Yesterday the world lost one of the great storytellers and fighters for human rights of our time, Tim Hetherington. He was killed in the Libyan city Misarata while covering the frontlines together with three other photographers, one of them, Chris Hondros died later due to his fatal injuries.

Hetherington got widely known for his Oscar-nominated film Restrepo and was not only an acclaimed photographer, but also someone who pushed the border of how we communicate our stories. Last year in an interview with the New York Times he declared photography as a medium for mass-communication as a medium of the past. Working on different film projects over the last years, he was a cameraman for Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004) and The devil came on the horseback (2007). He was working as an investigator for the UN as well. Maybe Tim was also so important for the community because he was seeing the camera first of all as a tool to communicate and tell stories, ready to move on to something else when that fitted better to reach people with his stories as he did with his films in recent years.

I would like to leave you with his last shortfilm Diary:

“‘Diary’ is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

RIP Tim