Obituary: Tim Hetherington

As a journalist and film-maker, Tim Hetherington won international acclaim with his focus on long-term projects examining the human impact of war.

Hetherington was born in Liverpool and studied English literature at Oxford University before pursuing a postgraduate course in photojournalism.

He was a cameraman on Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004), which chronicled the the bloody power struggle between Lurd rebels and Liberian president Charles Taylor in summer 2003, and The Devil Came on Horseback (2007), which used the testimony of an American military observer to examine allegations of genocide in Sudan.

But his directorial debut came in 2010 with Restrepo, a film about a platoon of US soldiers undertaking a gruelling 15-month tour of duty in a ramshackle base in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

Restrepo, named after a military outpost in the valley which regularly came under close-range attack from the Taliban, won an Oscar nomination and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

'Artistic'

Hetherington was widely respected by peers for his bravery, employers Vanity Fair said

The 41-year-old had dual British and US citizenship, and had lived in east Africa for eight years before moving to New York, where he worked as a photographer for Vanity Fair magazine.

He was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year Award in 2007 for his coverage of American soldiers in the Korengal Valley.

Hetherington teamed up with his long-term collaborator Sebastian Junger, the best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, to make Restrepo, spending 10 months between them with the platoon in Afghanistan.

Hetherington also created short films about the soldiers he met while making the film and released a book of photographs, Infidel, examining their lives.

In a statement on its website, Vanity Fair described Hetherington's approach to photojournalism as "imaginative, even artistic".

He was "widely respected by his peers for his bravery and camaraderie", it added.

Professional to the last, the day before he was killed in Misrata he emailed his editor at Vanity Fair to say that his experiences in the Libyan town would have made for an "interesting article".