Banda Khel, Afghanistan, April 4, 2014. Anja Niedringhaus texts “I’m glad” to her greatest pal, the photographer Muhammed Muheisen. That day, one in every of her photographs appeared on the entrance web page of the New York Instances.
Niedringhaus is touring by the jap Afghan province of Khost, together with a pal, the Canadian reporter Kathy Gannon. The 2 journalists are an skilled staff, reporting on the presidential elections in Afghanistan for the US information company Related Press.
Their journey has been well-prepared and is taken into account low-risk. They’re touring in a convoy with police, army personnel and election employees. Niedringhaus desires to take photographs of villagers registering to vote, the convoy has simply stopped at a well-guarded police station. Niedringhaus and Gannon are within the again seat of their automobile, speaking and laughing. Instantly, a younger policeman opens hearth on the automotive with a Kalashnikov, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is nice!”). Anja Niedringhaus is killed instantly. A critically wounded Kathy Gannon is taken to a hospital.
“She cherished Afghanistan”
Niedringhaus’ household couldn’t consider that the photojournalist was lifeless. “Deep inside, I believed that it wasn’t true,” says Elke Niedringhaus-Haasper, Anja’s older sister, in an interview with DW. “My sister cherished Afghanistan and the folks there. She was impressed by their hospitality,” she provides. The photographer by no means informed her household concerning the risks she encountered whereas working, says her sister. “She informed us concerning the good issues that a few of her photographs present.”
These are captured moments reminiscent of a smiling boy, with a darkish mountain vary behind him as he jumps as much as fly a home made kite. Kite-flying had been banned underneath the Taliban regime. One other picture exhibits three burqa-clad girls with a child, their colourful garb fluttering within the wind. And yet one more is of little boys on a carousel experience at an Eid al-Fitr competition celebrating the top of Ramadan, one in every of them holding a toy gun.
Brave and Decided
Anja Niedringhaus believed within the energy of pictures. She needed to indicate them to the world, within the hopes they might assist finish wars. “However in Yugoslavia, she realized that photographs aren’t any sufficient to finish a brutal struggle,” says Christine Longere, a former editor on the Neue Westfälische day by day newspaper, and co-founder of the of the Discussion board Anja Niedringhaus in Anja’s Westphalian hometown of Höxter. There, within the newsroom of that native paper, is the place Longere met the then-17-year-old Niedringhaus, who was working as a freelancer.
Niedringhaus‘ first project was to report on the retirement of a city corridor worker in Dangerous Driburg, 30 kilometers away. “She was 17 and didn’t but have a driver’s license, however when the secretary requested if she may drive, she in truth answered sure. As a glider pilot, she had typically pushed a automotive to the airfield. So she grabbed the keys to the corporate automotive and set off,” relates Longere. She nonetheless has the primary picture Niedringhaus took for the Neue Westfalische, which appeared on the entrance web page. The previous colleague provides, “Even then, she was extremely brave and decided. She knew what she needed.”
First struggle reporting project
The younger photojournalist was nonetheless very inexperienced when the European Press Company (EPA) despatched her to cowl the struggle in Yugoslavia in 1991. In an interview for the guide “Bilderkrieger,” she mentioned: “A struggle in the midst of Europe? What am I doing right here? And I instantly went to my editor-in-chief and mentioned, ‘I need to go there.’ He thought I used to be loopy. ‘What expertise do you’ve gotten, anyway?’ I had none, I used to be solely 26 years outdated. However I wrote him a letter on a typewriter each day for six weeks till he lastly mentioned, ‘Then go.’ He and my colleagues have been positive I’d name after two days and need to return. I stayed for 5 weeks that point. I then spent a complete of 5 years in Sarajevo.”
