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(helicopter propellers)

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- How you doing, all right? - Yeah, how about you?

- Yeah, good, mate.

Pretty much standard procedure, if you've got suspected IDs,

even though you're clearing it,

you want to walk in the footsteps

of the person in front of you.

If they've stepped on that patch

and it hasn't triggered anything,

there's a good chance that that's a safe bit of ground.

But of course if you pause for even a fraction of a second

to frame up and take an image,

you're not looking where their feet went.

And so, now this is a very demanding job,

requires a lot of concentration

and a lot of fear management as well.

And you just reach the point where you're like,

there's only so much I can do,

I have to trust that that guy in front

is picking up any traces if there are any devices here.

(explosion)

(gunfire)

- Jeremy get down in there, get down there!

(camera shutter)

(crackling)

(intense instrumental music)

- Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries

in the world, for decades it's been ravaged

by political violence, drug cartels of course,

and human rights violations.

Photojournalist Jason Howe has spent several years

documenting the civil war there.

- Colombia was the big learning experience,

the place that I had gone to to try and

learn how to be a photojournalist,

to learn the skills involved in telling a story in pictures,

gaining access to people.

So it was very different from the travel photography

that I'd done before, which was all about, you know,

blue sky, sun behind you, beautiful landscape.

This was gonna be a lot more difficult.

The first area that I started working

was down in San Vicente del Caguan,

which is the town that the FARC controlled,

in a demilitarised done that the government

had pulled out from to allow them to negotiate there.

The peace process was very shaky,

and they told me that this isn't a good time,

if the situation changes we'll come and let you know,

and then you can visit us in the camp.

Now, given that I had quit my job,

sold off my remaining possessions,

I couldn't allow that initial rebuff

to be the end of the story.

I explained to them, I explained the situation,

explained the things that I'd given up

and the fact that I wanted to dedicate my time now

to telling their story was how I put it over at the time.

So I spent the next couple of weeks

sleeping 100 metres away from their camp.

Suddenly the FARC started becoming a little friendlier,

and then as this moved on, eventually one day they said,

oh, you might as well just move your stuff over

and move into the camp.

So I've got to the point where they would

stop thinking of me as a journalist,

this person that was in their faces,

and I'd become this person who was kind of in the background

that they could kind of get on with their lives

and do what they needed to do.

There was a young couple I spent quite a bit of time with,

a guy called Bernardo and his girlfriend Marisol.

We walked around the camp one evening

and they stopped and kissed,

they shot me a sort of little shy,

glance, half smile, and moved on.

After a while the peace process completely broke down

and the government gave the FARC 24 hours

to evacuate the zone before they would come in

and take it back by force.

As the FARC had left their zone of control

and the military were coming in to retake the zone,

they had set an ambush, which were two buses and a truck,

and one of the buses had a message painted on the side

saying that it had explosives on board.

They sent a few men ahead to basically diffuse the bomb,

was the idea, I thought perhaps they would walk up

and just roll a grenade under it, blow the thing up,

it's safe, and on we can go.

The soldiers were walking around, kicking the tyres,

they got in, tried the ignition.

Not techniques that I think are approved

by many bomb disposal squads.

I walked away and I'd been gone

probably not more than 30 seconds,

maybe a minute at most, and I was about 15 metres away

when there was a large explosion.

(explosion)

I ran round the bus through the smoke

expecting to see the soldiers

that I'd been with for a few hours standing at a distance,

laughing and pointing and saying they had found the bomb.

But instead what I was confronted with

was three bodies laying on the ground,

looking to me to be pretty obviously dead.

It occurred to me immediately that I had

very narrowly escaped being killed by that explosion,

by a matter of a few metres.

I then walked over to this other heap in the road

which was two bodies, and then all of a sudden,

the body on top groaned, and his eyes came up and met mine.

I sort of froze, I didn't really know what to do.

All of a sudden I wasn't just photographing a dead body,

I was photographing someone in pain,

someone that was suffering.

My hands were still shaking,

and I was realising in some ways that this was the big test,

this was the, okay, you want to be a war photographer,

you want to witness these serious situations

and take pictures to show other people, here is your test.

If you can handle this, maybe you'll be able to do it.

If you can't, if you're gonna walk around feeling sick

or going into shock, or you don't take any pictures, then,

you've failed, give up.

- The whole idea and the term war photographer

I find pretty ridiculous now.

But you know, when you're in your early 20s

and you're trying to get your war on

and make pictures, you're like, yeah.

(gunfire)

Hell yeah!

(gunfire)

(explosion)

Woo!

I met Jason in Colombia I believe in the year 2000.

And we got on well right from the start.

I mean I thought he was kind of a maniac and an idiot, but,

I loved him for it immediately.

It's a type of maniacal idiocrasy that you just

fall in love with. (laughing)

- Me and Eros and are trying to figure out where to go

and then somebody said oh, there's this other guy

who's also a freelancer, he's interested in going.

So he came over and we sat down and had a few drinks,

looked at some pictures, talked about a plan,

and we all came up with a,

(laughs)

It's a plan, I don't know if it's a good plan or not,

but we came up with a plan, and that's how we met.

- So a week later we happened to be back down

in the same region on the same road that the FARC controlled

when we came to a roadblock.

- And we walked up to the FARC commander,

whoever was in charge there, and said, can we take pictures?

He was just like, looked at us going like,

yeah, what are you asking me?

Like, I'm trying to do something else here.

- The FARC had all of the civilians laying down

crouching in the road in between their vehicles.

- It was honestly a very cynical technique

because the guerrillas ended up basically

using the civilians as human shields

so that there wouldn't be airstrikes against them.

