Chris Hondros

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Chris Hondros (born March 14, 1970) is a pre-eminent Pulitzer Prize-nominated war photographer.

He was born in New York City to immigrant Greek and German parents who were child refugees after World War II, and moved to North Carolina as a child. After receiving a degree in English Literature at North Carolina State University in 1993 and conducting his graduate work in photojournalism at Ohio University's School of Visual Communications, Hondros returned to New York to concentrate on international reporting.

Hondros has photographed in most of the world's major conflict zones since the late 1990s, including Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, and Liberia. His work has appeared as the covers of magazines such as Newsweek and the Economist, and on the front pages of The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

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[edit] Iraq photos

Hondros's images from Iraq, especially a January 2005 picture series detailing the shooting of an Iraqi family by U.S. troops, have been published extensively and garnered worldwide acclaim and criticism.

On January 18, 2005, an Iraqi family was travelling in a car which failed to stop at a US checkpoint in Tal Afar. US troops opened fire, killing both parents, Camille and Hussein Hassan, and injuring one of their five children sitting in the back seat. Racan, 11, was seriously wounded in the abdomen and lost the use of his legs. As a result of the worldwide interest in his case generated by Hondros's pictures, Racan was flown to the United States for treatment in a Boston hospital. Hondros won dozens of international awards for the images.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

In an interview, Hondros stated:

“ Almost every soldier in Iraq has been involved in some sort of incident like that or another, I would say. Their attitude about it was grim, but it wasn’t the end of their world. It was, “Well, kind of wished they’d stopped. We fired warning shots. Damn, I don’t know why the hell they didn’t stop. What’re you doing later, you want to play Nintendo? Okay.” Just a day’s work for them. That stuff happens in Iraq a lot. That’s why it’s such a damn mess, because almost everybody’s had something like that happen to them at the hands of U.S. soldiers. [8] ”

The Editor and Publisher reported that Hondros' photographs of the children were widely distributed to United States papers -- but few newspapers published more than one photo. By contrast, Hondros states, the same photographs "seemingly dominated the discourse in Europe, where they were run in full over multiple pages by many important papers there."[9] "These pictures are going unseen because editors don't print them. And they don't print them because readers don't want to see them."[10]

[edit] Awards

Hondros's images have received dozens of awards, including top honors from World Press Photo in Amsterdam, the National Pictures of the Year Competition, the Visa Pour L'Image in France, and the John Faber award from the Overseas Press Club in New York. In 2004 Hondros was a Nominated Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for his work in Liberia, and in 2006 he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal, war photography's highest honor, for "exceptional courage and enterprise” in his work from Iraq. In 2007 he was named a "Hero of Photography" by American Photo magazine, for his ongoing coverage of the Iraq war.

Hondros lives in New York City, where he is a staff photographer for Getty Images.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Checkpoints test US troops' rules" (March 8 2005). BBC. 
  2. ^ "The Best of Photo Journalism 2006 > Still Photography Winners > International News Picture Story 1st Place" . National Press Photographers Association. 
  3. ^ "In pictures: Shooting in Tal Afar" (January 2005). BBC. 
  4. ^ Hider, James (January 21 2005). "One Night in Iraq: Chris Hondros Witnesses A Shooting After Nightfall". The Times Online. 
  5. ^ "Chris Hondros Wins OPC's Robert Capa Gold Medal Award" (April 19 2006). The Stock Photo Industry Press Release Cemetery. 
  6. ^ "The Photographers" . Getty Images. 
  7. ^ "The Photographers Award Winning Work By Chris Hondros" . Getty Images. 
  8. ^ a b Hondros, Chris. "The Continuing Story". Colombia Journalism Review. 
  9. ^ Bedway, Barbara (July 18 2005). "Media Cleansing Why few Graphic Images From Iraq Make It to US Papers". Editor & Publisher. 
  10. ^ Rainey, James (May 21 2005). "Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories U.S. newspapers and magazines print few photos of American dead and wounded, a Times review finds. The reasons are many -- access, logistics, ethics -- but the result is an obscured view of the cost of war". Los Angeles Times. 

[edit] See also

  • Tal Afar scene of the checkpoint killings.

[edit] External links