1970–2011
Getty Images | Misrata, Libya | April 20, 2011 | Age 40
His photographs from conflict zones across two decades captured the human cost of war with unflinching clarity, but it was his commitment to bearing witness that ultimately cost him his life in Libya.
The Journalist
Chris Hondros knew something about the displacement war leaves behind. Both of his parents arrived in America as child refugees after World War II—his mother from Germany, his father from Greece—carrying with them an understanding of what it means to lose everything to violence. That inheritance stayed with him.
He was born in New York City in 1970 but grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where military culture was simply part of the landscape. Fort Bragg sat nearby. The sounds and rhythms of military life were familiar long before he ever thought about documenting them.
At North Carolina State University, he studied English literature while working for the student newspaper, the Technician. Writing and photography existed as separate interests then, two ways of trying to make sense of things. In 1991, while still in college, his portfolio earned him an invitation to the Eddie Adams Workshop, a prestigious program where young photographers studied under established professionals. Adams himself had won a Pulitzer for his 1968 photograph of a Viet Cong prisoner being executed in Saigon, and the workshop bore his name because he understood that a single photograph could matter.
After graduating in 1993, Hondros moved to Athens, Ohio, to earn a master’s degree at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communications. The program had a reputation for producing serious photojournalists. He spent a brief stint at the Troy Daily News, working his way up to chief photographer, before returning to Fayetteville in 1996 to work for the Fayetteville Observer and be near his aging father.
The Work
Hondros came to war photography through Kosovo in 1999. It was his first time covering armed conflict, and what he found there clarified something. The stories that mattered were about what happened to people caught inside history’s machinery.
After the September 11 attacks, he photographed Ground Zero. The assignment put him in proximity to a different kind of violence, one that had arrived suddenly in his own country. But his work increasingly pulled him toward places where violence had become ordinary, where people lived inside it daily.
In 2003, he traveled to Liberia during the country’s Second Civil War. Charles Taylor, who had led a rebellion that ended Liberia’s First Civil War in 1997, had become president but his government ran on corruption and brutality. By 2003, rebel groups were closing in on the capital, Monrovia, while civilians tried to survive in the space between.
THE SECOND LIBERIAN CIVIL WAR
The Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003) began when rebel forces opposed to President Charles Taylor launched attacks from neighboring Guinea. Taylor, who had won elections after leading his own rebellion in the First Civil War, ruled through intimidation and enriched himself through illegal trade in timber and diamonds. By 2003, two rebel groups—Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL)—controlled most of the country. Taylor resigned in August 2003 and fled to Nigeria, ending a conflict that killed more than 50,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
On July 20, 2003, Hondros was embedded with forces loyal to the government near a strategic bridge in Monrovia when rebel fighters attacked. Through his lens, he captured Joseph Duo, a militia commander, firing a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel positions. The photograph froze Duo mid-celebration, his face twisted in combat rapture, the weapon still smoking on his shoulder.
Hondros later wrote about the moment: “The rocket ripped from the commander’s shoulder with a deafening roar. It apparently hit its mark, because, to my surprise, he spun around and jumped into the air shouting in joy, drunk with the rapture of combat.”
The image ran on the front pages of publications worldwide. It captured how an individual human being could get caught up in violence, and even be transformed by it. The photograph made Hondros’s reputation. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his Liberia work.
When he returned to Liberia in 2005 to cover the country’s elections, he tracked Duo down. The war was over. The militia commander was 28, decommissioned and unemployed, trying to support a wife and three children. Hondros found a school and paid his tuition, continuing to support Duo financially for years. Most people didn’t learn about this until after Hondros died, when Duo posted his condolences on Facebook.
In 2004, Hondros followed Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign—a detour into domestic politics that felt distant from the work that pulled at him. By 2005, he was back overseas.
Iraq had become the defining conflict of the era. Hondros made repeated trips there, documenting the grinding reality of occupation. On January 18, 2005, he was embedded with troops from the 25th Infantry Division on an evening foot patrol in Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq near the Syrian border.
Around dusk, as curfew approached, a car appeared on the darkened street, heading toward the patrol. The soldiers, fearing a suicide bomber, fired warning shots. The car kept coming. They opened fire on the vehicle. At least fifty rounds hit the car. When it rolled to a stop, children’s voices filled the air—sobbing, screaming.
Six children tumbled out of the back seat, all splattered with blood. The parents in the front seats were dead. The family had been hurrying home before curfew. The soldiers, equally terrified, saw only a car that wouldn’t stop.
Hondros photographed the entire aftermath. He captured the confusion, the children’s terror, the soldiers trying to help kids whose parents they had just killed. He sent the images to Getty immediately. They went out worldwide..
The images won Hondros the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2006, war photography’s highest honor, for “exceptional courage and enterprise.” General David Petraeus later cited the series as an example of good press-military relations, arguing that the truth, even when painful, needed to be documented.
The Final Story
In early 2011, the Arab Spring revolutions that had toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt spread to Libya. Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled the country for 42 years, faced armed rebellion and the conflict quickly became a civil war.
Hondros arrived in Libya in April. The city of Misrata, Libya’s third-largest, had been under siege by government forces for nearly two months.
On April 20, 2011, Hondros was working with fellow photojournalist Tim Hetherington—a British filmmaker who had been nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary Restrepo about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan—and two other photographers. They were documenting fighting on Tripoli Street in downtown Misrata, where rebel fighters were battling government loyalists in house-to-house combat.
The group was traveling with rebel fighters when a mortar round or rocket-propelled grenade struck their position. The explosion hit Hondros in the head, causing severe brain trauma. Hetherington was killed instantly. Two other photographers were wounded.
Hondros was evacuated but died shortly after from his injuries. He was 40 years old.
The Legacy
In the months after his death, colleagues and family established the Chris Hondros Fund to honor his work. The fund supports photojournalists working in conflict zones, providing grants and fellowships to continue the kind of reporting Hondros dedicated his life to.
Getty Images and the fund created an annual award in his name. The first fellowship went to a photographer attending the Eddie Adams Workshop—the same program where Hondros had gotten his start two decades earlier.
In 2017, filmmaker Greg Campbell—a childhood friend who had worked alongside Hondros in Kosovo, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone—released a documentary titled Hondros. The film retraced his journeys, finding the people in his most powerful photographs and documenting their lives after his camera moved on. It won the Audience Choice Award at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In a posthumous collection of his photographs and writings, titled Testament, he had written: “The problem with war photography is that there is absolutely no way to do it from a distance. You have to be close.”
Hondros showed that photojournalism at its best creates a kind of witness that outlasts the moment. His images from Liberia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya remain as evidence that someone was paying attention, that the human cost was being documented, and that these lives and deaths mattered enough for someone to risk everything to record them.
Content included in this publication was generously provided by Freedom Forum which hosted the Journalists Memorial for 18 years to commemorate journalists who died reporting the news.
Freedom Forum is a partner with the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.