- And then in the distance to see these government soldiers

coming running across the river,

it was a very sort of Vietnam-y kind of feel to the scene.

- It was the first firefight that any of us had been in.

We'd certainly been in situations that were dodgy enough,

but this was a proper gunfight.

- There were people trying to get white flags,

trying to make sure they weren't getting shot at.

But then the shooting getting more intense and more intense

as their army got closer and closer.

People are starting to run into this field

to take cover in just some high grass,

'cause there was really nowhere to hide.

And the FARCs sort of took cover on the other side.

Eros and I went with the civilians, photographed them,

and Jason went with the FARC soldiers.

And that kinda shows you a little bit sort of where

he was going, where we're all sort of looking at

different parts of the conflict,

within the same scene you're looking at different things.

- It didn't really feel dangerous,

it felt incredibly exciting.

And I'm sure the civilians must've thought

we were utter lunatics.

- They were shooting, I don't even know how long,

it could've been -- - Maybe a half hour or so.

- Three hours, I really don't know.

- Maybe it was five minutes, it's hard to remember really,

you're in the middle of it.

- You could tell the army was getting closer

and the FARC was kind of getting away.

- All of a sudden I found I was alone,

they had gone and left me.

And so the only person that the soldiers

were shooting at now was me.

- We're like, Jason!

Jason!

He's like what, what?

And we're like, you're about to get shot.

- And I didn't really notice or feel any of this

until I got close to the grass and saw the dirt

and the grass flying up as the bullets hit it.

- So then at some point he, we don't see him,

we're like uh-oh, did he just get shot?

And then we see him crawling back to us

with a big grin on his face. (laughing)

- We went back to San Vicente, where life was pretty normal,

and got drunk, and then the next day,

we're like, yeah, we're gonna go out

and find this shit again, man, like hell yeah.

We're combat photographers now, we can do it.

We were totally hungover.

- More than 20 years ago I read Tim Page's autobiography,

a book called Page After Page.

It was probably my first introduction to

the life of a photojournalist or a war photographer.

And it was very exciting,

at that stage I had never even been trampling,

certainly never even left England at that point.

(road traffic)

And then I happened to meet him,

and I was a little bit shocked

by the way he was describing war and the glamour of war,

and kind of admitting that he found it exciting,

and that it was a big adventure and all that kind of thing.

Whereas, (dog barking)

that's something that a lot of photographers

are very afraid to admit that they actually quite enjoy,

and get a big sort of thrill and buzz from it.

- Vietnam was an absolute, it was a marvellous place.

Not for the Vietnamese to be in the middle of it,

but in terms of war, what a great session.

One minute you're in a muddy foxhole

in the middle of Woop Woop being shot the shit of,

and the next minute you're back on a beach on a surfboard.

There was no compromise, it was all or nothing.

It was incredibly exciting and very fulfilling,

you're not empty.

It's not a boring life.

(gunfire)

You've still got fear, but you can press it back in.

Time becomes this elastic module.

You don't know if this incident, this part of the operation,

this part of the fight, this part of the battle,

has actually lasted seconds, minutes, or hours.

(intense music)

- After the first six months spent in Colombia,

I printed up some of the better images

and I decided to go to Perpignan in the south of France,

where there is an annual photojournalism festival

called Visa pour l'Image.

- It's like our equivalent of Cannes, for a journalist,

and everybody kind of gathers all the way around the world

and if you're on assignment and you're done,

we all just go there and we all just get drunk.

- And I walked into a bar and --

- And it was early hours in the morning,

and I came across Jason.

- Somehow ended up in conversation with this

slightly inebriated Irishman

who turned out to be Seamus Conlin.

- He was just off his head and,

and he showed me his pictures,

and it was of the Colombia bombing.

And that was when I made the decision to actually,

actually be his agent.

And to represent him, because I knew he had something.

- After spending time with the FARC

and realising that I couldn't with a clear conscience

just document their side of the story,

because it would effectively end up

just being propaganda for them.

The only things that I was really seeing with the FARC

were the things that they wanted me to see.

I wasn't seeing child soldiers,

I wasn't seeing the people that they were holding hostage

that they had kidnapped.

I wasn't seeing any direct involvement

between them and the cocaine trade.

I was seeing to a large extent,

really, the public face of the FARC.

My next mission really was to get down

to try to meet the paramilitaries who

I had really thought were the bad guys in this whole story.

The FARC, I'd gone there with the idea

that they were these sort of romantic revolutionaries

fighting for the poor people,

but having narrowly missed getting blown to pieces

by one of their bombs,

and then seeing the terror on the faces of the civilians

that they claimed they're fighting for and supporting,

that really, those illusions crumbled pretty quickly.

So I set off to a different part of the county

sufficiently far away that I felt

there wouldn't be any crossover.

Now that was quite difficult,

because I had to go to villages

where people couldn't tell me clearly

whether the FARC were in control,

or the paramilitaries were in control.

So the technique that I found that worked

was to always travel on local transport.

And once you learned to communicate a bit,

people ask you what you're doing,

where you're going and, you know,

you can pick up bits of information.

But I was sitting next to this girl on the local bus.

She was very young, I don't,

can't really tell exactly how young she was.

Pretty face.

Pretty much ignoring me completely.

And as we were driving along

we started to approach a military checkpoint,

and I saw that she was kind of glancing around

and looking a little bit scared.

So I didn't want to actually point the camera at her

and take a picture so I just focused it on

a metre away, which is roughly how far she was,

preset the exposure, and so then I just clicked,

wound, clicked, wound, just made a few frames.

And once of them really sort of shows

this look of concern in her eyes.

And it's one of my favourite pictures

of how the conflict affects the civilians.

