Jocko Podcast - 36: Photographer, Kieran Doherty. Images & Experience of Belfast, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Liberia, The Sudan

Episode Date: August 17, 2016

0:00:00 - Opening 0:14:17 - Belfast 0:38:58 - Iraq War 1:04:30 - Tsunami in Sri Lanka 1:29:04 - Liberia 1:48:08 - Starvation and War in the Sudan 2:02:04 - Wimbledon 2:13:36 - Wooton Bassett 2:33:55 - ClosingSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 36 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Behold. The world is a sight to behold. I'm just back from a trip to the wilderness in the Sierra Mountains of California. And every time you open your eyes, there's a sight to behold. An image of beauty.

From a distance, a mountain of solid granite, almost a hundred million years old, juts up from the valley floor. Up close, the roots of a newborn tree, trying to find purchase, maneuvering around and over and through rock until it finds soil. And in doing so, draws an infinitely complex picture of life. Yes, the world is a beautiful place, but we also know that the world can be a horrible place, a wretched place. And in the military, I was usually sent to the bad places. And in a way, I was sent to those bad places to deal with them, to keep them away from us. those of us lucky enough to be born in the right country with the right form of government

and the right supply of water and food and energy and it was our job as the lucky ones keep the horror away to shield the eyes of the blessed there are other people whose job it is to open eyes to show the world not just the light

but also the darkness and that's the life of a photographer and like the soldier he must travel and like the soldier he must take risk and like the soldier he must face the darkness and live with it and like the soldier to an even greater

degree he must detach from what is happening he must observe from outside be a part of what is happening in front of him without being a part of what is happening in front of him we have a guest on the podcast tonight friend of mine who spent his life with a camera in his hand capturing light and capturing darkness welcome to the podcast mr kieran dockerty who in addition to being a friend an outstanding drummer, a husband, a dad, and last but not least, an award-winning photographer.

Welcome to the podcast, Karen. Thank you for having me. Good to have you on. Detecting a little accent there. You're from? It's an English accent you can detect. Yeah. Just a little on that.

So, you're from England. And how did this whole business start? How did you end up starting pictures? How did I start taking pictures? my dad was a good photographer always had a camera and I think I got to my 17th birthday and he gave his cameras to my sister now I had no interest in the cameras at the time but I suddenly had an interest when I found he gave him to my sister so I demanded that I have them I had to do some sort of swap but I got the cameras but I didn't really use them I really wanted to be an artist

I wanted to paint, but I wasn't good enough in my own eyes. I was okay, but not good enough. So the camera became a tool for me to create and express myself. And I ended up, I did a degree course after school in sports science. And then I went on to do, oops. Yeah. Hey, listen, it was a great course. I had three years playing tennis and football.

I mean, come on. It was a great course. So I wasn't really good enough to get onto an art foundation course. So I did the sports course, and then I wanted to concentrate on doing a course in photography. So my mum found a course for me, and there was only one course in the country, and they only took 12 people.

and normally you had to apply five or six times to get on. And so I applied for the course, I went for an interview, and I showed a portfolio of appalling black and white pictures that I'd shot. I mean, really appalling. I'd gone to a couple of music festivals, and I had pictures of dribbling babies and prams. I mean, this is what I took to my interview. But they put me on the reserve list, so I was number 13.

And it meant that I wasn't going to get on the course because they were only taking tomorrow. So my mum, every day for about six months, rang the head tutor and said, come on, put him on the course. And come on, put him on the course. And after six months, he just thought, oh, to stop this woman calling me every day. Okay, okay. And he put me on as number 13 on the course. and I did the course

and I ended up spending most of my weekends travelling at home down to an agency at home where you were really working so the course was teaching you how to do stuff but the job that I wanted to do you can't learn it in a classroom really it's a bit of common sense

and just reacting to the environment around you so I used to spend my weekends traveling home and working for a real agency and they would just send me out on stuff and I would be shooting pictures, developing transparencies, black and whites, printing, putting it on wire drums, sending it into the papers. You know, in the real one, that's what I do at my weekend, and then I go back to the course. And I just felt the course was really dragging for me. But I finished it, and the route is you join a regional newspaper, and then you sort of cut your teeth in the industry, then you go to maybe a big provincial paper.

And then you head down to maybe London for a work on a national. And then maybe after the national you might consider working on an agency. Well, I didn't have time for any of that. So I just went straight down to London out of college. And try to get a job. But I ended up, what you end up doing is you go around and you just speck pictures into newspapers. So you find a job, you shoot it. You ring them up and you say, I have this great picture.

and you need to, you really should have it. And they would say, okay, bring it in and you would take it in and they go, thanks. But we had our own photographer there and blah, blah. So I did this for two or three years, not really getting anywhere. And I ended up, I learned a few tricks of the trade, which is you turn up to a news event that's happening. And you shoot the pictures and then you ring the desk, the wire desk, wherever it is you want to sell the picture to. and you say, listen, very few people were here, and this is a big story,

and really you can't afford not to take this from me because your opposition was here, and I think you really should see this picture. So they'd say, come in, and I went in once, and I'd shot this picture of this tank that appeared outside the High Court in London, and coming out of this tank was a 20-foot marlin. It was just the most ridiculous thing,

and it was some guy protesting about a divorce, he was going through. So he just loaded up the tank. Just headed out the court. It's legit. Yep. And I was driving past with a friend and I thought I better shoot that picture and I shot that picture and I rang up and I said, listen, Associated Press were here.

Reuters, you really should take this picture of me and I went in and it was such a ridiculous looking image that they said, great, we'll take it. And so they just snip the negatives because it was film in those days. they take three negatives, the one in the middle they want to be the one they scan. And that was 75 pounds in my pocket. And I just thought, right, I need to keep doing this. And I said, so if I come in here with a picture, do you give me 75 pounds every time I come in? They said, well, every picture we take, we'll pay you 75 pounds.

So, of course, I just kept ringing them and kept ringing them and kept ringing them. And eventually they cottoned on to the amount of 75 pounds. They were giving me in a day. And they said, okay, listen, we'll put you on. shift. So we will pay you a hundred pounds and you will work five shifts. We will stop paying you five times 75 every time you come in. And that's how it started. And so it's a bit of luck and a bit of determination. And yeah, that's how that's how I got into it. And if I'm totally honest, I really didn't know that that sort of job existed.

I'd seen magazines by photographers like Don McCullen, who used to shoot the troubles in Northern Ireland in the early days. And I used to see his spreads on the Sunday Times. But it never dawned. I used to look at the images. It was mesmerized by these black and white images. But never put two and two together and worked out. So this is obviously a job and somebody does this and he's paid to do this. And so, yeah, it sort of dawned to me.

This is an existence that I really quite like because I don't have to wear a suit. I can wear jeans and a t-shirt and I can just shoot and create and I can earn a living and that's really how it started and then you ended up staying at Reuters for what

10 years? No from 1993 to 2008 so I was freelance until 2000 and then in 2000 which was really fortuitous because my first daughter was born they made me staff

so there was the security of the job there. And then I resigned in 2008, so I'd sort of done my stint of staff and I decided that I wanted to move on to other things. But yeah, it was a bumpy road, but it was, and I couldn't have asked for a better grounding into photojournalism than working for a wire agency like Reuters

because you just got to cover everything. From spot news, from something that was happening in Downing Street, to, covering Wimbledon to covering World Cups, Olympic Games, war zones, you name it. There was nothing. A wire agency photographer didn't cover. And so, you know, literally you could come off from shooting a Champions League football match

and the next day you could be in Afghanistan shooting a new story. That's how it worked. And that's incredibly intoxicating, especially when you're a young guy, you know. I mean, I didn't get to translate. I had to cut my teeth and they had to trust that they could send me away. And I must admit it took a couple of years. In fact, my first assignment by my line manager, he just said to me one Friday night, I need to go to Belfast for July the 12th for the troubles.

And I said, I can't. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, I've got a gig tonight. I'm playing in London and there are 13 other people in the band. And if I get on a plane, they're not going to have a drummer. Wrong answer. So you went to Belfast? No.

Oh, you didn't? You held the gig. I took the gig. Bros before. Yeah. Because I didn't realize. I was too naive to realize the implications of why you, you know, sorry, this guy wants to work for Reuters and I'm going to send him to Belfast to cover the troubles and he wants to play drums in a club.

Yeah. So I learned that lesson pretty quick. How long did it take to get another offer to travel like that? I think the Belfast offer was 95, and then I ended up traveling literally 98. So they put you on the bench for three years? That's it. I mean, yeah, totally. But when I did get to go, he waited until I'd been married a month and then said to me,

I need you to go away for four months. And I'm just married. You know, I've been married for a month, and you want me to go. And it was the Caribbean, believe it or not, to photograph cricket England against the West Indies. So it wasn't that tough a gig. And I ended up being able to take my wife with me as well. So yeah, you can't complain about that at all. Not at all.

Not at all. We had a great time. So tell me about like a little bit about the times where you went to Belfast and what that was like for the first time where you're going, okay, do you feel that tension for the first time? you feel kind of the presence of violence around you. I was a nervous wreck. And bearing in mind that I had lived in Belfast, so I had lived in there during the start of the troubles, and for maybe five or six years in my life, I was there, although I never experienced any of the troubles,

it was very protected from it. But, yeah, I mean, you know, I went back, and I was petrified. I thought, where do I go? Where can I not go? And I was very conscious of my name. very Catholic name and there are certain areas of... Yeah, for those of those you don't know, Kieran's name is the same name as one of the the heroes of the IRA.

IRA, yeah. And who actually died in prison from a hunger strike. So that's your name. So there's no... That's my name. There's no hiding that one. Absolutely. And of course, just to clarify, I was not named after him, but just coincident, but there

are murals all over Belfast with Kieran Doherty. So there are certain areas of Belfast I could walk into very easily, and there are certain areas of Belfast that I didn't really want to be caught with my press card in my pocket. So, yeah, it was, yeah, I was petrified, you know. There's no other way to describe it. Did you start thinking yourself, well, maybe this isn't the job for me, or were you thinking yourself, I'm scared, but this is awesome?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because that's sort of the typical, you know, when I talk to obviously all my friends in the military, that's everyone's feeling, you know, hey, I was scared, but that was awesome. Yeah, that's what everybody wants to do. I mean, as a photographer when you're in there, and there's the potential to have those shots, those moments of human existence that only happened at that place at that time and you've got that opportunity that. Yeah. I mean, you're waiting.

The worst thing is you get over there and there's nothing happening. Because that's what happens that, you know, leading up to July the 12th and there may be the pockets of violence and that happened usually in the evenings after the pubs closed. Imagine that. You know, I mean, yeah. And the one thing it did, it made the flames really stand out when they did throw those petrol bombs, you know.

But what you were doing was you'd be doing a lot of driving around and there would be nothing and you'd go back to you. hotel, you think, okay, what am I going to file today? You know, I'm over here, I'm being paid to be here, I need to be filing some imagery just to sort of justify the air flight out here and whatnot. So, and it would be really tough. And so those were the toughest moments because you were having to find images that sort of told the story, but they weren't really the reason why you were there. You were sent there because they were expecting trouble. And then you'd be sitting in the bar at night and somebody would say, right, this is happening on the falls road.

And you'd go, great. And we'd just go straight out there. And if you had something physical happening in front of you, it's almost as if you needed to get one under your belt to calm down. Because then you were able to say, okay, I've produced something from here that's noteworthy and newsworthy. And sometimes you could go on those trips and there'd be nothing for a week. and you'd be sitting in your hell and there'd be absolutely near your hotel

and there'd be nothing for a week and that was the worst but as soon as something did happen it was then a catalyst for maybe something else to happen and if there was something happening that night

there was always the clear up the next morning so that was then the catalyst for actually what would maybe happen during the week and one thing would lead to another and you'd end up beginning to feel a little bit more confident

and you know I was just watching the guy that were a lot older than me and far more experienced. And I just sort of hung around with those guys. Sort of, you're just trying to work out. What do you do? And that's how you learn. You just watch how these other photographers are doing it. And you just think, okay, well, I'll remember that the next time.

Because these guys came in and they just looked immensely cool and, you know, they sort of knew what they were doing. And also to just... Did you ever have a time period where you thought you were more badass than you were? Or were you always pretty humble about, hey, you know what, these guys, they know more than me. I'm just going to watch them and learn. I mean, you obviously thought you were pretty badass when you're like, you know what? I'm not going for the regional paper. I'm going straight to London. Give me a job.

Yeah, you're right. But I don't know where that came from. I just thought I'd lost enough time. I think I can't hang around doing, you know, I mean, no distress. And there were no jobs going anyway at the end of the course. So I just thought, well, you know. So yeah, badass. Me, probably not. I mean, I'm still. I'm not really want to work with other photographers now, but when you're working in Fleet Street and you're working for a news agency, you can't help but be in a pack

and you're always working with other photographers. And there are, as time goes by, there are sort of fewer photographers that you begin to sort of look to, you can sort of work out which are the ones that are doing something similar to the way you want to be doing it. And there are others that do their own thing

because all photographers are completely different. You can have 10 photographers standing next to each other and they can all shoot the same picture but every single image will be completely different because each photographer has decided there's a different part of what's happening in front of him that he wants and concentrate on so and that's what I found you know was happening a lot with especially if you're sent down to Downing Street to do the prime minister I mean the prime minister would just walk the door would open the prime minister would walk out of the door and get into the car and drive off you take 47 pictures yeah and the guy next to you could be a

could be a trainee and he will stand there and he'll shoot the same imagery with the same cameras and the same lens and that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a guy who's been doing it 20 years and a trainee because that's a very sort of orchestrated theatrical moment you know and that's I didn't I wasn't really interested in that sort of stuff I was interested in the stuff that was really spontaneous sporadic and it happened and you had to be ready for it and you had to react to it and that's what I like to do react to what was happening Did you feel like going to Ireland in the late 90s and early 2000? Did you feel that that prepared you at all for going to Iraq,

for going to the other places that you went to in the world? Yeah. Good. Preparatory step? Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? To be totally honest, I've never even thought about that. That thought has never crossed my mind until you just said it.

