The RPG’s a major weapon
because it’s portable and very destructive.
One of them almost killed me in Afghanistan,
and it would have done if it had gone off.
[Developing News]
This photograph’s taken in Afghanistan.
I was on assignment for Médecins Sans Frontières,
and they wanted me to do a piece on the war, the forgotten war.
It’s originally shot in color,
and actually, I prefer it as a black and white.
But the slightly demonic look on the horse
kind of feels that color’s the right medium.
There’s a sport there called buzkashi,
which is quite a violent sport,
and traditionally the headless corpse of a goat or a calf
would be the ball.
And the idea of the game quite simply was to get it across the line
by whatever means are possible.
When I was taking this image there, everything was a bit chaotic.
I mean, it’s just before the game started.
This guy and the horse in front is trying to sort of bat me off.
You know, Afghanistan was a great place to photograph
until the Taliban came into power.
So it was pre-Taliban days,
and there was a lot of... there was a civil war going on.
I mean, basically, various warlords
were making sure that they kept control of their turf,
which meant that they could rape the women in it,
which meant that they could steal from the farmers.
And the farmers were getting pretty pissed off, not surprisingly.
My experience is very simple, that when I do go to war zones,
except for total war zones, life goes on, people get by.
Sheep got herded in the rituals of summer and winter.
Crops get grown, sewn, and harvested.
And I wanted to photograph that older Afghanistan.
If you had a camera 2,000 years ago, you’d take exactly the same picture.
Kids would be wearing what they’re wearing.
A sheep would look like this,
the architecture would look like that.
So I was...
keen to kind of try and get that nuance of...
the ancientness of the culture.
You’ve got this dynamic that weaves around.
He looks that way. He’s looking back at me,
then I’m back in the picture again.
But it’s got a strong, very strong diagonal going on with it,
which is contradicted by this horizontal.
And that sets up a kind of tension, visual tension.
And I think a lot of good photographs, interesting photographs
have a quality of circularity
that they keep you bouncing about inside the frame,
and then you bounce outside and then you come back in again.
This is only a fragment of what their lives are like.
Hopefully I’ll carry it back with me.
I was parked up beside the road with some kind of puncture, I think,
and this truck went past,
so I chased them around this hill a bit with a long lens.
They’re kind of wondering what this lunatic’s doing.
I’m not shouting at these people to look at the camera.
I’m shouting at them not to look at the camera.
And they kind of go around the bend of the road and off to war somewhere.
You know, the fact is that they were like farmers with a Kalashnikov,
and they used it when they had to use it.
The level of skills were basically learned on the battlefield.
You know, there’s no nice army training system for two years.
They get thrown in headfirst, basically.
Like soldiers everywhere,
just ordinary people who got caught up in it.
They were sensible people. They had families at home.
They wanted to get back in one piece,
and I think you have to respect that.
You know, I think it’s a common thing amongst armies.
They downplay, as it were,
the dangers that they’re going to go into.
I don’t expect to go to places like Afghanistan,
where there’s a major conflict going on,
and get away lightly.
This guy, for example, has got an RPG on his back,
and then he seems to be holding one in his front as well.
I was beating a retreat along with some other media people,
and then we heard this “sssss” noise and hit the ground.
There was an unexploded RPG head,
and it didn’t go off.
You know, running up this hill, watching this,
I had two young kids.
I thought, “I want to play football with them.”
I sort of decided that was the last conflict zone I was going to go to.
OK, let’s start again.