One Second of Light (a)
(a)
Gino Strada: La Condition Humaine A.L.Kennedy: Not Taken Melissa Fleming: Shared Moments Giles Duley: One Second of Light (b) This book is dedicated to those around me, who were there to catch me when I fell.
Stories 2005–15 (c)
Captions Roger Tatley: In Conversation with Giles Duley Acknowledgement & Credits
EMERGENCY UK
Stories 2005–15
(Bailundo, Angola. 2008)
Widows from the civil war find shelter and companionship in the abandoned buildings of a catholic mission. They’d lost everything; their husbands, homes and often their children, yet the smoke-blackened rooms still echoed with laughter and song. As one woman said to me, “they have taken everything, but we have found each other.�
1
2
3
5
7
8
(Dhaka, Bangladesh. 2009)
The Acid Survivors Foundation is an inspiring hospital, but its staff are what makes it truly special. Founded in Bangladesh to campaign for, and rehabilitate, victims of Acid Attacks, many of the staff are survivors themselves. Despite the horrifically brutal nature of these attacks, they have made the ASF a place where nobody is pitied, none see themselves as victims; and remarkably created a place that is full of hope, laughter and companionship.
12
(Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan. 2014)
In 2014 the brutal civil war had been raging in Syria for three years, displacing 6.5 million people. Over 2.5 million refugees had fled their country. In Za’atari Camp there were already over 100,000 Syrians seeking shelter. Yet amongst the statistics were families, stories: everyday people trying to find a life amongst the chaos. 2.5 million refugees. One family. Siwar, Amin and their five children.
15
16 17 18
19 20
25 26
(South Sudan. 2009)
The Murle tribe at Lekwongole. A few weeks before, the village had been attacked by the Nuer, with over 450 Murle killed.
43
(South Sudan. 2009)
Child soldiers of the Nuer ‘White Army’.
45
46
(Angola. 2007)
The Angolan Civil War ended in 2002. For 36 years, the war had ravaged the country, costing the lives of over half a million civilians and destroying the countries infrastructure. In 2007, the country was still struggling to recover from the legacy of that conflict.
52
53
54
(Kabul, Afghanistan. 2012)
Civilian casualties from the war in Afghanistan at EMERGENCY’s Surgical Centre for war victims and the ICRC limb fitting centre.
57
61
62 63
64
65
66
67
(Pieri, South Sudan. 2009)
With the highest reported maternal mortality rate in the world, childbirth and pregnancy, rather than conflict, are the biggest killers of girls and women in South Sudan.
70
(EMERGENCY’s Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery, Sudan. 2010)
Located in Soba, 20 km south of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, is the Salam Centre for Cardiac surgery. Set up by EMERGENCY it is the only hospital offering fee-free heart surgery in the continent. Built in 2007, the hospital reflects the passion of EMERGENCY’s founder Gino Strada, in not just providing medical care, but also in showing solidarity with developing nations. According to that philosophy, EMERGENCY advocates for medical care to be considered a basic human right, equally enjoyable by all. “If a European gets a CT scan, it cannot be that two tablets are enough for an African,” says Strada, “That’s why we bought the most sophisticated type of surgery here, to show that all people are equal.”
71
72 73
(Jordan. 2013–14)
The night had become so bitterly cold that I’d taken shelter in a portakabin with UNHCR doctors and Handicap International staff. We sat, sipping hot tea, fighting our tiredness, waiting. It was nearly 1am and still no sign of refugees arriving. Restless, I went outside to join my colleagues who were sharing a cigarette in the starless night. Suddenly we were silent, in the distance we could hear buses and then, out of that cold dark night, they started to arrive. The first to appear was a young girl, maybe five, dressed in a cream coat. She walked with a determined purpose, far beyond her years. Behind her, two young mothers clasped their children, wrapped tightly in blankets to protect them from the night. Out of that darkness more figures emerged till there were hundreds. Immediately it became apparent that this was like nothing I had witnessed before. A nation was on the move.
88
(The ‘family’ of Prymorska Street Odessa; Andrei, Colya, Ruslana, Sasha, Lydia, Dima, Nadya and Lilick. Odessa, Ukraine. 2010)
Following the collapse of the USSR, children from across the former Soviet Union had come to Odessa, in Ukraine, with the hope of finding better lives. However on arriving, they found it was not the dream they’d hoped for and were faced with new hardships. Without proper registration, they had no access to healthcare, education or welfare. Many ended up living on the streets, some involved with petty crime and drug use, often targets of brutal police tactics. I had seen harrowing images of street children living in sewers, injecting drugs, forced into near feral lives. However I felt there must be more to this story. I wanted to understand what their daily lives were like and who the street kids of Odessa really were.
94
95 96 97
98 99
105 106
107
108
109
118
116 117
Captions
(c)
Roger Tatley:
In Conversation with Giles Duley
R:
Cambodia/London, 8th March 2015
G: Yes. I can only describe it as something like a whirlpool that you’re enthralled, drawn into. And so many young people from so many generations and different countries have been sucked into that power and destroyed by it. Having started working around war zones, documenting the consequences of war, it was inevitable I would be drawn into the centre of it. And these photographs of explosions represent that centre; they are the heart of darkness from which all the other suffering you see in this book comes from.