Did you think that prepared me? And I thought, actually, do you know, yeah, of course it did. But it's funny, when you're working, You don't think about things like that. You don't, I mean, if I'd kept a diary, which I've never done, in fact, I did when I was in Sri Lanka. But if I was, if I'd kept a diary, I maybe would have had a little bit more self-awareness of my progression through my career. But when your, you know, your priorities are on earning money, you know, and being able to pay the rent. And am I going to get work next week?

Or is that other guy who's come in who looks quite? good is he going to start getting my shifts you know and so you're constantly on your toes and you're not thinking and you think if I get the the Northern Ireland gig I got that and he didn't that's enough you know and that's how you were thinking you weren't really I had no structure to my career whatsoever and I think maybe because the whole thing was so new to me and I just couldn't get my head around the fact that I was actually making a living living as a photographer. And that's really actually pretty similar to what I experienced on my first deployment

to Iraq, where never mind, never mind anything. We were happy to be outdoing operations. Like, we were going to go do real operations. Man, we were, what, the strategy, the danger, the whatever. It was like, hey, we are here. We are doing operations to catch bad guys. Awesome. that was our focus.

So it sounds like you and the mindset, that similar mindset. And it took me, you know, a couple months of being in Iraq and getting that out of my system before I was like, okay, so let's take a look at what we're actually doing here and how we're trying to affect the battle space because I was just too young and inexperienced. And I just need to get some experience under my belt. So sounds like, and really sounds like Ireland kind of prepares you for. that but I also look at okay so so let's just go straight then do you get the call how did you know you got we're going to get the call to go to Iraq was that was it a lottery how do they do they just say hey we want to get you down there how did that work that the way it worked at Reuters was they no photographer was ever forced to go to a hostile environment

so it wasn't part of your remit that if you work for Reuters you must go to a hostile environment they were never like that they you know and and you can see why what they want. Is it wrong for me to picture every, because I put my, I put my personality over a guy with a camera. And so I think like every guy with a camera is going, I want to go to the war zone tomorrow.

Is that not true? Yeah, that's not true. There are a lot of guys that don't want to go anywhere near a hostile environment. Okay. See, that's important for me to know these things. Because in my mind, everyone's just thinking, I'm going to go get after it. I got a camera.

There's a war going on. Yeah. Let's go make it happen. Yeah. I mean, that was then. That was, yeah, 2003. I would say maybe it's slightly changed now. There are a lot more photographers, young photographers, going to war zones.

But then, no, it was, I think if I remember rightly, they, they, because the buildup to the war was so, you know. Prolonged. Yeah. I mean, we knew it was going to happen. And immediately there were those guys that wanted to, there was one that embedded with the artillery in Kuwait. So he had a month wait in Q8 and then just went with the artillery. There were the Reuters had very seasoned photographers, very experienced in those sort of environments

that would then embed with Americans or Brits. And those were the guys that were being shot at on a daily basis, but extremely hard to produce imagery from those situations. And I remember I had a very good friend of mine said to me who did a lot of that stuff. He said, Kieran, the thing about going and embedding with the soldier is that you can get in the way. And the last thing you want is to compromise a unit. But they set these units up and they said, yep, the media has to come in and, you know, show us what's happening.

But most of the time, he said, you have your head down and your hand in the air and you're just blindly shooting and hoping. And he said, invariably, you get nothing. You know, I mean, that's not always the case, but he said majority of the time. and you have to do it a lot before your sort of hit rate, you know, gets moved up. And if you're embedded, I think you struggle. If you go unilaterally, which is the really unsafe way to do it. So you're on your own. You're on your own.

You're just going to take pictures. There you've got the chance of getting something. And again, it's being in the right place at the right time. So they'd said they had certain guys in place that stuck their hands up straight away. Yep, I'm doing that. That's me. I'll be embedded there. And I'll do this and I'll do that.

And we spent a month looking at the stuff that was coming out and it was invariably pictures of soldiers within sandstorms and stuff like that. There was no action. You know, it was, I wouldn't say that was true from all of them. But the majority of the case, it was very difficult to produce imagery when you're embedded. I certainly wasn't interested in being a unilateral at that time at all. But I was really interested in going and doing. what happens after the war. So what interests me is the people afterwards,

I always tend to think that people go in and shoot what's happening and that moves on and then the photographers move on with them. And I wanted to just sort of go in in that backdraft and photograph what was happening life-wise after, you know, soldiers had been in there. And that's exactly what I said. I said, I'd be happy to go to Baghdad, you know, pretty much, almost once it's secure

it didn't quite work out that way I think we went a little we went a little bit earlier it does does it yeah and it never is as secure as you think and I remember I got the day after the the statue of Saddam was pulled down

and it was it was a just it was a moment of euphoria for Baghdad and I just thought hey you know what this isn't I mean my first trip to Belfast was worse and this. This is okay. But we'd had, but we turned up and had the,

face with the problem of one of our cameraman had just been killed under friendly fire. And that had taken a huge hit on Reuters and that really hit home that actually this is really not a safe place, you know, because there's still an awful lot going on and there's still an awful lot of misunderstanding. And so that was a real

leveler when we got out there and um and staying in the palestine hotel was incredibly exciting because it was just there were just photographers and journalists and just buzzing around everywhere and you know you were okay I'm here now so what am I going to do and it was almost as if I had to get out there and start shooting and I didn't care what it was that I started shooting I just I'm here now I need to start shooting something so that is the feeling that I had in my face Iraq, like, let's go. Yeah, yeah.

So, and I said to my, the chief photographer there, I said, Jack, what do you want me to do? He said, I don't know, walk out into the square and see what's happening. So I did, and I walked out into the square, and there were kids playing around in the main square, in the fountain. Because you kind of, we were talking about this earlier today, but you, and you just said the word euphoric, right? And a lot of people, because of the war in Iraq actually is still going on right now. but it's really easy to forget the initial, I don't know, four or five weeks after it started when we had crushed, you know, Saddam's regime and now the people were waving American flags. The Iraqi people were waving American flags.

They were hugging. They were happy. And it's really easy to forget that because things turned so bad. Really? You know, within a couple months, they had turned bad. and then they went down from there. Yeah. But you were just like, oh, you know what?

I'm going to go out outside the Palestine Hotel, which is, by the way, across the river from the green zone, but it still was a very well-protected, you know, fairly well-protected hotel that a lot of Westerners stayed in. And you just said, oh, I'm going to walk outside and check it out. No security. No security. Just get nothing. Yeah, just what can I shoot?

And yeah, and I found this picture of this kid. And I still have that picture on my website. But it's a little kid and he just pulls his head out of the water and he's swimming in this fountain there. And you wouldn't believe what was in the fountain. I couldn't believe these kids were swimming in it. But he just sort of popped his head out and stood there and flexed his muscles. And it was just a young 9, 10-year-old guy just flexing his muscles. And the light was fantastic.

And it just made such a beautiful image. I mean, it really did. And I thought, okay, I just got here and I've shot. a really nice picture and I felt really proud of myself and I thought okay and I just walked that back in and of course there was mayhem happening and what Reuters were actually doing was in there in the process of moving out of the Palestine Hotel to a house that they'd rented because we were then becoming quite a big outfit and the Palestine Hotel was never going to house it the amount of staff that we had so we were moving out to a big house just a couple of blocks away but again it was like Belfast I had got to something under my belt and I felt pretty good about it and I thought okay right let's bring it on let's see how many places I can get to how many stories I can shoot every day and I was I didn't want to stop shooting I just I wanted to get up at seven in the morning and go and work with the light and then middle of the day was never really a good time to shoot because the light was

dreadful and then I'd wait for the sort of late afternoon and the golden hour Which became tricky because we were never really allowed to be out at dark. So I just wanted to shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. And, of course, it didn't quite work out that way because there are certain responsibilities on a photographer whose first language is English when you go into a place like Baghdad where the captioning on images is extremely important. And it's extremely important that the captioning is correct,

the information is correct. It's valid, verified, and it has no spelling mistakes. And, of course, being the only photographer in there that first language is English, I ended up. Where are most of the photographers from? Well, we had, I mean, all over Europe. We had different, you know, and there was maybe only four of us in there at a time, three or four of us in there at a time. So you've got a French, a guy, a German guy. Yeah, Croatian, yeah, absolutely, you know, and we were all looking for, you know, we were all,

we're all looking for those great pictures. So, you know, you began to wonder, okay, how's this going to be divided up every day? Who's going to get what? You know, am I going to get? Are you looking for pictures at this point that are good pictures that you want to see? Or are you looking for pictures that are going to be news, are going to be front page newspaper?

Which one of those two? Or is it both? Primarily, if I'm completely honest. Because a picture of, like, when you describe that picture of a kid, pulling his hat out of this dirty water, He's 10 years old and he's flexing. That's just an awesome image, right? And I'm sure that's a great picture.

That picture is not going on the front page of newspapers, though, is it? Absolutely not. But you don't, but that's your focus is I want to get good pictures that are capturing the images of what you're seeing around you, as opposed to, hey, I just want this front page picture. Yeah. I mean, I was never really one for looking for publications. I was always shooting for me. I mean, somebody once asked me in an interview, who's your biggest audience? I humble than me, because that's what I'm shooting.

for. So I'm not looking to please editors or whatever. Obviously it helps if they're pleased with what you've done, yeah? But I was primarily looking to satisfy myself and I've never, that's never changed with me. And so yeah, I totally understand that, you know, when you're in a situation, I say that, but obviously we'll get on to something later that showed I completely didn't understand but I understand when this the front page and I understand the impacts and I understand what they mean to the company totally and don't get me wrong when I was getting front pages it was a great feeling you know it's sort of verified the fact that you were out there and you were doing it but you know

there are so many other agencies out there and so many other photographers out there you have to get really lucky you just have to get that one image that separates it from everyone else and I knew how you know how difficult that is So I never concerned myself with looking for that image. I sort of began to think, listen, if I think the image is strong, you have a bit of confidence in your own ability to judge whether or not an image is strong or not and whether or not it has a good chance of making. So if you're not, if it say, listen, it's features today,

just go out and find something that, you know, every picture you shoot is not going to tell the story of what's happening in Iraq. But for me, that picture of that boy, that day, three days after whatever Baghdad had been liberated, that showed a kid playing in the water and looking, feeling happy. And I thought, yeah, do you know what? That's what's happening. That whatever's happening in Baghdad now is being, that child is a conduit for a moment. Yeah, it captures the emotion in the spirit of what's going on around you.

Yeah. And that's, it's a good overall, I think. Attitude to have with everyone. And you hear this all the time, right? People say, you know, do it your, go with your heart. It's basically what you're saying. Absolutely. And I'm an agreement with you.

I mean, and again, we've talked about this before. Even just with what we're doing here, this is based on what we want to do. And our toughest audience or our most important audience is like, yeah, us, you know, what do we want to do? What can we, how do we feel about making this? And how does it feel to record it? And how does it feel when I put the headphones on and listen to it? Is it what I want to hear? Because that's, you know, that's, I'm doing it, and we're doing it more for the value of itself rather than, I mean, there's no doubt that we're not saying, hey, everybody listen to this, you know, because we know that this isn't for everybody.

And we're okay with that. And I think that's a good attitude to have. Yeah. That's usually how it turns out the best anyway, because you know what you like and you know what's going to make what you like good or look good in your case. if you try to estimate what everyone else likes, all you have is this like gray, brownish water, mush. Yeah, totally. And you're not talking about just one other individual that you know really good.

You're talking about a bunch of people. So a lot of times people, and it turns out real obvious when they're trying to please other people with what they're doing. And it goes for so many things, just like how you're saying. So, you know, they're trying to basically play for the cheap seats. They're trying to, we talk about this where the goal should be doing. a good job doing the best that you can do and we talk about it with jih Tjitsu with everything that the belt isn't the goal the front page that's not the goal the goal is to do the best that you can do for your work you know yeah and like i said if if you if you don't do it that way man it just

you can smell it from a mile away man yeah i mean i don't know that there any apart from even even the image that did make all the front swallows in iraq um i don't think you In my career, there's one image that's made a front page that I would keep and put in a portfolio of images. So that just shows you that the stuff that I really like is really the stuff that most people don't see. And it's, you know, people will say, oh, you shot that picture. Yeah, and I really like that picture. And I have really weird reasons for really liking that picture. And that's the stuff that I really enjoy doing is most people never see that stuff.

You know, and they're surprised when they do see it. But I don't think there is a picture that I would take from a front page that I've had that I would want to keep and show. And that's one thing I know from knowing you and things you've told me. There's times where you're looking at a picture and you're saying there's a tragedy here. This is a person's life being destroyed. I'm not going to sell this picture. I'm not going to publish this picture. I'm going to delete this picture.

You have your own personal standards, which I have the utmost respect. for that you're not going to I mean there's so many people and me especially now with social media and everyone's everyone's a photographer right now because everyone has an iPhone and people just shoot I mean there's whole websites that are dedicated to debasing people right you know and and the fact that you're a professional you you draw you drew that line a long time ago is very respectable um so you got some kids and you got some nice things about about the euphoria of Iraq as it kicks off. They're liberated.

There's also some horror mixed in there as well. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Just, and it always comes when you least expect it. And we just moved into this new house in Baghdad and everything was set up and all the comms were set up. and I don't know, it was about 5 o'clock in the afternoon and a call came in and the call just said, a photographer and a TV guy need to get to this address in Baghdad. And I was sitting there and Jack said, Kieran, you know, off you go and take a, obviously take a vest and a hat. We always have to travel with those.

