Anja Niedringhaus was born in Höxter – North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and began working as a freelance photographer at age of 17 while still in high school. In 1989, she covered the collapse of the Berlin Wall for the German newspaper Göttinger Tageblatt.
Anja knew what she wanted early on in life. When she was 7 years old, her grandfather showed her a globe. She tried hard to find Höxter on this globe — without success. “That’s when I discovered how big the world is”, she remembers. She wanted to see the world with her own eyes. And she wanted to capture what she saw – with the help of a camera. Even during her school years in Höxter she had a precise aim, “I have wanted to be a photographer since I was 12 years old”, she said. Her first camera was her grandfather’s old one. Later, a local photographer’s shop enabled her to pay off a more demanding piece of professional photographic equipment at a monthly rate of 50 Deutsch Marks. Years later she said thank you by offering her signed photo-book called ‘At War‘ which comprises a selection of her photos taken in various war zones.
She began full-time work as a photojournalist in 1990 when she joined the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA) in Frankfurt, Germany. One of her first assignments for EPA was covering the conflict in the Balkans, where journalists were regularly targeted by Bosnian Serb forces. Anja’s time in the Balkans began covering the declarations of independence from Yugoslavia by Slovenia and Croatia in 1991. A year later she arrived in Sarajevo (gallery) and the region would be her home until 1995.
“My career in journalism began as a freelancer. I had just finished university where I studied literature, philosophy and journalism. I was never supposed to cover the war in Yugoslavia. My editor thought I was too young and a woman with no experience covering conflicts. It didn’t seem possible. I had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and a couple of other assignments, including trips with the Pope, but never a conflict. Still, I refused to give up because I believed the job of a real journalist would be to cover a war like this in the middle of Europe. I wrote a long letter to my boss telling him why I had to go and why he needed to send me. I don’t remember the words I wrote but whatever they were, they convinced him. One week later, I was on the road. In my first week in Croatia, I was hit by a sniper but the bullet grazed my flak jacket.”
Anja Niedringhaus
“Living in a city under siege brought us together and we shared everything with each other. If one had pasta or fresh fruit, she shared it with the other. I remember one night I got a message on my walkie-talkie from an AP colleague who had got hold of some pasta. I was told to make my way to their office to share it with them, but to get there I had to go through sniper alley. That part of Sarajevo was constantly under attack. Snipers chased people as we moved through the streets like rabbits. That pasta evening, the sniping was relentless. I jumped into my car with another colleague and we tried to shield the front window with our bulletproof vests. We screamed out of the garage at full speed. I was hiding so far down in the car while still trying to drive I could hardly see the street in front of me. I drove so fast we got to the pasta party without a single bullet in the car. I remember that night like it was yesterday.”
Anja Niedringhaus
“What was also unique for Sarajevo was the camaraderie. No matter who was working for whom, we never let competition put anyone in danger or stand in the way of our co-operation. Even today when I meet my colleagues from those days, it is as if it were yesterday. Time slips away. I felt in that war in Sarajevo the sense of the community of journalists as a family. It was so unique and in the 20 years since then, I have never found it again.”
Anja Niedringhaus
“Sarajevo was home for me for many years. Friendships I made then have been lasting.”
Anja Niedringhaus
In 1997, her foot was crushed and broken in three places by a police car while she was covering demonstrations in Belgrade, requiring three reconstructive operations. That same year, Niedringhaus became EPA’s chief photographer.
In Kosovo in 1998, Niedringhaus was blown out of a car by a grenade while caught in cross-fire. In 1999, in Albania, she was with a group of other journalists at the Albania-Kosovo border crossing when they were mistakenly bombed by NATO forces. Niedringhaus says that she and her colleagues tried to hide in bunkers and cars as the NATO forces continued to fire. The bombing went on for 20 minutes, until NATO got word of their mistake. Some of the journalists’ cars were destroyed and a few of the other journalists in the group were injured.
