Margret Moth Photojournalist
MWB
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/03/21/margaret.moth.obit/index.html?hpt=C1
(CNN) -- Simply put, Margaret Moth made an impression.
Given her jet-black hair, thick black eyeliner, black clothes and combat
boots (which she often slept in while on assignment), people didn't always
know what to think upon meeting her. She was quirky, the sort who excused
herself from a social gathering by saying she had to wash her socks. And she
was fearless, the kind of woman who not only kept the camera rolling while
under fire, but zoomed in on a soldier who was shooting at her.
Colleagues learned quickly to appreciate all that this CNN camerawoman was.
Beyond her rich personality, which included deep optimism and kindness, she
brought to her profession top-notch technical abilities, unmatched
dedication and an approach to work that inspired others to push themselves.
Moth sought out, even demanded, assignments in conflict zones. She barely
survived being shot in the face in Sarajevo in 1992, only to go back as soon
as she was physically able. The multiple reconstructive surgeries that
followed, as well as the hepatitis C she contracted from a consequent blood
transfusion, were mere obstacles she moved around.
But more than three years after being diagnosed with colon cancer, her
tremendous life journey has come to an end.
Moth, known for her gutsiness, striking appearance, distinctive humor and
sense of fun, died early Sunday in Rochester, Minnesota.
"Dying of cancer, I would have liked to think I'd have gone out with a bit
more flair," she said with a laugh last spring during an interview with a
CNN documentary crew that had traveled to Texas, where she was visiting
friends.
"The important thing is to know that you've lived your life to the fullest,"
she said then, before tubing down a river in Austin, Texas; taking jaunts to
Cape Cod and the Canadian Rockies; and piloting a houseboat up the
Mississippi River -- replete with beer and Cuban cigars. "I don't know
anyone who's enjoyed life more."
Born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand, to a homemaker and a man who
made swimming pools, she got her first camera at age 8. She later changed
her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth, a nod to the airplane, which was
appropriate for a woman who had a penchant for jumping out of planes,
barefoot.
She said she never aspired to be a photojournalist. Rather her path, she
explained, was mostly driven by a love of history and her desire to see it
unfold firsthand.
Whether she was amid rioters after Indira Gandhi's assassination or covering
a long menu of wars spanning continents, Moth felt she and her colleagues
were the lucky ones
"You could be a billionaire, and you couldn't pay to do the things we've
done," said Moth, who had most recently called Istanbul, Turkey, home.
Reported to be New Zealand's first camerawoman, she came to the U.S. and
worked for KHOU in Houston, Texas, for about seven years before moving to
CNN in 1990.
When other photojournalists dived behind cars as militiamen opened fire on
protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia, she stood her ground and kept her camera
running. As a band of medical professionals defied Israeli tanks and armored
vehicles, marching into then-Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's
compound in the West Bank, she got in the middle of the group, joined them
and helped nab an exclusive interview. When many around her slept in
Sarajevo, she set to work in a destroyed hotel room, filming with a night
scope through holes blown out by artillery fire, hiding herself and camera
from the eyes of snipers.
The Serbian sniper bullet that did hit Moth while she was traveling along
"sniper alley" in Sarajevo shattered her jaw, blew out her teeth and
destroyed a portion of her tongue -- which left her forever sounding like
she was drunk, she said.
Others got angry, as the van she traveled in was clearly marked as a press
vehicle, but she refused to go there.
" 'We came into their war. Fair's fair,' " former CNN correspondent Stefano
Kotsonis, who was with her when she was shot, remembered her saying. " 'I
don't blame anyone for firing at me. They're in a war, and I stepped into
it.' "
Her attitude made other colleagues, many of whom were interviewed for the
documentary "Fearless: The Margaret Moth Story," strive to be better at what
they did. Sound techs and correspondents would often follow her lead,
whether they felt ready or not. She was known to outrun her own security.
Photojournalists viewed her as a bar-setter.
Another of CNN's international camerawomen remembers Moth
Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent, who'd been
away from Sarajevo when her friend was shot, was sitting at Moth's hospital
bedside when an assignment editor from the international desk called. He
wanted to know if Amanpour was ready to return to the conflict zone, she
recalled for the documentary about Moth.
"I said I'd go back, and I know to this day that if I hadn't said yes then,
I probably never would have gone back, and I never would have done this
career. But I said yes because I couldn't say no," Amanpour remembered,
fighting back tears. "We did the work for her. We did it because she was our
champion, and we wanted to be her champion."