R: I let you off too lightly about your images of explosions when we were talking the other night. I think I’ve always dwelt on your photographs because you favour the implicit over the explicit, but you can’t get more explicit than an explosion. G: I’m not interested in photographing war. I’ve always been interested in documenting its effects. But those photographs of explosions represent the cause of it all, which is why they are here, even if they go against much of what I do. Having spent so much time seeing the effects of war, I was interested in some of its causes, well not so much the causes but some of the causes of the effects, if that makes sense? I’d seen the results of war, I’d seen people injured, I’d seen refugees forced from countries, but I needed to learn more about what it really is. I always saw the effect of something, but I wanted to understand what that something was in essence. Being in Afghanistan on the front line and documenting people at the epicenter of war, feeling the intensity of the fighting was all opening up an understanding of what war is. As a kid, I was drawn to it. There is something enticing about it and maybe I wanted to understand that too. As a child I enjoyed watching films about war, reading the history of wars, comic-strips, playing soldiers—it was a huge part of my childhood and I think of many children’s development. We are surrounded by so many references to war, but in an abstract sense.
R: You’re sounding worryingly like a traditional ‘War Photographer’, a phrase you despise being used to describe you. G:
Yeah…
R: …I think of you as someone who makes empathetic images of people whose lives may be affected by the long-term ravages of war after the ‘war photographers’ have long gone off in search of their next gratuitous-action gig. You’re more inclined to dwell on the still remnants of what’s happened because of those explosions. G: I’ve never wanted to photograph people firing guns. Obviously I’ve often seen people shooting, wrapped up in the excitement of conflict, but I’ve never really been interested in photographing any of that. I suppose what I find fascinating about those explosions is they are abstract. It’s the only time that any of my photographs have no people in them. But they cast a shadow that is on all my other work.
R: So do we find war inherently enticing, or were you and I, as kids growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, conditioned to find war enticing because politicians needed soldiers?
R: Purely formally they’re almost beautiful. ‘Abstract’ in both the impersonal and artistic senses. G: Right, I kind of wanted to show that. There is definitely a visual appeal to war. While I was drawn to it as a kid, loads of people still are. Those explosions represent power, but also the strange beauty of war, and when war looks like that you forget the terrible truth that they’re ripping people apart as they go off.
G: I think it’s instinctive. My brother really wanted his son to grow up not having toy guns, not being exposed to anything like that, and yet he will still pick up a stick and go “BANG-BANG” with it. Where does that come from? You could argue that much stuff in current culture makes war attractive to kids, but, often even when I’m in a refugee camp it amazes me that kids who have been traumatised by war often play soldiers. And even if you are someone like me who is completely anti-war, there is something undeniably awe-inspiring about being around that sort of hardware: the airplanes, machines and all that power.
(c)
So you found those explosions mesmerising?
R: And you’d never want to take photographs of those people being ripped apart. G: No. Nor of the person firing or detonating the device that might do that to them. But these give
(c)
an obvious danger. As for whether it’s a failure of photographers not to have helped to stem the tide of war, in some ways I think we’ve all failed, because if we could really convey the real brutalities of war, nobody would want to fight. No photograph will do that. We can and should document it though, and for me one reason I focus on the consequences of conflict, is because the way they are fought has changed. During the First World War, over 90% of casualties were military, with relatively few civilians killed. In most modern conflicts, those figures are reversed: still focusing on photographing soldiers fighting seems strange when the vast majority of people killed or injured by war now are civilians.
abstract sense of all that’s compelling about war. I needed to understand and express that. They are my small way of trying to understand why people are drawn to something that causes them so much personal unhappiness, without the glamour. R: I think we’re already into the territory of talking about the rift between being a ‘photographer’ and being a ‘person’? G: Yeah. While I don’t like the idea of seeing myself as being a ‘campaigner’, the work increasingly feels like that. R:
But you’re not some photographer-activist? R: Including you. If the title of this book refers to the rough total period of time you allowed light to flood through your aperture to create all of these pictures, hasn’t it also got something to do with the intensity of light of one particular explosion in your life? Aren’t people misreading what happened in that second of light as a latter-day ‘Damascus-Road’ experience? I get tired of reading articles about how your injuries made you radically change your approach—as if Giles Duley suddenly discovered empathy when he woke up from a coma.
G: Maybe not. I’m not good with labels, but I don’t see them as separable things any more. I take a photograph because I want it to have an impact. I want it to create some kind of change. When I was 18, I would have loved to be a war photographer, but it never happened. And by the time I did set out to do that work I was less interested in the fighting than in what had happened to those caught up in it. R: Should ‘war photographers’ in the traditional sense even exist?
