Chris Hondros was born in New York City to immigrant Greek and German parents who were child refugees after World War II.
[2] Hondros studied English literature at North Carolina State University where he also worked for the Technician, the campus newspaper.
[2][3] Hondros left his job at The Fayetteville Observer in 1998 to return to New York and concentrate on international reporting.
From his base in New York, Hondros worked 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.
[3] When Hondros returned to cover the Liberian election in 2005, he was able to meet Joseph Duo again to discuss the progress that had been made in Liberia since his last visit.
[3] The United States presidential election in 2008 found Hondros photographing Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
[10] Hondros's images from Iraq, especially a January 2005 picture series detailing the shooting of an Iraqi family by U.S. troops, were published extensively and garnered worldwide acclaim and criticism.
As a result of the worldwide interest in his case generated by Hondros's pictures, the boy, Rakan Hassan, was later flown to the United States for treatment in a Boston hospital, but was murdered in a bombing by insurgents shortly after his return.
[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] One of his pictures of this tragedy is likely to become "one of the few photos from the Iraq war that could stand out in history" according to Liam Kennedy, from University College Dublin.
[19]It was reported on April 20, 2011, that Hondros had been fatally wounded in a mortar attack by government forces in Misrata while covering the 2011 Libyan civil war.
[27] In 2013 the author Greg Campbell launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce a documentary named Hondros: A Life in Frames.