“She informed me rather a lot concerning the struggle, about Sarajevo and the moments when her photographs have been taken,” remembers Anja’s mom, Heide Ute Niedringhaus. Moments such because the one in a Sarajevo courtyard: it was snowing, kids have been sledding and he or she thought how good it was that these kids may neglect the struggle for a second. Instantly an mortar shell landed and killed a woman. “Her identify was Emine. She had lengthy darkish hair. Anja mentioned she appeared like Snow White. The woman’s mother and father and her father’s brother got here operating out of the home. They held their palms over Emine’s head. The picture went world wide. A tragic and shifting image,” says Heide Ute Niedringhaus.
Sharing with the world
For Anja Niedringhaus, it was vital to doc and bear witness to such occasions and share them with the world. Her photographs present girls carrying their kids out of burning villages, males retaining vigil at a roadside, or a girl bursting into tears at a water distribution level in Sarajevo when she learns there is not any extra consuming water.
Troopers additionally seem as victims of the struggle. They’re younger males who’ve been despatched to Iraq from small-town America. Considered one of them carries a G.I. Joe doll as a fortunate allure in the course of the bloody battle for Fallujah. Niedringhaus was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for this and different photographs from Iraq, turning into the primary German photojournalist to win the award.
She reported from Gaza, Israel, Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan, amongst different locations. Repeatedly she cheated dying. In 2010, she was strolling by an alleyway with troopers in Afghanistan when the person in entrance of her kicked a hen. Anja captured that on movie, however seconds later a mortar shell landed — she was critically wounded by shrapnel.
In Falludjah in 2004, 60% of the troopers within the unit she frolicked photographing have been killed. “If I would recognized what I’d see in these two weeks, I’d not have accomplished it, no,” she’s quoted as saying in “Bilderkrieger.”
But she returned repeatedly to areas gripped by battle and disaster. She mentioned, “We’ve got a journalistic mission; now we have a societal obligation.”
Paying the final word worth
Anja Niedringhaus was simply one in every of dozens of journalists who’re killed every year whereas fulfilling that obligation. In response to figures from the group Reporters With out Borders, 50 journalists have been killed world wide in 2023. Different organizations cite even increased figures on account of completely different strategies of reviewing particular person circumstances. The Committee to Shield Journalists says 99 media representatives have been killed prior to now 12 months, greater than three-quarters in reference to the battle between Israel and Hamas.
Some 80% of such crimes towards journalists stay with out penalties for the perpetrators. “The place there isn’t a plaintiff, there isn’t a decide,” says Christopher Resch from Reporters With out Borders. “It’s typically solely worldwide organizations reminiscent of ours that denounce the violent deaths of media professionals. Within the international locations involved, these circumstances are sometimes not investigated for numerous causes,” he explains.
A decade since her dying
The killer of Anja Niedringhaus was apprehended and dropped at trial. He claimed to have acted out of revenge for the deaths of relations in a bomb assault by NATO troops. A Kabul court docket sentenced him to dying. Figuring out that Niedringhaus had opposed the dying penalty, her household fought the tough sentence. The Afghan Supreme Court docket decreased it to twenty years in jail. Two years later, the perpetrator’s influential household started pushing for his launch. “Now he’s most likely at giant,” says Heide Ute Niedringhaus.
On April 4, the tenth anniversary of her daughter’s dying, she’s going to lay white flowers on her grave and place heart-shaped lights subsequent to a photograph of her.
The Discussion board Anja Niedringhaus in Höxter is exhibiting photographs of Anja’s brave missions in struggle zones within the exhibition “The Energy of Info.”
On the identical day, buddies of Anja will open an exhibition of her work on the Bronx Documentary Heart in New York. Elke Niedringhaus-Haasper and Christine Longere may even be there to “preserve Anja’s reminiscence alive.”
And later that night on the Bronx Documentary Heart, the Worldwide Ladies’s Media Basis will current the Anja Niedringhaus Braveness in Photojournalism Award to honor the work of brave feminine photojournalists worldwide. As brave as Anja, who used her digicam and her coronary heart to report on folks in disaster areas.
This text has been translated from German.
