Journeys to democracy

A tribute to the spirit of Anja – and the courage of journalists

The story behind a poignant photo exhibition that opens at Harvard today featuring the work of the late photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan at the height of the war between the Taliban and the USA. The show, and its accompanying book, are co-curated by the reporter Kathy Gannon who was injured in the attack that killed Anja.

PERSONAL POLITICAL 
By Beena Sarwar

An exhibition of powerful images from Afghanistan and Pakistan by the late Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus opens in the Boston area today.

I never met Anja, a photographer from Germany who worked in my country, Pakistan, but I have long known her close friend and colleague Kathy Gannon, a Canadian who has lived in Islamabad for decades. Kathy was severely injured in the attack that killed Anja.

An Afghan police commander had emptied his AK47 into the back seat of the Toyota Corolla where Kathy and Anja sat waiting outside a government compound in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost to cover the presidential election for the AP.

Anja died instantly. She was 48. Seven bullets shattered Kathy’s arms and shoulders. One of her arms was practically shot off; a lung was punctured and collapsed.  

Kathy is now the driving force behind the exhibition, which premiered at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York on Thursday, 4 April 2024, marking ten years to the day that Anja was shot and killed. There, I also met Anja’s older sister Elke Niedringhaus-Haasper, a journalist in Germany, who planned to return to the U.S. for the reception at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation and the Shorenstein Center.

Courage

The opening reception at the Bronx was followed by the IWMF Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award ceremony, now in its tenth year. 

Both Kathy and Anja are IWMF Courage in Journalism awardees – Anja, 2005 and Kathy, 2002. Kathy is also a Spring 2022 Shorenstein Center fellow.

The IWMF established the Courage in Photojournalism Award award after Anja’s death with a grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, to celebrate “courageous women photojournalists like Anja” and recognise the “importance of visual journalism that helps us better understand our complicated world”.

This year’s awardees were Samar Abu Elouf from Palestine, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a Nieman Fellow 2016, from U.K. and Sweden, and Nariman El Mofty from Egypt and Canada. Anastasia was the only one of the three who was able to attend the ceremony.

Kathy and Anja had planned to do a text and photo book on Afghanistan together that they wanted to publish by the end of 2014, around the time the U.S. was to hand over security to the Afghans. Anja had already begun choosing images. “And it is that book that we changed to be just Anja and her images with remembrances, which is accompanying the exhibition.”

Kathy, 70, having retired from the AP in 2022 after 35 years covering Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the driving force behind the exhibition and the accompanying book, supported by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the AP.

She has undergone 18 surgeries since the attack, with an annual procedure in New York. The last one was some days after the Bronx exhibition launch. 

In all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never once heard Kathy complain or mention her injuries or trauma. Even now, when I reach out to ask her about the exhibit, she is characteristically matter-of-fact and focuses more on Anja and her spirit – which she herself exemplifies. 

“Your life is as important to me as it is to you,” she remembers the Afghan surgeon saying at the government hospital in Khost. 

He cauterized the bleeding, put a tube in her punctured lung so she could breathe and “literally used duct tape and wood to put my arm together,” says Kathy.

Doctors at the French military hospital in Kabul where she was later medically evacuated said that had she reached them first, they would have amputated the arm.

The pain is pretty steady, she admits when I ask, but “you manage it. When you think about what could have happened, it was so close to the spine… I’m so grateful every day.”

She continued reporting tenaciously, going back to Afghanistan like a rider thrown from a horse who gets back up. 

Kathy has been in the region since 1986 when the ‘mujahideen’, so-called ‘holy warriors’, trained and conditioned in Pakistan, financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia were fighting the erstwhile Soviet Union. They later morphed into the Taliban (literally, ‘students’ – of the seminaries they had been trained at in Pakistan). 

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Kathy was one of the few Western reporters they permitted to work there – a testament to the fairness of her reporting and the trust she inspires.

Humanity 

This labor of love and the photographs themselves are a testament to the creed followed by both women: Humanise people and present them to the world in all their complexities, beyond the stereotypes.

Kathy’s co-authors and co-curators for the book and the exhibition are Ann Marie “Ami“ Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation, also a close friend of Anja Niedringhaus who edited her ‘At War’ book, and Muhammad Muheisen, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who runs the Every Day Refugees foundation and also photographs for National Geographic.

Anja traveled for her work “through some of the most difficult years of the protracted Afghan war, reaching deep into the soul of Afghans, her pictures often serving to remind us of our own humanity,” says the Bronx Documentary Center, founded and run by the award-winning journalist Michael Kamber. 

When Kathy began reaching out to possible partners for the exhibition, Michael was the first to say yes. She realised quickly that he is someone “Anja would be one with”. With his commitment to the community he serves – largely Haitian immigrants – he exemplifies “her spirit of giving, caring… she was a crazy person for helping others”. As is Kathy.

She was with Anja on those trips “reaching deep into the soul of Afghans” – and Pakistanis – documenting in words what Anja did in pictures, both offering glimpses into lives rarely witnessed by outsiders. 

They are the only western journalists to embed with the Pakistan army, as well as the Afghan army, experiences they shared in a detailed interview with IWMF, 2012.

Another uniquely daring embed was with truckers from Landikotal in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa transporting fuel from Karachi to Kandahar. 

“We did a lot of stories like that which no one had ever done before, or since,” Kathy told me. “We were trying to make the invisible visible.”

She shared some of these stories and photos with my journalism students and at a larger discussion with two more classes at Emerson College in the fall of 2022. I had roped her in as she was in the Boston area as a Shorenstein Fellow. 

“The exhibition serves to remind us of the extraordinary sacrifices journalists make to keep us all informed. This is a particularly powerful lesson at a time when journalists are dying, suffering life-changing injuries, being targeted, or being imprisoned at an alarming rate,” says Michael Kamber of the Bronx Documentary Center.

Beena Sarwar is founder and chief editor of Sapan News, where Kathy Gannon serves on the informal advisory council. This article has not been sponsored or commissioned by anyone, and is updated from the earlier curtainraiser.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for use with due credit to http://www.sapannews.com

Things to know

Reception, May 9: 5 – 7 pm ET: Allison Dining Room, Taubman Building Harvard Kennedy School
(15 Eliot St, Cambridge, MA 02138)

Exhibition: May 9-June 2: Knafel Concourse, Center for Government and International Studies
(CGIS South, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA  02138).

Book information:
Anja Niedringhaus
By Ami Beckmann, Kathy Gannon, and Muhammed Muheisen
Hardcover, 80 pages, 44 images
Release date: April 2024
Published by Fort Orange Press
Price: USD 30

Filed under: 'War on terror', Afghanistan, Pakistan | Tagged: Afghanistan, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Anja Niedringhaus, Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award, Bronx Documentary Center, Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Human rights, iwmf, IWMF Courage in Journalism, kathy gannon, Michael Kamber, Nariman El Mofty, News, Nieman Foundation, Pakistan, Palestine, Politics, Raza Rumi, Samar Abu Elouf, Shorenstein Center, south asia |