Chris Hondros

Chris Hondros

Chris Hondros was a legendary photojournalist who was killed on the front lines of the Libyan Civil War in 2011. He shot dozens, if not hundreds of photos of active war zones, particularly in the middle east, and his photography made it possible for Americans to know the extent of violence and brutality which occurred in that region at that time. He was also an NC State alum.
Journalists always talk about the "human thread" of a story. It's important to bring down the scale of something as huge and awful as a war so that people can connect to it on an individual level. It's easy for us to distance ourselves emotionally from these things as a coping mechanism, so photojournalists like Hondros work to prevent that.
I chose this photo because it shows the extent of the danger Hondros put himself in to take these pictures. He stood in a burning building, photographing men with guns from inches away as they shot at one another. He has much more "humanizing" photos than this, such as his images of child soldiers, but this photo really showed how far he was willing to go for the sake of informing the public about what was going on in those places.

Ben Wolf