Translator: Monica Ronchi Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
My story begins with a small gift.
An Olympus OM-10 camera,
and a book by the war photographer Don McCullin.
When I was 18 years old, I had gone to the States on a sports scholarship.
I was the world's worst boxer.
I remember getting a backhanded compliment from my coach.
He said, “Giles, you take a punch very well.”
(Laughter)
But as you'll learn, I'm quite a stubborn character
and I wasn't sure that my lack of sporting ability
wouldn't get in the way of a sporting career.
But when I reached the States, I had a car accident
and I damaged my knees and had to return to the UK.
And suddenly I found myself in hospital,
told I would never do any kind of sport again.
I had failed at school, I'd been quite a problematic child,
and lying in that hospital bed, I became a very angry young man.
I had no idea what I was going to do with my future.
Unfortunately, at the same time,
my godfather Barry, who I was very close to, passed away.
But he bequeathed me two things
that his wife, Neeta, came to bring me in hospital.
One was an Olympus OM-10 camera that he had just bought,
and another was the book by the war photographer Don McCullin.
Now, I had never really come across photography.
I grew up in a house where art wasn't a big thing,
we weren't really covering or listening to the news.
So suddenly, I was confronted by these black and white images
that Don McCullin had taken, for the first time.
Images from Biafra, from the famines in Bangladesh, from the war in Vietnam,
and I was amazed, I was so moved by these stories.
At night, I would turn the light on and get the book from the bedside table
because I had to look again.
And to this day, if I shut my eyes, I can still see those images.
I was so moved that I knew this is what I wanted to do with my life,
I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Don McCullin
and document conflicts around the world.
So with this Olympus OM-10 camera,
I actually taught myself photography lying in a hospital bed.
I used to photograph the doctors, nurses, my friends,
anyone who would come in.
As an 18-year-old I mainly photographed the nurses.
(Laughter)
And when I left hospital, I had mastered the basics of photography.
But I had a few friends in bands who were musicians, and they said,
“Can you come along and photograph us?”
And really by accident, I became a music photographer.
Suddenly magazines were commissioning me, and I travelled around the world
photographing the likes of The Charlatans, Oasis,
Marilyn Manson, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz,
so suddenly I'd got into this very exciting rock and roll life.
I remember my Aunty Margaret, a very stern Scottish woman,
sitting there one Christmas Day, and she said,
“Giles, I thought you wanted to do something serious with your photography,
and here you are doing this silly music and fashion – what went wrong?”
(Laughter)
I looked at her and said, “Aunty Margaret, I've got to be honest,
I'm just doing it for the beautiful women and great parties!”
She said, “Giles, seriously.”
I said, “I'm 19 years old; this is a legitimate reason for a career path.”
(Laughter)
For the next 10 years that's what I did, I loved it.
I had an amazing time, I met many amazing people,
but increasingly, there was a nagging sense
that I should be doing something more with my life,
and that nagging sense grew to become a depression,
and I found myself really unhappy with the work I was doing, with my life,
but I couldn't quite work out what was going wrong.
On the outside, to everybody, it seemed like I had this dream life,
but inside I was empty.
One day I was doing a shoot at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London,
a very fancy hotel,
and there was an argument going on between the editor of a magazine
and a young actress, about her state of undress.
Another thing that I'd grown increasingly cynical about
was the way women were portrayed in the magazines I worked for.
I was listening to this argument, and I suddenly thought,
"This is not why I became a photographer."
So in a rock and roll moment I took my cameras
and threw them out the window of the Charlotte Street Hotel.
That's the story.
Anybody who knows me knows I'm less rock and roll and more Radio 4.
I kind of had a little hissy fit and I threw them on the bed.
(Laughter)
It's just that they happened to bounce out of the window;
someone else saw them fly out the window, and I had to go along with it.
But it was a symbolic end of my photography.
I sunk into further depression,
and really had no idea where I was going with my life.
I was only 29 years old but I felt like my life was really over.
And then I remembered that small gift,
and I remembered that Olympus OM-10 camera and the work of Don McCullin,
and I realized that's where I had been going wrong,
and that I hadn't followed what was my destiny.
So at that point, I moved to Angola,
I sold my flat, and I pursued a full-time career
as a documentary photographer covering conflicts around the world.
More specifically, I covered the effects of conflict on civilians around the world.
I was really interested in their stories.
In 2011, while doing that work in Afghanistan, I stepped on a landmine.
I lost both my legs and my arm.
At that point, I was told, at first, my life would probably be over.
Then I was told I'd never walk again and I would certainly never work again.
A few weeks after I got injured, I watched on the news
as the first uprisings began in Syria.
As the months went on, I had 37 operations in my first year,
and through that recovery, again, I watched the news,
and I saw the crisis in Syria grow.
