An exhibition of powerful images from Afghanistan and Pakistan by the late Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus opened Thursday in Cambridge and is up through June 2.
I never met Niedringhaus, a German 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. Gannon was severely injured in the attack that killed Niedringhaus.
An Afghan police commander had emptied the magazine of his AK-47 into the back seat of the Toyota Corolla where Gannon and Niedringhaus sat waiting outside a government compound in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost to cover the presidential election for The Associated Press.
Niedringhaus died instantly. She was 48. Seven bullets shattered Gannon’s arms and shoulders. One of her arms was shot practically off; a lung was punctured and collapsed.
Gannon is now the driving force behind the exhibition, which premiered at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York on April 4, marking 10 years to the day that Niedringhaus was shot and killed. There, I also met Niedringhaus’s older sister Elke Niedringhaus-Haasper, a journalist in Germany, who flew back 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 International Women’s Media Foundation Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award ceremony, now in its 10th year.
Gannon and Niedringhaus are International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism awardees – Niedringhaus in 2005 and Gannon in 2002. Gannon is also a Spring 2022 Shorenstein Center fellow.
The IWMF established the Courage in Photojournalism Award award after Niedringhaus’s death with a grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to celebrate “courageous women photojournalists” and recognize 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 2016 Nieman fellow from the U.K. and Sweden, and Nariman El Mofty from Egypt and Canada. Anastasia was the only one of the three able to attend the ceremony.
Gannon and Niedringhaus had planned to do a text and photo book on Afghanistan that they wanted to publish by the end of 2014, around the time the United States was to hand over security to the Afghans. Niedringhaus had already begun choosing images. “And it is that book that we changed to be just Niedringhaus and her images with remembrances, which is accompanying the exhibition,” said Gannon, 70, who retired from the AP in 2022 after 35 years covering Afghanistan and Pakistan and became the driving force behind the exhibition and book, which is 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 Gannon 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 Niedringhaus 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 Gannon.
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.
Gannon 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 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, Gannon 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
The exhibition and the photographs themselves are a testament to the creed followed by both women, to humanize people and present them to the world in all their complexities, beyond the stereotypes.
Gannon’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 Niedringhaus who edited her “At War” book, and Muhammad Muheisen, two-time Pulitzer-winning photographer who runs the Every Day Refugees foundation and photographs for National Geographic.
Niedringhaus 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 journalist Michael Kamber.
When Gannon began reaching out to possible partners for the exhibition, Michael was the first to say yes. She realized 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.”
She was with Niedringhaus on those trips “reaching deep into the soul of Afghans” – and Pakistanis – documenting in words what Niedringhaus did in pictures, offering glimpses into lives rarely witnessed by outsiders.
They are the only Western journalists to embed with Pakistan’s army, as well as the Afghan army, experiences they shared in a detailed interview with IWMF in 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,” Gannon 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,” Kamber said.
- “Anja Niedringhaus,” the war photography exhibit, is up through June 2 at the Center for Government and International Studies in the Knafel Concourse, 1737 Cambridge St., Mid-Cambridge near Harvard Square.
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. An earlier version of this piece was published by Sapan News. This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for use with due credit to sapannews.com.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.