And we traveled in armored vehicles everywhere. So we went to this address and I sort of, I got out onto the pavement and I was looking around. We had no idea. We had no idea why we'd been called. And somebody came running up to me as soon as they saw the cameras and they said, are you the photographer from Reuters? And I said, yeah. And they said, okay, wait here.

And they went to get a gentleman and he came out. and he was I couldn't understand what he was saying and there was somebody there sort of translating and it soon came to pass that his son had just been killed

from, he'd found an IED and he'd just been it had just blown up while he and his friends were playing with it and it was a kid that was killed his son and the father just

had said something to the interpreter and the interpreter said listen can you wait he'll be back and he came back with a plastic bag and I wasn't, even up until that moment, I just wasn't aware of what was going on.

But I think the TV cameraman had sort of grasped the situation a little bit quicker than me. And he started to produce body parts from the bag that was, you know, they were unrecognizable as, body parts, but they were coming out of this bag and the interpreter saying he needs you to photograph this because he wants you to show the rest of the world that his son was killed playing with an IAD and he doesn't want his son's death to be in vain and he can't start grieving until you take these pictures. And so I think I took six or seven pictures and I think I took six or seven

pictures and he ended up putting the plastic bag back down on the floor and he just said thank you and it was just chokran and he just then he walked in and the interpreter said now he can start to grieve and it was then that I noticed that the um the the TV journalist cameraman was he was Iraqi and he just completely um collapsed I remember having to get him back into the car because what he just witnessed was just so shocking. And I was just numb going all the way back to the office because, you know, I just hadn't anticipated anything like that happening. And it had just come out of the blue.

And I understood why I could understand the father's sentiments. I totally got what he was trying to do but at the same time I totally understood that this you know those images weren't couldn't go on the wire they were just so utterly horrific and graphic

and I remember as I was shooting it I just I wasn't even looking so I had my I remember my eye was the camera but I wasn't even looking at what was you know so if you were to apart from the first moment if you were to say to me you know what I

couldn't tell you. I just knew that it was just coming out and being held up and being put back. I couldn't even bring myself to look and then I sort of got back and I, the first thing I did was just delete. And I never actually said to my bosses there that I'd deleted those images. I just thought I am not putting those images on the wire. I sort of took an executive decision there and there at that time. I didn't mention anything to anyone else there. And the only thing I had was a, that I kept was just a portrait of the father, so we could move the portrait of the father and talk about the story. And I think, I then spoke to my dad that night and I sort of, you know, took the be

and sat phone and just rang him and I just told him what had just happened. And we were sitting in the garden and then that, that night, Reuters wanted to give the staff a break and so they'd organized a barbecue and there was you know there was going to be some there was a I think a belly dancer turned up and it was an amazing night because all the Iraqis that had not been able to party

in 40 years were all sitting on the roofs of their houses surrounding the house that we were on and they were just listening to the music and it was an incredible thing to see but you'd gone from something that happened like that at 5 o'clock to something, a barbecue that was happening at 7 PM.

And those moments were incredibly difficult to sort of disseminate and work out what was going on. And of course, it was something I kept to myself. Apart from the, I think maybe they found out, maybe the TV journalist had said something, but I just didn't want to speak to anyone remotely connected to the office about what had just happened, you know. And I don't, and I think, to be honest, they would have completely agreed that this is not imagery that we can put out. You know, it serves no purpose and it's just, you know, just not injury that they would move.

So, yeah, there was, there was plenty of that in Iraq and you sort of had to just take it in your stride because the next day you'd be up and there'd be the next story and you'd sort of move on to that, but that would still be in the back of your mind, you know. And then, you know, quite honestly, soon enough, you know, if you're busy and you're doing a lot of stuff, stuff when you're sitting around and not doing anything, that's when you really begin to think about stuff. But if you're busy and you're out and you're traveling, so a week after that, I was taking anything. And even if I was being, you know, sent out on stuff that I thought, oh, why am I being sent to do this? You know, I didn't mind. I just thought I'll take it. It's better than sitting around and being with your own thoughts.

Totally, totally, yeah, yeah, absolutely. me. And it's also weird, and it's hard for people that haven't been in a war zone before to understand how things like what you're talking about this. Obviously, everyone anticipates or expects that there's the horror of war, but they understand the barbecue part. That's a hard thing for people to understand that you can be, what, three months into this war, and we've got the Reuters staff having a staff party. I mean, okay, people in America know what a little staff office party is, hey, guys, we're going to go, we're going to order some pizzas. They do that.

They do that in these war zones. And the military does it. The, I mean, I've talked about it a bunch. I mean, these big bases that we had eventually built had subway sandwiches, the company subway and the company Burger King and the company Starbucks were on these bases. So if you want to have a little subway party for your boys, you could do that. Fire up the grill. You know, so it's really a hard dichotomy for people to understand that inside the

the protected areas, we carve out little chunks of America, little chunks of freedom. Did you take any pictures of the Iraqis looking at the party? Yeah, I did. That must be pretty old. That must have been awesome. But you know what? They weren't great pictures because it was so dark. And it was, I took a few and I saw, and of course there other photographers there that were taking stuff as well, you know.

So, yeah, I did. And I've always thought about that. I remember those pictures, but they didn't, we didn't, they weren't good enough. I just, I just didn't shoot it well enough, you know. I just didn't have the right lens and I just, yeah. And I think that was the sort of a, you know, that might have been as a result of what had happened earlier. But, yeah, and I have thought about that. I have thought about those.

And it remains with me as a memory that I saw because I think, you know, it's like any of you concentrate so hard on taking. pictures of stuff you never actually take anything in but that was a moment that I really wanted to take in because it was just incredible to see these people out on their roofs just enjoying the music and not being afraid and you know somebody said to me this has not happened in 40 years and I just thought that was just incredible and those are the people that I talk about you know I always end up trying to explain to people that there's that the normal citizen Iraq is a normal person that wants to have a job, raise their kids, and have a house, and that's what

they want to do. And it's really hard. I mean, America does a terrible job of showing that. I mean, America media does a terrible job of showing what that is. You know, all you see is the crazies. All you see is the extremists. But that's a great example of people going, hey, you know what? We've been impressed for 40 years.

They're listening to music. This is awesome. Let's watch them. and those are the people that wanted to take Iraq in the right direction. And you did end up getting some pretty important, or maybe not important, well, maybe important. But you ended up with some pictures that did end up on the front pages of a bunch of newspapers. That's right.

It was coming off the back of another amazing story where I'd been to Najaf to follow a cleric who was coming back, who'd been exiled 40 years before by Saddam and he was coming back to Najaf and I spent two or three days down there waiting for him and that whole scenario of him turning up with thousands of followers and being pushed into the mosque as I'm trying to photograph him and you know finding myself in the middle of a mosque as a Westerner just thinking

you know how did I get in here it was just you know and that's what happens when you stand in front of the door and wait for the guy to turn up you're just going to get taken in with him and I'd done that and I'd really enjoyed that job and the sort of anticipation of waiting for this guy to turn up and it was an incredible moment

and we would I'd left and of course in those days when I'd walked from the mosque in Najaf back to the hotel which was probably a mile you know and those you didn't think twice had all my camera gear around me You just didn't think twice about walking down that street. And we got back into our armoured vehicle and we traveled back to Baghdad.

And about three quarters away there, we got a call and it said, you need to turn off to, there's a mass grave has been found at Hiller. And you're on route. Well, you're going to pass it on the way back into Baghdad. So can you stop off and have a look? And my first reaction was I was so shattered from the four days. after that I was sort of slightly resigned about having to, you know, you know, really, because we have to be back in Baghdad before it's dark and, you know, I just, I had a really

sort of ambivalent attitude to it. So we found this place and we pulled up and everyone said, right, hey guys, you've got literally 40 minutes because, but we got to be out of here before the sun's down. So we got out and I just sort of walked over this mound. And as I said, I walked over the mound that was here, there was just hundreds of bodies just laid out in front of me. And they'd been there. I think it was probably about four or five days. I think it was obvious how long they'd been there because you could see how many bodies that they pulled out of the pit that they dug there. And it was obviously an execution spot where Saddam had taken them. I don't know how many years before and they'd all been executed. Just a bullet to the back of the head, all men. And they were. They dug them up and pulled the bodies out.

And I imagine the relatives had obviously had an idea of where they were, but they were never able to do anything until, you know, they were in a position. Baghdad had been liberated and they felt it was safe enough now to go and try. I think they knew Saddam was on the run. So they were excavating this area, and they'd found all these bodies, and they'd put these bodies into plastic bags,

and they had a name tag on each body. and that's when I realized, okay, that this is probably quite, well, this is bigger than any other mass grave that I'd shot during my time there. So I started shooting it and I knew the light was going down and the light was incredible. It was just incredible. The lights on the sand and everything and I just started shooting and I started shooting the women that were sitting around the edge behind the barbed wire. So they'd obviously made the women sit around and then when they'd finished digging the women were able to walk through the body. and try and identify family members and they were just picking up

ID cards and, you know, trying to sort of figure out who was who. And I remember there was one really bizarre moment where somebody had taken a body or what was remains of the skeleton and the corpse and they laid it out in the shape of somebody just lying on the ground. It wasn't a case of the remains

were put into a plastic bag, they had actually almost constructed this person as they were. And so they were laid out and it looked like a person lying on the ground with their arms out and their legs in the correct position and their head to one side. And I just remember a young kid just walking past holding his dad's hand just staring at this. And I thought that must be an unbelievable thing for a kid that age to be staring at. And I remember taking that picture and it's, I remember thinking that is, I remember thinking that is, I've never seen anything like that. And I thought somebody has actually gone to the trouble of trying to do this.

And I couldn't work out why. And I thought, why have they done this? You know, I was pretty sure that it didn't help with the identification of that person. But somebody had gone to the trouble of laying this corpse out. So I shot that picture. And I started moving around and shooting the women. And the women were crying. And I subsequently found out they were only, they were crying because.

I had turned up with a camera. So I had altered that situation. And when they realized that I was no longer interested in shooting them because they were crying because they thought this is what this photographer needs to see. Yeah, I just, they went back to playing with their dice. And so I sort of moved away. I thought, well, I won't be taking any more picture of that. Yeah, and just shot and saw, and they had, and I know this isn't the right word,

but remind me, Jocker, what's the American version of a JCB? Oh, a backo. A backo. So they had a backo in this pit, pulling out the bodies, and they had a couple of kids underneath collecting the remains and just put them to one side. And these kids were doing it as if it was just another day. You know, it was no...

It was impossible to see if there was any shock or any... You know, they were just getting on with it. It was as if they knew this job has to be done, so we're going to do it. And they were just, you know, I remember seeing a skull roll off the claw of this backo, you know, and this kid caught it, just caught it like a goalkeeper would catch a football and then just put it into a bag. And, yeah, I watched that one. I didn't actually shoot that one. And so it was a case of getting the job done as quickly as possible, getting back in the van and getting back to Baghdad. And I got back to Baghdad.

and I moved, I think, four or five images because I was never really a person to move a lot of imagery. I thought if I had some really good stuff, I didn't want to dilute it with stuff that I thought was inferior, so I just put the four or five best images out. And was just hanging around when the chief came in and he said, listen, how many pictures did you move of that story? And I said, maybe four or five.

And he said, right, okay, you better move some more because it's become the number one story in the world and I think there was over 2,000 bodies they discovered at this place and of course I then thought geez okay right and then I just sort of slightly panicked because I thought well I've just edited my stuff and I've moved five pictures of what am I now going to find in there that's going to improve the file

so I went through my you know on my computer screen just going through the pictures and thinking, do you know what? I really wish that I'd spend a little bit more time shooting that moment. Because I'd shot it and thought, actually, do you know what? I'm going to get something a bit stronger than that in a minute. So, and I just, and I saw, and then I'd see another image and I'd work it through and I think, okay, I think the fourth image in this sequence is going to be the one.

And then I'd realize there wasn't the fourth image. And I just kept saying to myself, what were you doing? and of course at the time I had no idea that this was going to be the number one story in the world and so I ended up moving I think I ended up moving maybe 15 pictures maybe more from this and every time I put a picture out I thought

you know what and it just so annoyed me that I hadn't maybe approached the job in the right manner I just had seen the light and I'd shot what I thought would be really strong and like I say in my career I miss as many pictures

as I get in fact I miss more than I get and I can tell you about all the great pictures I didn't take and that would make a great book so I was just really angry with myself and angry that I'd had this opportunity and I'd maybe blown it and I thought well this is why I'm here

I'm here to shoot this I'm here to show the world that this is why this is what's happening and you know And how could I have been so stupid as to not have concentrated a little bit harder while I was there? And I know we only had half an hour to 40 minutes, but still I could have shot five times as much in that time. But I didn't. I just chose to meticulously walk through, pick my moments and shoot them. So we moved these pictures.

And fortunately the next day, I think one of the, it was an image of a woman walking past a skull that was just, and I chod it from really. really low down on the ground. And it was really, it was an upright, and that's what suited most of the papers as an upright image of vertical. And that was what got used on all the New York Times everywhere, just the Washington Post, all the British newspapers everywhere around the world had run with this story. And although we were the first guy there, there were a couple of other photographers that were there at the time with me, but they didn't work for an international wire agency. And that's the beauty about working for an international wire agency is that their reach

and their clout is just phenomenal. It doesn't matter whether you're working for a newspaper. But as soon as you work for an international wire agency, particularly one as good as Reuters, you then realize, actually, when I've got this picture, it's really going to get out there. Everybody is going to see it, you know. And that's a huge buzz. And it did. And it made the play.

was incredible and then my chief said to me okay Kian well you know we were going back to tomorrow and again I thought well you know what I've just I've just been there and I had pretty much the place to myself and I knew going down the next day when I drove there it was a zoo there was just every photographer and every cameraman in Iraq was at Hiller and you couldn't shoot anything without getting another photographer or a cameraman or a sound boom because of the... And there were... I think I did take a couple of pictures that day, some very strong...

