Chris Hondros

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Chris Hondros (born March 14, 1970) is a pre-eminent Pulitzer Prize-nominated war photographer.

He was born in New York City to immigrant Greek and German parents, and moved to North Carolina as a child. After receiving a degree in English Literature at North Carolina State University in 1993 and conducting his graduate work in photojournalism at Ohio University's School of Visual Communications, Hondros returned to New York to concentrate on international reporting.

Hondros has photographed in most of the world's major conflict zones since the late 1990s, including Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, and Liberia. His work has appeared as the covers of magazines such as Newsweek and the Economist, and on the front pages of The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

1 Iraq photos
2 Awards
3 Notes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Iraq photos

Hondros's images from Iraq, especially a January 2005 picture series detailing the shooting of an Iraqi family by U.S. troops in a checkpoint accident in the northern city of Tal Afar, have been published widely and have garnered worldwide acclaim and criticism.

On January 18, 2005, a family of eight were travelling in a car which failed to stop at a US checkpoint in Tal Afar. US troops opened fire, killing both parents, Camille and Hussein Hassan, and injuring their five children sitting in the back seat. Racan, 11, was seriously wounded in the abdomen. He lost the use of his legs and was treated later in Boston. Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros, who was on the scene, took graphic pictures of the shooting and aftermath. Hondros won several awards for the still photos.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]

In regards to the incident, Hondros stated:

“

Almost every soldier in Iraq has been involved in some sort of incident like that or another, I would say. Their attitude about it was grim, but it wasn’t the end of their world. It was, “Well, kind of wished they’d stopped. We fired warning shots. Damn, I don’t know why the hell they didn’t stop. What’re you doing later, you want to play Nintendo? Okay.” Just a day’s work for them. That stuff happens in Iraq a lot. That’s why it’s such a damn mess, because almost everybody’s had something like that happen to them at the hands of U.S. soldiers. They hate them. ^[8]

”

The Editor and Publisher reported that Hondros' photographs of the children were widely distributed to United States papers -- but few newspapers published more than one photo. By contrast, Hondros states, the same photographs "seemingly dominated the discourse in Europe, where they were run in full over multiple pages by many important papers there."^[9] "These pictures are going unseen because editors don't print them. And they don't print them because readers don't want to see them."^[10]

[edit] Awards

Hondros's images have received dozens of awards, including top honors from World Press Photo in Amsterdam, the National Pictures of the Year Competition, the Visa Pour L'Image in France, and the John Faber award from the Overseas Press Club in New York. In 2004 Hondros was a Nominated Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for his work in Liberia, and in 2006 he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal, war photography's highest honor, for "exceptional courage and enterprise” in his work from Iraq.

Hondros lives in New York City, where he is a staff photographer for Getty Images.