G: It annoys me. A lot of journalists like to force their narratives onto my life: He was blown up, and now he’s devoting his life to documenting ‘people like him’! And since then he’s been this great campaigner. I got injured because I was doing the same work I’d done for years, and I don’t think my work has changed fundamentally since. That’s one of the reasons this book isn’t structured chronologically and has images from all over the place, both before and after my accident, in it. I can see that some of my early work was perhaps a little more visually-based and increasingly recently it’s just come right down to the people, but that was a progression I was working towards anyway. I discovered years ago that the best way to get the type of pictures that interested me was to be vulnerable. It’s hard to do, but say for example when I was with the Ukrainian street kids, a long time before my injury, by leaving my cameras lying around, being no more protective with my possessions with them than I would be with good friends and acting normally around them, I think they trusted me.
G: Of course. But that’s what I’m talking about: there is something that draws young people, mostly men, to go and fight. And war photographers can definitely help us to explore what that is. The risk is of glamorising it. R: Right. But however well-intended, courageous and skilful, these people have been over the years— from way before Capa et al, beyond the advent of photography, to war illustrators—clearly they haven’t achieved any kind of deceleration of warfare. On the contrary. Can we hold them partially responsible? G: War photography has a certain coolness and kudos to it. I was just at a war remnants museum in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday, and it’s of course full of photographs. Inevitably most of those photographs of the Vietnam War era have so contributed to an iconography of war. You can’t help but look at photos of young soldiers smoking Marlboro, and hear a soundtrack of Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. You can’t single out those photographers for that, but it’s
R: And you could then photograph them being themselves, sweeping rooms and so on, rather than
(c)
G: It’s one of the weirdest, most unnatural, things to bring a camera in front of someone who is seriously injured, in pain and shock. It goes against every human instinct to point this thing in their face. But you can see it—people immediately look at me and think, “This guy’s lost two legs and has only got one arm”. I don’t want to compare my situation to theirs, but it does create times when people are less guarded. I was walking on the street in Vietnam yesterday and this old guy came up to me and started banging what remains of his missing arm against mine. He had been a Viet Cong soldier who lost it fighting the Americans and was acting out what happened to him. He started making firing gestures and explosion sounds, and I started acting out what happened to me. We had no common language except these gestures. Two grown men making explosion noises and waving their stumps around like they’ve just been blown up! Then he started hugging me. And that’s from a man who just saw me on the street, can’t speak a word of English and felt he had a bond with me that’s greater than others. So, I do get seriously annoyed when people suggest that this experience has suddenly awoken the humanitarian in me. But it’s given me a new language, or at least eased an ability to meet people and break down inhibition, and so in many ways it has made things easier.
them being what they thought a photographer wanted them to be: ‘being junkies’? G: Right, photographing the banal moments, when they were being themselves. There were photographers in the Ukraine when I was there who were giving twenty dollars to kids to do drugs in front of them, to pose for ‘the story’. That always makes me sick. So, getting back to what has changed since my injuries, I suppose one thing that is different is that inevitably I am more vulnerable. And, while I wouldn’t say it’s essentially changed what I do, it’s possibly made it easier. One example—well one of the hardest things for me in terms of the story—was when I was in Lebanon recently. I met a woman whose husband had gone missing in Syria. She had two young sons and a broken hip, so she urgently needed shelter. The only means of getting it was when a man took her in off the street. This was a man who in her words’ “did not treat her right”: he physically abused her, but she had stayed with him because she felt it was the only way for her children to be sheltered. I was nervous about how she would interact with another man who was stranger. They lived on the fourth floor of a building that had a broken elevator, so by the time I got up all those flights of stairs, I was hyperventilating and sweating. And while I’m sure she was more anxious about meeting me, her initial instinct when she saw me was that this guy needs some water. She got me a chair and checked I was fine once I’d sat down. So, I became the vulnerable person. And I think that enabled her to open up and feel more comfortable.
R:
You’ve always been a pragmatist.
G: And the picture of the guy in Afghanistan on the cover is not really that different to a picture in this book you talked about the first time you saw it of the woman in South Sudan who’s giving birth to a stillborn child. My work has not changed fundamentally, nor have my reasons for doing it.
R: So she was the one who changed the subject/ victim-photographer/documenter dynamic. G: Yes, and I think that happens a lot now. In Afghanistan many of the people I photographed— despite some having been injured by Western airstrikes—would come up and hug me I think because they felt a commonality. So, I don’t think my motivations have changed. I hope not. But I do think it’s easier for me to meet and photograph people.
R: Except that both will have been published and seen more by others now because of what happened in between. And you’re right, one was taken after your injuries, the other before. One doesn’t show the man’s mauled leg, the other doesn’t show a tiny body being sawn out from her. There’s something about both that surely screw us up more as recipients than if they’d been more explicit. Yes there would surely have been some immediate shock, but the haunting subtleties of both are more lasting than bloody spectacle—the still, dual pairing of empathetic images and words.
R: The quiet portrait of the guy on the cover of this book is compelling despite us not seeing the fact that he has something in common with you in having lost a lower limb. But he may not have allowed his thoughts to drift and be himself while you were in the room without that basic solidarity.