A couple of strong pictures of a woman that had just discovered her husband, and she was surrounded by a family. And the bane of every photographer's life is the sound man's boom. And this woman was making this... She was... it was this dreadful wailing. I mean, I still remember it. Now, it was awful, the noise she was making. It was really guthral.

And it really went right through you. And I remember being really down low and in close and trying to photograph this. And the next thing, this furry boom just comes over at microphone. And he's trying to record the sound. And that's what it was like. And you're getting annoyed at a sound man who's just stepped in and trying to do something when you were trying to, and you think, and I'm getting annoyed with a guy. who's trying to record a woman who's plumbing the depth of grief.

And I'm annoyed at him and I'm not thinking, well, listen, what about her? You know? And in those situations, you're not thinking about that. You're just, I need to shoot this picture. So, yep, the next day it was a zoo. But I was able to stand back and think, you know, I got lucky yesterday. And I learned a really valuable lesson, which is, go into every situation like that as if you're never going to see a situation like that again.

And actually even further back, there was a chance that you could have said, I know we can't make it, we won't be home before dark, so we're just going to head back to Baghdad. And of course, but that's right. But ultimately in that car, that probably wasn't going to be my call. So somebody in the car, and I think I was with three or four others, maybe the journalist might have been the most senior in the car, in the armored vehicle at the time

and she would have made that call and she would have just said, listen, if this is what they want, we need to go and do it, you know. So, yep, it came out okay at the end, but it was, that was close. I had a, when I was in my first seal platoon,

my leading petty officer who is the senior, well, not even the senior, but the second senior of the enlisted guys. Anyways, he had this, this mantra and the mantra was always go out now when he said always go out

what he meant was always go out to the bar always go out you know you can you pull in somewhere for night go out you know that's always go out there's always some fun to be had and I actually in my mind I always twisted that mantra from his always go out

to go to the bar or go to the club I change it to just always go out period So if there's an opportunity, there's an operation coming up, go out. If there's a bar to go to, go out. If there's something to do, go and do it. It's just a little, you know, a little something to think about. And it might when you're sitting there thinking, you know, maybe it wouldn't have been your call.

But if it was your call, maybe you would have sluffed it off. And if you had the attitude, if you know what, always go out. Okay. Yeah. Then you would have been there 100%. Yeah. Absolutely. And you get, I don't want to cut Iraq short, but at the same time, there's so much stuff I want to talk to you about and hear other people talk about.

But you get home from Iraq and you go back to your kind of normal day to day. You said you were, you know, you saw some stuff, but it wasn't like a major psychological effect that you noticed out of the gate. You came home. Hey, that was my job. I did my job. Next call you get, big call, is to go to Sri Lanka,

which you mentioned briefly there. And in Sri Lanka, you were going because of the horrible tsunami that hit on boxing day. And Americans don't know what boxing day is. That's a day after Christmas in England. Hit on boxing day, and you get the call to go out to Sri Lanka

and shoot yeah that was I remember the the Desca working on boxing day called me and I was around at my parents

with my kids and we were all just about to start opening Christmas presents and she said Kieran you need to get on a plane and you need to go to Colombo

literally straight away and I said said, why? And she said, well, have you not heard? And I said, heard what? And she said, turn on the TV. So I turned on the TV.

And, yeah, it was like a 9-11 moment, you know, when you're sitting and you're looking. You just think, no idea. And by the way, just to kind of give some basic facts on this, the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean had the approximate energy of 20,000. 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. It was a magnitude 9.0. The rupture was 600 miles long. It displaced the seafloor by 10 yards, 600 miles, 10 yards.

So trillions of trillions of tons of rocks moved. It's the largest earthquake in 40 years. And within hours, the killer waves, started arriving and unfortunately because of lack of communication and no warning systems in place people were just not they weren't prepared for it throughout Asia and they just got crushed absolutely crushed and uh you know you said a 9-11 moment which i understand where you're coming from from a psychological standpoint of hey i know what i was doing at this point on september 11th well september 11th was four thousand

maybe 5,000 Americans killed, the tsunami resulted in almost a quarter million den. I mean, just a massive destruction. And you got the call. So you got the call? And it just happened to be because I was the guy on call for boxing day. So it could have gone to any photographer in London. so and they they they reuters had sort of there were there were photographers that had gone to band

atche and other places and they needed somebody go to shri lanka because they they had an idea that shrank had been pretty badly hit and because it was my name on the sked for boxing day that's why i got the call and i ended up going out the following i think it was the 27th i flew out and uh yeah just one of those stories where you have to hit the ground running so you're the plane you get through customs and you're straight into a car and you're into the office and you're speaking to the bureau chief there and you say right I'm here so where am I going and they are still trying to figure out what's happened and where the you know the most severe damage is and pretty much you know most of the coastlines of Sri Lanka had been hit so it

didn't really matter where you went you were always going to find something so they They were trying to, I said I really want to get over to the other coast. I don't want to get over to this stay here where all the tourists come. I want to get over to the other side. So we were literally trying to find a helicopter that would get me straight over there. But in the meantime, while they were trying to work that out, I just got in the car and I just drove down from Columbia, just straight down through goal to just see what was going on. And again, to get something under my belt, and I just started shooting. And then came back to the office.

Had you ever been Sri Lanka before? I'd never been to Sri Lanka, no. So, got back to the office and I said, listen, what's happening with the chopper? They said, well, you know, it's not really happening, but there might be a government minister

that's going to go across. So myself and a journalist got in a car, we went to the government minister's office and he was going to get in a chopper and get over to the other side, the other coastline. But before he did that, we were going to sit down

and have lunch. I was just thinking, okay, listen, do you know what? I really don't want to sit here and have lunch. Why don't we just get in that chopper and get going? But we had to go through this whole ring more all, and then eventually we got to the chopper, and we got up for about three minutes, and a storm front came in, chopper came back down.

So that was that avenue of getting across. And we would have been there in an hour, so we had to work out another way. So we drove to Candy in one of those. We found a car, a guy who drove us from Colombia, drove us all the way through the center of Sri Lanka to Candy. And we got to Candy. And I remember that was New Year's Eve when we got there,

myself and the journalist. And coincidentally, the journalist that was with me, she was flying back from a holiday. And she'd heard about the tsunami, and she stopped off in Sri Lanka. She was a lobby journalist that worked for Roy. But so she was used to dealing with the politicians and She just said listen, I'm a journalist and I need to this is a story that I need to cover

So she came in and she said listen, you know, and I knew and I and I said wow, what are you doing here? And she said well, I you know can I be of help? So I said let's go, you know and we got in this car and we went And she Had such an amazingly fresh time take on a story like that purely because she was used to covering lobby in and back in the UK and because she wasn't a seasoned sort of I don't know hostile environment journalist the way she would write stories and find stories was just like you just wouldn't have got it from a you know she just had a completely

different angle on it so it was so refreshing to work with someone who just saw everything from a completely different viewpoint everything was news to her but that meant that her writing and everything was really fresh and vibrant, you know. So she was an absolute pleasure to work with and we sort of just teamed up and we got to the other side and as soon as we got to the other coast, it flooded. The whole area flooded which meant no one could get in to that side of Sri Lanka and we had that place to ourselves for over a week and we were staying in a hotel where the floors were just two feet high in water. I mean, but they still managed to get us rice every night.

I mean, it was just incredible how these people just manage. And, of course, you get out there and you're, okay, right, where do we go? So let's just walk down to the coastline and let's just see what the situation is. And, of course, you go down as a, as a westerner, and these people just think that you can help them. So they're coming up and they're showing you documentation and their passports. And can you take this to the American embassy? and can we get off the country and I have I have relatives that live in the UK and

relatives that live in America and I can leave and I and you net you I've never felt so helpless in my life never felt so helpless and and I've spent a fair amount of time in Sri Lanka back in back in the day and the Sri Lankan people are just the nicest yeah absolutely kindest but hardworking I mean it's just a beautiful and the countryside itself is absolutely stunning beautiful. And so I can imagine them doing, going, jumping through hoops and doing what I had to do

to get you a bowl of rice when you came home at night. Yeah, it was just incredible. And then you would meet the people that were living on the beach, their homes were on the beach, and they've been hit by the wave. And they were just immediately, immediately rebuilding. It was just, okay, listen, this is what we've got to do. And they start rebuilding.

And I'll never forget, wandering around at that point on the tip on the eastern tip and I found just there was a wall just a wall left of a house so I imagine it was the wall where there was the door and everything else had gone it was one brick wall just standing on the zone and if you sort of walked through this door you just saw golden sand and palm tree and there was a dresser just a one wooden dresser against this back wall. And this young guy came up to me and he said, he said, hey,

you're photographer and where are you from and the usual. And I sort of got chatting to him. And he said, can I get you a drink? And I said, no, listen, I'm fine. Seriously, don't worry about it. I'm absolutely fine, but thank you. He said, no, no, no, listen, I can run to the store, which was about a mile inland.

Yeah. And I can get you a diet Coke or a Coke, whatever it is. I said, please, listen, I'm seriously, I'm absolutely fine. He said, okay, well, please sit, and he pulled up a crate, and we just sat it down, and I'm sitting in what used to be his main room of his house. And he puts, gets the crate and lets me sit on it, and then he just shimmies up the coconut tree, and he just pulls a coconut off the top of the tree, shimmies back down,

and I'm thinking, and I really, because it doesn't agree with me, me so I just thought okay but you know he's gone to this effort so he cut down this and he took the top off and then he went to the dresser and he opened the drawer and he pulled out a tiny silver platter and he put the coconut on the platter and then he handed it to me and he'd even got a straw and he put a straw in it and he said please you know you're in my home and I'm looking at the one wall that's left of his home with his dresser. And so I take a sip of this drink and I said, so tell me what, I mean, if this is your home,

I mean, you know, the water was 25 feet away. There's the golden sand. I said, what happened? And he said, of the wave came in and destroyed my house. And it took away my parents, my wife, my brothers and sisters and my six kids. They're gone. and all I can think of is that he has tried to find somewhere for me to sit

he's gone up a tree to get me a coconut and put it on a silver platter the only thing that's left in his house is this chest of drawers or his dresser with a silver platter in it and he's more concerned about my welfare at that moment and this is what had happened to him about five days earlier and I remember thinking when I got back from Sri Lanka, I couldn't stop thinking about that conversation and I think that was the time when it really hit me, it really hit me about what had happened.

And I can't even begin to describe. I think I had a numbness similar to a sort of numbness that I'd had in Iraq, but this was a different kind of numbness because the thing about the tsunami was you were dealing with the living, and it was the living that affected you. It wasn't the death, and it wasn't the bodies that had been swept a mile inland and ended up in people's houses and stuff like that.

It wasn't the way you would cover the funerals of all the different religious types there. It's when you're speaking to the people that survived, that you it's it was a real a real level you know and um well that just about sums up my you know that story about that guy i mean first of all anybody that hears that story has to think to themselves you know am i really doing the best i can to number one have a positive attitude number two put other people before me i mean what a what a what a saint i mean that's just unbelievable. And I remember actually as you were telling that story, I remember

that when I was in Sri Lanka, there was guys that, you know, they'd been fighting a war against the Tamil Tigers for many years. And so we, that's who we were working with, these guys. And they would, they would be telling these war stories with, and they'd be showing you, you know, there's a guy that couldn't move his arm, right?

He got shot in the arm with an AK-47, so now he was working as, like, a secretary in the army. And he's just got this big smile on his face. And he's telling me, yeah, you know, And I got shot and now my arm doesn't work. But, you know, being a secretary is a pretty good job too. And it's just good to still be in the Army. And you just have this, this feeling, probably the similar feeling that you have.

We're just looking at these people and you're saying, how can you be so happy? Yeah. And why can't I be that? I want to be that happy. But it's just so impressive. And it puts everything in so much perspective. When you hear about somebody that's lost that much, that's going to climb that tree. That's going to climb that tree for somebody else, even though they've lost everything themselves.

It's humbling. So incredible. Yeah. So did you, when you came home, and you tell me about this earlier, and you were just kind of getting into it. I mean, you felt like after Sri Lanka, you know, you go to Iraq and you see the war. and that's that's one thing and like you said you're dealing with the dead and you're seeing people that were killed but now you're dealing with the what's left behind and you said that that really had more of an impact on you than that iraq did or the northern island did yeah did you how did how did you deal with that well the reuters policy is that um

when you arrive back from a situation like that, your line manager hands you a number, you know, quite discreetly and says, there's a number there if you need to call it. And it's a sort of a helpline, you know, it's sort of, you've talked to a professional about what you've been through, and it's a sort of way of,

I imagine in the art we'd be the debrief, it's a sort of a thing that just sort of, you get that you start to talk about what it is. And I don't know I've never been in a situation like that, so I don't know what happens, but I remember thinking, I'm fine, I don't need that at all.

So, again, I couldn't have been more wrong. And I ended up, I had nightmares for, I mean, maybe a couple of years. Afterwards, really, really bizarre nightmares that involved cameras and involved tidal waves. I mean, the sort of the mix that was going on, I mean, I suppose if I was to sit down and talk to a professional about it, They might find it really interesting what was going on in my head. But I came back really angry. I remember coming back really angry for the main reason being that I was coming back to my comfortable home. And I thought about those millionaires living on the riverbank in London.