Sure enough, as soon as Moth could carry a camera again, six months later,
she went straight back to Sarajevo to join her CNN colleagues. She joked
that she was there to find her teeth.
Moth maintained her humor amid madness and helped others smile and unwind
when the surroundings could make levity seem impossible.
She enlisted a producer to go rollerblading with her on the marble floors of
a Baghdad, Iraq, hotel lobby. She forced colleagues to tell her who they'd
rather sleep with, while giving them horrifying choices. She liked to kick
back with fine cigars and could drink others under the table.
Despite her tough exterior, there was insecurity, a vanity to her. No matter
where she was, Moth rose early to do her eye makeup and hair. Forever
worried about her weight, she picked at a block of cheese in Bosnia for
about six weeks and got by on mango juice during a stretch in the West Bank.
She admitted that after being shot, she was more afraid of what she'd look
like than she was of dying. Enveloped in bandages, she slipped her dear
friend Joe Duran a note asking him if she looked like a monster.
But she often worried about others more than herself.
Moth enjoyed working with seasoned correspondents but also looked out for
those who were new. In Pakistan, she taught Patty Sabga to sleep behind
couches and talked her through everything she was shooting to help Sabga
build her stories. And in Afghanistan, she carefully led the former CNN
correspondent through rubble that probably hid land mines.
"She took such incredible care of me and taught me so much," Sabga said. "I
can honestly say that the work I did with Margaret Moth is still the very
best work of my career."
Moth repeatedly visited the doctor who saved her life. And she boosted the
spirits and changed the attitude of another CNN photojournalist, David
Allbritton, when he was seriously injured by a bomb in Sarajevo in 1995.
"She made me realize that I was going to get through this," he said. "She
set an example by overcoming everything that's happened to her. ... I took
that example, and I'm shooting today. I'm not sure that I would be doing
what I'm doing today if it had not been for Margaret Moth."
Her chosen lifestyle didn't leave room for children of her own, but she
bonded with them across the globe. And her love of animals was so deep that
she refused to ride in a horse-pulled wagon, preferring to run with heavy
equipment in the desert heat while on assignment in Petra, Jordan.
In fact, when it became clear that the advanced cancer would end her life,
the concern that drove her to tears was her cats -- the more than 25 strays
she looked after in Istanbul.
"She was more upset about them than she was about dying," said Duran, who
rushed to her side after she'd been medevaced out of Sarajevo. But when
Duran, also a CNN cameraman, moved into her home in Turkey with the promise
that he'd care for the cats, he said Moth told him, " 'Now I can die happy.'
"
There were a few things Moth wished she had done. She would have liked to
have seen the Krak des Chevaliers, a medieval fortress in Syria, and the
Burundi drummers. But regrets? She had none.
She "led the complete life," Amanpour said. "I don't think Margaret could
ever look back and say, 'What if?' She did it to the max, and she did it
brilliantly. And she did it on her terms."
Matthew Kruk
news:tyspn.54130$mn6....@newsfe07.iad...
>
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/03/21/margaret.moth.obit/index.html?hpt=C1
Great story. It's worth viewing the clips at the link.
orpheus
> "MWB" <bick...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:tyspn.54130$mn6....@newsfe07.iad...
>
>
>
> >http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/03/21/margaret.moth.obit/index.html?hp...
>
> Great story. It's worth viewing the clips at the link.
Thanks for posting. You never hear much about the people behind the
scenes. She was quite a character.
BobF
[Default] On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:19:51 -0400, "MWB"
<bic...@gmail.com> magnanimously proffered:
>(CNN) -- Simply put, Margaret Moth made an impression.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10633565
NZ-born renowned photojournalist dies
7:42 AM Monday Mar 22, 2010
New Zealand-born internationally renowned photojournalist Margaret
Moth has died, CNN reported.
Ms Moth, who came to prominence after being almost killed when she was
shot in the face covering the war in Sarajevo, was 59.
She had been diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago.
Ms Moth began her journalism career in New Zealand and joined CNN in
1990. She covered the Persian Gulf War, the rioting that followed
Indira Gandhi's assassination and the civil war in Tbilisi, Georgia,
for CNN before volunteering for the dangerous mission of filming in
Sarajevo.
On July 23, 1992 in Sarajevo, Ms Moth was struck by a sniper's bullet
as she drove with colleagues to the airport to interview pilots flying
relief supplies.
