@RyanBMcBrideRyan McBride
Beautiful story by @pacemakermcq; Charles McQuillan. His life on the line, he guarded his legacy with utmost beauty. tinyurl.com/3quj3hn
Three months ago, photPublish Postographer Tim Hetherington was killed by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. These are his final images.
Nine days after Tim Hetherington was killed, I received an email from him. It was sent on April 20, the day he died, but for whatever reason, spent a week in digital purgatory. I read it at 2 a.m. on a Friday morning, still feeling numb and confused by his death. “Hey man, just checking in,” he wrote. “Crazy day today. Full on city fight. It’s an incredible story . . . and hardly anyone here.” In some strange way I felt that Tim was still reaching out to me, reminding me of the importance of his final story.
These photos, shot on Tim’s Mamiya 7 camera, before he died, evoke a tangible sense of gravity. Striking on their own, they hold immense power because we know they are his last. Tim was always compelled by war. He was driven by a profound need to be present, a desire to document the life and chaos of places like Liberia, Afghanistan, and Libya. Tim chronicled a dark side of humanity, and the pictures he left behind are extraordinary landscapes of vulnerability and trauma.
More than anything though, Tim’s photos speak to what it means to be a man and how war often defines masculinity. “Photography is great at representing the hardware of the war machine,” he told his good friend and writer Stephen Mayes, a month before he died. “But the truth is that the war machine is the software, as much as the hardware. The software runs it, and the software is young men. I’m not so young anymore. But I get it. That’s really what my work is about.”