And I thought, well, what if it happened if the Thames suddenly went? It just completely flooded the beach. barriers broke and just water just how would do they think you wouldn't be you wouldn't know what where to start you just wouldn't know what to do and you sit and these people you know we have lots of floods

in England now and what people go through I can understand is completely and utterly miserable but their carpets are being ruined and all this sort of stuff and yep I wouldn't want to go through that but you know when you compare that to what happens

during a tsunami it's just you know, night and day. It really is. And so I got angry about coming back to live in a comfortable house and I used to get angry that my cellar flooded in Streatham where I lived. I had a big cellar where I had my drum kit and it flooded once and my wife, Tia, she was down there with my daughter and she was ended up pulling my drum kit out of three or four inches of sewage water that had come into and and I'm responsible for her hurting her back because she should never have done it but she was trying to get all my equipment off the floor and I remember being so angry that my cellar had flooded and then you go to someone like Sri Lanka and you think actually come on

let's put this in perspective so yeah the anger and I think it took a while to maybe if I take in my line manager's advice and wrong that phone number I might have been in a different place and it might have had you know I might have got to a different place a lot quicker but I didn't and I thought I can handle this and and even while I wasn't handling it I didn't know I wasn't handling it you know I just thought this is normal that you come back from these events and just yack yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah at your wife who's dealing with three really small kids and there's you in one ear as you know given all this about

your dreams and you know flooding and this and that and I'm really annoyed and I should have stayed out there longer and why did they bring me back so early I had so many other stories lined up and of course it dend on to me

you know that actually my wife was my psychiatrist and to be fair she wasn't actually having to say anything she was just listening and it was a case of me needing to just get all this stuff off my chest.

And I would just pick the bizarre moments to do it, you know. But something would pop into my head and then, you know, I'd have friends around and something would set me off and I'd like another thing, you know, and it was a bit like that. So, yes, I would say if maybe I'd been sort of clinically diagnosed, they would have said you're suffering from some post-traumatic stress. and I didn't experience that after Iraq and I don't know why I think maybe it was because I thought of war

as completely different to what you would maybe categorize as an act of God so that in a way I found quite interesting or was what happened when I got back from the tsunami a culmination of what happened in Iraq but I'd been to Iraq and at the end, in between Iraq and the tsunami, I had spent nine weeks in Australia photographing the Rugby World Cup. And that was a pretty good gig and I'd had a great time.

So there was that sort of huge job in between these other two huge jobs. And I'm wondering maybe the distraction. Yeah, had helped. You know, maybe I was too busy thinking about something else. I was nine weeks on a tour in Australia, an amazing country, having a great time shooting the rugby world cup, which England then went on to win. So, yeah, it was, I don't know. I really, and to this day, I'll never know. But, yeah, dealing with that.

And it was interesting because I was working for the BBC in Dubai in 2010. And I was working with a producer, and there was a series called Human Planet. and I was out there shooting stills for the book that was going to come out with the series and we were out with this falconer in Dubai, a South African guy who trained falcons and it was the end of the shoot and we were out and we were having a meal

and the producer asked me he said oh Kieran you've got some you know incredible stories why don't you tell him the story about the tsunami and I thought wow that's a really bizarre thing to start talking about at the end of a meal where we're celebrating, finishing a shoot.

But I obliged, and I can't even remember, I started talking, and just the whole table just went, utter silence. I mean, they were enthralled, but in the end, the producer came up to me afterwards, and he said, I'm really sorry that I asked you to talk about that, because he said, I can see that every time that you must talk about it, you lose a piece of yourself.

You know, it's so entrenched in you that when you talk about it, you know, you're giving a part of yourself away and he said, and I really apologize for you in that position. And that had never occurred to me if that was happening, but he could tell that by watching how I was talking about it, you know. I don't know if that's the case now, but I don't tend to talk about it purely because it was 2004 and, you know, A lot has happened between then and now, and so it's not something that I sit down with on a regular basis

and talk to people about. But I can imagine that even now, probably at some point, it's probably just a tiny bit maybe similar, but not like it was closer. But that was 2010, that was six years afterwards. And he still spotted that it was still very high in my sort of psyche. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's somewhat therapeutic to talk about these things.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think the more you talk, if that guy asked you the same question once a week, and you told that story once a week, and you got more in depth with it and got your hands wrapped around it, I think that's good for you. And, you know, they talk about that to the veterans in World War II. When you came home from World War II, first of all, you've been at war for three or four years,

and when you came home, you got onto a ship with a bunch of other guys that just did what you did, And what did you do? You talked. You talked through stuff. You told stories. You cried. You let it out.

And by the time they got home two weeks later, they just had this therapeutic session, right? And that's why they said that these guys recovered a lot better. Well, in Vietnam, you're in the middle of the war. And then one day, your tour is up of 365 days. You get on a plane. And 24 hours later, you're sitting in Main Street, USA. You didn't debrief anybody. You didn't talk to anybody on the way home.

you just went from that environment to the normal environment. And as one of my seal buddies you said one time, I can't believe in 24 hours, we're going to get inside of an aluminum tube, and then we're going to be back home. And that's true. So I think if you can find your friends or people that you can talk about these things with,

it helps you. And that's what you said too. When you told Tia, your lovely wife, what was going on, that's how, and all she did was listen. She didn't have to All she had to do was listen And let you explain those thoughts

Yeah Um Rough And then The next big assignment You know we've talked about a bunch of different things that you've done But one of the things And I always get drawn to things that I know a little bit about

Or something that I've seen And I know that you ended up going to Liberia as well And I did I was on standby I was actually off the coast of Liberia in the late 90s when things were just going completely sideways. And I pulled up a little article that captures some of the madness that was going on in Liberia. This is an article from The Guardian by Chris McGreel, which the Guardian is a UK site.

A commander in Charles Taylor's... Charles Taylor's militia, so Charles Taylor was this psychotic dictator of Liberia. Militia has told a war crimes trial that the former Liberian president ordered his fighters to eat their enemies, including UN peacekeepers, as a means of terrorizing the population. Joseph Zigzag Marza, chief of operations for Taylor, who is on trial at the Hague, also testified that he oversaw horrific crimes such as cutting the babies out of pregnant women

and that the former president told his men that their enemies are no longer human beings. Taylor 59 has pled not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity at a special international court over his

collaboration with anti-government rebels in Sierra Leone which borders Liberia. Marza this is his chief of operations. who led the death squad of group of killers, said many of the victims of cannibalism were members of the Kron people of the then Liberian president, Samuel Doe,

who Taylor was attempting to overthrow. But those eaten also included soldiers from UN and West African Echo Mogg peacekeeping forces. He said we should eat them. Even the UN white people. He said we could use them as pork to eat, Marza told the court. We ate a few Ecomog soldiers, but not many. But many were executed, about 68.

He said Taylor said eating people set an example for the people to be afraid. Taylor's defense lawyer asked Marza how the fighters would prepare a human being for the pot. The former commander described decapitating, carving up, cleaning, and cooking corpses season. with salt and pepper. We slit your throat, butcher you, throw away the head, take the flesh and put it in a pot. Charles Taylor knows that,

said Marza. He told the court how rebel leaders who fell out with Taylor met a terrible end. The former commander described dismembering the body of another rebel leader known as Superman and then taking his hand to Taylor who gave him cigarette money in return.

Marza said the pair of than cooked up and ate Superman's liver. Marza said that he had killed so many men, women, and children he had lost count. He described drowning and bludgeoning babies to death and murdering women with pen knives. He said when he was serving Taylor's rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia, he'd established checkpoints on roads using human intestines and severed heads mounted on sticks. Asked whether Taylor knew about this. Marza replied he was aware.

He made us understand that you have to play with human blood so that enemies would be afraid. Asked how he felt about these actions now. Marza said, I regret nothing. Sorry. I apologize. That is our lifetime. That is me. This is me sitting off the coast of Liberia while this was happening.

heinous. It's just it's just sick. And I think you know Taylor was overthrown in 2003 obviously the country still bears the scars of that kind of

darkness and evil and that's something you talked about earlier was the fact that your perspective and this is what I think I find very interesting about your perspective is that I'm always

talking and exploring and studying the point of war, where it's happening. And you end up in these places, maybe you're a day behind, maybe you're a week behind, maybe you're a foot behind, maybe you're a mile behind, but you're seeing what the after effects of war is. And I think that that perspective for all of us to know is very important. So, and I know you were there while you were there again you were there in what year 2012 yeah so this is I mean it was never

it's never exactly a going to be the most peaceful place in the world but it was relatively stable compared to when it was under Taylor yeah um and I'll tell you this is one thing that

when I when we were off the coast of Liberia and you're looking at the coast and you can see the cost we were we were literally maybe a couple miles offshore, looking at the coast, and I can see that there's waves breaking. So I'm thinking, you know, I'm a surfer. I'm thinking, hey, you know, those look like good waves. And then you can see there's build a nice, big kind of hotel. You can see this beautiful white beach. You can see it looks like a just beautiful place. I'm thinking to myself, I need to go here on a surf trip. And then eventually, you know, I'm looking at this for a few hours. We get a little bit

closer. I'm starting to make out a little bit more of what I'm looking at. And eventually I get out the big giant optics to study where we might be landing and what's going on there. And when I look through these optics the whole picture changed. Because now you see all these buildings that look like, they literally look like big, beautiful

beach. What's a big beach hotel called? Moana Surf Rider. Yeah, something like the Moana Surf Rider. These big, resorts. They look like these big giant resorts. And as I put the big, optics on them

and sort of looking all the they're just completely gutted they're destroyed it's just a nightmare and it's so horrible to see such a beautiful place

just completely destroyed by us by humans by fellow human beings have just completely destroyed it what did you notice or what did you what was it like when you were there Give us a debrief on 2012.

I mean, I, just when you're mentioning those hotels, I remember taking a trip out to the beaches and just walking along the beaches for a couple of hours and just looking at these places thinking, what has gone on here? I mean,

my overriding, it's just that the country was just eviscerated. I mean, and it's still, I mean, I was there working for an NGO and there were certain, areas and certain things that they wanted covered.

And I had the opportunity on a couple of days to basically just go unilateral and just take a fixture and just go and do my own stuff. And on that particular trip, that's when I actually shot the pictures that I thought were really quite interesting from that. But that was looking at sort of Liberia as a whole, but I was only in Monrovia. but I had this picture of, I mean, we traveled down to the River G. County and Grand Geder. I mean, just stunningly, stunningly beautiful parts of the country. I mean, just ridiculously beautiful. And the sort of the difference between living in the country and maybe living in Monrovia was so tangible. I mean, Montrovia was, it's the, the,

infrastructure has just completely disappeared and I can't remember the figures but I just remember being blown away by the fact that the town was built for say hypothetically a million and there's something like five million living in it I mean those figures aren't correct but it's it's that sort of scale that was just mind blowing and it was such a shame because it's such a beautiful country. The Liberians are such beautiful people and yet you had this overriding sense that are they ever going to escape this? Is this the legacy? Is it going to stay with Liberia? Are they ever going to be able to pull themselves out? They are such a poor country. And I remember looking at areas where money was being spent and I was asking myself, why are you spending money here? Why are you

making the roads outside the mayor's office look pristine when the inside of Monrovia is the state that it is. There's the West Point slum, I think which is one of the biggest slums there. And I remember walking through that and I never once felt intimidated. These were just incredibly vibrant places, but the conditions that the people were living in. their version of normality was a camera really couldn't tell that picture you just couldn't shoot those images to tell that story properly

I think it's one of those rare times where I've had a camera in my hand I think I can't tell this story with with a camera I don't know what I can tell it with but I can't tell it with a camera and this is because the the conditions were so yeah so so so dreadful and I mean the way Monrovia is built it's sort of slightly on a hill and and it rains a lot in Liberia

and what happens is the rain falls off the concrete and when it rains excuse me it really rains and it creates just torrents and these torrents just drop off the roads of Monrovia and they go down into the slums and they hit the slums before they hit

the sea and these slums are I mean they're they flood at certain times of the year and yet the people are they expect it

they know it's going to happen so I'm spending some time in West Point Slum with a young man and his family and he is a health advisor and he has two daughters and they both want to be doctors

and he is describing the conditions that they're living in and what they have to go through every day. And, I mean, you can, especially if you're walking through Monrova, you can see the sanitary conditions and the lavatories. It's just, it's beyond belief. It really is. And, you know, there are latrines that go straight into the river. And they're just corrugated latrines with a door and you just go in and the sewageage. go straight into the river and three feet away the kids are just playing around in that river the way our kids would play around in a swimming pool. No idea of what is going through their

systems. And of course when you catch something like dysentery or typhoid, they're one of the biggest killers of kids in Africa. And you look at it and you think, this is such a vicious circle. How are they ever going to come out of this? How are they ever going to find a way to lift themselves up because it's such a poor country, but they sort of make do with the situation that they're in, and then the slum floods, and they say, oh yeah, it's going to flood, and although we're four feet off the ground, and we've got steps coming up to our, you know, it's going to flood and it's going to come in.