(c)
empathise with people you’re photographing soon after they’ve being seriously injured without going through that. And so, when people photograph me and make a point of asking me to wear shorts, not trousers, I laugh because why would I? I don’t wear shorts! And I see these people trying to construct a narrative about me. It helps remind me to try not to do that to others. But, going back, it’s also about what you don’t photograph. When I took that image in South Sudan I was supposed to be creating a whole photo essay about the terrible mortality rates during childbirth in the region, and that’s the only photograph that made it. Which isn’t ideal for the commission, but for me at least, that photograph said all I needed to say. So why do more? And it has lasted. Can I say it’s ‘timeless’?
G: That’s the development I hope I’m seeing in my work. As an editorial photographer, somebody would direct you “Well we need to see a guy in a wheelchair who’s lost a limb, so we understand”. And I was always torn between being very visual, in terms of narrative, and explaining everything in the picture. Now when people photograph me they inevitably try to get my legs, or my lack of legs, in the shot. And I understand that, they think, “I’m photographing a legless person here, I obviously have to show that he has no legs!” But you don’t necessarily need to. A phrase I hadn’t thought about came out when I was giving a lecture recently: stories are not events. I’m not big on events. Stories, for me, are about how people respond to events. And my work is as much as possible not about the instant of an event, but rather how it affects that person and others. So, I hope that in that photograph in South Sudan, instead of reeling away from a saw cutting out a baby, you get some small glimpse, or sense of what’s going on in her mind.
R: No way, you definitely don’t get to say that! But exactly, that’s the point. You have your own sense that your images are by no means decisive moments… G: They’re indecisive…indecision’s the thing for me! I’d like to think I photograph moments between events.
R: It’s glib to suggest that there’s an inherent difference between ‘taking’ and ‘making’ a photograph, but, to paraphrase you, you once said that many photographers are interested in the things that make us different, but that you’ve always been more interested in common moments, that could be taken anywhere, and that a refugee is not a refugee: a refugee is a mechanic, a teacher, a doctor, a taxi driver. And my distrust of narrative-based photography is not only that ‘making’ a picture rarely allows for the observation of the ordinary, and so becomes fictional. If someone’s discouraged from photographing Ukrainian kids merely sweeping, in favour of them shooting up, then we’ve lost something even more worrying. We afford ourselves the dubious luxury of reassuring ourselves, “I’m not a junkie,” immediately avoiding any chance of a human connection.
R: I was unsure about it at first, but I think that’s one of the things I like about this book’s title now. You’re rid of the vainglorious construct of your photographs being captured by the precision of your photographic genius, realising that they are of course merely fragments of seconds within long, complex lives. They have as much to do with whatever series of arbitrary events allowed you to be in any given place at a particular time as anything else. (Which isn’t to say that they’re fleeting and impermanent themselves). Collectively these pictures took less than a second of ‘taking’—so there’s a certain humility in the title—but, as you know, most pain is ultimately either caused by gradual, insidious forces and failings, or experienced over the long-term, and those are the sorts of durations I think of these pictures existing in. So, maybe some of your pictures do get to be called ‘timeless’.
G: It’s been a battle. After I made the decision to step away from editorial to the work I do now, in the beginning I really struggled. I’d go to papers and magazines and could tell they didn’t think it was dramatic enough. It was only starting to pay dividends with exhibitions and so on, but, I actually think that one of the things being injured has done is make me believe that I was right. I’m probably in a fairly unique position in that there were photographs taken of me the whole time after I stood on that mine. And naturally it’s harder to
G: I do think of most of my photographs as moments between events. Reflection, pauses, or thoughts about something that has happened. And so I guess these are part of the spaces between those ‘everything-coming-together’ events we’re supposed to seek as photographers. At the same time, I’m not so grandiose as to say that I have captured this person’s life, their inner truth. Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, does
(c)
is I get them to take photographs of each other. When I show them photographs that I’ve taken as portraits and get them to talk about what they see, and what they’ve photographed, it’s clear those old aspirations are still there, but in a good way. What makes me laugh is when ‘professional’ photographs say how terrible it is that everyone thinks they can take portraits now, when in fact they can. A great photographic portrait will shine through regardless of the technical expertise of who took it—and for that matter who looks at it. I’ve seen 12, 13 year-old kids in tears dwelling on photographic portraits. It’s not that they’re unaware or unappreciative of the strength of that, they’re probably just smarter than us in not thinking of the photographers themselves as being so important. I always say that my conventional portraits are documents of people having their portraits taken. It is a reality, but it’s the reality of being photographed.
capture a decisive moment visually, but subscribing to the idea of ‘capturing’ somebody’s whole personality, humanity, in a fraction of a second is dangerous. The idea that, as well as I know you, I could somehow sum up all of that in a single portrait of you is crazy. R:
Sure. It’s disingenuous.
