Tim Hetherington Quotes

“Brotherhood means laying down your life for somebody, really willing to sacrifice yourself for somebody else.”

— Tim Hetherington

“As journalists, because you don't carry a gun, you sort of become this observer.”

— Tim Hetherington

“The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.”

— Tim Hetherington

“I'm a documentary image maker, still and moving, because keeping the real world on the agenda is really important at a time when we're increasingly disconnected from parts of the world on whom we depend.”

— Tim Hetherington

“I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.”

— Tim Hetherington

You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.

— Tim Hetherington

“Going to Liberia really changed a lot for me. I didn't realize what was happening on the same planet. My understanding that in the world everything is interconnected really grew - to go to one of the poorest countries from one of the richest countries in the world. It was two worlds apart.”

— Tim Hetherington

“I think it's really important that we understand that we share this world and we're connected to it.”

— Tim Hetherington

“With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.”

— Tim Hetherington

“It's an amazing thing to hear they're finally giving out a Medal of Honor to a soldier from the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

— Tim Hetherington

“We're journalists, so our default position is we're not writing editorial. We're trying to bring information to readers, viewers, so that they can make up their own conclusions.”

— Tim Hetherington

“I'm very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to be better explain to people the ideas I'm exploring.”

— Tim Hetherington

“The best way to get Americans to focus on what's happening in Afghanistan is by using the example of their own.”

— Tim Hetherington

Making an independent documentary film is so hard that usually, the usual model is that your film becomes a model for advocacy, so you can enlist that support group and get as much juice out of your film as possible. That's just practically, financially, what you need to do.

— Tim Hetherington

“The military has a very prickly relationship with the press.”

— Tim Hetherington

“It's funny, the old media idea is very segmented, like "this is my territory and this is yours." But media is changing. You're at a point now where people can start to move into different forms.”

— Tim Hetherington

I have a set of images that go around the world in an art gallery installation. Each of them have different audiences, and they kind of each elucidate the subject in a slightly different way, and they ping off of each other.

— Tim Hetherington

“Liberia is not at the center of a massive geopolitical game. Afghanistan is and has always been. The history is dramatic, the politics are dramatic, the landscape is incredibly dramatic.”

— Tim Hetherington