So we have to just put what we sleep on on little stilts, you know, but they're getting up in the morning and stepping into it and coming out, and then, you know, they don't have wellingtons, they just wade, their way through it and this goes on for and he said uh i was there in august and he said well you should be here in september this is nothing um and so i was away from i i sort of detached myself from the NGO at the time and i just went to unilateral and i just wanted to photograph i just wanted to try in some way to explain what it was i was looking at and i wasn't shooting it for anyone in mind i mean the NGO take all my images um they they have they have access to all my

imagery that I shoot whether I'm shooting it for them or whether I've just gone off-piece, so to speak, to shoot. So they get absolutely everything. And I was trying to find a way to document what it was that you could see. And I was really struggling until there was one moment when I was wandering through the slum, the flooded slum, and I was up to my knees in sewage as we were walking through between the corrugated huts and there was a little flash of pink in front of me and I saw this young girl sort of just go between two buildings and she was carrying a pink umbrella

and I remember thinking there's another picture I've missed so I asked the young doctor who was accompanying me through this time I said you know what's the deal and he said oh she's probably off to church or something you know it's because she's in her Sunday best effectively with her perfect little shoes and her skirt and her pink umbrella um so I thought nothing of it carried on shot some more pictures and I thought actually I've got I've got quite a lot of stuff here none of it I was really thinking this is really strong you know and then on the way back to the car

I saw a little flash of pink again in front of me and it disappeared and I thought well this time I'm not I'm not giving up. So I just started to run through this. And you can imagine if you're running through two foot of sewage, well, it's not the greatest site in the world, and you're trying to stop your cameras from going in, and there's a couple of times I nearly went headfirst in,

but I was so desperate to try and take a picture of this. And the image I had in my head was when she comes back through that corridor and comes back into this main corridor that I'm in of water, I'm going to just shoot her from behind like a Mary Poppins type of picture and the contrast for me was this beautiful little girl in this situation

in this with a pink umbrella in this horrendous slum situation and there she was and by the time she disappeared again I just thought this is just really not my day and then she'd obviously heard me running and she sort of popped out again

and just turned around and it was almost like a little bank of sand that she She was standing on between two huts and there was about a foot and a half of water in front of her and she just turned round and looked at me as if, yes, what do you want? And I just took one picture and click. And that was it. And the second I took the picture, she just turned on her heels and just walked off and tipped her away.

There was me in the middle of this, you know, sewage. but she was finding these delicate way around, just like Mary Poppinswood, you know. And I didn't really, and so I thought, okay, I hope that's sharp because I'm shooting on manual focus lenses and, you know, when you've got one shot at it, you just really hope that you got it sharp, you know,

because I have been in that situation when I've had one shot at it before and not got it sharp, and those images haunt me. So I got back to the hotel the NGO was still working on their TV film that they were doing and I put it into the laptop and scanned it up and I looked at it and I just thought

well yeah that is how I want to remember Liberia I don't want to remember it as this place that has been eviscerated I want to remember it for the beauty that it has within its

you know the beauty of the humanity there that's what I wanted to show because I don't want to come away from places and shoot images of people at their expense. I'm just, that's not me. I think the human race is a majestic species and if I'm out there and I want to shoot this, I want to show it because it's there.

It's everywhere. And you just have to see it. You just see it and you go, that's what a human should look like. And even in the worst, the worst conditions imaginable, it's there. And that picture,

Was it for me from Liberia and that's I have pictures from Liberia that I keep but that's the one that I'm really proud of because It was sharp, thank God But it just her beauty in that mess was what I wanted to remember and It just shows you if it there you look for it. It's it's everywhere You just have to you have to want to find it It's easy to just go in there and shoot What's obvious. You know it's like sometimes you're going to

in a situation like that, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. It's there, point your camera at shoot. But you just got to, you know, if you're looking for it, you'll find it, you know. Keep your eyes peeled. Yeah. And you, from there, you

ended up also going to South Sudan. And again, just a, just a place of complete evil and darkness. For those of you that don't, don't know anything about Sudan.

Pulled a little clip in a guy named... This is 2014. Seabon Fenton wrote this. More than 100 children have been killed in South Sudan, whilst many others have been raped and castrated. According to UNICEF. UNICEF says that 129 children have been murdered in the last three weeks alone,

while surviving boys were castrated and girls were raped. They say that some children were even thrown into burning buildings. The executive director of UNICEF, Anthony Lake, said, the violence against children in South Sudan has reached a new level of brutality. The details of the worsening violence against children are unspeakable, but we must speak of them. Survivors report that boys have been castrated and left to bleed to death. Girls as young as eight have been gang raped and murdered.

children have been tied together before their attackers slit their throats. Others have been thrown into burning buildings. Just a nightmare scenario. Yeah. And I'm going to clarify one thing. You're working for an NGO, for those of you don't know what that is, it's a non-government organization. Generally, you're talking about some kind of a benevolent organization that is trying to do good in the world, such as the Red Cross. is probably the premier example.

I know you weren't specifically working for the Red Cross, but you were working for another benevolent organization when they called you up and brought you down to South Sudan. And again, you're not, for the most part, going to the front lines and capturing the action of the war. What you're capturing is the results of the war. And what did you see when you got to, when you got a sedan

well we flew into Juba and what we were looking at were the UN camps so the situation in South Sudan was that the two tribes the Dinka tribe and the Nour tribe were at war with each other

and there was a lot of fighting and killing going on and what the UN was trying to do was segregate the tribes from each other in certain areas so that they just stopped killing each other because until the killing stopped then really politically they were never going to come to her and you had the president and the vice president

one was a dinka and one was a newer and whatever was happening between them was being mirrored you know on the street so to speak so and there was never any trust between those two men they have a lot of history and there was never too much trust So it was a, you know, when they got their independence, I think Sudan, it was only three years. It had been independent of three years. So we were visiting camps that were, you know, had segregated the tribes.

And Juba was probably the most aggressive camp in that the only time we ever had any trouble was. maybe if some, a couple of guys who got a hold of some alcohol and they wanted to know hey, what are you doing here, you know, in this place? Why are you here? Why are you taking? And what you have to remember is

these people don't want to be photographed in this situation. This is not a good situation for them. And it's very easy as a journalist to go into a situation to say, yes, I have to document this and I have to show what's going on, but you have to understand that the dignity of these

people needs to be taken into consideration and you know some people are fine they're fine to let you photograph and they go yeah well this is where I am at the moment and so yeah I'm quite happy for you to to photograph me and others quite plainly aren't so apart from the the sort of criteria that the the the NGO was looking for and the NGO was effectively providing water for these camps because and they worked out some sort of desalination process and they were able to produce water on a regular basis for the camps but the situation in the camps was incredible they were just so overcrowded and again you know back to that sort of scenario of people being cramped on top

of each other and then you know that's how diseases spread and you know so on so um we then I there were obviously certain parts of um south Sudan that I wanted to travel to because I knew that the situation up in those parts of the country was even worse than, you know, Juba was relatively stable compared to other parts of Sudan. There was a place called Benteau that I wanted to get to. And there's a lot of oil up there, and both tribes are trying to, they're trying to control the oil. That's what they need to get hold of.

And as we were sort of, I'd say, listen, let's go there. And the NGO security would say, you can't because there's fighting. and we're not allowing staff to fly in and the only time aid is getting to these places is there is helicopter drops but no one's touching the ground and you know and the NGO are very hot on security I mean it's Oxfam

the NGO is Oxfam and they're incredibly professional organisation and they're very hot on security and anyway you're go if you go to any country working for Oxfam, the first thing you get is a security briefing and they tell you what the situation is, what you can and can't do, where they advise that we don't go, and these are the regulations and the stipulations that they make, and you have to adhere to them because you're there as a member of staff with, even though I'm a freelancer and I can

technically do what I like, you have to really sort of bear in mind that you are out there working with Oxfam staff, and Oxfam staff have travelled out from the UK with you. so you really can't just go off-piece and start doing what you like because you could put other people's lives in Japanese. So everywhere we wanted to go, I particularly wanted to go, we couldn't. And it was just always the case. I wanted to go here. No, you can't go there, but you can go here. So we ended up traveling to areas that weren't where the security risk was pretty low.

and these were camps UN camps UN mission camps that were created to where the fighting was at its worst

and they were trying to stop the tribes from killing each other and one of the places we went to which I will never forget is a place called

Bohr and we sort of flew in in a small plane and we got I think it was a helicopter and then a small plane unfortunately we didn't have to drive because I've been on a few journeys

through Africa maybe 10, 14 hours in a car where there's no road so we were grateful to be able to fly in and you couldn't always fly in and we'd always get in maybe a UN helicopter that was dropping something and we just get in there and fly up with them

and we got to this place and Oxfam were working there and they were providing water and they had this situation where the camp was the camp was being run by the South Koreans and they were physically building the camp and they were in charge of it at the time

and they had created this space maybe the size of two British football pitches or maybe a couple of American football pictures similar sort of thing for people to live on and in this you had South Sudanese they were the newer tribe living in here

and you had wealthy you had middle class and you had very poor living alongside each other in the camp. So there was a real mix of people in the camp. And Oxfam were providing water, and there was a huge reservoir, but it wasn't a reservoir. It was just a huge pit of water that had gone stagnant.

And every time it rained, it would flood and flood into the camp. So they were having to control that and keep making sure that that never got flooded. And at the same time, they were producing water with this filtration system and providing pumps that people could, you know, and then basically saying to them, listen, if you want to come to the pump and take water, you've got to learn how to clean your bucket. So they wouldn't,

so they were installing discipline into them. So, you know, and we support that. Absolutely. And so, but it wasn't as simple as us turning up with, I was there with a filmmaker, a journalist and myself,

there were three of us, and it wasn't as simple as just marching into the camp and saying, hey, we're Oxfam and we're here. here to take some pictures and shoot some film. Even though Oxfam were working there in that capacity, so we had to go through the route of talking to the elder, and the elder was a doctor who worked in Canada, who'd come all the way back from Canada, and he described his journey to me of how he got to Boer in South Sudan from Canada, and I thought it was bad enough me coming from London he threw to get to South

Sudan. It was just, I think it took him 11 days of pure travel to get from, yeah, it was unbelievable. Quit complaining about that traffic on the forum. Yeah, totally. It was just, it was humbling. And he was there to rescue his mother and get her safe. And this was a camp, so we had to talk to him. And he wanted to know a little bit about us.

And he said, you're fine, you can come in. We don't let any journalists in here. The journalists just come here and they do their story and they leave at our expense. And we don't have that. But you're providing water, you guys can come in. And so we had carte blanche to wander through the camp and do it like and everybody knew

the elder has granted these guys are cool they're fine do what you like so this was a camp that had been attacked by the Dinka tribe

a month earlier and in order to try and build you a picture if you can imagine the two football pictures you had the UN camp and then

within the UN camp there was this other camp that they were living in and it had a perimeter around it. It was just barbed wire and a perimeter and it was about the size of two football pitches and they were wanting, the Koreans

were meant to be building another space because their latrines had collapsed because of the rain and they, you know, it was just it was, it was, the conditions were abominable. But this perimeter was, on the outside of this perimeter was Dinka land and the Dinkas had come in

and they had attacked one night. They had just stood on the outside over the fence and with machine guns just shot away and they killed a hundred of the tribe. Women, children, kids. I mean, we were talking to kids where bullets were coming through. I mean, they just live in,

it's literally a couple of bamboo poles and some just white material. That's what these people were living in. But if you went into these homes that they created, they were just spotless inside. And then you realize, again, the dignity that, you know, you have to be, you just have to be so careful

as you just don't wander around gung-ho just, you know, these are very these are very proud people and they're in this situation and they're in this situation and what's more, they can't get out. Because if they try and leave this camp, they'll just be shot dead, you know, by the opposing tribe.

And it was like that throughout Sudan. So it wasn't necessarily just one tribe being protected. It was the dinka in one camp, it was newer and the other, and they were being protected from the others. And they were, I remember you saying earlier Jocker, did you ever notice the state of their lives or their fear ever being etched on their faces wherever you've travelled? And if this was one place, I saw it, it was in this camp.

And they were petrified that this was going to happen again because the UN hadn't reacted in time when the first attack happened. And so they just thought this is just going to happen again and who's going to protect us. And that is, again, a situation where you're thinking, when I leave this place, I'm getting on my plane and I'm going to fly home. And yet, they are still going to be in that camp and they're still not going to be able to leave. And in this camp, you're talking to young guys that were professionals working in Juba. And, you know, it's, yeah, that was the closest I had as a lot of. an experience to Sri Lanka with South Sudan.

And you brought that attitude home. And your next, as usual, your next assignment that you shot, oddly enough, was something that you had scheduled six months prior. You said, you know what, I'm going to go and just take a breather. I'm going to go and shoot Wimbledon, the tennis tournament in England, on the grass courts. You'd scheduled that. In the meantime, you go to Sudan. You experience this.

When you get home, and this was just on your own, you just schedule it for yourself to go and chew Wimbledon. Sure, yeah, non-commission. And you brought this back with you. And what did that do to your Wimbledon shoot? Well, originally, I think it was a couple of weeks before Wimbledon started, and I was not in the slightest bit interested in going to shoot. the story and I'd gone to all this trouble to get this accreditation and the the photographer that

runs the Wimbledon is also a very very highly respected sports photographer who also runs the photography of the Olympics and he'd said Kieran listen I'd be happy for you to come in and shoot whatever it is you want to shoot and I'd gone to all that trouble to get that and he'd given it his blessing and I thought you know what I'm just going to turn and I said a Bob Jain I I really don't fancy this because I've just been in South Sudan living with these people in these camps and the idea of going to Wimbled

and shooting people eating drinking champagne and eating strawberries and cream it really that's what Echo and I like to call a rough transition yeah yeah and on top of that it was a self-commissioned so as a freelancer

self-commissioning and not earning any money it's not really the greatest idea in the world but but over time As we got closer, I just thought, hey, do you know what? Hey, why? Yeah, okay. Maybe I'll go and do this. So I went for the first couple of days.