Anja Niedringhaus has covered every major conflict including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while working for the European Press Photo Agency (EPA) and for the Associated Press (AP) from the time she joined them in 2002. She was included in a book called ‘Bilderkrieger’ which was her unofficial nickname, meaning ‘photo warrior’. Since then some of the exhibitions were named the same.
In 2001, Anja Niedringhaus photographed the aftermath of September 11 in New York City for the EPA. Shortly after that, she traveled to Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, where she spent three months covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Much of her work since then has taken her to the Middle East, where she has reported on events in the Gaza Strip, Israel, Kuwait and Turkey. Once the war in Iraq began, Niedringhaus traveled to that country, which is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world in which a journalist can work. According to the International Press Institute, 23 journalists were killed in Iraq in 2004. In November 2004, Niedringhaus was embedded with the U.S. Marines during the U.S.-led offensive into Fallujah. She also photographed the bombings of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad and the Italian base in Nasiriyah, as well as events at the Abu Ghraib prison and the 2005 Iraqi elections.
In 2005, Anja Niedringhaus became the first German woman to win the Pulitzer, she was the only woman on a team of 11 AP photographers in Iraq. She was delighted to win America’s top journalism honor, but it didn’t change her in any way. Soon, museums began contacting her to offer Anja exhibitions of her work. “They say it’s art,” she said. “But I don’t think of my work as being art.” Instead she said she sought to portray reality as precisely as possible through her work, asking, “who, if not us,” is going to do that?
Two of her photographs were part of the AP’s Pulitzer entry. Many of the images are deeply disturbing but you won’t soon forget Niedringhaus’ image of an American soldier in camouflage fatigues on a rubble strewn city street, facing away from the camera, a tiny GI Joe in camouflage fatigues strapped to his back.
That same year, in 2005, she was the first German woman that was awarded Courage in Journalism Awards. In her acceptance speech she said, “I do my job simply to report people’s courage with my camera and with my heart.”
Her working equipment also acted as a kind of protection for her because it created distance. “I am glad that I have got a camera which can give me a certain feeling of distance or even a feeling of security; a possibility for me to concentrate. It is sometimes far more difficult to cope with situations when you put the camera down”, she said. There were moments in which she did put down the camera in order to administer first aid spontaneously. In Sarajevo she drove wounded people to the hospital. She realized only afterwards that she had not taken any photos.
Anja was killed on the 4th April, 2014 in Banda Khel which is situated in the province of Khost in the east of Afghanistan. “I am so happy “, was one of Anja’s last sentences, remembers her colleague who was sitting next to her in the rear of the car when the Afghan policeman started shooting. While the Canadian female reporter who saw the policeman approaching them was able to react by raising her arms, Anja was unaware of what was happening and was hit in the head by bullets from the killer’s Kalashnikov. Kathy Gannon (60) was seriously injured. Anja paid for her commitment for the people of Afghanistan and other parts of the world where war dominates every day life with her own life.
In a memo to staff, AP President Gary Pruitt remembered Niedringhaus as “spirited, intrepid and fearless, with a raucous laugh that we will always remember.”
“Anja is the 32nd AP staffer to give their life in pursuit of the news since AP was founded in 1846,” he wrote. “This is a profession of the brave and the passionate, those committed to the mission of bringing to the world information that is fair, accurate and important. Anja Niedringhaus met that definition in every way.” Gary Pruitt
Anja Niedringhaus will never be forgotten; because of her photographs; because of the Anja Niedringhaus Award for courageous journalism initiated by the IWMF. The award will be granted once a year to female photojournalists who continue Anja’s work. The award was initiated by a donation of 1 million US dollars by the Howard Graham Buffett Foundation.
ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS was born 12 October 1965 in Höxter, Germany.
She was killed 4 April 2014 in Afghanistan.
“… and my grandfather’s globe keeps turning I realized that there is always more to report.”
Translated by Mustafa Corbo
Music used:
‘Erik Satie – Gnossienne No.1’
The song is permitted for non-commercial use under license:
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
© 2020 Sniper Alley. All Rights reserved.
