All language subtitles for 3. 1993–1997

(no audio)

So, back in England,

because I was doing some good pictures and I'd won an award,

I was kind of expected to be able to do everything.

And so, I started taking jobs that,

I wasn't really qualified to do, you know.

Lighting, I knew nothing about.

I didn't have the modern cameras

that had the TTL flashes on them,

as in the through the lens metering.

So, I would do press jobs where, at night,

where I've gotta use a flash and I just,

you know, they were either overexposed or underexposed.

I was shooting on transparency film,

which is completely unforgiving.

Like, if you more than a third of a stop off

when you shoot slide film, it's gone.

So, I had quite a sort of depressing

thump back down to Earth.

At the sort of heights of all this travel and stuff.

And very much did a lot of things wrong.

Waited for big opportunities to come to me,

didn't work hard enough to do them myself.

And then good couple of years went by,

and then I'm I'm 23 years old.

And the wars kicked off very, very, very

full on war in Chechnya, in Grozny.

So a friend of mine,

talks to me and says, "what you doing?"

"Why aren't you working?"

You know, basically I had a friend

that gave me a real kick in the ass and was like,

"look, you know, you've got this talent,"

"you're wasting it away."

"You should be doing big news stories."

And we talked about Chechnya, went to sleep.

The next morning, there's a pounding on the door

at about 6:30 in the morning, and he's there.

And he hands me this envelope.

I remember it was like a ripped brown envelope

full of cash, had £500 in it.

And he was like, "here."

"Go to Chechnya and restart your career."

"And when, and when it becomes a success,"

"don't get, I don't want the money back,"

"hand it on someone."

You know, it was a real spiritual deal.

So he's like, "hand it on."

So I was like, "okay, incredible."

And within two days, I was on my way out to Russia.

Did everything the wrong way around.

I had no visas, no press passes, no right to be there.

I basically traveled with a news night team,

down to Chechnya.

And, were it not for, you know,

literally being in the back of a bus

full of people with press passes,

they just never checked mine;

and found my way into Chechnya.

Where I hooked up with a defense correspondent

from the Independent Newspaper, guy called Chris Bellamy.

And we went to work, covering the war.

And this was a really full-on place.

I was recently with the BBC's correspondent, Jeremy Bowen,

who's their Middle East correspondent.

And I talked to him last year about,

the experience of being in Chechnya.

And he said, "well, look, I've done this ever since."

"And the only anything that ever came close was,"

"being in Homs, in Syria, a few years, a few years ago."

And he said "outside of that,"

"nothing has touched the sides like Grozny did."

So, we,

I got through that and you sort, you know,

you have a lot of experiences in these sort of places.

And came back and immediately planned to go to Sierra Leone.

I had an offer from a mate of mine who'd left the army,

and he was a mercenary.

And there was a mercenary army,

gonna try and overthrow the government.

And,

I asked if I could go along and take photos.

And it was agreed.

So I turn up in Sierra Leone,

go to the hotel where I'm meant to meet everyone.

And there's this little crappy handwritten note

that says, something like, "it's all gone to shit,"

"you're on your own, good luck."

Mick. Right.

And so I've arrived there,

and my big story has evaporated in front of me.

And I can't really afford to go home

with my tail between my legs,

'cause I've invested this,

you know the money in the airfare and stuff.

I set about going to work.

I stayed there for about five weeks,

covering all sorts of things, but it was grim as hell.

And I had a number of experiences

that absolutely petrified me.

And by the day I left,

I swore I was never, ever, ever,

going to go to a war zone again,

and I have stuck to that religiously.

So that was 25 years ago.

And I've never, ever been remotely tempted to go back.

So I come back to the UK, and I'm definitely freaked out.

I'm definitely not entirely, sort of, mentally happy.

And I'm shooting,

I suppose stories that are quite, you know,

they're sort of still quite dark.

So I'm still a photo journalist.

I photograph this family and their poor daughter,

as she was dying of CJD,

which was the human strain of Mad Cow Disease.

I broke the story of the second generation of Thalidomide.

So the, where kids of Thalidomide parents were

having the same deformities as their parents.

And it had been believed that that wasn't possible.

I did stories about bereavement,

about kids with brain damage,

from sort of, road traffic accidents.

All quite heavy stuff.

And then I mixed that,

with these really ridiculously quirky stores.

Quirky features like, you know,

a baby gorilla growing up in a human household,

which was, you know, a Zookeeper's household.

I went to Sweden,

and did a story on show jumping bunny rabbits, right?

And these stories would syndicate.

They would sell to maybe, you know,

70 magazines around the world would run my pictures

of show jumping bunny rabbits, right.

And as sort of embarrassing stories the like that sound,

they were A, very profitable,

and funded me doing these much more in depth stories.

Much more profound, concerned, worthy stories, I suppose.