As I started my rehabilitation, as I was working to walk again,
the only thing on my mind was I had to go there and cover this story,
because I knew this was the most important story of my career,
and the stories had to be told.
Three years after my injury, I was well enough to return to work full-time,
and the first place I really wanted to go
was to Lebanon, to document the refugee crisis there.
Lebanon is a country of 4 million people, and by the time I went in 2014,
they already had over a million Syrian refugees living there.
That's 25% of the population.
To put that in context, last year, during the European refugee crisis,
close to a million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe.
Europe has a population of 250 million people,
so imagine what the pressure is in Lebanon.
I was mostly interested in the most vulnerable,
those with disabilities, the elderly, single mothers.
So I went there and I started to document.
This is one of the first people I met; this is Khulood.
Khulood had been out in her garden,
her village in Syria was under siege, and so she was growing vegetables.
She was in her garden with her children, tending to them,
when suddenly she collapsed.
A sniper had shot her through the spine, and she fell in front of her children.
Her family managed to get her to Damascus where her life was saved,
and then they got her to Lebanon.
They ended up living in this makeshift tent
in an informal settlement in the Bekaa Valley.
When I went to visit her, her husband, who's in this picture,
was her full-time carer.
I asked Khulood, "What is your hope for the future?"
She said, “I just want to be a mother again.”
She described to me how it felt - she was paralyzed from the neck down -
when she heard her children playing outside,
and one of them would fall over and scratch his knee.
They would come in and lift her hand and put it on the wound, and say,
“Make it better, mummy.”
And she said, “And I can't even feel it.”
I met Reem. Reem was asleep one night in her house in Syria when a rocket hit.
Her husband was killed in the bed next to her,
one of her daughters was killed in the room next to theirs.
She lost her leg.
When I met her, she was living in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon,
in a house that was not fully finished.
She was up three floors, so with her new prosthetic leg
was not even able to get in or out of the building.
Her children no longer lived with her because she felt ashamed,
and she didn't want them living there when she felt she couldn't be a mother.
This was her father who also lived on the rooftop.
When I took his portrait, I said, “Why do you live on this rooftop?”
He looked out into the distance, to the mountains, and he said,
“That is Syria. I may never return in my lifetime,
but at least every morning and every evening I see my home.”
And then I visited Aya.
When I first went to see Aya, I was shocked.
She's a 4-year-old girl with spina bifida,
meaning she's paralyzed from the waist down.
When I went to see her, she was living like the others in a makeshift tent.
She was alone on a concrete floor.
I saw her and I thought she looked so vulnerable, like a victim,
and one of the key elements in my work
is I never want to portray people as victims.
They're victims of circumstance but I don't like them to be seen as victims.
So I said to the people I was with,
“I can't take this photograph, it's wrong and won't represent her in the right way.”
As soon as I said that,
her family started to come back in, people started to chat,
and her mother, Shihan, said to me, “You should meet her sister, Iman.
Iman and Aya are the two that should be photographed together."
I said, “Why's that?” And then they told me the story.
Iman, who was only 12 herself,
when their house was bombed in Syria had taken Aya in her arms.
They'd gone and sheltered in the basement for three days with no food or water,
and then they'd begun the perilous journey from Syria to Lebanon
that took them nearly three months.
She had carried her sister Aya that whole journey.
Then I also discovered that Aya was not a victim.
She was actually the feistiest 4-year-old I had ever met in my life.
When Iman walked in, she shouted, “Hey, donkey, pick me up!”
(Laughter)
They went out and started playing hopscotch.
I went and revisited several times.
And, as I say, I discovered Aya was this incredible feisty young girl,
and so the photograph I was able to take was this one,
which I think really represented her.
Last year, I was asked by the UNHCR
to document the refugee crisis across Europe and the Middle East.
They gave me one of the most amazing briefs a photographer's ever been given,
they just said, "Follow your heart."
For the first six months, I documented the crisis across Europe,
but I knew that if I was really to follow my heart, I had to return to Lebanon
and revisit the families that I'd got to know there the first time.
This is meeting Reem's father.
I gave him a picture I'd taken, and his first comment was,
“You made me look really old in this!”
(Laughter)
This is Reem, and you'll see her daughter Sara is now with her,
and this is with her brother and father; and life, in many ways, goes on.
The cooking, all the kind of things you expect a family to be like.
But then the longer you spend there,
the more you realize things are not quite what they seem.
The men aren't able to work,
and in many cases, the children can't go to school.
When I spoke to Reem about her daughter Sara, I said,
“What is her education like? How's school?”
I found out that Sara hadn't been to school for four years.
In fact, she hadn't even played with any other children in that period.
She was isolated on this rooftop,
and this is the case for many refugee children around the world.
I, of course, went back to visit Aya and her family.
Things had changed a little, UNHCR has now provided better accommodation for them,
they obviously get enough food.