It was very important with this project on Colombia

to make sure that it didn't just become

a book of pictures of guys with guns.

Because whilst the weapons and the conflict

and the fighting and the fighters

are a very important ingredient,

the civilian population is also

crucial to telling this story.

(loud talking and music)

A huge amount of access and getting images

can just be about luck and timing.

And sometimes that's not because you've planned that

yourself, it's just you happen to be

in the right place at the right time.

I met Marylin whilst changing buses

in one of the small town en route to a town called Pitalito.

And we happened to get on the same bus

and were sitting next to each other.

My Spanish at this stage was very basic,

but I managed to explain to her that I was a photographer

and that I had recently spent some time in the FARC zone,

and that the purpose of my trip south

was to cover the other side of the conflict.

She explained that she knew people

who were in the paramilitaries,

and knew people who were in the military,

and that they would stop and buy sodas or beers

and that kind of thing from her father's roadside store.

And that she could kind of point me in the right direction

for meeting up with these people.

Right from the start she seemed to be

a very useful person to have met, useful contact.

She was young and she was attractive,

and I was young and naive and off on my big adventure.

When we first met,

the only reason that our relationship didn't

progress faster was the fact that she lived with her parents

in a very basic house with paper thin walls,

and she shared her bed with her young daughter.

Which made making any kind of progress a little difficult.

So over the course of several visits,

whenever I went to see her,

our relationship was growing a little bit

in terms of friendship, and because my Spanish was improving

so that we could communicate better.

- We were down in Putumayo in way southern Colombia,

which is one of the hottest zones,

I mean, it's nasty down there.

There's a lot of extreme violence.

- We went out to her house the first time,

we drove out from the city.

- Swim in the river, had a very nice time with her family,

ate, kicked back, and that was all good.

- On one visit I asked her if it would make things easier

if I stayed at a hotel in the nearby town

so that she could come and stay with me,

and it was the next morning that she decided to

basically confess to me

that she not only knew the paramilitaries

but that she was actually an active participant

in the conflict.

- At that point we didn't really know to what extent.

'Cause so many people work for either the guerrilla

or the paramilitary, and in sometimes very innocuous roles.

They might just be messengers or they, you know,

they just listen and look, and report,

so, she could have been anything.

- When she elaborated on what she did,

which, in fact, turned out really that she had

migrated away from being a uniformed member

of the local branch of the paramilitaries

into working with an urban sell,

and her job was basically to eliminate people.

So she was effectively an assassin.

- I don't think the issue of ethical behaviour

or anything like that really entered into my head.

Any doubts that I may have had in my mind

about the situation were overridden, really,

by the excitement of being in the situation.

Because it was just playing out

really like some kind of movie.

(contemplative music)

I decided to ask her if I could

conduct an interview with her.

I had the feeling that this was a story

that she really wanted to tell, she was very keen,

and there was no withholding of any information.

- And in truth when I was listening to her

answering the questions, I couldn't actually understand

all of the finer points of it.

It wasn't until the interview was transcribed later

that I could actually

start to understand how little feeling she had

about the things that she had done,

how little regret there was.

- He became very conflicted about his feelings

and his relationship with her.

Because it had kind of slowly came to light

that she was not just a mere, you know,

oreja, you know,

a lookout, that she was an assassin, that she killed people.

- In Colombia people get killed all the time.

In that town people were killed all the time,

and she's doing a lot of the killing.

- Now there were limits.

She told me that she had a target that she was looking for

that she was going to kill,

and she asked me if I wanted to

come along and photograph that.

I chose not to do that.

I felt that in some ways by me going along

and photographing her killing someone,

there would be two outcomes.

One, it would feel as though I was actually condoning

the murder by standing by and just photographing it

and not stopping it from happening, and also,

that was outside my personal envelope of acceptable risk,

so I chose not to do that.

And that's not a decision that I regret, I think,

that that whole situation is hard enough to deal with

retrospectively anyway, and if I had condoned in any way

what she was doing more actively,

then I would have more things to feel bad about, really.

- I think that Jason was really high on the whole romance

and danger and all that kind of thing of, like,

dating this chick.

Dating, yeah like they're going out to pizza and the movies.

Having a little affair with this woman who's definitely

knee deep in some pretty nefarious shit.

I mean,

that's attractive to everybody,

that's why the story of Jason and Marylin

has been so popular, everybody's like, ooh, ahh.

It's so sexy, it's so dangerous, we love it.

And Jason loved it for that.

- One day she actually pointed the pistol at my face

and said, why aren't you scared of me,

aren't you scared that I will kill you?

I said to her no, I'm not scared,

I don't like being threatened,

but if someone offers you money to kill me,

let me know, and I'll pay you double

to let me get to the airport.

And that kind of lightened the situation,

she laughed and put the gun down and,

the moment passed.

One evening Marylin came to the hotel

that we were all staying in for dinner.

- And our hotel happened to have this balcony

right in the centre of town, it's a small town.

- And just immediately, all the workers in the hotel,

they're like. (dramatic music)

- And our fixer was completely freaked out,

he was like, I cannot be seen, like,

I live here, I cannot be seen with her.

This is gonna put my life in jeopardy,

my family, everybody.

- So our feeling was like, well,

we'd just been compromised.

We gotta get out of town.

And Hector and I left.

- And Jason did not come with us, yeah.

(eerie music)

(yelling)

- Jason we had to throw him into somewhere immediately,

make it his beat.

And he had to learn really really quickly.

It's one thing if they're wanting to do it,

and actually having the talent, but,

the being thrown into a place,

the way you turn on the TV and everybody's,

it looks like everybody's dying every moment of the day,

it's kind of terrifying.

(car horns)

So we kicked him out the door and we equipped him,

and it was like, go on, just, do it.

