Man of the war zones
Film honors local photographer who gave his life to expose injustice
Chris Hondros was already a highly regarded photographer on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He shot heart-rending photos from conflict-riddled zones in Nigeria, Angola and Kosovo. But, after 9/11, the Middle East would become his beat and vault him to fame.
Hondros was in Pittsburgh, on hiatus from his job at Getty Images, when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pa., that day. He and Justin Merriman, a photographer pal, raced to the scene. “Chris was frustrated with the access we received,” Merriman told The Post. “So, he got in his car and headed right to New York.”
Arriving at Ground Zero within hours, Hondros quickly realized the broader global scope of the story. “A couple days later, somebody told me Chris was on a plane to Pakistan,” said Spencer Platt, a photographer with Getty. “As soon as the airport opened, he was off. That’s how the guy operated.”
Over the next decade, Hondros ducked bullets, drank pina coladas, snapped pictures and captured history. “He looked beyond the chaos of war,” said journalist Greg Campbell. “He focused on people being affected by conflicts. He found humanity.”
Now, the lenser — who tragically died seven years ago at age 41 — is the subject of “Hondros,” a documentary opening in theaters Friday and directed by Campbell.
Born in NYC to an immigrant couple in the restaurant trade, Hondros lived in Queens until he was 4 years old, at which point his family relocated to North Carolina. He got serious about photography in high school and, after graduating from North Carolina State University in 1993, landed his first job at a newspaper near Dayton, Ohio. In the late ’90s, feeling restless, Hondros sold everything he owned and went, without any media affiliation, to cover the civil war in Kosovo.
Establishing himself as a conflict photographer for hire, he earned a reputation for fearlessness. “Chris made incredible pictures because he went farther and got closer [to the fighting] than the rest of us,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Lynsey Addario, a friend. “He believed in shining a light in places that would otherwise be dark,” Pancho Bernasconi, a vice president at Getty, says in the movie. In 2005, Hondros photographed a young Iraqi girl splashed with her dead parents’ blood after American soldiers shot up the family’s car. The image ran around the world and forced a conversation about excessive American aggression against innocent Iraqis. The girl’s brother had been shot in the abdomen; Hondros pulled strings to get him treated in a US military hospital. As a result, al Qaeda viewed the boy as a traitor and killed him by blowing up the home that he was staying in. Despite it all, Platt said, “Chris stayed optimistic in war zones.” Addario last saw Hondros at a 2010 New Year’s Eve party in Brooklyn, where he introduced her to his new fiancée, humanrights attorney Christina Piaia, whom he planned on marrying that summer. Fellow photographers recall how, in April 2011, while a group of them traveled through Libya, Hondros broke the tension by asking how to order wedding flowers. It was the first leg of what proved to be his final journey. A few days later, in Misrata, Hondros endured a morning under fire near the front line. He opted to not return that afternoon. Then he reconsidered. The decision would be his undoing. A mortar shell landed where Hondros and others stood. Hours later, he and another photographer were dead. “I talked to Chris that morning . . . [news of his death] felt extremely unreal,” said Piaia, who has since founded the Chris Hondros Fund, which gives grants for photographic endeavors. Hondros’ funeral was held in the North Carolina church where the couple’s wedding was originally set to take place just a few months later. As Piaia said, “The commitment and passion he showed to his work helped me to understand why he did what he did. He planted a lot of seeds around the world and touched a lot of people.”