Tim Hetherington arrived at the Big Issue in the late 1990s, fresh out of college and landing in an editorial office that often felt like a dysfunctional college campus itself. We were a small crew – young and green and making the job up as we went along. If Tim thought he was joining the ranks of some idealistic guerrilla army (and I think, initially, that is exactly what he thought), he was too good natured – too abidingly generous of spirit – to let his disappointment show.
He was our staff reporter, rolling into the office with his big voice booming and his camera bags clattering. He had been living in squats and sported clotted dreadlocks and comfort clothes (sweatshirts, tracky bottoms) that he wore until they literally rotted off his body. Some of my colleagues were dismayed by this. "He sat opposite me on the tube," one reported in a scandalised whisper. "Legs apart, trousers all torn at the crotch. And he wasn't wearing any pants!"
Tim's pictures were extraordinary: rigorous, alive and shot on the fly. We sent him to snap homeless shelters and demonstrations, dockers' strikes and boxing gyms. Sometimes we would send him to photograph celebrities, too – an indignity he weathered with pained good humour. He couldn't quite see the point of it. Why photograph celebrities when there were so many proper stories playing out right now, under our very noses?
Tim Hetherington finally moved on from the Big Issue. He cut his dreads and bought a suit. He went to war zones, outraged then Liberian president Charles Taylor and found himself recognised as one of the finest photojournalists on the planet. But when I last saw him, in October, he was reassuringly just the same. His intense professionalism always went hand-in-hand with a childlike wonder at a world that never ceased to spark his interest.
It is perhaps the fate of all great photographers that they will eventually cross the camera line and start being photographed themselves. Prior to that last, gut-wrenching image that reared up on BBC News last night, the final photo I saw of Tim was taken at the annual Oscar nominees' lunch in February. Tim had been shortlisted for his devastating war documentary Restrepo, and this involved him rubbing shoulders with 150-odd Hollywood stars and industry players. Having once had to suffer photographing film celebrities, he had somehow conspired to become one himself.
The nominees had been arranged in rows and gathered around an oversized Oscar statue. Helena Bonham Carter sat far out on the wings. Colin Firth and Mark Ruffalo perched up in the gods. And there, bang in the centre, right by the statue stood our old staff photographer – a winner before the envelope was opened. It was a position that seemed to reflect how Hetherington lived his life: in the thick of things, at the heart of the matter, honouring the Robert Capa dictum that "if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough". He was never one to sit out on the sidelines.