- I arrived in a world,

in a war totally different from Colombia.

And one that I was really in no way prepared for.

(emotional music)

- I met Jason in Baghdad.

He was a bit different to the other journalists in Baghdad,

and he had not come from the same experiences.

Which meant that he didn't really know how to carry himself

in a place like Iraq.

(helicopter propellers)

- Hey Joe? - Yes, sir?

- [Man] Take that rug off.

- Freaking Jason ended up in the spider hole

on his first assignment, and he calling us,

and he didn't even know what to fucking do,

you know, he was like, holy shit, I'm an idiot.

- [Jason] My mind wasn't in sort of news gathering mode yet,

that wasn't the photographer I was,

I wasn't a news photographer.

They're seeing this crowd of people around this hole,

just bang bang bang bang bang bang bang,

shooting so many pictures and just,

looking like, it's a hole in the ground.

- It's really a black hole, okay?

- Okay. - Okay.

- I was just wondering like,

how many different angles can you shoot

a hole in the ground from and make it interesting?

But then of course later on when I saw the work

from the other photographers I realised that

there were quite a few angles that they had done it from

that I hadn't.

It's amazing, you have to have your head in the right place

and you have to know what you're doing

and maximise the situation.

And this was so early on in that whole learning process

that whilst I got pictures published

and I was paid for them,

I didn't do a particularly thorough job on that occasion.

- It was very clear that whatever he'd been doing before,

he hadn't really been working for someone.

And he hadn't worked in a conservative environment like that

so I mean, he would just say wildly inappropriate things

and do wildly inappropriate things.

He would show pictures to our Iraqi drivers

of naked Colombian women,

and people snorting coke off them and things like that and,

and I just eventually took him aside and said,

you know, sweetheart,

this is Iraq, it's not Colombia.

(yelling in foreign language)

- Pretty much one of the craziest moments

of the time spent in Iraq,

I was in the towns of Najaf and Kufa,

which were Muqtada al-Sadr's territory.

He was leading a group called the Mahdi Army.

The Mahdi Army were fighting the Americans

on the edge of town, they were hyped up,

they're waving their weapons,

they're firing their guns in the air.

And some of them are saying, you can't take pictures,

no pictures, no pictures.

Then another one will stand in front of you

and ask you to take a picture

and then someone else would come and hit you

with the butt of their Kalashnikov and push you out the way.

And at one moment I had four Mahdi Army fighters

with Kalashnikovs pointed at my chest saying,

are you British?

Knowing if I said I was British,

they would pull the trigger and that's that.

Are you American, nope, nope.

Where are you from,

so I said the first thing that came into my head

that seemed like a safe answer was that I was Irish.

And they're like, ah, Gerry Adams, very good man.

A moment later, surrounded by another group,

and this time the guy has a hand grenade,

he holds a grenade in my face with his finger in the ring,

and he starts the same questioning process.

They're all hyped up on adrenaline,

you're hyped up on adrenaline,

your heart is banging backwards and forwards

off the plate in your body armour.

They're quite happy to blow you up and all go to heaven

or wherever it is they think they're going,

and you have to kind of out-crazy the crazies.

So you sort of throw your hands up in the air and say

look, you know, I just told these guys all of this.

And they can't understand a word that you're saying,

but your attitude and your body language

somehow conveys something and they,

for some reason, they backed off.

(ominous music)

- He really got it and he really enjoyed it,

he enjoyed the moment.

Because it is about living the life,

and it's about being in the moment

and being party of history.

- When I was in Iraq I received an email from Marylin

saying that she felt that I was the only person

who could help her and that she did want to

get out of the situation that she was in,

but the paramilitaries, they don't allow people to leave,

because quite literally,

they know where the bodies are buried.

So someone like Marylin

would be privy to a lot of information,

and so her group were not really gonna

just let her walk away.

I don't recall exactly how I responded to her email but,

it wasn't in a particularly sympathetic manner,

and certainly I didn't come up with a solution

as to how to help her get out of her problem.

And that is a decision

that would possibly come back to haunt me,

later.

(explosion)

Pretty much every day there would be suicide bombs.

They were around about eight o'clock in the morning

and about five o'clock in the evening.

So those times became nicknamed bomb o'clock.

(explosion)

On the 18th of November, 2005,

I was woken up by a huge explosion

which blew the glass windows into my room.

I had no idea what it was, I had been sound asleep,

I woke up just to feel this freezing air

and to see that the window had been blown in.

And I lay there kind of semi sort of frozen in shock

on the bed, trying to sort of reboot my brain,

work out what had happened, and then there was another,

much, much bigger explosion

which ripped the aluminium window frames

away from the concrete, threw those across the room.

The door was blown off its hinges, the ceiling collapsed.

Pull on my jeans and boots, put on the body armour,

grab my money and passport

in case the insurgents were climbing over the wall

or we needed to climb over the other wall and escape.

And then get outside and start taking pictures.

But as I walked around the room,

really plucking up the courage

to go and put myself out into this inferno

that was kind of raging outside,

there was some sort of strange hesitation,

I was trying to find little distractions

to kind of delay that moment of truth.

And I remember opening the fridge

to see whether my eggs had broken in the explosion,

and being bizarrely delighted

that they were all still in one piece.

Outside I could see burning cars,

smoke billowing everywhere, people screaming,

people running around shooting.

The windows of every building for, you know,

a block in either direction had been destroyed.

There were dozens of cars on fire

where shrapnel had ripped into their fuel tanks

and exploded those.

And just all of these people

sort of wandering around in shock.

Their crime,

the reason that their lives had just been turned upside down

or destroyed was that they just happened to live

next to a hotel full of foreign journalists and contractors,

and that's who the insurgents wanted to kill.

