How a German photojournalist exemplified the courage and heart of reporting from the frontline

On April 4, 2014, an Afghan police commander walked up and emptied his AK47 into the back seat of the Toyota Corolla where German photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus was seated.

Niedringhaus and her close friend and colleague Kathy Gannon, a Canadian based in Pakistan, were waiting outside a government compound in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost to cover the presidential election for the Associated Press.

Niedringhaus died instantly. She was 48.

Seven bullets shattered Gannon’s arms and shoulders. One of her arms was practically shot off and a lung was punctured.

“Your life is as important to me as it is to you,” Gannon remembers the Afghan surgeon saying at the government hospital in Khost.

He cauterised 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”, said Gannon.

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.

That was 10 years ago.

On April 4, 2024, an exhibition of Niedringhaus’s powerful images from Afghanistan and Pakistan opened at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York.

A labour of love, the photographs and the book, both, are a testament to the creed followed by...

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