She should know. She’s been covering wars for 15 years, first in the middle of Europe and more recently in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. This spring, she was the only woman on the 11-member AP team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography, mostly from Iraq.
Niedringhaus has had more than her share of serious injuries. Her first day in Sarajevo, she was hit by a sniper’s bullet. In 1997, her foot was crushed and required three reconstructive surgeries after a Belgrade policeman deliberately ran her down while she was interviewing a protestor against Slobodan Milosevic. During that same incident, she was one of dozens of wounded lying in a hospital corridor when a policeman began kicking her. The next year, she was blown out of a car by a grenade while caught in crossfire in Kosovo. And in 1999, she was one of the journalists mistakenly bombed by NATO forces in Kosovo.
A colleague rescued her from the hospital in Belgrade and helped get her back to her home country, Germany, for medical attention. She kept going back, she said, partly because she felt privileged to be there.
One of her colleagues from the Balkan wars, Adrian Brown, who now is a BBC World Service producer, says Niedringhaus is far more than a high-energy, competent war photographer. He said she has an ability to “stay human even in the worst circumstances.”
Asked to translate that, Niedringhaus said she thinks it is “because I don’t feel special. I feel that I’m a gift” to those who are affected by the war firsthand.
There are certain situations that Niedringhaus is uncomfortable photographing. For instance, funerals, which can put a news photographer into the role of a “paparazzi,” a position that she wants to avoid. “You can’t take advantage. This is losing respect,” she says.
Niedringhaus got a camera from her grandfather when she was young but said no one in her family took pictures. A reporter friend of her parents took her to his newspaper office and she joined him some weekends in covering local events. That had a big impact. She talks today about a sense “of being completely free,” of admiring the “autonomy” of a reporter.
She began freelancing at 17, in time to help cover the collapse of the Berlin Wall as a freelancer for the Goettinger Tageblatt. In 1990, she became a fulltime photojournalist for the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA). And then she began pushing to cover the unfolding conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
“They said I was too young, I had no experience, I was a woman,” she recalls. “I wrote them every day for three months and I said, ‘How do you judge me, if you don’t let me try?’” Finally, they let her go. She never had any doubt she could do the job. By 1997, she had moved up to be the agency’s chief photographer.
“My interpretation of the war was a little bit different than what they had before; the more human aspect than the military aspect,” she said.
“I was never keen to go on the front lines because what do you see? Guys and their shoes. You see them firing. So I cover the other side.” She says she tries to cover the “human aspect” of the story by photographing those who are not combatants, but whose lives are impacted by the turmoil of war.
She had seen war only in the movies. “Finding yourself in the middle of it is quite different. I had no idea how I would react or how I could cope with this,” she said. But cope she did. She stayed for years, covering the siege in Sarajevo, the civil war in Macedonia, the refugee crisis in Kosovo.
In November 2002, she joined the Associated Press as a traveling photographer, covering the Middle East including the Gaza Strip, Israel, Kuwait and Turkey. When the war in Iraq began, she was there. The only time she was an embedded photographer was during the recent U.S. offensive on the city of Fallujah. While in Iraq, she was also free to pursue the non-combatant angles. Her photos consistently showed up on front pages around the world.
Now, at the age of 40, she takes more care. She stops, sometimes, where she would not have before. But she still insists that her feelings, not her brain, drive her. “Without feelings, you cannot cover a war. If you don’t connect with the people, you can’t cover it.”
No one forces her to keep covering wars. She is very clear that this is what she wants to do. Still, she says, “The moment before you leave is the worst moment. There are doubts. Why are you doing this? On TV it always looks different. But once I’m there, I always feel good. I never feel I need to leave. It’s not that I like war, not at all. But if you don’t cover it, nobody knows about it. It’s one of the things that drives me.”
After 15 years, she still has the capacity to be astounded by what she finds in covering wars. “I don’t feel like this profession has betrayed me. It pushed me, told me that I’m on the right way, that I should continue.”
That ability to be amazed made her an award-winning photographer. In the depths of the siege, she found “people living under these conditions, even in Sarajevo, trying to make the best of the situation. You saw them with no water, constantly under fire - and yet people try to dress up before leaving the house …. They could be very afraid of being hit but they try to make the best of it. I try to do the same. Otherwise, if you lose hope, you’re lost.”
Where ever she has been assigned, Niedringhaus has helped mentor local photographers. She is proud of one of her early protégés, who was “16 or 17 when I found him outside my hotel in Kosovo. I saw that he had a very good eye. I gave him one of my cameras. And now he’s working for the European Press Agency, covering the Balkans.”
A decade from now, Niedringhaus says she hopes she is still a globe-trotting photographer. The idea of settling down and taking over an office or running a region of the world is a “horrible” thought to her.
And does she consider herself courageous? “Maybe,” she says, adding “I hate to characterize myself. And I think the victims are more courageous.”