Thursday, 10:25 p.m. | Updated
A statement on Facebook attributed to Mr. Hammerl’s
family said they learned Thursday that he had in fact been killed April 5 by the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
When Anton Hammerl decided to go to Libya at the end of March, he knew he would be working as a freelance photographer, with little support. He knew it would be one of the few conflicts he’d covered for years. And he knew he’d have to leave his wife in London with their newborn son.
He also knew he had to do it.
Early in April, Mr. Hammerl, 41, went missing in Libya. On Wednesday, four detained journalists — Clare Morgana Gillis, James Foley, Manu Brabo and Nigel Chandler — were released. There was no news of Mr. Hammerl.
“Until I see him, I don’t believe any of these reports,” Penny Sukhraj, Mr. Hammerl’s wife, said by phone from London on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s just a recipe for emotional disaster.”
Free Photographer Anton Hammerl A poster at the Johannesburg demonstration for Mr. Hammerl.Five years ago, Mr. Hammerl was the pictures editor and chief photographer for The Saturday Star in Johannesburg. He and Ms. Sukhraj moved to London in 2006. He became a freelance photographer, shooting both news and corporate work.
The conflict in Libya was a catalyst for his return to front-line work. “He realized it’s actually a part of him,” said Ms. Sukhraj, who met her husband in 2000 when they were both reporting on child prostitution in the suburbs of Johannesburg. In recent years, she said, he had been seeking the financial stability needed to return to “what he really loves doing, which is documentary — covering difficult situations; getting to the bottom of human dramas.”
Mr. Hammerl had worked in Libya in 2007 and his wife persuaded him to go again. “I had to push him and say, ‘You must,'” Ms. Sukhraj said. “‘We’ll be fine and we’ll cope. You’re just going to go for two weeks, anyway.’ So he did.”
Although he posted a few images on his Web site, and Africa Media Online has since started to represent him, Mr. Hammerl had not filed from Libya when he disappeared. “He didn’t feel that what he had was worthy of filing yet,” his wife said. “I look at it and I go, ‘You silly boy.'”
As a freelancer in the 1990s, Mr. Hammerl covered the violence in Thokoza during the weeks and months before South Africa’s elections. “He cut his teeth in the townships of South Africa,” said Bronwyn Friedlander, a friend in London. And he was mentored by Ken Oosterbroek, the Bang-Bang Club photographer who was killed in 1994.
On Christmas in 1995, he shot a portrait of President Nelson Mandela — and managed to spend the day with him. “He really annoyed me, and I’m sure most other photographers,” said Shayne Robinson, one of the organizers of the “Free Photographer Anton Hammerl” Facebook campaign. “Like, how do you do that? How do you arrange that?”
Unai Arandzadi Mr. Hammerl on the front line in Brega, shortly before he disappeared.Mr. Robinson, who met Mr. Hammerl in Johannesburg, recalled, “You’d go to a job with him and walk away and look at his pictures and look at your pictures and go, ‘Were we at the same job?'”
Karel Prinsloo, a photo editor for The Associated Press in London, called Mr. Hammerl a “thinking photographer.” While the two were shooting together in South Africa in the 1990s, Mr. Prinsloo was working for a daily and Mr. Hammerl for a weekly.
“He would look at something and out of nowhere he would get a frame that would last a week,” Mr. Prinsloo said. “Ours would last a day.”
Peta Krost Maunder, a journalist and magazine editor who worked with Mr. Hammerl in Johannesburg to start The Sunday Independent alongside The Saturday Star, said: “He had the story in his mind. He wasn’t just taking a picture of the subject; he was taking a picture that fit with the story.”
And, she added, “There are few other photographers who walked around in leather pants and had their hair down to their waist.” (For a time, Mr. Hammerl dabbled in fashion, starting a clothing line with a close friend.)
Ms. Krost Maunder said her heart sank on Wednesday when she heard that Mr. Hammerl was not among those released in Libya.
“The silence is just so unfair,” she said. “Even if it’s bad news — to put people through this is just inhumane.”
Shayne Robinson A vigil for Mr. Hammerl in Johannesburg.
