Slave Magazine issue 11

From then on, he started getting closer and closer to what he was cut out for; in some strange way it seems to me, that meeting Paul Raymond in the late 80s was some sort of good omen. “I wrote a letter to Paul Raymond asking if I could take photos at Madame Jojo’s and backstage, and to my surprise I got an answer back.

It was his right-hand man, Carl Snitcher, who called me in.

And finally I met Paul Raymond who let me take as many pictures as I wanted. I don’t know why, but I kind of liked him, there was something soulful about him.”

It was 1988 when Sean Smith joined the Guardian and since then has worked in all areas of photojournalism, including war photography being a big a part of his work. As a natural born pacifist who is generally scarred by the slightest signs of violence (even people brawling in the street make me run in the opposite direction), I am curious to find out what a man, who is not a soldier, feels when being sent into a conflict zone. “It keeps changing, it is never the same. It is always a bit of a struggle to go.

You always want to make it mean something. You do not want to just show dark sky with smoke. You always try to tell a certain story in pictures rather than just words.”

And what about natural human feelings like, for example, fear?