G: And that’s where the falseness of photography becomes overbearing. I’ve taken photographs of someone who looks intense and compelling and serious and then five minutes later their child makes them laugh. It’s obvious to say it, but some people still adhere to that image as truth stuff and it’s ridiculous. I love photography and I think it’s an incredibly powerful, worthwhile medium, but I think that still investing it with these notions in 2015 that make us stand back in reverence from an image on the wall, is disrespectful to the people in those images. And worse, to not allow ourselves to understand the situations they’re in, because we’re so quick to ‘get it’, rather than to ask “I wonder what got them there and how it felt”.
R: An artist I work with was looking at iPhone shots of my son and said he looked like the sort of kid who might appear in one of her photographs. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and her premises and aspirations are very different to yours, but I can’t imagine that forming part of your approach.
R: There’s no way you could’ve, or should’ve, followed the woman in South Sudan as she walked the miles along the road back to her living children. But at least you’ve allowed us to attempt to imagine how that felt.
G: No, that’s something that’s progressed. At the beginning I did think I had to find a type of person, rather than it just being about their story. When I was last in Lebanon, I was with a film crew and they were very conscious that they needed to find say somebody who’s missing a leg or we’ve already done something with someone with that kind of injury so we really need to try to find another one. And I think it’s simpler for me now: let’s find the stories first and see what images come of that.
G: Of course you put a certain amount of knowledge, expertise, editing when you construct an image, but you do so knowing ‘that’s just me’. We all project personalities onto people we glimpse, say on the tube, and that’s what all photographers do visually. You create a projected life for them and think you understand them, but you don’t. Great photography can give you some insight, but it’s just a brief window you’re looking through momentarily.
R: Yes, you use the word storyteller a lot. But you’re not one in the sense of generating a particular story to tell, you’re more of a conduit…
R: Hopefully we’re losing the sense of how important those individual windows are. The means of image-making has made them so proliferate that my kids, and many others reading this, would find some of the traditions we’re talking about laughably antiquated, if not inconceivable. But that’s not to say that the aspiration to create a worthwhile photographic portrait has evaporated.
G: I like to redirect an existing story. I might reinterpret, and be selective of what I see, but I always hope that I’m just a conduit. In the same way that old travelling storytellers would hear a story in one town and tell it in the next. They might have changed a few details, but it remains essentially what it started as: some person’s story. Not the photographer’s or storyteller’s.
G: I do school projects with kids and I get them to shoot portraits. And one of the key things I do
R: Then does it matter to you if that person’s story hasn’t changed very much in real terms after
(c)
that my world is limited to this, and these pictures opened up stories”. So that’s a less specific thing that I hope the work does. One of the few times I’ve felt that I might’ve done my job was when the photographs I took of injured civilians in Afghanistan were presented in the Members waiting area of the Houses of Parliament where all the MPs congregate before they go in to vote. I didn’t think for a second that they would look at these pictures and suddenly go, ‘Shit, I didn’t realize that war sucks, stupid me, I mean what have we been doing all these years?!’ But there are times when I take somebody’s photograph and they say something like “Show this to your leaders.” Because they want it to become ‘something’. And why do you photograph somebody who’s just had their legs blown off? Why would you do that? You’re doing it because you want a nice picture!? Are you doing it because you think that people will respect you for having done that?
you tell it? I’m sure that you’re aware of how, for the majority of the people in this book (except maybe in Angola), unless they’re dead, their circumstances and the socio-political mechanisms that put them there haven’t significantly altered. If I gave you grief earlier for talking about ‘timeless’ photographs, some of these images are ‘timeless’ in wholly the wrong sense. G: That’s maybe why I’m less interested in specific dates or events, but more in the way people deal with the aftermath of events. There’s a common sense of looking, through all these different stories of how people deal with adversity, with the ongoing situations that they’re in, more than recording a specific historical event. R: You’re taking away a sense that these are isolated events shot on particular dates, and that what’s happening to someone is only caught up in this particular skirmish in this particular civil war, or as the result of a specific, surpassable pestilence that’ll be over soon. You’re neither despairing nor someone who thinks of themselves as altruistic, but it seems important that you don’t delineate those you’re photographing as an isolated ‘them’ and ‘then’.
R: Right, you’re either an advocate or an absolute egotist. G: So, therefore to me, to have taken a picture of a child who is lying there with his fingers severely injured and to have put that in front of decision-makers to at least know they’ve seen that, I’ve done what I was talking about, which is taking somebody’s story and passing it on. That’s the only thing I can do: pass my pictures on. I can’t pretend I can change things in any other way but I can, at least, do that. I’ve had letters from people who said, “I saw your works four or five years ago and I’m now working as a nurse”, and that means so much to me. Not in a kind of look at me, I’ve changed these people’s lives, because thinking like that’s deplorably self-important, but why the hell would you take these photographs if it wasn’t for those reasons?! I find it so uncomfortable to photograph somebody who is injured and the only reason I’m doing it is because I hope somebody will look at it and go “I better fucking do something about this”.
