Harald Henden spent his life behind the camera, photographing wars and famines, capturing the most painful moments of people’s lives – and deaths. Now, a #cancer diagnosis has left him with only months to live. Back home in Oslo, surrounded by close friends and celebrated for his lifetime’s work, he is unaccustomed to the attention.
Rune Denstad Langlo’s film Requiem for a Photographer charts Henden’s final months with sensitivity and an eye for detail. It will leave few viewers unmoved.
Made different
War photographers often don’t have a good reputation. Sometimes seen as reckless glory-hunters, their portrayal in feature films highlights the madness of their craft. (Think Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now – modelled on famed American photographer #Tim Page#, who documented the Vietnam War.)
Henden was made of different stuff. As much as he appreciated critical acclaim for the many striking and beautiful images he captured during 35 years of world travel, it is the moments when he put down his camera that he values most.
There was the time he was doing a stand-up for TV in #Palestine when Israeli rockets injured a group of boys playing football on the beach. He helped dress one boy’s wounds and save his life. Or the coverage of famine in #Sudan that led to the establishment of a Norwegian fund to help.
As much as he appreciated critical acclaim for the many striking and beautiful images he captured during 35 years of world travel, it is the moments when he put down his camera that he values most.
Regrets and reflection
Other moments stand out for their sadness: the 18-month-old starving child who took his last breath as Henden photographed him. «The mother set the child gently down on the ground and started beating the earth in grief,» he recalls.
Or the mother unable to say farewell to her daughter, killed along with other relatives, because the press pack in the family home was overwhelming.
Those are moments of regret. But he would not do anything differently, he tells his oldest friend and personal doctor, Morten, who also features in this remarkable film.
The day in #Kabul when his hotel was attacked and a close colleague was gunned down is another moment of deep reflection. Henden applied a tourniquet to a severe wound, and photos show him treating his friend. He thought they had saved the man’s life, but he died on the operating table later.
Henden’s most famous photograph is more prosaic – an American soldier washing his hair in Saddam Hussein’s personal marble bath with solid gold fittings. Other images of the pain and sacrifice of #war were seen in Norway and around the world throughout his career.
At a moment’s notice
A single man who never married or had children, Henden is remarkably stoical about his impending death. In his clean, spartan flat close to a large park in Oslo, he reflects on the years, showing us what was in the bag he always kept packed, ready to leave at a moment’s notice: his camera gear, a first-aid kit, power banks, and a car cigarette lighter that could be hooked up to its battery.
Feted with prizes and accolades, including Norway’s highest civilian honour – the Order of St Olav, granted by his royal namesake, King Harald – he received recognition in the final months of his life. There was also a magnificent book of his photographs, as friends and colleagues rallied round to provide, in the short term, what he would likely have received in the longer term anyway, as one remarks.
Contemplating his life, one notices a small, framed photograph in his apartment by another great: Russian war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei’s image of the Red Flag flying over the #Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945. I have the same photograph above my desk. I wondered if Henden’s, like mine, was signed by Khaldei… after all, Henden was also an accredited correspondent in #Moscow back in the day.
Touching, gentle and revealing in turn, Henden’s farewell, following his death in July 2024, featured one of his pre-packed bags accompanying his coffin out of the funeral service – as he heads off on his final assignment to eternity.
