAL rifle, likely looted from the Qaddafi storehouses or lifted from a dead loyalist soldier as the population rose and claimed the rulers’ guns to turn toward the palace. And he is seeking a shadow, which would seem wise, and not because it means you can’t quite make out his face. But because this place was dangerous.

Need more information? On the day that this photo was made, April 20, the street this man was on - Tripoli Street - had been watched over by machine-gun and mortar crews, and by snipers, for weeks. Remember that name: Tripoli Street. Tripoli Street was the scene of Libya’s most pitched building-by-building fighting this spring. When the history of the Libyan uprising at last gets written, Tripoli Street may well be marked down as the turning point in a bitter ground war. The battle across Misurata for its four lanes, over several blood-soaked weeks, proved to be the battle that ensured that the uprising would continue to crest, and finally, as happened today, that Libya’s fighters would capture the country’s longtime ruler and bring him to his grisly end. But not before many thousands of people were dead.

Tim was right there, on this day, as momentum was shifting. The Qaddafi forces were breaking, and the rebels were breaking out.

Wars live in their details, and moving through a war to document it with precision demands seeing the little things, like Tim did. Look at that formerly well-manicured canopy on the tree the man is trying to use to hide. That tree was one of several in a neat curbside row. Look at the leaves on the sidewalk. The weather had been calm and dry for weeks. Those leaves had been blasted out of the tree by ordnance, and almost certainly the same ordnance that scarred the tree’s trunk. Now look into the background, further out, and just to the right of the mangled utility pole, also broken by ordnance. A lot of lead and steel had been flying through the air here not long before this almost pacific frame was made. And more would fly soon. But there are men walking around in the open over there, even as this man in the foreground emanates caution, and fear. Out there, though, the body language seems calmer, less amped up. So many battlefield glimpses look just like this, a jumble of the ordinary and the broken, overlaid with a sense of menace and ease — all at once. Scenes like this, in real time, can be almost impossible to read, just as choices for journalists who work war can be both emotionally taxing and technically difficult to make, much less to make right, day after day, hour by hour, down to the minute, right now. No matter how good you get, how wise, how attuned to the signs, you come to moments and places like this one, where the puzzle swirls — if you are even sharp enough to see it.

Tim could see it. And there he was, moving gracefully through his own puzzle in a tiny lull, making a subtle and pitch-perfect photograph, not knowing that he and Chris, who was beside him, were in the last hours of their lives.

Chris and Tim were two of the lost. How many people died in in these last months in Libya? No one yet can say, at least not reliably. Given the participants’ propensity for spin and falsehoods, we may never get to know. But the war was documented, bit by bit, and still is being documented, and a fuller sense will take shape as time passes. When the accounting is done, Tim’s record will be part of what we will all refer to. Like the image above, almost shimmering with its layered meanings, it will matter, and last.

The Bronx Documentary Center is located 614 Courtland Ave. To get there, take the 2 or the 5 train to the 3rd Ave-149th St. stop. Read Mike’s post on Lens. Then find some time to take the 2 or the 5, and see what should be seen.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

An unidentified anti-Qaddafi fighter, on Tripoli Street. Misurata, Libya. April 20, 2011. By Tim Hetherington. Provided by Jim Estrin, the New York Times, Lens. Rest in Peace, Chris. Rest in Peace, Tim.