This is the picture that probably most affects me still.
She had stood up and gave me this look.
Walking away is often much more difficult
than actually doing your job,
especially when you know that only a few dollars would keep them alive.
[DEVELOPING NEWS]
My name’s Giles Clarke. I’m a photojournalist.
These images are from Bhopal in India,
which was the place where, in 1984, a gas disaster occurred.
A former pesticide factory, owned at the time by Union Carbide,
leaked a toxic cloud of gas
that killed 10,000 people over 24 hours.
And these pictures are of second-generation people
who have been affected by the water contamination.
The authorities never cleaned up the site.
It's still never been cleaned up.
Greenpeace called it one of the most toxic hotspots on Earth.
This is a young boy called Sameer and his mother.
And like many of the people in Bhopal that I talked to,
they were very keen to show
the ravages of just what this toxicity has done.
He weighed just 40 pounds despite being 15 years old.
The muted genetic effects of carcinogens in water
create all sorts of cancers and thyroid issues.
Many of the children that I photographed
have since passed away.
Sameer died in 2015, I believe.
This is another picture taken in a Bhopal slum
that’s near the former pesticide factory.
There’s something about the resilience of the mothers
who, for 24 hours a day, look after their children
that have been affected by this contamination.
Ateeq is the boy, who was 15 years old at the time,
and his sister is pumping water.
This is part of the problem with Bhopal and the slums around
is that because the government
really didn’t want to accept responsibility for this,
there was not a big campaign to warn people about
the effects of the toxicity of the water.
So this image here
shows that they are still pumping water from the aquifer.
You see the twisted fingers here of the boy.
What that still doesn’t capture is the violence of this illness.
And this is Ateeq again
in the throes of one of his convulsions.
His mother’s arm is trying to keep his head up,
but he was very expressive.
And this is a 15-year-old boy who has no communication skills,
and it’s guttural sounds that came out of him.
I just found this moment a powerful statement
to the horrors of the toxic contamination.
Ateeq has since died,
like many of the other children that I’ve photographed.
This is Mohd Anas. He was seven years old at the time.
The mother, who had a number of children,
would say to me that this was a place that Mohd would like to sit
because of the yellow light.
And you can see he’s smiling.
Again, I’m drawn to how the parents deal with
having a son or a daughter like this
and the dignity and the level of patience needed
to look after a child in this condition.
Whatever it takes to bring a little bit of happiness.
And I think it captures sweet innocence despite his condition.
During the 1970s, El Salvador was in the middle of a 36-year civil war.
Many of the young El Salvadorians fled to Los Angeles.
And to protect themselves against gangs in L.A.,
they created MS-13 and M18.
These are the two main gangs
that run most of the gang life in Central America now.
They were named after two streets in Los Angeles.
MS-13 and M18 took control of much of the overland cocaine business,
which is now an epidemic issue within Central America.
It’s a gang-run society in many ways.
Because of the overcrowding in the jail systems,
I spent a few days with the police captain and his team.
Suspected gang members were put in these cages
and held away from other parts of the prison society.
They’re fed twice a day.
They shit in a hole in the back.
They’re just waiting for trial.
A lot of them wore crosses.
The only thing that they were reading was the Bible,
which is the sort of dichotomy of this whole situation,
the fact that these imprisoned men
have this God-fearing spirit about them.
What they do is, when they arrive, they--
I mean, this guy still has his shirt on,
but you can see here the strands of cotton.
They’re given needles.
They pull apart their clothes,
and from these strands of cotton that they’ve separated,
they make hammocks,
and then they sleep in the hammocks.
You’ll see how they hang themselves up
and take it in turn to sleep.
The police captain had come to his wits’ end
about how to deal with this.
This was just a desperate thing going on in the back of his station,
and he was fed up with it.
And he told me, “This can’t go on.”
Yemen has been sort of under lockdown in many ways.
Coalition led by Saudi Arabia and America and other Western powers
against the Houthi rebels of the northern area,
which is controlling the Sanaa capital
and the surrounding area,
which is some 20 million of the 28 million people in Yemen today.
This shot sort of covers the downtrodden women
and the men rushing off to war.
Daily life shot, really, in many ways.
But just with the symbolism of the flag,
it just gives it that geographical meaning.
This is the Aal Okab school.
It was a school that had been bombed.
You can see here the airstrikes had taken down most of the ceilings.
And I was just fortunate enough to get to this place
and then to meet some of these children.
The infrastructure’s broken.
The blockades have created a lack of supplies
in everything from construction, medicine, food.
The access has been cut between the schools and home.
With 4 million kids out of school at any one time,
compound that by every year,
then you have a lot of children who are just not going to school
for many years.
It takes the future away from them.
I’ve met so many kids in camps,
and they’re operating in schools on the sand
and they’re operating in tents.
In a way, it’s a sign of hope
because despite the damage and the despair and everything,
there’s still that yearning to learn.
This is Batool.
At the time of photography, she was seven years old.
I’d come into the hospital
and was shown the severe malnutrition wing,
but she’d been sat down when I first met her.
As I turned round to walk out,
I sort of looked back,
and she had stood up and gave me this look.
And so I took this picture.
It resonates really with me because of what I felt at the time
and almost her not wanting me to leave.
This is the picture that probably most affects me still.
I didn’t quite know what to do.
Walking away is often much more difficult
than actually doing your job,
especially when you know that only a few dollars would keep them alive.
I kept in touch with Batool’s mother through the doctors.
We’d been able to get some basic supplies
through to the malnutrition wing.
So after a few weeks,
Batool was actually discharged and went back to her village.
But in early August of 2017,
I got word that Batool had passed away from cholera.
We published this picture,
and Senator Bernie Sanders got hold of it.
Yemen is at risk of the most severe famine in more than 100 years.
He’d used it as argument against
the US involvement in the war in Yemen.
So her spirit sort of lived on, in a way.
What’s the role of your camera in a seemingly hopeless situation?
It’s a roller coaster of emotions, always, covering this stuff.
But I’ve really found peace
covering some of these tougher situations
because I just think I should.
I’m fortunate to be there.
It's a dreadful situation.
There's not much time to be sad,
but there’s quite a lot of time to be angry.
It’s really...
better than doing nothing.