G: No, and it isn’t simplistic to say that there is this idea that a community in South Sudan, a family in a refugee camp in Jordan, and a bunch of Ukrainian street kids are experiencing similar things. I’m interested in our commonality of experience, the humanity we share in dealing with things. R: It’s fine to say that, but it matters to you, I think, that your photographs actually achieve something with that sense. Have we been idiots for years and overestimated the power of photography to mobilize any tangible change since the ’60s? Can your pictures do anything except appear in books and museums, removed in every sense from the experiences being relayed? G: I’m not naïve in thinking that all, or even any, of my photographs are in themselves going to change even some small part of the world, but I’d say this: when I take my photographs into schools, some kids do react, and they think outside of their own lives. We can think of them as being insular and don’t give them enough credit, but so there are many times after I talk in a school when kids come up to me afterwards to say, “You made me think that I’m very selfish and
R: Speaking of which, you’re now very particular about those you’ll consider working on projects for. You once said that for example “EMERGENCY is just not like any other NGO. I’ve worked with so many of them, but it’s just profoundly different in the way it treats people with such dignity and such respect.” So, I’m wondering if, as an advocate, are you as
(c)
R: OK then, going back to Gino et al, do you have a set of parameters, even rules that determine what you do or don’t allow yourself to take?
demanding of yourself as you are of the people you’re prepared to work with? Gino Strada says that the hospitals he works in have to be places where he’d want his own family members to come to be operated on—what are your equivalent standards for your job?
G: I always, always have to think of dignity in the first instance. I have a strange rule: I always think of my sister, or anybody close to me, and I think, ‘How would I want them to be photographed if they were in such bad circumstances?’ It’s a weird thing, but I see it that way. How would I want somebody I love to be photographed? I’d want them to be photographed with dignity.
G: Oh God, this is the thing I beat myself up most about. OK, I don’t take a lot of photographs, I’m not someone who shoots thousands of frames of loads and loads of different people. I tend to get to know people, spend time with them, so I think I can kind of remember almost everyone I’ve photographed. I then feel like I have a duty to them to make a photograph that has some kind of effect. The thing for me is when you’re editing and you decide the photographs aren’t strong enough, then I feel I’ve really let this person down. And the thing that beats me up is the photographs that people haven’t seen. Because the ones that were taken weren’t good enough, and the ones that weren’t taken weren’t taken.
R: So one of your simple, abiding rules is don’t dehumanise people to the point where, however memorable, the photograph can’t really function as an agent of advocacy, because we cease to relate to them? So it’s a practical, as well as a moral rule? G: Exactly. I want people to relate to the people in those photographs as people. It achieves little if they’re repulsed, if they turn away. It’s very simple but the only way I can do more than merely look is that if in some small way someone else looking at what I’ve done influences them to do something. So when I take each picture, I’m thinking about what might happen to that photograph later, what it’ll be used for, much more than is this going to be an ‘impressive’ photograph.
R: So you’re saying that there are many photographs that you lacked the courage, the skill, the luck to take…? G: There will be many times when things outside of your control come into it, the light’s not great, the situation is not great, there’s too much stuff going on in front of you or in the background, whatever it is. But sometimes I’ve put my effectively camera in somebody’s face when they’re in a terrible circumstance and for that they’ve got nothing in return. The very least I can give people is a small chance at that advocacy and in these cases I haven’t even managed that. If they are never seen, then of course I’ve completely let them down.
R: But what if it is impressive, what about the other extreme? Is there any value in an ostensibly aesthetically pleasing image in the midst of actual unease? When I saw one of your photographs of the widows of rebel soldiers in an abandoned school in Bailundo, Angola, I was drawn in by the smoke of the fire, the Goyaesque composition, the almost biblical tableaux. I’m not accusing you of being Salgado— whose images of Rwanda I recoil from because they’re too exquisite, too painterly and epic—but is it OK that that’s what drew me into your work in the first place, or is it dangerously disingenuous?
R: So, conversely, are there some photographs you regret taking? G: No. I genuinely can’t think of a photograph that I wouldn’t take again, but that’s because I don’t just stick a camera in somebody’s face. But I can think of hundreds of photographs I didn’t manage to take that I should’ve. And at many times I’ve thought, well I wasn’t brave enough to take that photograph, and maybe that’s been true, but I know there are more opportunities I’ve missed because I don’t want to ever do what’s wrong in terms of intrusion, breaching trust and relationships.
G: It’s interesting because those Angolan pictures were very early on in terms of me trying to make this sort of work. I look back at them, and it’s not that I regret taking them or if I wonder if I would take those sorts of photographs, but I think that had I taken them now, they would be alongside pictures I didn’t take that would be more intimate. To me they are ‘beautiful’, which I’ve no objection to, but there’s still some distance between me and the women in them.