Aya was as feisty as ever,
here is she playing, again telling her donkey brother to go faster,
and so things were good in some ways.
But again, when you spend time with the family,
you realize things had changed, psychologically.
When I first met them, they kept saying,
“In six months we'll return to Syria, the war won't last.”
Now when I sat and talked to Shihan and Ayman, Aya's parents, they would say,
“We've lost hope. We don't think we'll ever see Syria again.”
So now, they're trying to look for other options.
On the last day I was there, I got a phone call.
I'd tracked down many people that I got to know in Lebanon, but not everybody,
and on that phone call was a family member of Khulood.
They said, “Khulood would love to see you, she hears you're around.”
I said, “Where is she? Where's she living?”
They said, "She's in the same tent, where you last saw her.”
My heart stopped.
I thought of all the people I'd met two years before,
she was the most vulnerable and the most in need.
I couldn't believe that she could be living in the same tent.
I was shocked.
When I turned up there, I actually burst into tears.
I said, “I've failed you.
I tried to tell your story and yet here you are in exactly the same situation.”
Her husband hugged me, and said,
“You didn't fail us and we knew you'd come back.”
I was in turmoil, I didn't know what to do,
I thought, "What's the point of my work if it doesn't make a difference?"
But the next day, that stubbornness clicked in again
and I said the only thing I can do is to tell their story again.
So I went back and over the next few days
I documented everything about their daily life.
I can honestly say I've never worked so hard as a photographer
to try and tell their story.
It's a beautiful family and you can see the connections that they all have.
But imagine the fact that Khulood has not been out of that tent for over two years.
Every day she lies there, just staring at the ceiling.
This is her doing homework with the kids,
this is her with her husband who every day patiently looks after her.
I was nervous on showing them the photograph I took the first time.
This is a picture I took of Khulood soon after she was injured,
with her living in this tent, paralyzed; how will she take it?
But I said to them, “I want to give you the photograph I first took.
When I took this photograph, I did not see you as a refugee.
I did not take a photograph of a disabled person.
I took a photograph of a couple who loved each other so deeply.”
Then they both started crying, I started crying,
and they just looked at each other and expressed their love to each other.
We are facing a global crisis.
The refugee crisis affects all of us.
It's a global crisis that needs global solutions.
I believe we are at a crossroads
in how we choose to treat and deal with the refugee crisis.
I also think it's a moment in the history of our humanity
in how we deal with it, and it's difficult.
I come home from trips, and people say,
“How do you deal with everything you see in these camps?”
I say the biggest struggle is that in those camps
I see humanity, I see love, I see compassion.
Often when I come home, that's where I miss it.
Every day we see in the media negative stories.
Every day politicians use negative rhetoric for their own aims.
Every morning when I look
I see on social media negative stories, with bigotry and hatred.
It's time for us who know what's right
to stand up, be counted, and do something about it,
because every time I see one of those negative stories,
I think of Aya, I think of Reem and I think of Khulood,
and I think to myself, "What more can I do?"
I want all of us to go home tonight and think to ourselves,
"What more can I do?" because we can do something,
we can make a difference, whether that be raising funds,
donating to some of the large organizations,
getting involved and volunteering with grassroots organizations.
There are so many things: petition your politicians,
and when you see negative stories on social media,
maybe point out the truths to those people.
I believe no matter how small our act is, we can and should make a difference.
I want to end my story with a small gift.
Twenty-five years ago my godfather passed away,
and he left me an Olympus OM-10 camera
and a book by the war photographer Don McCullin.
What I didn't realize then is that he had given me two things:
in the work of Don McCullin, he had given me the gift of stories,
and with the camera, he had given me the gift of how to tell them.
I received a letter six months ago from a young man in Australia,
a guy called Mark, and he started by saying,
“I just want you to know that I've got into Brisbane Medical School.”
I thought, "Well, good for you, but why are you telling me?"
(Laughter)
He then explained that he'd struggled in his last year at school.
It had been very difficult for him,
he had problems at home, had struggled academically,
people had told him he wasn't smart enough.
But he said, “I got into Brisbane Medical School to do surgery
and I was in the top 1% of my class.
But I want to thank you, Mr. Duley.
A photograph that you took in Afghanistan inspired me,
and every day I had that photograph on my wall,
and when I struggled, I'd look at that it and say,
'That's why I want to do what I want to do.' "
Twenty-five years after that camera was given to me,
the ripples of that action were still being felt
and affecting people around the world.
I'm a storyteller, but stories have no power if people do not listen to them,
so I want to thank you all for listening to these stories today.
Together, we have made those stories concrete,
but it's now time to take action from that strong base that we have built,
because we must take action, and now is the time to act,
and I honestly believe, all together, we can make a difference.
Thank you.
(Applause)