And in my rush to get out there and take pictures,

I decided to jump,

or let myself drop from the first floor balcony.

And so having survived these two massive explosions

which were later reported as being a 400 pound car bomb

and then a one thousand pound truck bomb,

my injuries were sustained by dropping

from the first floor balcony into the rubble

and twisting both ankles and scraping my arm.

What was quite a strange experience

was watching the press corps

who were living in other parts of the city

arrive and start photographing this scene.

And suddenly it gave you a little insight

into how it is when you arrive at a scene

and someone's wandering around slightly dazed

after a bomb attack on their house or something like that.

And a car pulls up and four people jump out and just,

they don't talk to them, they don't communicate with them,

they just run towards them and point the camera

in their face and start taking pictures.

It felt very strange, it was a,

a combination of feeling like the victim,

that this was my story, except that of course,

when it happened I'd immediately gone outside

and starting shooting pictures as well.

It was a very confusing incident,

and the feeling of surviving it,

the euphoria, is just incredible.

I got told off by one of my colleagues

because you have to stop smiling,

you're just walking around with this big grin on your face,

and people have died, 15 people were killed,

40 were wounded.

And of course I wasn't doing it deliberately,

it was just that,

I was so happy to be alive and to have survived this.

One of the weirdest things ever to have

come out of covering suicide bombings

was the fact that you would nearly always find

the male suicide bomber's genitalia on the ground.

And apparently one of their preparations

for going and blowing themselves up

would be to pack their genitals in silver foil

so that it would be intact,

ready for going to heaven and the 72 virgins.

(muffled radio)

(explosion)

The far south of the country, Basra,

down towards the Kuwait border

was an area controlled by British forces.

And a small contingent of them also were based in Baghdad.

And the soldiers that I first met there

were the Royal Irish Regiment,

and they were protecting the road called Route Irish.

Which was for a long time

labelled the most dangerous road in the world.

It's the road that ran from Baghdad Airport

into central Baghdad.

It was a road that normal cars would probably take

30, 40 minutes to drive along at normal speed.

The soldiers could do it in, something,

I seem to remember something like about 10 minutes.

It wasn't safe for them to drive any slower, or to stop.

The soldiers on top cover above

would be training their weapon on any flyovers

to make sure people weren't dropping grenades off.

Any vehicles that didn't get out of the way,

the first technique was to throw a water bottle,

so it slammed into the hood of the car

and gave the driver a bit of a shock.

'Cause he maybe he just hadn't seen you

or something like that.

Another thing with being able to spend quite a bit of time

with the soldiers that you then get to cover

all sorts of little parts of their lives.

It was quite interesting that a lot of the soldiers

obviously cover the walls in pornography.

Naked women is something

that helps to get them through the tour.

But you also saw young guys who had got their girlfriends

or wives pregnant on the last visit home,

and the pictures that they had on the wall were of the scan,

or maybe they had a newborn baby and they had those pictures

and they'd go to sleep every night

looking at the pictures of their newborn child.

There is a cemetery in Baghdad

which is just for burying babies,

there were no adults buried there at all.

The situation during the war was that there's so much,

so much stress being put on the civilian population,

there's the suicide bombs,

there's kidnappings, assassinations.

Lots of women were losing their children during birth.

And another issue was that, to counteract the stress,

a lot of women were taking drugs

like Valium and diazepam and this kind of thing,

so there are also a lot of children

being born with deformities.

So this was a very strange place to work,

to go to the cemetery, meet the cemetery workers,

and then basically wait for a family,

which it would happen every day several times a day,

normally the husband or perhaps a brother,

or someone like that,

would bring a tiny corpse wrapped in white cloth.

The funeral workers would prepare the body

and bury it in a small grave.

It would be interesting in some ways

to go back to that cemetery and that would be,

an evidence of some of the impact

on the Iraqis of that, of that,

of that conflict, of that invasion and occupation.

- Carnage you can get somewhat accustomed to.

Suffering is more difficult, so,

if you see people suffering because they've been bereaved

by the carnage you've seen, that's very difficult.

Seeing children who've been killed

is the one thing that gets everyone,

because I think that you have some,

there's some very very visceral human response

that is, somehow I'm meant to protect children,

we are meant to protect children.

So seeing them harmed in any way

I think is absolutely soul-polluting.

I used to tell Jason he needed,

it didn't matter what he got, he needed to get out more.

'Cause as a freelancer he would go in

and he would stay much, much longer.

Staff correspondents would rotate in and out.

You would do sort of six or eight weeks.

But he was staying for months at a time.

I said no you need to get out

and just give your brain a break from this,

you cannot sit there day after day

with that threat hovering over you that way that it did.

- I was taking a break from Iraq

where I had been almost solidly for six months,

and that I wanted to travel back down to Colombia

and see if I could find out what happened to Marylin.

So I flew back down to Puerto Asis.

I checked into the same hotel

that Marylin and I had spend our first night together,

and I stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror and

started thinking about the reality

of what I was now going to face.

Thinking well, there's two things,

either I'm gonna arrive at that house

and as I have done in the past,

her daughter will come running out

and leap onto my back and want to have a shoulder ride,

and Marylin will come out and smile,

and she will tell me about what's going on here in Putumayo.

And I will tell her about life in Iraq.

And things will be basically exactly the same

as the last time I was here.

When I got there, her father came out,

and he was very surprised to see me.

And his eyes kind of started to fill with tears

a little bit and he said,

I guess you know what happened to the girl.

And he told me that she had died,

he didn't actually say that she had been killed,

he said that she died, it happened six months before,

and that she was buried in the local cemetery.

