April 2011

Green Celebrity Death!

Who was Tim Hetherington, the Oscar nominee killed in Lybia in 2011?

[Apr. 24]

Tim Hetherington was born in Liverpool, UK, on December 5, 1970. He originally studied literature at Oxford University, but he went back to school to get a degree in photojournalism. He had been living in New York, and had been sharing his time there with time in London. He maintained dual citizenship. He contributed regularly to Vanity Fair magazine, for which much of his photojournalism work in Afghanistan was done.

Over the course of his career, Tim Hetherington, a green celebrity player behind the camera, became active in humanitarian circles, using his skills with still frame photography and video camera equipment to capture the social and political impact that war had on regions abroad, including Afghanistan, Liberia, and most recently in Libya, where he was killed by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, fired by Qaddafi forces.

Tim Hetherington was best known for his work on Restrepo (2010), a documentary film covering a year with a platoon in one of the most dangerous areas in Afghanistan. Hetherington was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary this past January, but lost to Exit Through the Gift Shop with the notoriously world-renowned street artist, Banksy.

However, Tim Hetherington was the recipient of many awards, according to his website, prior to the hit Restrepo. He was a cameraman for Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004) and for The Devil Came on Horseback (2007). He also wrote two books — Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, capturing the history of present-day Liberia, and Infidel (2010) about the soldiers in Aghanistan, studying the effects on conflict on the young men at the front. His most recent project, a short film called Diary he called highly experimental and it currently is being shown at multiple film festivals.

While this green celebrity author, photojournalist, and filmmaker was not beholden to one side or the other, he did work hard as a humanitarian to expose the effects of war and conflict on societies and individuals alike, and he has received numerous awards for his efforts. He had a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts from 2000 to 2004. He received a grant from the Hasselblad Foundation for photography in 2002. He received four awards from World Press Photo, which aims to promote excellence in photojournalism. Ultimately he won Photo of the Year from World Press Photo in 2007. From the Rory Peck Trust, named after an Irish freelance cameraman killed in Russia while covering the constitutional crisis there, Tim Hetherington won the Rory Peck Features (rather than shorts) award in 2008. And he won an Alfred I. Dupont award, recognizing excellence in broadcast journalism, in 2009.