When my anger at the killing of Anja Niedringhaus reached near boiling point, I kept saying to myself, Anja died doing what she loved best, being on assignment in one of the world’s hotspots covering a very important story, and that’s something to hold on to.
Yet the outrage lingers. After all the wars that Anja covered, all the risks that she took — the rockets, minefields, improvised explosive devices, and small weapons fire that she evaded — to die at the hands of an Afghan police commander whose job is to protect people was almost too hard to bear.
Anja and her great friend and colleague Kathy Gannon, who was seriously wounded in the attack, are exemplars of the current generation of talented, intrepid and courageous women who followed in the footsteps of the pioneering women war reporters and photographers over the past century.
I first crossed paths with Anja during the Bosnian war in the 1990s, when she was working for the European Press Photo Agency EPA and I was working for the AP. Anja took enormous risks — snipers were everywhere in Bosnia — and the photos she took are a testament to her ability to capture the horrors of war as well as the depth of her feelings for its innocent victims.
That combination of talents was noticed by AP photo chiefs who hired her in 2002.
The thousands of pictures she took in conflicts and at great moments in history captured every human emotion, from the joy at the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fighting that toppled Iraq’s longtime dictator Saddam Hussein and the determination of Afghans to vote in the recent election. They are already part of history, but that won’t be her only legacy.
Howard Buffett, a photographer who early on became a friend and fan of Anja’s, has established the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award with a $1 million gift from his foundation. It will be awarded annually by the International Women’s Media Foundation to a woman photojournalist whose work follows in Anja’s footsteps.
There is no better tribute.
I’m certain she would applaud the award because it will honor women photographers who set themselves apart by their extraordinary bravery — just as she did.