And so I asked if I could go with her daughter

and her mother the next day

to put some flowers on the grave.

I did feel really sorry for her daughter who,

in reality, is the real victim in all of this,

her mother made choices to do things

and died as a consequence of her choices.

Whereas her daughter is completely blameless

in the whole situation.

The reason that it was explained to me

that Marylin had been killed

was because she had been accused of being an informer,

and the paramilitaries had stoned her to death,

they had crushed her head with rocks.

And then they had shot her.

And the reason for killing her in this manner was that,

in Colombian Spanish, the word for informer is sapo,

as in frog.

And the way to kill a frog is to stone it to death,

to throw rocks at it.

And so they had killed her

in this kind of ritualistic manner

as a warning to other potential informers.

Marylin's story became really the thread

to my Colombia project, it gave it some,

some theme and some purpose.

Instead of just being a lot of random images

from different sides of the conflict,

she really defined the conflict for me.

Very much like Colombia itself,

a place of beauty with lots of resources,

that is just trapped in a cycle

of self-destruction, basically.

(footsteps)

- I've spoken to Jason quite a bit

about his imbed in Afghanistan when the British soldier

was injured with the IED.

- [Friend] Primarily it first started out

as an ethical conversation about,

jeez, I don't know what to do with these pictures,

they're really important, but, you know,

I've gotta clear it with the kid's family,

I gotta really think hard about this.

And I was really pleased by that whole conversation

because I'll tell you right now,

majority of the photographers out there,

they'd just like, I don't know,

it's all about me, me and my pictures.

They'll say it's about the importance of the whole story,

but it's really about them.

- And that was definitely a sign of maturity in Jason.

In the past I think that he would,

he would've made that same argument about,

you know, it's for the greater good.

Which I just find kind of absurd.

I understand it a little bit, but,

ego trumps that shit almost every time.

- I received an email from the MoD

saying that Steve's recovery is going very well,

and we are at a stage

where we might be able to move forward with this.

So we arrived Headley Court,

and were met by a sort of MoD representative,

and we went in to see Stephen.

Absolutely amazing experience,

I hadn't seen him for basically five months.

Here he was wheeling himself around in a wheelchair,

he was smiling, he was happy, he looked well.

I showed Stephen all of the pictures,

we looked through them, and he was fascinated,

he was fascinated to see the damage to his legs,

and he was pointing at this, and he's,

ah, yeah, I remember that.

He did remember getting dropped on the stretcher twice.

He was basically conscious all the way

from the blast happening until the helicopter.

(helicopter propellers)

The first thing I asked him is

whether he had any thoughts or concerns

about the whole process that we were going through,

about these images, about what I might do with them,

whether he had concerns about the article I might write.

So he basically said that he had no concerns,

he felt that he was gonna be happy for them to be published,

he liked the idea of the story be told and so on.

My whole spirit, everything, were lifted.

All this nervousness that I'd had about

whether he would approve them or not,

obviously all completely evaporated.

- I think that Jason makes an incredible point

in going back and seeing the guy who's lost both his legs,

and he's okay with it.

That says the whole thing,

because it actually says something about walking wounded.

It says something about the tenacity of mankind.

- One of the most poignant moments

during that day in Helmand was when the helicopter took off

carrying Stephen to the hospital,

and we got into a safe compound.

And the soldiers came over and were shaking my hand

and thanking me for helping to carry the stretcher.

And one of them said that he never thought

he'd see a journalist do that,

and I thought it was so, so sad

that this is the impression that these men have

of journalists and the media, that they're only there

to take something away and not to contribute something.

That they're kind of a bit like a pack of vultures

waiting for something unfortunate to happen.

And that, I felt quite proud, really.

(screaming)

(yelling in foreign language)

(screaming)

Conflict is very often a lot of ordinary people

put into very extraordinary situations.

In the summer of 2006 the war in Lebanon broke out.

(yelling in foreign language)

- There were hundreds of photographers and journalists.

So I arrived at one place and you could see five or six

TV crews all with a TV anchor doing a live broadcast.

- It attracted an awful lot of very green freelancers

who really didn't know how to conduct themselves.

- More and more young people are going out to do this job,

and they're being encouraged by the journalism schools.

And there's no job!

There's no job.

So...

It's gonna push all the young photographers

beyond the pale of acceptable conduct.

- Some of these things do actually

turn into a big fricking circus.

- There would be five or six carloads of journalists

screeching through the streets, and others running,

and an ambulance would stop and there would be perhaps

20 photographers crowding around the back door

and you saw local Red Cross ambulance drivers

pleading with the photographers to move back

because they weren't giving them enough space

to get their injured person out of the ambulance.

- I've come this close to just beating people

within an inch of their life for just being so,

either rude to me, or rude to the subject matter.

Like, Jesus Christ, man.

Step back.

Give these people some room, you know?

- And woe betide you if you weren't concentrating

rather on your subject but on keeping out of the way

of everyone else, you'd be shouted at in,

you know, eight different languages

to get your elbow out of someone's picture.

And it was an incredible sort of level of aggression,

and competition.

I left my cameras on the ground once.

I thought someone was watching them for me,

I came back and found that

someone had fiddled with the controls

and dialled the exposure compensation to plus three,

so the next time I took some pictures they were ruined.

(sighs)

- I don't know what I'd do if I was young

and I had to fight with inside the business to survive.

- And there's a certain kind of respect

that the photojournalists have,

that when they go out they are going there

actually report on the people, try to do some good.

And then there are other people who go there who just,

out there for the bang bang, you know,

it becomes the war porn.

- Photojournalism has changed hugely over the years

that I had either been trying to become a photojournalist,

or actively working as one.