And I just, I'd had an idea. I wanted to see if Wimbledon still had any charm. Because I went with my dad when I was 10 years old. And I never forgot it. I got to see John McEnroe and Peter Fleming. Yeah, Peter Fleming, not Ian Fleming, play doubles. I bumped into John Lloyd, a British tennis player at the time

and I just remember thinking that was a magical afternoon I had with my dad for my birthday when I was 10 years old let's see if Wimbledon still has that magic and bearing in mind that I had shot 15 Wimbledons

previously in my career as a professional sitting on court shooting the tennis you know I was there when Venus won first I was there when Roger Federer beat you know seminal moments and sport so I just wanted to see if it had any charm now that was my

original intention when I got the press accreditation six months early that completely went out the window I wasn't interested if Wimbled hadn't had any charm or not I just thought I'm going to go up and I'm going to photograph those people that can't that just get the cheapest ticket and get in and just wander around the outside courts I don't want to see a tennis player I don't want to go anywhere near the show courts. I just want to see what it's like to be a punter because when I came up when I was 10 years

old, that's all I was with my dad. We were just two punters that managed to sneak two tickets to get into show court to see McEnra and Fleming play doubles. So in a way, I said, was I maybe trying to see if it did I have a bit charm? I think so, but that had really got out of my head. So I, I turned up and I just started walking around. And the, my attitude was, well, do you know what? It doesn't matter if I don't get a picture because who's going to shout at me? Who's going to say, Kieran, what have you got today? No one. Only me.

So I just, my mindset changed dramatically and I just started wandering around. I remember I used to hang around in the, I had it because I pressed past, I'd just go into the media hall where all my mates were working, you know, slogging their guts out, covering the tennis. Because it sounds really glamorous. but it's full on shooting tennis at Wimbled it really is full on

and they just you say you hang around in the calf a lot I'm just waiting for the light and just go out and see what there is you know and then oh god I've got to go and sit on Centre Court for another four hours

and then Andy Murray's going to come on a plane the roof's going to come over and I'm not going to get out of here till 10 o'clock like really yeah I'll be gone by six you know because the light will have gone then and there'd be no need for me to be here and I'd have another cup of coffee and wander out

and just wander around and I just had one camera and one lens just a small Leica and a 35 mil and I'd wander and wander and wander and the first couple of days didn't get anything I thought hmm okay so I decided okay let's go on day three and I went on day three and I remember

walking around and what had happened at this Wimbledon is they occasionally they build a new court and when they build a new court it means the dynamics of that area since last year have changed. So walls have gone up and in Wimbledon, they're not walls, they put sort of green sheeting,

very thick, heavy sheeting across to sort of delineate this is a new court. Well, what that means is that the security guards who are employed, who are just young guys looking for a summer job, you know, they're employed, they haven't got a clue what the dynamics are of this court because this court only existed this year

and all these new things have been put in place. And so I remember just coming around the corner and I saw this guy standing with his face right up to the green bays like this. It's as if he'd been sent to the naughty step. I thought, what is, you know, face the wall, son. I thought, what is going on here? So I was sort of watching and I took a few pictures and I thought, okay, I need to get a little bit closer here. And as I did that, somebody else walked past me and just went straight up to the wall and put there like this. I thought, God, there must be a pinpricks in the material that allows them to put their eye right up to it and they can see the whole court.

And, you know, I thought that's what they're doing. Okay. Right. I get it now. So I thought, well, all I need is for 10 people to just do this and I've got a picture. So as I'm doing this, as I'm waiting for this moment to evolve, thinking I haven't got a picture yet. them and this could be my first so I'm gonna I'm gonna let this one mature and see what happens and as I did that this guy turns up young guy turns up with a pram and he takes

his kid out of the pram and his kid has this shock of red hair and he's maybe eight months old no maybe a year old a bit older than that yeah about a year old still a really tiny baby and his wife walks past and his wife goes to join the three other people that are peering through like this and I thought okay right got this there's four people there like this and then I don't know what this guy's doing with this baby I mean what you know but this baby's got such an amazing shock of red hair it looked fantastic against the green so I've got to this what's going to happen and this guy just picked the baby up and shoved the baby's head

over the top of the bays and before I took a picture I thought why are you doing that because the baby can't see anything and you certainly and I think in his mind he thought if I shove the baby's head over the top I'll be able to see something as if it was like a periscope you know what I mean and it was so bizarre and he kept it down I thought right time to take a picture so I took this picture and as I took the picture there was an old boy standing behind me selling programs and he went hmm that's a hell of a picture you've got there and I thought yeah it is unless I'm just going to see if something else happens with the baby you know I don't know what's going on but

it didn't and I had my picture but what I really wanted was to have been on the other side of that court and just seen that baby's head appear over the top so that was my first picture and I thought okay this has and that's how I normally work get one under your belt and build on it and I thought that's a very funny picture that is how I am going to look at this story I'm going to find the humorous elements of being a punch in Wimbledon and I want to shoot it as if you, so when you look at the pictures, you think, why has he shot that picture with those two heads in the way? And I can only just see that tennis player.

And my point is, well, if you're a punter at Wimbledon, that's exactly how you see it. You're in cheap seats. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, and most of these seats are, you just walk around and stand. So you're always crouching and trying to see. And I just thought, and of course I have very rarely looked through the camera. I'd see a situation and just go, there you go, because I didn't care. I actually didn't care whether I got anything that was any good.

I just thought, you know, this is a nice feeling to just wander around and just click away. And I wasn't framing anything. I was framing, but framing in a way for a purpose, but I didn't care. And if somebody said to me, is that the result of two weeks? at Wimbledon, I would have said, yeah, you know, I don't care. And I really, really don't care. So that was, that was the attitude with which I shot it. And yeah, so to finish the story, so come, that was June 2014, and come January 2015 are the big, in the world of photojournalism, world press photo awards and I the world and those are like the the Oscars that yeah for photo

journalism yeah they're the big ones and and I remember when I was a young kid I always used to print my stuff up you know when I was starting and send it in and then look at the stuff and go why didn't I win anything well that's because you know my stuff was just crap and that's why I didn't win anything so I sort of stopped entering competitions when I resigned from Reuters in 2008 it just didn't really interest me anymore but a friend of mine rang me up and And he said, you have entered those Wimbledon pictures into WordPress photo. I said, no? And he said, oh, Kieran, you've got to.

You've got to. They're amazing pictures. And I thought, well, you're the only one that thinks that they're amazing pictures. I was happy with them. But, you know, and he said, no, no, no, do it. So I did. And I had to submit 10 pictures. And I found 14 images that were potential.

And I got down to seven. And then I called Tia in. And I said to Tia, listen, you've got to find a number. another three pictures out of these five or six, which three do you think should go into the set? And Tia said, that one, that one, and that one. So great, that was it. And then it went.

And lo and behold, it won. So. Hearing won an Oscar. Yay. Yeah. So, yeah. And the irony of the story was, self-commission yourself and earn no money,

and you win a big award. I want to cover one more thing before we wrap this up. and one more series of images that you took. And I'm going to start this off with a poem. The poem is called Repatriation, and I'm just going to do an excerpt from it. The coffin draped in Union Jack is slowly carried out the back,

out of the dark and into the light, slowly down the ramp and to the right. The six approach the hearse, all black, and placed the hero gently in the back. The sixth then turn and march away. Their duty has been done this day. Politicians usually have much to say. No sign of them near here this day.

They hide away and out of danger. Much easier if the hero is a stranger. The hearse with its precious load moves slowly out on through the road. The floral tributes line the route While comrades snap A smart salute At the edge of Wiltshire town The courtage slows its pace right down

The streets are packed many deep Some throw flowers Most just weep The crowd have come to say farewell The church bell rings A low death knell regimental standards are lowered down as the hero passed through the town. The courtage stops and silence reigns.

The townsfolk feel the family's pain. The nation's flag lowered to half-mast. Our brave hero is home at last. And that was written by Sergeant Andrew McFarlane. In 2009, about a place in England called Wooten Bassett, which is where all British soldiers and service members that were killed in action were brought back home to England. And you shot some amazing photographs of that. And this was actually, when I first got to know you,

this was the first thing I found out was that you'd shot these photos and they're just incredible and they represent really to me just an incredible view of England and what England is in the world and how did you end up there once again with your camera? were in your hand. I was assigned the first time I ever went to Wooden Bassett. It was an assignment and I turned up and I was told the only

information I was given was bring a really tall ladder because you'll need it. And I didn't understand the dynamics of what was happening on the street. So it was my first time and I got there and the traffic was awful and I literally arrived

maybe 20 minutes before the cortege came through so I was running down the street with my ladder and I thought okay here with the other photographers is what we do we put a ladder up here and the ladder became clear because you need to go to the top of the ladder so when the hearse has come down the street

and stop and the family members put their roses on the hearse you need to be able to see over the top of the hearse to be able to see the grieving widows and relatives and you're standing on top of a six-step ladder. You're probably about 15 or 16 feet in the air and you're really quite conspicuous with a long lens. And it wasn't something that I was really comfortable doing

because the click of a camera in that silence was deafening. And it was one of those things that the repatriations had been happening before, for a while, I think, before I got there. And I mean years, maybe 2008, 2007, but before I, you know, had actually turned up to shoot my first one. So there had been a pattern that had developed over time. And the pattern was photographers turn up. They stand up a ladder.

They shoot the pictures. The event finishes and everybody goes home and the pictures are wired. And my first time I was there, I ended up. The best image I shot was from the floor of a young girl holding red roses, looking down the street waiting for the cortege to pass. And I was really aware of the ladders and the noise of the cameras and I thought I can't, I stopped myself from shooting because it was so loud.

And I thought, I can't be the one. And you would see something happening. And you would see a moment when maybe a wife came out and she touched the back of the hearse with her hand, you know, and put her head against the glass. And your instinct is to shoot that and shoot as many frames as that as possible. But I had my camera on single shot, so I was click, click.

But all you could hear, it was like machine guns of cameras. And it was so invasive. And I thought, but this is how the photographers got their pictures. This is what they had to do. There was no way around it. And I decided, that's fine. I understand that. That's what we have to do to get the pictures.

But I'm not going to do that anymore. I really don't want to get involved in this anymore. I found it too stressful. And what I ended up doing was not shooting when I should have shot, stopping myself, because I didn't want my click to be the click that everybody heard. And even though everybody had accepted that this is what happens, I thought, well, I'm just not comfortable with this. So I decided then that this was an amazing event and that I needed to look at this properly.

And bearing in mind that I had been late for it relatively, I hadn't seen what had happened before the Houses came. I had no idea what happened. So the next time I went down, I got down there really early, and there was no one on the street, and I watched the buildup. And for those of the don't know what the whole story about Wooden Basset was, the bodies of service personnel killed in action in Afghanistan were being repatriated to an air base,

and the only route out of the air base was through this tiny village market town. Caldwood and Basset. As the bodies were taken to the coroner's office in Oxford and it was the first time this happened the hearses came through and I think the town mayor spotted it and he just stopped and doffed his cap as they went past and then that just exponentially grew into you'd have thousands on the street

over the years it just grew into thousands and then the families changed their routine the families would just go to the basin line them and pay their final respects and then they would leave. But what happened was that the families would then pay their final respects and then everybody would wait for the families to come to the street and stand on the street. And so that you could see how the whole thing was evolving into this sort of incredible 10 minutes. And it started with people would turn up on the street and you'd find people that hadn't seen each other for years and they were just hey how's it going to you fancy going to the pub for a pint and they'd go and they'd have a drink and there would be this it was almost like a party atmosphere people were really pleased to see each other

and there was this lively bubbly noise going on and people were laughing and joking then the families would turn up and everything would sort of calm down just a little bit and then the bells were told in the church and there was complete silence and then the cortege would come through and it would stop and it would be led um by a lead sort of pallbearer and it would stop and it would give five minutes with the families and then sometimes it was just one hearse sometimes it was i did one occasion there were six six horses that came in um and and then it would leave and then everybody would disperse and then it would happen again and then again and it could be two could be twice a week it might be once a month

But I'd said every time it happens, I'm going to go down and shoot the story in a linear fashion because I just wanted to show everything from start to finish. So when you look at the essay of 50 pictures, it starts at the beginning with the street empty and then it works up to the last thing you see on the street of the roses as the hurses have driven off and the roses have fallen off the hurses. But I couldn't do it as a press photographer would do it. I had to find a way of doing it. And because I just wanted to get those moments.

I was looking for something completely different to what maybe the newspapers and the wire agencies were looking for. So I decided to shoot on film. And I have two Lyca M6s, and I had a 28 mil and a 50 mil, and I put film in because I could operate and you just can't hear those cameras. It's just a...

As opposed to the digital, which was really loud. And I started shooting it on film, and it was really hit and miss. I'd get stuff and I'd go down there on some occasions and I'd get nothing. But every time I went down, as I was building the story, I knew, okay, I'll look at the situation and work out what I'm going to get from this today and concentrate on one thing. And invariably you would concentrate on one thing, but what you would get was something that would happen somewhere else.

And so it meant getting into positions that the press were not supposed to. to be getting into. So I would want to go onto the other side of the street, which was reserved for family. I mean, anyone could stand there, but the unwritten rule was this is for family. And I didn't want to intrude on the family and their grief, and I wasn't there to photograph their grief from my position up close. I just wanted to see the reaction of people around there that I couldn't see from the other side of the road. So I was taking pictures, and I felt so conspicuous, and I was there with these two tiny cameras. but I felt so conspicuous, but no one was looking at me.

And I was able to just turn the camera around and just pre-focus and shoot. Don't put it to my eye, just turn around, click, shoot. So everything was sort of one frame. And, yeah, I sort of gradually sort of built the story up, and I knew that it had an ending because the air base that they were coming into originally before it came to Wooden Basset had been rebuilt. And all the bodies were going to be repatriated back to that other air base. So I knew at some point in August 2011 there would be the last repatriation.