(c)
listening, and recording each woman’s story. And you’re exactly right. The best of my work should be a portal. My work now knows it’s just a photograph. One good example is of the Rohingya refugees, in which each person has a long and troubling life story. If you had those as an article of 40-odd text-only case studies nobody would read them. But I hope that, and I’ve seen, people read them all when they are alongside their photographs. It’s not complicated that someone would wish to read more about the person who’s in the portrait that they are so engaged with. I grew up inspired by photographers like photographers like Don McCullin, Bruce Davidson, Robert Capa, Lee Miller etc. whose captions would just have a place and a date and whilst it’s true often the photographs are enough, for me, I found I wanted to know more. I’m interested in the context. But you very rarely see that in documentary photography, even now. So definitely for me as a viewer, and I’m not talking about being a photographer, having even a few words as a means of accessing somebody’s story is hugely important.
There’s no way I wouldn’t still take that photograph, but there’d be more photographs that I didn’t take… R: …of one of them later pinching your arse, and others laughing, flirting? Which I remember you telling me about, and which goes back to your point about photographers only shooting one aspect of someone’s character… G: …yes! I did and do believe, that there’s something extremely important in taking a beautiful photograph. Because you want people to look at it. You want people to be drawn in. Again, the worse thing for me is when I hear somebody say, “God that photograph was so upsetting I had to look away”. Because then I’m like, well I fucked up, because what’s the point of it if people aren’t really looking, looking at it? So I want people to be drawn in, read the stories, spend time with them then, and in their heads afterwards. But, of course there is a danger where the beauty becomes the dominant thing. For example, going back to Salgado, with his recent series of the environmental pictures, I listened to people having gone to see his landscapes and everybody was talking about the aesthetics of the photographs. I didn’t hear any of them talking about the issues as they did with his earlier work. And I think I’m usually relieved that with my work people don’t really say that they are really beautiful photographs. They tend to say “My God that person’s story…I couldn’t believe that someone would throw acid at her,” or whatever it is. I take it as a compliment that they stop talking about the photograph pretty quickly and talk about the story. That, for me at least, is closer to what I’d define as ‘success’.
R: And if you’ve never had the aspiration for your photographs to substitute narrative in the first place, a simple written narrative next to a photograph is not only permissible, but necessary. G: Yeah, but, also, each of those texts are the stories that I knew when I took each photograph, which I think is important as well. So I’m also sharing the texts as if to say, “This is what I knew that helped me take this photograph; this is the information they’d shared with me when I created this image”. R: So if the texts often stand in for what encouraged you to take them in the first place, they’ll really premises of, rather than the footnotes to, each image?
R: And I welcome the fact that, in this book and in your exhibitions, your pictures invariably have extended captions. There’s a clunky photographic stipulation that somehow still permeates that photographs somehow fail if they require words—that great images should exist in lieu of words. But I need words, and if your photographs serve as portals to me reading more that’s sort of the opposite of a failing.
G: Yes. I’m of course putting a certain interpretation on it. And, as I said, the fact that they aren’t my stories doesn’t mean I’m completely neutral or benign here, but I am trying to help viewers understand, help me understand, each story that I’ve been told. You know the very simple portraits of Angolan men in their 30s or 40s…
G: Increasingly the words have become inseparable. When I started out, and going back to the war widows in Angola, I was so taken by the whole thing that I didn’t really record the individual stories of those people. Now I know that if I was there, I would be
R:
…who were once child soldiers?…
G: …yeah, and they’re interesting for me and those who have looked at them because we often think of
(c)
G: Look, any humanitarian or political action only ever comes at the point where someone says, “God, I can no longer accept what is happening to those people” and you’re never going to feel that unless you relate to them in some way. And that’s all I really want in my photographs is for people to relate to people caught in the middle of these bigger stories, these huge catastrophic events. People say to me, “There are millions of Syrian refugees, what can we do?” That’s an impossible question and leaves people daunted and feeling they can’t change things. But if you can make somebody relate to another person’s individual story and think, ‘that could be my son, that could be my wife, my sister: and I will not allow that to keep happening to them,’ then people feel they can and should make a difference. And if I’m ever doing my job properly, what I hope for is that someone looks at what I’ve photographed and thinks, ‘Enough. I have to do something.’
child soldiers but never of what happens to those children as men. But if you took one of those portraits out of context, isolated and entitled it ‘Jazz Musician’, people would see that photograph in a completely different way. They might prejudge the image by saying you can tell they’ve lived an interesting life by their facial expressions, or something, whereas if you read their story and look at them, you may sense they’ve seen so much brutality since they were a kid that their eyes feel deadened. And I’m being unfair on both my images and photography generally, and the people who view both, but what comes with that writing isn’t secondary, and it adds a lot of weight to what you experience. So for me to be able to simply say, I met these men, they told me they had been child soldiers, which made me think a lot about their lives, and these are the photographs I created, is important. R: So dislocating a story from an image isn’t just duplicitous, it’s dangerous and, conversely, if there’s a symbiosis between image and text, the result is potentially resonant. But you’re not a writer by trade. There are those who can write about, or try to write about, what you definitely can’t or shouldn’t photograph, and there are medical professionals who have the skills you don’t to help someone directly, but what skills—rather what character traits—do you have that make us dwell on your photographs? G: I am genuinely fascinated by, and want to try to understand, the people in these situations—I’d like to understand how maybe I would react, how I would deal and cope in them, or not. And that’s all I want from the viewer too. Most photographers would say, “I’m trying to empathise with people”, but are we really always working on that? That’s what I’d like more than anything, is for people who see my work to try to relate to situations that might otherwise be entirely alien to them. How can I possibly empathise with that woman in South Sudan, or a Syrian father in a refugee camp in Jordan? With a guy who’s lost his legs in Afghanistan? R: So you’re an outsider, who doesn’t claim to be able to tell a complete story with his camera, but I think that could be one of the things that makes you a worthwhile storyteller. And advocate. And you share something, anything, of what you’ve experienced of someone’s story in person and you represent them in some way. You don’t want to let them down, and you don’t want to let down what they’ve been kind enough to let you see.