The whole myth, the whole kind of romantic image,

sort of purpose,

has changed a lot and been very diluted.

So, it's become really sort of

paparazzi for the dead and dying,

which kind of just leaves

a pretty nasty taste in your mouth.

The situation in Lebanon kind of traumatised me

quite a lot, and I was disgusted with the way

that I'd seen the media working there,

and thinking I don't want to be a news photographer,

I don't want to be involved in this industry.

I certainly don't like who I've become

and I don't want to become

anywhere near as bad as that either.

So I thought I'd pretty much given up.

But my brother who's a British soldier

was deployed to southern Afghanistan to Helmand province

in April 2007.

And I decided to have one last ditch attempt

at going to the front line and taking pictures in combat.

And it was kind of a, almost literally a killer cure.

I'll either get there and it'll totally break me

and I know that's the end, or I'll be back on form,

I'll make good pictures, I'll earn money,

and I'll realise this is what I want to be doing.

I pitched an idea to a British magazine called Arena

to do a story on two brothers on the front line,

one is photographer, one is a soldier.

And they jumped at the idea.

In order to get the airfare,

I sold my last remaining Leica,

the camera that I'd shot all the pictures in Colombia,

I was very attached to it.

But I was more attached to getting my head sorted

and moving forward.

- Listen, don't mention the war, I mentioned it once,

but I think I got away with it all right.

(laughter) So!

It's all forgotten now --

- We sat there one night watching Faulty Towers

on his portable DVD player

when the Taliban decided to fire

a 105 millimetre Chinese rocket at us

which hit the building next to us and exploded.

So we sort of glanced at each other,

pressed pause on the DVD player,

put our body armour and helmets on and,

after saying, don't mention the war,

the classic Faulty Towers line, we resumed play.

On another patrol, I was crouching down behind a wall

with my brother and suddenly I saw the ANA,

the Afghan National Army RPG gunner

get up and run across a piece of open ground,

maybe 50 metres or so.

The Taliban are down here firing this way,

the British soldiers are on a rooftop firing this way.

So I looked at my brother and said, what do you think?

Do you think I can make it over there?

And he's like, pfft,

you can go if you like, I'm staying put.

And I, okay, I really, really want this picture.

So I sort of psyched myself up, got ready,

and sprinted across all this rubble

trying to sort of weave a bit and all this kind of thing.

And get down there, the guy lifts up the RPG,

click, click, click.

On the next one the RPG fires. (explosion)

There's only one shot that captures that split second.

(intense music)

- I think in Afghanistan,

Jason had set himself this impossible quest.

To take the perfect image which defined the war.

- We were based in a patrol base called Patrol Base One.

Jason come out to be embedded with us

in around July, August time.

Summer tour, which are always renowned to be move violent

and more extreme than winter tours.

You could say that the summer tours

were the start of fighting season.

(rapid gunfire)

(continuous gunfire)

(explosion)

- [Male] Fucking Hell.

- Why he'd want to come out to our compound,

to our patrol base, at that time, I don't know.

- Jason's an extraordinary character.

He would relish having as much equipment

as he possibly could.

Extra pockets, zips, flaps, body armour, a helmet,

you name it, if there was a gadget that Jason could carry,

the chances are he'd have it.

- He turned up, right, and when I first seen him,

and he was stood there,

he had like an American special forces helmet on,

and a chest rig with ammo pouches on the front.

But him ammo pouches didn't have ammunition in,

and he wasn't carrying a rifle,

he was carrying lenses and various camera equipment.

- When we were embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan,

I think Jason always felt a very strong affinity

with the troops, partly because his brother's a soldier,

partly because he's spent a lot of time with the soldiers.

He also operated with a sense of admiration

for what they did.

(chuckling)

- I get paid one way or the other so I don't mind.

Mine's for specific --

- I got chatting to Jason when he was in the patrol base.

He was a interesting character to say the least.

A couple of the other freelancers that were with him said,

were sort of nudging him and saying he's fucking nuts.

(metal detector)

Jason was keep to get out on the patrols with the company

and get out on the ground.

He accompanied a few patrols out

when they were maneuvering through the AD clearance

going on at the south of the patrol base.

(clanging)

- Fire!

(explosion)

- I don't think the public fully understand

the severity of conflict because they're,

it's hidden from them.

They only get certain bits and pieces

via mainstream media.

They're not exposed to the full severity of conflicts

and what it involves.

(popping)

(yelling) - Shot!

- Man down! - You all right?

- Man down! - Man down!

- Man down! - Man down!

- [Soldier] Medic, get a medic!

- [Soldier] It's not me, mate, it's not me!

- It's vital,

if the general public are funding the armed forces,

that we do find out what happens to our guys on the ground.

And in this case, this is completely unique.

We've never been able to before tell a story

of a soldier sustaining serious injury

and also going through the rehabilitation process.

- In the final stages of the attempts to

get authorization from the MoD for the pictures,

the emails I received from them

stated that the pictures,

that the pictures of Stephen on the ground,

injured, had not been cleared,

and that they did not intend to clear them.

- I'm really keen not to give anyone an excuse

to just impose their personal feeling

on the picture not being used, and I,

as long as the pictures are not going to upset the casualty,

which we've determined they're not,

and they're not going to put anyone in danger,

I'm not sure what the other issue is

that can be imposed on this.

One thing that was mentioned during the phone conversation

was that in fact it was the policy

of the Ministry of Defence

to not allow the publication of images

that show injuries to soldiers.

He told me that the last time that such images

had been published would've been about 30 years ago

during the Falkland's conflict,

and that basically the Ministry of Defence

would be pretty upset

if the pictures that we used were graphic.

