Kathy Gannon shares an iconic photo by Anja Niedringhaus during a talk at Emerson College, Boston, 2022 - Photo by Beena Sarwar
A Tribute to the Spirit of Anja - And the Courage of Journalists
By Beena Sarwar
Boston, MA
Marking ten years to the day that Anja Niedringhaus was shot and killed, an exhibition of her powerful images from Afghanistan and Pakistan opens at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York on Thursday, 4 April 2024.
An Afghan police commander had walked up and emptied his AK47 into the back seat of the Toyota Corolla where Anja, a photographer from Germany, sat with her close friend and colleague Kathy Gannon, a Canadian based in Pakistan. They were waiting outside a government compound in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost to cover the presidential election for the Associated Press.
Anja died instantly. She was 48.
Seven bullets shattered Kathy’s arms and shoulders. One of her arms was practically shot off; a lung was punctured and collapsed.
“Your life is as important to me as it is to you,” Kathy 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 Kathy.
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.
Gratitude
Kathy, then 60, has undergone 18 surgeries since the attack, with an annual procedure in New York. Another surgery is scheduled there some days after Anja’s exhibition launch. Her former employers, AP, have taken care of her medical needs and overall been “extraordinary” in their support, she says. She retired from the AP in 2022, after 35 years covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In all the years I’ve known Kathy, I’ve never once heard her 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 Anja and her spirit - which she herself exemplifies.
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. This is not the first time she has done this.
Anja received the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) Courage in Journalism award in 2005. Kathy was a recipient in 2002.
“I’m not here today to tell you my difficulties covering conflicts. The real difficulties and the real courage belong to those who are subjected against their will to conflicts. I do my job simply to report people’s courage with my camera and with my heart,” said Anja in her acceptance speech .
EMBED VIDEO
CAPTION: Anja Niedringhaus: IWMF Courage in Journalism acceptance speech, 2005
https://youtu.be/a4_QqF-oAr0?si=8_yUtf3UbKCj14ky
“Anja believed in and reported on the courage in other people’s hearts with her heart,” Kathy tells me over the phone from Islamabad where she has lived since 1988. In 2004 she married the respected architect Naeem Pasha.
Kathy had landed in Peshawar in 1986 to cover the first 
Anja Niedringhaus – The Guardian
Afghan war. The ‘mujahedeen’, so-called ‘holy warriors’, trained and conditioned in Pakistan, financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the erstwhile Soviet Union, later morphed into the Taliban (literally, ‘students’ - of the seminaries they had been trained at in Pakistan).
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Kathy 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.
In 2001, she reported from Kabul during the American invasion as the Taliban were ousted from power. There were air raids, power cuts, and bomb attacks - one of which struck nearby, throwing her across the room. Then too, she went right back to work.
Kathy and Anja had planned to do a text and photo book on Afghanistan together that they wanted to publish by the end of 2014, around the time the US was to hand over security to the Afghans. Anja had already begun choosing images. “And it is that book that we changed to be just Anja and her images with remembrances, which is accompanying the exhibition.”
The book and exhibition are supported by the Bronx Documentary Center exhibition, supported by Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the AP.
Humanity
This labor of love and the photographs themselves are a testament to the creed followed by both women: Humanize people and present them to the world in all their complexities, beyond the stereotypes.
Anja 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 award-winning journalist Michael Kamber.
EMBED VIDEO
CAPTION: Anja Niedringhaus’ photos showcased in a tribute posted by her colleagues at AP
https://youtu.be/gaejirniBJk?si=gp3O1kxAlF0rZtIP
When Kathy 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”. As is Kathy.
She was with Anja on those trips “reaching deep into the soul of Afghans” - and Pakistanis - documenting in words what Anja did in pictures, both offering glimpses into lives rarely witnessed by outsiders.
They are the only Western journalists to embed with the Pakistan army, as well as the Afghan army, experiences they shared in a detailed interview with IWMF, 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,” Kathy 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 Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Kathy’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 Anja Niedringhaus who edited her ‘At War’ book, and Muhammad Muheisen, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who runs the Every Day Refugees foundation and also photographs for National Geographic.
“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,” says the Bronx Documentary Center .
The attack that killed Anja and impacted Kathy for life “provided a stark reminder of how broader tensions can set off violence at the most personal level,” commented a New York Times report . But its aftermath “also highlighted the bonds between old friends and strangers alike, be they Afghans or foreigners.”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai immediately tried to reach Kathy who he has known for years, and condemned the attack in a statement. Dr Muhammad Shah who saved Kathy’s arm, told the NYT that not only he, “but all Afghans are disappointed and sorry” about the attack on these “guests” in Afghanistan.
An opening reception at the Bronx Documentary Center marks the launch of Anja’s exhibition at 6.30 pm. This will be followed by the IWMF Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award ceremony at 7:30 pm. The IWMF established the award after Anja’s death with a grant from the Howard G Buffett Foundation, to celebrate “courageous women photojournalists like Anja” and recognize the “importance of visual journalism that helps us better understand our complicated world”.
The exhibition will travel to Cambridge MA, 9-10 May 2024, co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.
Exhibition information:
Bronx Documentary Center
614 Courtlandt Ave, Bronx, NY 10451
On View: April 4 - May 5, 2024
Gallery hours: Thurs-Fri 3-7 PM, Sat-Sun 1-5 PM
Book information:
Anja Niedringhaus
By Ami Beckmann, Kathy Gannon, and Muhammed Muheisen
Hardcover, 80 pages, 44 images
Release date: April 2024
Published by Fort Orange Press
Price: USD 30
(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.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature www.sapannews.com)
