Eye Wide Open
BY ZACH SCHONFELD
Chris Hondros captured the brutality of war armed with only a camera. A new documentary celebrates his fearless life and works.
An iraqi girl screams. she’s splattered in blood— the blood of her family, whom U.S. troops have just killed, mistakenly thinking they were suicide bombers. She is 5 years old. The photograph (above right, at bottom), taken in early 2005, is one of the most chilling—and grimly iconic—images from the Iraq War. Dozens of news outlets, including Newsweek, picked it up. Such horrific incidents were common but rarely documented on camera, and few photos captured the residual carnage of the war with such startling clarity. The girl’s story would never have been told if not for the late photojournalist Chris Hondros.
A war photographer from North Carolina, Hondros was prolific and fearless. He returned to hot zones frequently, seeking out the stories that needed to be told, long after the mainstream media had moved on. His life’s work is the subject of Hondros, a new documentary by journalist-turned-filmmaker Greg Campbell.
The film traces Hondros’s career photographing conflicts over the last two decades: Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia. After the 9/11 attacks, he covered Ground Zero, then caught a plane to Pakistan. Within a few months, he was embedded with anti-taliban forces in Afghanistan. He was perhaps best known for his extensive work during the Iraq War. “Most people went to Iraq in 2003, and that was it—the war was over,” a former colleague recalls on screen. “Chris went back every single year, patrol after patrol after patrol.”
Conflict photography has always been dangerous, but the stakes rose after 9/11; suddenly journalists became targets. And since
photographers aim to capture the faces of war, they are as close to the action as soldiers and casualties. On April 20, 2011, Hondros, then 41, was killed in a mortar attack in Misrata, Libya. (His friend, fellow photographer Tim Hetherington, was also killed.) In the documentary, Hondros’s mother says she often urged him to be careful. “He had a dangerous job,” she says. “I’m still a little bit mad that he had to go. But I always say he did more living in 41 years than some when they’re 100 years old.”
Campbell grieved for a year after his friend’s death, then decided to honor him with a film. He was able to obtain crucial footage of Hondros at work in various war zones. And in the process of tracking down the Iraqi girl, he managed to secure high-profile producers for the documentary. When Campbell reached out to the New York Times’s Baghdad bureau, “the guy who answered the phone was like, ‘Check with Jamie Lee Curtis, who might be able to help you.’ We thought we weren’t hearing him correctly. As it turns out, she was really affected by the photograph that Chris took.”
The actress, a photographer herself, agreed to produce the film, and brought in actor Jake Gyllenhaal, her godson, as co-producer. “Jamie held our hand when we needed it held. She kicked us in the butt when we needed that to be done.”
Hondros has been gone seven years, but, says Campbell, his work remains “absolutely critical to our understanding of the world around us.” And, he adds, “when our profession is being called into question from the highest offices in the country, dedication to the truth and truth in imagery is more important than ever.”