VIEWFINDING #21
Tim Hetherington / Saul Leiter / Bert Hardy
Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington
Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington is showing at the Imperial War Museum until 29th September and marks the 13th anniversary of Hetherington’s death. The display includes both photography and moving image, together with several of his cameras and diaries. Hetherington’s film Sleeping Soldiers is being shown simultaneously across three screens, as its maker intended.
As a photojournalist and filmmaker, Hetherington spent much of his time in conflict zones, which ultimately led to his death – together with that of fellow photographer Chris Hondros – in Misrata, Libya, in April 2011. This was a year after the film Restrepo, co-directed by Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. The film covers the year that Hetherington and Junger spent in Afghanistan, on assignment for Vanity Fair. The US Airborne team that they were embedded with is shown defending the Restrepo outpost, named after the platoon’s medic who had been killed during the campaign. The directors stated that their film is not a war advocacy documentary, they just ‘wanted to capture the reality of the soldiers’.
Hetherington chose to shoot stills with traditional film cameras, rather than digital, as most photojournalists were using at the time. This choice caused him to slow down his approach, creating time to interact with his subjects, and forcing careful consideration of each frame he exposed.
In the words of the Imperial War Museum, Storyteller is ‘a deeper look into the human experience of conflict, a more thoughtful and visually captivating insight into conflict than in the news we watch or read, which challenges your assumptions about war and those caught up in it’.
‘I do not set out to make a work of journalism, but rather a visual novel that draws upon real people and places.’ Tim Hetherington
Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington is showing at the Imperial War Museum, London, until 29th September – further details can be found here.
Images © Estate of Tim Hetherington, courtesy Imperial War Museum
Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World
Having already covered Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World at MK Gallery, Milton Keyes in VIEWFINDING #11, this is a follow-up having now visited the exhibition.
Firstly, a little background on MK Gallery, which is a very smart new purpose-built exhibition space about 30 minutes’ walk from Milton Keynes train station. Opening in 2019, it has effectively been operational for three of those years, due to pandemic restrictions. Architecturally and design-wise, the space takes its cues from the late 1960s and 1970s when town-planners created Milton Keynes. Think raw concrete, furnished with Bertoia and primary-coloured Omstak chairs. It all works very well.
But enough of the space, this is the largest UK show of Leiter’s work to date, with 171 photographic prints and 40 paintings, plus vitrines with contact sheets, notebooks and some copies of Harper’s Bazaar featuring the artist’s photography.
The prints on show are a combination of silver gelatin, Cibrachrome and C-type, some vintage and some contemporary. These are beautifully displayed in vast spaces with ample room to breathe, doing justice to the work. The prints are accompanied by quotes from Leiter, polymath Teju Cole, writer and filmmaker Harrison Levy, and the exhibition’s curator, Brigette Woischnik.
The Cibachrome print above is captioned, ‘Leiter reduced the action in this photograph to a central sliver. The rest of the composition is covered by the shop awning, a black space reminiscent of the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko. A Man idles in a parked white car looking at two men in front of a newsstand. These figures, dressed in dark suits and hats appear as recurring motifs in Lieter’s work during this period’.
‘When I did photography, I wasn’t thinking painting. Photography is about finding things, and painting is different: it’s about making something’. Saul Leiter
Yes, it’s a commitment to travel to Milton Keynes, but it’s a commitment that richly rewards both eyes and mind.
Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World is showing at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes until 2nd June, and further details can be found here.
Bert Hardy: Britain Through His Lens 1938-1957
Published to coincide with the excellent Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery (until 2nd June), this is a newly revised soft-back edition of the long out of print Bert Hardy's Britain.
As the title suggests, the book covers Hardy’s work in the UK and features insightful marked-up contact sheets of some of the photographer’s most well known and loved images.
This 2024 edition also features a new introduction by Tom Allbeson, Senior Lecturer in Media History, Cardiff University and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator, The Photographers’ Gallery.
‘Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs.’ Bert Hardy
Published by Blue Coat Press, Bert Hardy: Britain Through His Lens 1938-1957 is available to pre-order from The Photographer’s Gallery Bookshop, shipping in May.
All images © Estate of Bert Hardy, courtesy Blue Coat Press
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