(c)
Organisations & Charities
Acid Survivors Foundation (ASF) The Acid Survivors Foundation is a Bangladeshi organisation dedicated to raising awareness and preventing acid attacks and providing survivors with medical and legal aid. Acid Survivors Foundation is a Bangladeshi organisation dedicated to raising awareness and providing acid attack survivors with medical and legal aid. It is the first NGO in the world and the only NGO in Bangladesh to address the issue of acid attacks with a holistic approach; prevention, medical, psychosocial, rehabilitation, legal. www.acidsurvivors.org
EMERGENCY EMERGENCY is a humanitarian NGO that provides surgical and medical treatment to the victims of war, landmines and poverty. It was founded by surgeon and Right Livelihood Award laureate Gino Strada in 1994. Over time, their humanitarian projects assumed a broader view, in order to provide long-term support to those who suffer the social consequences of wars. EMERGENCY’s programs now include the provision of vocational trainings for individuals who have been maimed by the war and financial support for setting up cooperatives; pediatric centres; maternity centres and medical and social support to migrants and refugees. Training and employment of local personnel is also at the heart of EMERGENCY’s work and fully in line with the belief that support to communities affected by conflict should be sustainable and based on the principles of equality, quality and social responsibility. EMERGENCY promotes a culture of peace, solidarity and respect of human rights. www.emergencyuk.org
Find A Better Way (FABW) Find A Better Way was founded in 2011 by England and Manchester United legend Sir Bobby Charlton. While visiting a minefield in Cambodia, Sir Bobby saw first-hand the humanitarian damage which landmines cause in war torn areas both past and present. Find A Better Way acts as a major funding body for vital, ground breaking technological
(c)
research into improving the tools available for the safe removal of landmines and explosive remnants of war. The charity also funds the delivery of mine risk education projects in six countries and is developing a stream of humanitarian research aiming to alleviate the suffering of those survivors who live with blast and trauma injuries.
local authorities to ensure those needs are met. This directly helps people to get on with their lives, and get back their futures, free from fear. MAG shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its role in banning landmines. www.maginternational.org
www.findabetterway.org.uk MSF Handicap International (HI) Handicap International is an independent charity working in situations of poverty and exclusion, conflict and disaster. The charity works work tirelessly alongside disabled and vulnerable people in over 60 countries worldwide. Handicap International is cowinner of the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the Mine Ban Treaty. www.handicap-international.org.uk
ICRC The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a humanitarian organization based in Geneva. The ICRC’s mandate is to protect and help victims of armed conflict and violence. Such victims include war wounded, prisoners of war, displaced people and refugees. It is one of the most widely recognized humanitarian organizations in the world, having won three Nobel Peace Prizes in 1917, 1944, and 1963. www.icrc.org
Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders, is an international humanitarian-aid non-governmental organization and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, best known for its projects in war-torn regions and developing countries facing endemic diseases. www.msf.org.uk
Save the Children Save the Children works in more than 120 countries to save children’s lives, keep children safe and help them learn. Established in the United Kingdom in 1919, today Save the Children helps millions of children around the world through long-term development programmes, through emergency responses to conflicts and other disasters, and through promoting children’s rights. www.savethechildren.org.uk
UNHCR
Mines Advisory Group (MAG) MAG is a non-governmental organization removing unexploded landmines and bombs from land around the world and destroying them, making it safe for communities to grow food crops, build homes and schools, and access water sources. MAG takes a humanitarian approach to landmine action. They focus on the impact their work can have on local communities. This approach recognises that although the number of landmines in an area may be small, the effect on a community can be crippling. MAG prioritises areas for clearance by working with communities to understand their needs and liaising with
(c)
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well being of refugees. UNHCR has won two Nobel Peace Prizes, once in 1954 and again in 1981. www.unhcr.org
With special thanks to JR, EW, JC, DS, EW Images and text © Giles Duley 2015 Except plates 15–30 © gilesduley/savethechildren www.gilesduley.com Published by Benway Publishing info@benwaypublishing.com Designed by Shaz Madani Printed by Push, London All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. First Edition ISBN 978 0 9933123 0 4
In association with
EMERGENCY UK
“We have the right to dream and the right to achieve those dreams” (Amin. Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan. 2014)