No, not really, not afraid of dying, afraid of getting injured or being disabled, but
I certainly don't think if I was to die doing something that I was passionate about or that
I really cared about, that this is not something that really scares me, no.
More generally, there were a few crochets in Colombia and some more in Iraq and Afghanistan
and really there's a big sort of rush, the rush of survival, when you're in the situation
you're normally so preoccupied with either trying to make pictures or to actually survive
the situation that it tends to catch up with you later, so there's going to be any shock
or something that's maybe a few hours or a few days later, but when the hotel for example
was blown up by two suicide bombers in Baghdad, there was just this euphoria of having survived
the situation.
Well I don't know, I think it's very good to actually feel fear, fear is the thing that
makes you be a bit more careful, if you're not scared of anything then you're going
to take stupid risks, but the fear of getting injured and the fear of never being able to
work again and so on, these are important things, so you need to manage those and to
not put you into the self-insituations that you've got no way of getting out of.
Yes I was working in the country on and off for five years and during that time when I
went to meet the paramilitaries in the south of the country, I met a girl who said that
she could point me in the direction of the paramilitaries and I went to stay with her
family and over the next year or so we became involved with each other and then I discovered
that she wasn't just involved with the paramilitaries, she was, she didn't just know the paramilitary,
she was involved and working for them as an assassin and she killed 23 people and then
in 2004 she was murdered herself by her own group.
The Lanarko mafia or the people that control the drugs trade really just, they just changed
some one group to another so a long time ago I obviously saw Pablo Escobar ran the whole
thing. After he's demise he was shared out between a lot more people, so now the paramilitary
groups make money from the drugs, the rebels, the left wing rebels make money, I'm sure
there's still people involved, high up in the government that benefit in some way, but
the drugs is not the only thing at all that is driving that conflict in Colombia, a lot
of it is fighting over other resources and power and as long as there is a huge gap between
the rich and the poor it's a conflict that will keep going on.
Yeah it's the work that I'm most happy with, it's the work that I did to teach myself photojournalism,
it wasn't for any kind of financial gain or anything like that, it was to learn the skills
and to tell a story that although lots of other photographers have worked there no one
has ever published a book for example showing the conflict from all the different perspectives
so and it's the work that I've perhaps had the most success with as a result, there are
some exhibitions and so on going on which is nice and it's different from working in
Iraq and Afghanistan which became much more of a job rather than something that I was
really passionate about.
Which depends a lot on when you go to cover them and how you cover them and how you market
them with Iraq at the peak of the conflict, ICE would sometimes work for three different
clients a day and so in one year I did 209 assignments and financially it was very good.
I'll never ever make the same money as I did in that one year from working in Columbia
which took in total seven years to put the book together.
But the images are made for different purposes, Afghanistan now is becoming harder in some
ways to get work simply because every photographer goes there so there's a lot more competition.
Well the inspiration to go to Columbia in the first place was much more a search for
adventure rather than anything particularly journalistic and rather than thinking at
that time about educating people that wasn't the big mission it was to have an adventure
and discover if I could become a conflict photographer but then as time goes on you get
more involved in the story and you start to get some feedback on your pictures and you
realise that you are showing people things that they've never seen before or that have
some educational value then the balance switch isn't just a selfish experience anymore it's
something with a positive end result.
When you go to Iraq and Afghanistan it's obviously still a very exciting place to go but
it's very different from the sort of buzz that people get from when they go to the
movie or something like that.
These situations you're putting yourself right in the middle of it is dangerous if something
happens you're the one that will be injured or be killed and to do that just for the
thrill of it would be pretty crazy so there's got to be something else driving you but I
think often that motivation changes and evolves as time goes on.
They're very happy that we're doing something we want to do with our lives it's not a luxury
that a huge amount of the population of the world have most people are stuck in a nine
to five job so they can pay the mortgage, feed their children, we pick and choose what
I do in my case pick and choose where I go to take pictures and what I do with my life.
My brother is very passionate about his life in the military so our family are very supportive
of that.
Well I was interested in photography straight from school so I worked at a camera shop for
eight years because I was interested in cameras and all the technical side of it and so on
as well and then I started travelling and taking pictures and for several years I basically
do casual jobs just to earn a bit of money before I could go away again and shoot more
pictures and in fact I funded myself through the Columbia project by stacking shelves in
the supermarket on the midnight to 7am shift and that resulted in my best work because I
was doing a job that I hated but I knew that I was earning money to go and do something
I cared about and so I made very good use of the time when I was there shooting pictures.
Well in terms of the way that I wanted to shoot for example I shot Columbia in black
and white and I'm still really fond of black and white conflict photography because it
takes away any kind of time reference so the pictures could be maybe from Vietnam they could
be from earlier conflicts and I thought that worked well in Columbia but I was only able
to do that because it wasn't for a specific client it wasn't for news the pictures didn't
need to be filed.
I could shoot on film which also slowed down the way that I worked and meant that I took
much more care about the pictures and it gave a feel to the images that I liked.
Once you're off and you're shooting for clients and you're on deadline you're shooting with
digital and there's a lot of time pressure I found that my images don't really have the
same depth that was visible in the Columbia work.
Yes well to help fund the publishing of the Columbia book I wrote some articles and so
on relating some of my experiences there and one was the relationship with the pan-military
assassin girl and a director P. M. R. R. who had made the movie Taken at Red Yard School
and apparently he'd always wanted to be a war photographer so he felt this was a good
inspiration for a Hollywood movie so he and Universal Pictures have optioned this and
every next couple of years a screenplay will be written and maybe it goes into production
in a couple of years and we'll see how it is.