Her jaw was shattered, and she lost nearly all of her teeth and part
of her tongue. Moth was rushed to a local hospital for emergency
surgery and then flown to the United States where she underwent
numerous reconstructive surgeries.
"My face, it felt like my face was falling off. I remember, I was
trying to hold it on.
"I knew I had to keep calm and I knew I had to stay conscious: `If I
go unconscious, I will stop breathing'."
After much reconstructive surgery, she went back to her job in
Sarajevo.
In the 1970s, Ms Moth worked as a camerawoman for Television New
Zealand in Dunedin. She was also a fearless sky diver and an
enthusiastic bell ringer.
Her supervisor, Paul Donovan, told the Otago Daily Times that Ms Moth,
the country's first female television news camera operator, was a
"lovable rogue".
"She never did anything naughty, but she often just pushed boundaries
with a twinkle in her eye."
She changed her name from Margaret Wilson to Margaret Moth, Mr Donovan
said.
"I recall her saying she in fact wanted to change it to Tiger Moth but
it wasn't allowed...she loved the Tiger Moth aircraft."
Ms Moth was passionate about skydiving and passionate about shooting
news, Mr Donovan said.
Ms Moth was born in Gisborne and had initially wanted to be a mechanic
but could not get an apprenticeship.
She studied at the University of Canterbury, where she specialised in
film and photography.
Ms Moth was diagnosed with cancer more than three years ago and
entered a hospice in Rochester, Minnesota.
"I would have liked to have gone out with a bit more flair but I feel
I can die with dignity. I don't think it matters how long you live, so
long as you can say: `I've got everything out of life'," she said
- NZPA
--
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brad Ferguson
hearing about it. All I can find is the year (1951). Google hasn't
been helpful. I'm hoping local reporting will have it as word of her
death gets around. Thanks.
DDT
August 21, 1951 in Gisborne, New Zealand
Brad Ferguson
<3c60996d-fbd9-4795...@30g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>, DDT
<edin...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Thank you!
La N
Just finished watching a segment on her on CNN. Fabulous woman.
- nilita
Horatio Pugwash
> In article
> <3c60996d-fbd9-4795-a4a4-9f8987ec3...@30g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>, DDT> > > If anybody has a date of birth for MargaretMoth, I'd appreciate
> > > hearing about it. All I can find is the year (1951). Google hasn't
> > > been helpful. I'm hoping local reporting will have it as word of her
> > > death gets around. Thanks.
>
> > August 21, 1951 in Gisborne, New Zealand
>
> Thank you!
Hyfler/Rosner
Margaret Moth: Fearless camerawoman who faced the dangers of
many war zones and was seriously injured in Sarajevo
Friday, 2 April 2010
When Margaret Moth was shot through the face by a Serbian
sniper in Sarajevo in 1992, her life was in the balance. But
after two years and a dozen operations of reconstructive
surgery, she persuaded CNN to let her get back to work. So
where did she demand to go? To those who knew her, that was
a no-brainer: Sarajevo. "I want to go back to look for my
teeth," she joked. In the end, it was neither that bullet
nor the many others she faced thereafter that killed her;
she died of colon cancer at the age of 58.
Moth, her native New Zealand's first female camera operator
on national TV news, became known to her colleagues as "the
Lady in Black". There was the jet-black hair, the thick
black eyeliner which emphasised her piercing blue eyes, the
black clothes, black socks, the black army boots she slept
in while on assignment, the black rollerblades she took to
Baghdad to scoot around her hotel lobby to unwind. She even
painted their wheels black. Moth herself recalled bumping
into a group of children after dark while she was back on
leave in New Zealand. "They ran away shouting 'There's a
witch! There's a witch!'"
For two decades, Margaret Gipsy Moth - she officially
changed her name to that from Margaret Wilson when she was
in her twenties - covered the most dangerous stories of the
day, starting with the violence in India after the 1984
assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi. For CNN, one
of her first assignments was the 1990 Gulf War to liberate
Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, and she was in Baghdad more than
a decade later to cover Saddam's overthrow.
Often working with CNN's renowned correspondent Christiane
Amanpour, Moth had a reputation as fearless, and that was
the adjective used as the title of a CNN documentary about
her life. Colleagues recall how they ducked behind vehicles
in Tbilisi, Georgia, when militiamen opened fire on a crowd
of protesters. Moth stayed on her feet and kept her camera
rolling to obtain exclusive footage. She once famously
zoomed in on an Israeli soldier who turned his rifle towards
her and fired off a round. If it was a warning shot, it was
awfully close. Her camera did not even tremble and the
soldier jumped back into his armoured vehicle. Her
colleagues joked that he probably thought he had seen a
witch.
