James Foley met Neo, Anton Hammerl’s 7-year-old son, on a computer screen in Libya early in April 2011.
“A beautiful kid,” Mr. Foley said. “I remember Anton showing me a picture of him on the Skype screen, the night before the tragedy,” said Mr. Foley, a freelance writer and video journalist who has worked for GlobalPost.
The following day, Mr. Foley was standing nearby as Mr. Hammerl, a South African photojournalist, died in the desert.
On May 15, the group Friends of Anton — of which Mr. Foley is a principal organizer — is holding an auction to raise funds for Mr. Hammerl’s three children: Neo, who is 8, as well as Aurora, 11, and Hiro, 1.
The auction, hosted by Christiane Amanpour at Christie’s in New York, features prints (like those in the slide show above) from photographers including Tim Hetherington, Sebastião Salgado, Platon, Alec Soth, Roger Ballen, Gilles Peress, Chris Anderson, Yuri Kozyrev, Larry Fink, Lynsey Addario, Susan Meiselas, Joao Silva and Marcus Bleasdale. The event was organized by Mr. Foley, Clare Morgana Gillis and David Brabyn, a New York-based photojournalist.
Mr. Hammerl had been missing in Libya for more than a month alongside Mr. Foley and three other journalists who had been detained — Ms. Gillis, Manu Brabo and Nigel Chandler. Friends lobbied for his release with a “Free Photographer Anton Hammerl” Facebook campaign. But on May 19, Mr. Hammerl’s family and friends learned that he had been killed more than six weeks earlier by the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
He was 41 when he died.
He had started shooting in the townships of South Africa, where he was born, and later worked as a picture editor and chief photographer for The Saturday Star in Johannesburg. After some time freelancing in London, where he lived with his wife, Penny Sukhraj, and the children, Mr. Hammerl was compelled to go to Libya — acknowledging that he’d have little support as a freelancer, that it would be one of the few conflicts he’d covered in years and that he’d need to leave his family behind.
“He was excited to get back into Africa,” Mr. Foley said.
Unai Aranzadi Anton Hammerl working near Brega, Libya. April 1, 2011.The two met in a hotel in Benghazi, where Mr. Foley had been staying with other journalists. On the morning of April 5, they woke up earlier than usual to head out. Mr. Hammerl was the first one to the lobby. The story at the time had shifted to the oil town of Brega.
“We just went out early to try to sort of beat the rush,” Mr. Foley said. “There were a lot more rebels, a lot more reporters out there, and they were trying to start to organize it. You were used to free access.”
He continued: “Frankly, Manu and I were pushing it. We definitely had a lot of signs — you’re getting really close.”
Yet the four pushed on, making it past the last checkpoint and hopping into a bus filled with rebels. They passed a burning car. “That, in retrospect, should have been an indication that this was pretty fresh fighting, you know?” Mr. Foley said. “Walking by a burning vehicle in the middle of a highway. But we kept going.”
They stopped below a rise in the hill, where a group of teenagers in a car told them they weren’t far — about 1,000 feet — from Qaddafi forces. “I remember looking at Clare and saying, ‘That’s crazy.’ So we thought to get off the road to protect ourselves.”
When a couple of vehicles went up over the rise, some of Qaddafi vehicles spotted them and began firing. Mr. Foley recalls running. Mr. Hammerl, he recalled, said, “Let’s try to get to the vehicles.”
“Your body is just basically, thankfully, running on adrenaline,” he said. “And you’re crawling and I remember crawling back to Manu and Clare and I remember Manu saying, ‘Clare, keep your head down.’ ”
Thinking there was no room left, Mr. Foley crawled to another sand dune, where he thinks Mr. Hammerl was crouched on the other side. “I heard Anton yell, ‘Help! Help!’ between some bullet rounds going overhead. And my mind sort clicked in and I said: ‘It couldn’t be anything else. He’s hit.’ ”
“You O.K.?” Mr. Foley asked his friend.
“No,” was the response. A few rounds later, he asked again.
“You O.K.?”
Nothing.
Instinctively, Mr. Foley stood up and surrendered to the soldiers, whom he recalls having been younger than most of the rebel fighters he had seen. To his left, he saw Mr. Hammerl, with a large wound to his midsection.
“We all felt that he was dead,” he said. “You know, it was just a complete shock. After I saw that, I was just like: ‘You can hit me. After that, it’s not gonna hurt me.’ ”
Read more on the auction at ArtsBeat.
Friends of Anton
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