I knew Tim Hetherington before he became a war photographer. We worked together on a couple of stories for a new magazine that never launched. It was 1999 and our paths then diverged; I went to leafy Sussex and Tim went to war. In choosing Liberia, he entered an especially brutal conflict zone, a country that had already suffered a seven-year-long civil war, when only three years later it plunged into another. Liberia in 1999 marks the starting point of Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington, an exhibition of his sensitive and deeply considered work, now showing at the Imperial War Museum, London.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, as Tim was anything but the clichéd, bullet-dodging war photographer that Hollywood loves to portray. Fortunately, the museum and curator Greg Brockett have gone out of their way to show what made this tall,