During the Israeli incursion into the West Bank in 2002,
Moth hid herself within a group of protesting Palestinian
doctors and walked, filming all the while, past Israeli
troops and armoured vehicles to gain an interview with the
beleaguered President of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser
Arafat. During the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, Moth would
crawl into the rubble of a hotel room on what we called the
"Emmental cheese" side of the shell-battered Holiday Inn -
in direct line of sight of the Serbs' artillery. Using a
night vision lens, and covering her camera's red "on" light
with masking tape, she regularly filmed the overnight
bombardment of the city by Serbian forces.
It was in the Bosnian capital, on 23 July 1992, that Moth
and two CNN colleagues set out on what correspondents used
to call "one of the best laxatives known to mankind" - the
pedal-to-metal dash from the centre of Sarajevo to the
airport along "Sniper's Alley", at the time a deserted
boulevard in full view of Serbian snipers. Her crew's aim
was to interview pilots of relief flights at the otherwise
closed-down and besieged airport. Despite their van's speed,
Moth was hit in the face by a perfectly-aimed bullet from a
sniper many hundreds of yards away, shattering her jaw and
destroying her teeth and much of her tongue. After local
emergency treatment, CNN had her flown to the Mayo Clinic in
the US.
"My face, it felt like my face was falling off," she said
later of the moments after she was shot. "I remember I was
trying to hold my face back on. I knew I had to stay
conscious. If I go unconscious, I will stop breathing." She
also joked later - but it was true - that her injury left
her forever sounding to strangers like she was drunk. For
many months, she couldn't speak. Fellow CNN cameraman Joe
Duran recalled visiting her in hospital after initial
surgery, before she had been allowed a mirror. She scribbled
two notes to him: "Mark is OK?" referring to one of her
colleagues who had been with her, and less seriously
wounded, at the time. The other note read: "Do I look like a
monster?"
Asked recently what she felt about the man behind the gun
which shot her, she replied: "We came into their war. Fair's
fair. They're in a war and I stepped into it."
Margaret Wilson was born in Gisborne, on New Zealand's North
Island, in 1951 to a homekeeper mother and a father who
built and sold swimming pools. She originally wanted to be a
motor mechanic but found that no one would give a girl an
apprenticeship. "It was the first time I realised that being
female is a handicap," she recalled later. Perhaps that
helped motivate her to prove the opposite.
Fascinated by photography since getting her first still
camera at the age of eight, she studied film and photography
at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch before
moving to Dunedin, also on South Island, for the local TV
channel DNTV2 as the first news camerawoman in New Zealand.
These were the 1970s, before the days of a national hook-up,
and colleagues recall her racing by car to the airport to
get her videotapes to Auckland and Wellington in time for
the national evening news. After work, she would relax on
alternative evenings as a bell-ringer at a local church or
by jumping out of a small plane.
"There was no skydiving club in town," Dunedin pilot Mike
Caldwell said. "Margaret would just walk up to pilots and
ask for a lift. Even in blustery north-westerly winds, she'd
jump out at 12,000ft. She could have no idea where she would
land." Since there were no instructors to insist otherwise,
Moth preferred to skydive barefoot.
The quality of her camerawork landed her a job with national
television - TVNZ - which in turn got her a job in the
United States, with the KHOU 11 news channel in Houston,
Texas, and eventually, in 1990, with the CNN 24-hour news
channel. She had changed her name from Margaret Wilson to
Margaret Gipsy Moth "because there were too many Margarets
and too many Wilsons." The first aircraft she had jumped out
of was a Tiger Moth so she first applied to be Margaret
Tiger Moth but the New Zealand bureaucracy would not allow
it.
In Fearless, the CNN documentary about her life, Moth, who
lived in Istanbul before moving into a hospice in the US,
expressed no fear of dying. "You could be a billionaire, and
you couldn't pay to do the things we've done. Dying of
cancer, I would have liked to think that I would have gone
out with a little more flair, but feel like I can die with
dignity - that's the main thing."
Margaret Moth never married. She is survived by her 25 stray
cats, now being looked after by a fellow cameraman in
Istanbul.
Phil Davison
Margaret Moth, news camerawoman: born Gisborne, New Zealand
21 August 1951; died Rochester, Minnesota 21 March 2010.