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| In this image taken Friday Sept. 11, 2011 AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus attends an exhibition of her work in Berlin. Niedringhaus, 48, was killed and an AP reporter was wounded on Friday, April 4, 2014 when an Afghan policeman opened fire while they were sitting in their car in eastern Afghanistan. Niedringhaus an internationally acclaimed German photographer, was killed instantly, according to an AP Television freelancer who witnessed the shooting. Kathy Gannon, the reporter, was wounded twice and is receiving medical attention. |
Anja Niedringhaus
faced down some of the world's greatest dangers and had one of the
world's loudest and most infectious laughs. She photographed dying and
death, and embraced humanity and life. She gave herself to the subjects
of her lens, and gave her talents to the world, with images of wars'
unwitting victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and beyond.
Shot
to death by an Afghan policeman Friday, Niedringhaus leaves behind a
broad body of work - from battlefields to sports fields - that won
awards and broke hearts. She trained her camera on children caught
between the front lines, yet who still found a place to play. She
singled out soldiers amid their armies as they confronted death,
injuries and attacks.
Two days before her
death, she made potatoes and sausage in Kabul for veteran AP
correspondent Kathy Gannon, who was wounded in the attack that killed
Niedringhaus, and photographer Muhammed Muheisen.
"I
was so concerned about her safety. And she was like, `Momo, this is
what I'm meant to do. I'm happy to go,'" Muheisen recalled. And then
they talked, and argued. Mostly, they laughed.
Niedringhaus,
48, started her career as a freelance photographer for a local
newspaper in her hometown in Hoexter, Germany, at the age of 16. Her
coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall led to a staff position with the
European Pressphoto Agency in 1990. Based in Frankfurt, Sarajevo and
Moscow, she spent much of her time covering the brutal conflict in the
former Yugoslavia.
She joined The Associated
Press in 2002, and while based in Geneva worked throughout the Middle
East as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan. She was part of the AP team
that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for
coverage of Iraq, among many journalistic awards and honors for her
work. In 2006-07, she studied at Harvard University under a Nieman
Fellowship.
"What the world knows about Iraq,
they largely know because of her pictures and the pictures by the
photographers she raised and beat into shape," said AP photographer
David Guttenfelder. "I know they always ask themselves, `What would Anja
do?' when they go out with their cameras. I think we all do."
Niedringhaus
captured what war meant to her subjects: An Afghan boy on a swing
holding a toy submachine gun. A black-clad Iraqi giving a bottle to her
baby as she waits for prisoners to be released. A U.S. Marine mourning
the loss of 31 comrades.
Other images showed
life going on among the killing: A Canadian soldier with a sunflower
stuck in his helmet. A young girl testing her artificial limbs, while
her sister teasingly tries to steal her crutches. A bearded Afghan man
and grinning boy listening to music on an iPod borrowed from German
soldiers.
"Anja Niedringhaus was one of the
most talented, bravest and accomplished photojournalists of her
generation," said AP Vice President and Director of Photography Santiago
Lyon. "She truly believed in the need to bear witness."
She
didn't stop caring when she put down the camera. In 2011, she
photographed a Marine who had been evacuated from Afghanistan with
severe injuries. She wanted to know what happened to him, and after six
months of searching she found him. She showed him her photos from that
day, and gave him a piece of wheat that had stuck to his uniform when he
fell; she had plucked it and saved it when she was done taking
photographs.
"I don't believe conflicts have
changed since 9/11 other than to become more frequent and protracted,"
she told The New York Times in a 2011 email exchange. "But the essence
of the conflict is the same - two sides fighting for territory, for
power, for ideologies. And in the middle is the population who is
suffering."
Niedringhaus was injured several
times on assignment, including having her leg badly broken in the
Balkans after narrowly escaping an ambush. She suffered severe burns to
her leg in Iraq, and received a shrapnel injury while on patrol with
Canadian forces in Afghanistan.
There were many more close calls; after one, in Libya, she took up smoking again five years after quitting.
"Benghazi
was hell today," she wrote a colleague from Libya in 2011. "The tanks
came in while I was brushing my teeth." In the days to come, she
sheltered with a local family, sleeping on the floor. When the gunfire
in front of the house kept her awake, she listened to music on her
iPhone.
While she rejected the idea that she
was fearless, she made colleagues feel safe in danger zones. She
insisted on local freelancers getting the same protections that visiting
staff photographers had.
She was as stubborn as she was caring.
"If
she believed in something, she was convinced she was right and there
was almost nothing you could do to dissuade her," said former AP
reporter and editor Robert Reid, who met Niedringhaus in Kosovo in 1998
and worked with her in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said she was determined
to cover the U.S.-led military presence in Afghanistan to the very end,
even as the world's interest waned.
She
captured victory too - on Olympic podiums, at World Cups, at Wimbledon
and beyond. And world diplomacy, solar airplanes and cow-fighting
contests.
And she found fun in it all.
AP
photographer Jerome Delay, who met her in Sarajevo in the 1990s,
remembered playing ping pong with Niedringhaus on a dining table at the
Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Back home on another continent that might
have been another planet, he wrote, "we raced our motorbikes around Lake
Geneva between G-7 photo ops and riots."
This summer, after covering tennis at Wimbledon, she planned to swim the width of Lake Geneva.
Anywhere, everywhere, she laughed - a wide-mouthed, head-thrown-back laugh that could wake an army and infected everyone nearby.
At
an exhibit of her work in Berlin in 2011, she said: "Sometimes I feel
bad because I can always leave the conflict, go back home to my family
where there's no war."
That family includes
her mother, two sisters and an aunt. Several years ago the family bought
an old house in the central German town of Kaufungen, where she liked
to spend time with her niece and nephews.
Her teenage niece and goddaughter won first place in a riding competition Friday and dedicated the victory to her.
Niedringhaus is the 32nd AP staffer to die in pursuit of the news since AP was founded in 1846.
"This
is a profession of the brave and the passionate, those committed to the
mission of bringing to the world information that is fair, accurate and
important," said Gary Pruitt, the AP's president and CEO. "Anja
Niedringhaus met that definition in every way. We will miss her
terribly."
