You hear this sort of thud and smack.
I could feel the shockwaves of the physicality of these fights.
You just think, “That guy’s not going to get up.”
[Developing News]
I’m Finbarr O’Reilly.
I’m an independent photographer and writer.
I started my career, actually, as a showbiz correspondent.
I think it was about the fourth or maybe the fifth time
that I interviewed Lenny Kravitz that I said,
“I’ve got to go do something else, I think, now.”
For many years, I was covering conflicts across Central Africa,
West Africa, where I was based,
and I needed to step back from that at some point.
This whole scene,
it was this amazing spectacle of buzkashi,
which is Afghanistan's national sport.
The objective is to carry the carcass of a dead goat.
You have to carry it from one end, around a pole,
and back the other end.
It’s very brutal and violent,
and it encompasses Afghanistan in many ways
because the individual players are fighting for themselves,
but they also can form teams and alliances,
and these can shift throughout, which is very representative of
how alliances in this war shift sometimes.
The helmets that they’re wearing here
are old Russian tank helmets.
This is a sport that was played in the times of Genghis Khan,
and it’s still played now.
I went to Madagascar in 2018,
and one of the things that I stumbled across
was this amazing cultural phenomenon called moraingy,
which is bare-knuckle boxing,
something that dates back centuries and centuries
and was originally used as a way for the villages
to resolve conflicts between them,
and they would put their best fighters against one another.
In one of the towns where I was on Sundays,
all the people would gather.
It was almost like going to church.
The wooden pews would be laid out and crowds would gather.
And they’re all there to kind of worship the gods of combat, in a way.
This is the most prestigious sport.
When I was sitting on the ringside,
and you hear this sort of thud and smack,
I could feel the shockwaves of the physicality of these fights.
The impact that these guys are having,
you just think, “That guy’s not going to get up.”
But they do. They bounce up.
And the harder they fight, the more the crowd gets into it.
This is a bunch of kids sitting up here.
They’re up in the tree,
trying to get a free view of the whole spectacle.
Sometimes, I got in the way of the viewers,
and they’d start throwing little rocks at me,
at the back of me, and telling me that I was in their way.
But it was all in good fun.
There’s never any kind of hostility to it.
Here, we’re in Afghanistan.
I spent quite a bit of time with the US Marines in Helmand Province,
and particularly with this guy right here.
His name is Sergeant Thomas Brennan.
This was Taliban strongholds everywhere around this hill.
As soon as you walk outside the small outpost
that was about the size of two tennis courts,
they would take machine-gun fire from Taliban fighters.
So it was a very hostile area.
As an embedded photographer,
the more remote
and the smaller the group of guys that you can spend time with,
the more likely you're going to get intimate photographs.
Sergeant Brennan was in charge of the 15 or so guys
who were at this outpost.
These guys had no power, no water,
none of their tents had been delivered,
none of their winter equipment had been delivered,
and this was now November, which can get pretty cold at night.
That thing draped over his head was all they had to protect themselves
from the dust and the rain.
So there are all these real stickler rules,
you know, that you have to shave every day,
even though you’re out here, you don’t have water.
You’re just shaving with cold bottled water.
And you’re not supposed to smoke in your tent or in your bed.
When it published,
he got a lot of trouble from his commanding officer.
There were posters put up with this picture, saying,
“Here’s a picture of a turd Marine. Don’t ever be caught like this.”
But interestingly enough, a day or two later,
I got an email from a Pentagon officer saying he loved the picture.
He thought it was super hardcore.
So he got a lot of grief,
but in the end, we became friends.
We wrote a book, and we’re still friends to this day.
Last year, just before the pandemic hit,
I was assigned by
to embed with the French Foreign Legion
in the Sahel region, just south of the Sahara,
encompassing Niger, Mali, Chad,
and a few other countries in that area.
I had about a week, more or less, with them rolling around the desert
in this giant convoy of a couple of hundred vehicles,
a couple of hundred men supposedly fighting ISIS cells,
but really never seeing anybody.
This picture was taken as I was actually getting picked up,
and these were the guys who called in the location
and guided in the helicopters.
This is a Brazilian guy.
He was unwittingly just standing there
admiring these birds coming in for the landing,
and just got a face full of dust.
And he turned around, like, spitting,
and his weapon probably had to be cleaned.
I think he-- Yeah, nobody told him.
So here we’re in Senegal, in Dakar.
This is a place where I was based for ten years.
Over the years, as I was covering conflicts
and quite difficult stories,
I would come back often feeling pretty frazzled, burnt out.
Photographing these scenes,
it was about coming back to something that felt beautiful and creative
rather than the ugliness and destruction
that I’d been witnessing and experiencing in conflict zones.
Yeah, this courtyard was kind of a gold mine.
You know, it's the kind of place where you couldn't have designed
a better set for a photoshoot if I’d tried.
So, I was photographing these three women.
They were just there.
The women who owned the compound,
who were inside this room having a chat to themselves,
decided to stick their heads around the door to have a look.
This guy was a street vendor. He heard there was
kind of a commotion going on in this courtyard.
He thought maybe there were some customers,
so he wandered in.
At the same time were these boys
who’d been bouncing a ball off this wall
were observing the scene.
And it was funny because Adama, my friend,
the designer who made these outfits,
wanted to chase the boys away
and get people to go back to actually take the picture
as we were supposed to be doing it.
And I was quickly trying to take a series of pictures
to capture this kind of magical moment of all this stuff happening.
It did win first place
in the portrait category at the World Press Awards in 2019,
which was a really nice recognition of the work that Adama, the designer,
has done to put Senegalese fashion on the global scene.