Columbia Journalism Review last week paid tribute to photographer Chris Hondros by way of posting one of his contributions to Reporting Iraq. In the excerpt, Hondros explains how he got one of his most haunting photos from Iraq. As CJR writes,

As the world knows by now, the photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington were killed on April 20 in Misurata, Libya. Hetherington was the better known of the two for his documentary, Restrepo. But we have a special feeling for Hondros, whom we got to meet when he took part in a CJR panel discussion. In late 2006, for our forty-fifth anniversary issue, the magazine ran an extended oral history, which later became a book, Reporting Iraq, an oral history of the war by the journalists who covered it. It included photos, and every time we laid our potential choices out we were drawn to Hondros’s work. They had a recognizable humanity and an almost-beautiful light, even when they depicted the worst. One photo we chose was taken moments after a family car had been accidently shot up at a checkpoint. We see a soldier and a blood-covered little girl who had just lost her parents, not an image you can quickly get out of your head. When Judith Matloff interviewed Hondros for our history, we found the backstory of that photo so compelling that we used it to end the book. Here is the result of that interview, Chris Hondros on how he got that picture.

As we mentioned here, Hondros’ exceptional contributions to Reporting Iraq were praised in several reviews of the book.