So the fight you have with yourself when you're looking at the story and you're sitting there thinking, okay, I think I need this, I need an image here to fill this gap, is that you're waiting for a soldier to die in order for you to. finish your story. And it's not that you're waiting for a soldier to die, but a soldier dies and you, or, you know, in order for you to finish it, yeah, there's not, I'm not even articulate enough to explain what I mean by that, but the idea that you hear on the news, two soldiers have been killed and you think, okay, that's me going back down to Wooden Bassett to finish this story. So, the idea that I had a purpose, of going down to a place like that was really hard to deal with because people, everyone else down there was there because they were involved in, or directly involved with the soldier or they were people that just went to pay their respects. And so you could say in a way, if I wanted to justify it to myself, you are paying your respects

in a way because I wanted to, I wanted this story to be shot from start to finish because I think it deserved that. It wasn't just about grieving family members on the other side of a hearse, you know, weeping. There was so much more to that story than that. And so gradually the story began to sort of fill itself out. And then in the end, I was there for the final repatriation, and the town was then awarded royal status, which is the first time that happened in, I don't know, I think over 100 years

because it was the way, I think, the town, the way that it conducted itself was recognized by the Royal Family and they just sort of said, listen,

what you've done, you've not just put Wooden Bassett on the map, but you've shown how much dignity the British show when, you know, those that are fighting for their country are coming back and the way the whole thing.

And Wooden Bassett, they didn't want the adulation. They didn't want to be known as this place. They just thought we need to do this. And yep, it's from the heart, like we were saying earlier. There was no ulterior motive for that town to do what they did. It just happened. It was organic. And I wanted to show that story.

And so, yeah, that was it. It took, I think it was 19 months of going down and photographing it in every, every, you know, from every conceivable angle. And I was really proud of the finished set of pictures. I thought that tells the story from how I saw it from start to finish. And yeah, it was, and when it, when it finished, I didn't know how I felt because I thought, you know, when you get so used to doing something and, you know, I don't want soldiers to die

so that I can go down and finish a story. But you try and work out, how do I mentally get my head around what's happening here, you know? But the thing that's come out of it is that on the final repatriation, I wanted the pictures to be exhibited down there. I wanted to show Wooden Bassett

what I spent 18 months doing. But I didn't want to stick prints in a room. And I didn't want, you know, I just thought these pictures, I shot this on the street. These pictures need to be on the street. So I went down and I found a bank that said to me, you can have both double-fronted windows of our bank and you can put your images up during the final repatriation

because they thought we would love people to see this imagery and the reaction it got, I was really quite nervous because there were 50 images going up printed on A1 size in a bank's shop, you know, in the glass in the window. And I was really quite nervous as to how people would look at it. I thought, would people appreciate this? And they loved it. They loved the fact that this had been done.

And when I went back down to collect the images, I would say half of them. I just gave away to the pub, where you have the pictures of the soldiers saluting outside the pub that everybody went to. There was the old lady standing in the glass window. There was the kid wearing the Chelsea shirt. All these pictures just went,

and I just said, listen, just put some money in the charity box. and just take the prints because if all of them had gone, I would have thought that's fantastic because I didn't want to keep them. I just wanted, I thought if somebody wants that and they want it, that's amazing. And a lot of them went.

And that to me was vindication of having spent that time and done it, you know. And during that time as a photographer, I grew because I'd sort of come out of that way of shooting for the wire, which is all about a single image tell a story in the single image and I suppose ever since the beginning I've always been a photographer who wanted to tell a story but with a series of images

not just and there's a skill to doing what the wire guys do and I had that skill and I did it but I wanted to just expand my palette as a photographer and that meant spending time

on stories and trying to tell it as you know as a complete so you could take one picture out of there and go well what does that mean that picture but if you put it into the set you go oh okay now i know what it means so you're not shooting standalone images you're shooting images that means something when they're put together as a package um yeah and that was yeah i was very proud of those pictures well like i said that those pictures are are amazing and and i think they did exactly what why Wooten Bassett was, what was it named, a Royal Town? Royal Wooten Bassett.

Royal Wooten Bassett, I think it reflected exactly what that put forth in that is the pride of England, the honor of England, the respect of England, and I think that was all captured not only in the town, but of the images that you took. And I think we've been going for a long time right now, and I think that's about all we've got for tonight. I know I do want to say, obviously, thanks for coming on.

I know I worked with some photographers overseas. Some of them just took incredible risks to get the capture, to capture the moments that they captured. You know, the book that Laef and I wrote, a guy named Todd Pittman, who is their combat, he was a photographer

and just took some incredible images. And we were honored to be able to take those images and putting them in the book. But I know, there's many, many, obviously many photographers, journalists around the world that take great risks to report and capture the stories and get them spread around. And a lot of them are killed.

And you mentioned one in the beginning, but a lot, there's a lot of reporters and photographers, journalists that are out there in the world that they take huge risks and sometimes they pay the ultimate price for their job. And I know this was, I know I said a couple things on the podcast that were pretty rough. I appreciate everyone for sticking through those tough moments. Appreciate you travel to those places and sticking through those tough moments yourself, Kieran. And thanks for everybody for listening to the podcast. If you do want to support the podcast, Echo, tell them how to support it, my brother.

Well, we didn't really talk much about working out or anything that would constitute much supplementation. but what about alpha brain alpha brain yes yeah yeah that's true yeah because you got to be quick with your finger on the trigger of your of your camera yeah in some cases you might want to get something that alpha brain yeah i was talking to um i was i was talking to somebody this was like yesterday the day before about photography and you know people they'll see like a real good picture and they'll be like hey that's a good that's a cool picture what camera did you use? Do you ever find that insulting? I've heard it...

I've heard it compared to like, this girl I know Holly, she's an actor and a photographer. And she said it like this. When someone asks her what kind of camera she used, like, that's a great picture, what kind of camera did you use? It's like saying, hey, that's a great meal. What kind of stove did you use? You know, something like that. Yeah, I know, I get that. Meaning it wasn't the archer, it was the bow and the arrow that made it a good shot. Right, exactly.

I think I've had it the other end. I've had people say that, wow, that's a lovely looking camera. You must have shot some great pictures with that, you know. So, yeah, that's probably like that in reverse, yeah, you know. But you keep it traditional, too. I mean, obviously you're doing manual focus on film a lot of times. Yeah. And on digital.

this is this is yeah manual focus on digital as well yeah but I've been using them for 20 odd years so not the likers they're not everybody's cup of tea I know a lot of professional photographers they're not you know it's not their cup of tea but and

also you know it's a particular type of photojournalists I think that uses a camera like this and when I say particular I mean they shoot particular stories in a particular way it's not that you know they're any better than anybody else They certainly aren't.

They just choose to use a camera that doesn't have long lenses. And I like to use a camera that doesn't, my longest lenses are 50 mil. You got to stalk your target. Yeah. Like a bow and I like to use these are quiet and you're getting close. Yeah. See, like even that, that's a photographic assassin. There's so much detail to the art, you know, where, of course, equipment is something.

Sure. But like the artistic part of it, and I think it's, I think photography gets it the most, I think. Yeah. Because it's like, like how you said, everyone's a photographer now. Absolutely. Everyone can, I can take a picture. Give me a good camera. Mine can look like that.

And everybody can, everybody has it in them to shoot a beautiful picture. I firmly believe everybody can shoot a great picture. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. But yeah, so alpha brain, boom. Take some alpha brain. Take better pictures potentially. There you go.

Right. At the end of the day, there you go. But you got a lug heavy camera equipment around. Yeah. You might want to, you know. Some shroom tech for that one. Yeah. It's some shroom tech for that one.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. running TV, the sewage that could have helped you in the later minutes. Yeah, that's right. And I've just discovered these tonight as well.

Warrior bars, boom. Solid, right? Yeah. I'm not a good host. Didn't feed him. My wife.

What are you talking about? Oh, I did. I did. Once my wife said, what is wrong with you? Why don't you feed him some food? And I said,

okay, he needs food. Warrior bar. And she was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, not mine. Yeah.

Dem's mine. Boom. Warrior bar. So yeah. If you want to get 10% off those, Onet.com slash jaco, boom, 10% off. So supplement yourself, supplement your wallet, if you will. There you go.

Or if you want to support before you shop on Amazon, go to our websites, one of them, Jocko store or jacquodcast.com, click through the Amazon link. Support passively. Passively. No. Efficiently, yes. Passively, no.

We don't do things passive. here at the Jockle podcast. We aggressively make things efficient. Yes, that's what we do here. Amazon. All right, well, you want to get more efficient. And also, UK is working. Yeah, UK's up, solid.

Germany? Working. Germany is... We'll be working. Canada, we know. Canada is working, yep. So if you're in those countries, appreciate the support. Amazon, click through.

Trooper tool? Trooper tool. That's what I'm saying. If you want to get efficient, ultra aggressively efficient oh I like it mm-hmm

we're supporting through Amazon just go go the website instead of the Amazon link click on the trooper tool jocco podcast

trooper tool Chrome extension boom adds a little thing on your browser automatically support every time you shop

Amazon that's legit very legit my opinion thanks again brady for that one tech genius jujitsu student

and if you wear t-shirts go to jocco store.com you might like some of those you know discipline equals freedom jaco's head says good backwards the good is backwards

so when you look in the mirror it's a message to you it's not for other people it's not for other people just like this podcast it's not for everybody it's not for everybody this podcast is for you

that's right stickers but yeah stickers on there and travel mugs people are posting cool bumper stickers but they're not putting them on their bumpers

No, no. They're putting them on their squat rack. Yep. Like that. You know, I go on my desk, my whiteboard. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, the stickers are bumper stickers, but they're for everything, for sure.

Yeah. So if you like that stuff, yeah, man, you can support it that way. That's a cool way. Get one of those. We'll send it to you. Another thing we got coming. A little bit of Jocko White Tea, pomegranate style.

It should be coming out in the next few weeks. Just to keep checking back to the website. It comes in a cool tin. And it says jocco white tea on it. Pomegranate. Because that's how I do things. People like, what we need to do is come up with a really cool name for the podcast. And I go, okay, jaco, podcast, boom.

Oh, we need to come up with a cool name for the jaco white tea. Okay, Jocko white tea, boom. Because we're not, you know, we're just doing, we're just trying to keep things simple. Yep. Here to win. One of the laws of combat. Here to win, yep. So check that out.

It is pomegranate. white tea. It's what obviously I talked about that on the first my introduction to the world was when Tim Ferriss said I mixed up some some pomegranate white tea and you know Tim he's a he's an affectionato of tea. Dude that guy has a yeah that that too yeah he has a special um kettle where you press what kind of tea you're drinking and it's going to bring it to the appropriate temperature for that type of tea green tea white tea white tea. tea, black tea, it's going to do it right. He's got that thing. He's got like a little

shelf. He's into his tea. But he had the white pomegranate tea before. So when I showed up and I said, hey, you want some of this? And so I mixed it up for him and he's drinking it. And we were starting to podcast in you know, like 20 minutes. And 12 minutes later, he starts

going, yeah. What kind of tea was that? He was all kinds of fire. So then the next thing that happened was on Amazon I would see people would order extreme ownership. And then it would be like, oh, people that bought extreme ownership also bought pomegranate white tea. And then finally one of the tea people said, hey, you need to have your own tea.

And I said, okay, I'll make my own tea, but it's going to be good, real good. So I went through a, it took a while because I kept saying, no, nope, nope, do this, nope, a little bit more of that. And finally, we got to the tea that not only tastes good, but it gives you the white pomegranate D power So be looking for that Speaking of extreme ownership You can buy that book written by myself

And my brother Leif Babin You can get on hardcover Where you can make lots of notes And put little tabs in there And highlight stuff You can buy it on digital I think you can make notes Notes on digital too

But it doesn't look as cool Kindle Yeah you can put notes in Kindle right Well I use the Kindle app And bro I don't know what I did without Well I didn't really read before that but I'm just saying

you can do notes, color code every, yeah, man, all at your fingertips are really good. That's good, and I'm glad you dig that. Me personally, I need to have physical, you know, note. I got my pens lined up, highlighters lined up, you know how I do things with the physical. I mean, can I really do the podcast from a

Kindle? Is that going to work? No, we would have to shut down the podcast. Well, you'd have to learn how to use the Kindle first, you would... Oh, I'd have to free my mind a little bit. then also the extreme ownership muster which is a little conference we're having out here in san diego california if you want to talk about all this stuff in depth with some real focus myself laf running this thing out here in san diego california leadership conference but that's one

way of looking at it another way of looking at is frontal assault on your brain. So come and get some of that October 20th and 21st. Check out Eschalonfront.com for some details on that. And also,

if you want to continue this conversation, you know that we're all up upon the interwebs. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. Twitter,

Facebooky, Instagram. Kieran, is also on those various mediums. And he's... So I spell it. Spell it. Okay.

It's at. I am K-I-E-R-A-N-D-O-H-E-R-T-Y. And it's the same on Instagram. I'm Kiernda-R-D-R-D-R-E. But it's not I-A-M-M-R-A-M. Right, it's I am. I am. That's a common one, though, like people...

It's not like, it's like, oh, shoot, you know, like, what? Repeat that, because that's a common one. Like, they'll put the or I'm or, like, I don't know, MMA at the end or something. So that's a common one. So it's not that hard to remember is what I'm saying. India, Mike, Kilo, India, Echo, on down the line. I'll put it in the link. Romeo, half a November.

And I'm you to Twitter, so I really need some friends. Followers. Oh, sorry, follows. But actually, you have. do Instagram. I do Instagram. I guess that one's a little more obvious for you since you take pictures with that. And it's a camera thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Since you're a photographer and whatnot. And so, Kieran, once again, thanks for coming on. My pleasure.

Thanks for sharing these stories. It was awesome to talk to you and good to see you again. And, of course, to the troopers out there that have listened to this podcast. Thanks for joining us here. thanks for looking at the world and even if you're not taking pictures of the world at least take the time

to appreciate it all of it the good and the bad the light and the dark and while you're out there in the world go ahead and make sure you

get after it too So until next time, this is Kieran and Echo and Jocko. Out.