Guy Martin was one of a group of five photojournalists covering fierce street fighting in the Libyan city of Misurata when they were hit by a mortar attack. His colleagues Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed, and Martin himself suffered serious injuries. Jessica Salter hears his story
March this year: Libyan rebels gather on the western outskirts of Ajdabiya, from where they attempt to engage Gaddafi loyalist troops in control of the town. Photo: Guy Martin
By Jessica Salter 7:00AM BST 28 May 2011
On April 20 a group of five photographers, including the Oscar-nominated British photojournalist Tim Hetherington and the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Chris Hondros, came under fire in the besieged Libyan city of Misurata. They had spent the morning following rebel units as they fought at close quarters to clear Muammar Gaddafi’s forces from their town. That afternoon they were hit by a mortar attack. Within hours, Hetherington and Hondros had died from their injuries. The British freelance photographer Guy Martin, who was working alongside them, was seriously injured by shrapnel.
Martin, 27, from Cornwall, started covering the Libyan uprising in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, in the east of the country, on March 20 with a friend from university, Ivor Prickett, 27, also a photographer. The uprising had started in the city a month before as a small protest over the arrest of a lawyer representing victims of a prison massacre; two days later it had turned into a city-wide revolution. On the day Martin and Prickett arrived, rebels were celebrating the first air strikes by British and American forces around Tripoli, the capital city still controlled by Gaddafi, in the west.
The pair spent nearly three weeks following eastern rebels fighting along the coastal road between Ajdabiya and Sert, just south of Benghazi. Martin’s photographs show well-dressed rebels in camouflage gear and military boots with belts of bullets strapped across their chests, sometimes cheering and firing their rifles into the air, at other times praying by the side of their armoured vehicles parked on the dusty road.
Martin studied documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport, in 2003-2006, where he began pursuing long-term projects, one of which, Trading over the Borderline, a photo-essay from the northern Iraq/Turkey border, won the Guardian/Observer Hodge Student Photographer Award. In 2007, 2009 and 2011 he was listed as one of the Magenta Foundation’s emerging photographers.
In 2006 Martin went to Sudan, a year after the civil war ended, taking striking portraits of the Dinka tribespeople, some of the estimated 4.5 million Sudanese refugees, as they made their way back to southern Sudan after 20 years of displacement. Two years later he went to his first conflict zone to cover the war in Georgia.
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Martin’s work has a filmic quality to it. He uses his photographs to tell big, interconnected stories, and his trip to Libya was intended to be a chapter in a broader project looking at the Middle Eastern revolutions. He had already spent a month in Egypt, documenting the fall of Hosni Mubarak after his 30-year rule, and planned to move on to Syria, Yemen, Morocco and Algeria. 'As a documentary photographer I made up my mind in Egypt that this was a wider story,’ Martin says now. 'I wanted to cover the revolutions that were happening in other places as best I could because I think this is a story that will define this generation.’
On April 5, Prickett left Benghazi and travelled to Derna, eastern Libya, where he had an assignment. Martin, meanwhile, wanted to get to the centre of the Libyan story – Misurata – where fierce street-by-street fighting gripped Libya’s third-largest city. 'The rebels in Misurata were fighting to the death to protect their town and homes from Gaddafi’s forces,’ he says, 'and I felt that was emblematic of the whole story.’
He had met Hetherington (who last year won an Academy Award nomination for best documentary for the Afghanistan war film Restrepo) and Hondros in Benghazi, along with two other photographers, Michael Christopher Brown, based in New York, and Guillermo Cervera, from Spain, and together the five travelled to Misurata. As the city was sealed off by land, the only way to get there was on a 36-hour boat ride from Benghazi. Martin turned down two boat rides because they looked too dangerous, but took the third, with the other photographers, arriving on April 16. As they stepped off the boat, Martin recalls, some 400 Nigerian migrant workers were queuing to board it to flee the city.
Once there they travelled as a pack, following the rebels as they tried to clear government forces from the rooftops of their city’s buildings. In sharp contrast to the smartly uniformed rebel soldiers in the east, Martin’s pictures show the Misuratan insurgents dressed in hooded jumpers, fighting to protect their homes and neighbourhoods.
On the morning of April 20 they had been photographing heavy fighting between rebel forces and Gaddafi’s snipers, who were shooting from the tops of tall buildings with high-powered rifles down on to Tripoli Street below.
'The government soldiers were so close that they were firing into the stairwell from the opposite window and the rebels were firing back, defending their own small neighbourhoods,’ Martin remembers. By the afternoon, the atmosphere had changed. 'It was kind of quiet and there was no shooting, but it felt weird,’ Cervera says. 'I stopped to take a photo and just when I was going to join the group again I heard a loud noise.’
The group had been hit by a mortar, 'the only thing I heard falling all day,’ Cervera says. Hetherington and Hondros died from their injuries, Brown was hit in the shoulder and Martin, despite wearing a bullet-proof vest, suffered major injuries to his stomach and vascular injuries around his pelvis. He was taken to Misurata’s only functioning hospital, Al Hekma, where he had been photographing only days before. Four days later, when he had been stabilised and when an appropriate ship had been found, he was evacuated to Malta where his mother, Karen Martin, and his girlfriend, Polly Fields, met him.
On May 10 he was able to fly back to Britain. 'I was aware of the dangers before I went,’ Martin says from his bed in the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, near his family home. 'But I felt that the Middle Eastern uprising was an important story that I had to cover. Misurata was at the heart of the Libyan story and it seemed like the kind of warfare that doesn’t happen much any more – a small rebel army with small guns fighting a far superior army. We were there watching as these men fought for control of streets that they had lived in all their lives. It was just unbelievable.’
For more of Guy Martin's work see guy-martin.co.uk
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