- British Ministry of Defence

hides behind the argument of privacy

in order to prevent British newspapers

and British journalists for any newspaper,

any journalist from publishing pictures of wounded soldiers

because they argue that it's the soldier's right to privacy.

- And the argument at this stage,

since we now had the, we had Stephen's approval to do that,

was that it wasn't his decision to make.

So initially the argument was that

they were protecting patient confidentiality,

and now because the patient had decided and signed a release

stipulating that he was prepared

to give up that confidentiality,

then the reasons for not publishing the pictures

was changed.

- The editor's concern is for the --

- Soldier? - The casualty, the soldier.

- Right.

- And for the readers. - Yeah.

- I mean, he said that?

- Yeah.

- Okay, I mean, I have the signed release in my bag,

so he can be assured that the casualty's happy.

- So he's absolutely good to go.

(ominous music)

- Just because they tell me that they have a policy,

that doesn't mean I'm going to accept it or agree with it.

I do not work for the Ministry of Defence,

I do not work for the government,

my job is not just to show the good side of things

and the side that they want to be shown,

it is to show the reality of it.

And that sometimes is messy.

- What the MoD, the DOD, whoever the fuck they are,

Pentagon,

doesn't want,

they don't want war to be unappetizing.

It's got to remain good,

because otherwise you can't get people to join up anymore,

there's no more draught.

- Several months later,

I received a request from The Telegraph

to return to Afghanistan

to go on another embed with Thomas Harding,

the defence correspondent.

- And pretty close to the last minute,

the MoD said no, you can't take that photographer with you,

you can't take Jason, you can take any other photographer,

but apart from him.

- Which would seem to rather conflict with the assurance

that their senior representative

had previously sent me in writing

that there would be,

that publishing those images would have no negative effect

on my future embed requests.

- And if a journalist dares to try and report information

from the front line which the Ministry of Defence

is uncomfortable with, in a number of cases,

effectively blacklisted journalists.

- Jason was banned from going to Afghanistan by the MoD

which was, for a person who's a great war photographer,

quite a blow, I think.

- The truth is is that the British Ministry of Defence

did not want the British public to see pictures

of British soldiers being wounded or killed in Afghanistan.

And therefore they used the agreements they had in place,

and I'd say they abused the agreements they had in place

to make sure those pictures rarely, if ever, got published.

- It's a tribute to Jason,

and it's a tribute to Private Bainbridge,

and it's a tribute to the soldiers that helped both of them,

that those images did eventually come out.

- I didn't compromise any journalistic integrity,

and I didn't allow the work to be censored.

And I didn't let down any of the soldiers

whose story I swore I would tell.

When I was there on the ground with them,

I promised them that I would get that story published.

And that's what I did.

- Without a doubt, war photography is an addiction.

What really matters is how you manage that addiction.

There's definitely two faces to Jason.

When he's on the job, he's very serious,

very hardworking, he's no bullshit.

When he's not on the job, he's kind of a clown.

Which I love about him.

I love the fact that he can put on both of those hats

and not have to carry this whole persona

as a war photographer, although he does.

Don't get me wrong.

- Why did this big fat dude come here?

- [Woman] We need to have a toast.

- [Man] Stop fiddling with your cellphone watching poetry.

- [Eros] I'd go anywhere with Jason

except to a cocktail party.

(laughing)

- The thing is though I was like so completely off my face

that I was thinking --

- The survivor's euphoria is great.

Until it's not.

But decompressing.

Drugs and alcohol is the obvious one.

(discordant music)

- I think perhaps as much of a thrill seeker

in his private life as he is in his profession life,

as a photographer, his social life was often as fast paced,

and some would even say as dangerous

or as risky as his professional life.

- I told him this many times, I said,

you're safer in Afghanistan being shot at

than you are here in Bangkok

because of the way you're behaving here.

- We've decided it's better to leave on a high note,

so, let's go and get high.

Or drunk as the case may be.

Just in case Mum's watching.

- He'd drink everything, he'd fuck everything,

he'd snort everything and then he'd just wake up

like an angry bear and then he'd just do it all over again,

I mean it was just insane, and I would tell him,

you cannot keep doing this to yourself,

it's just out of control.

- As has happened in the past

when I've bene in places like Thailand

and I've been partying too hard

and I've looked in the mirror and thought,

if I keep on like this,

my friend Roger Arnold is probably gonna be

coming around and identifying my corpse next week.

So it's time to call the airline, change that flight,

and get back to that wonderful detox zone, Afghanistan.

(contemplative music)

Because of the teachings of the Jehovah's Witness'

I was brought up to have no fear of death,

and that's one thing that I am actually really grateful for.

Whilst I would,

obviously I'm concerned about getting seriously injured

and having to live with a disability

or missing limbs or something like that,

the idea that when I'm dead, that's it, it's the end,

which is quite liberating.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be a Catholic

and be worrying that perhaps

I'm gonna have to somehow pay for all of these mistakes

that I've made and all of the bad behaviour

over the last however many years.

And it just makes me think, well,

should be enjoying every moment up until

the moment that the lights go out.

(sinister music)

Karen Woo was a good friend of Jason's, she was a doctor.

- Who gave up a very good job in the UK

to go out to Afghanistan and work as a volunteer

to set up a sort of medical camp

in the mountains of Nuristan to help out the locals

who had no access to medical facilities.

She was one of these people that lights any place

and any situation up with her personality.

But the problem with living in a place like Afghanistan

and with being involved in a profession like this one

is that there's always bad news.

- She was murdered in northeastern Afghanistan

by the Taliban, and that really broke Jason up.

- However on the evening of that day

that the news had come in.

- We were having a small party at his rented house in Kabul.

- Induced by a fair amount of alcohol

I basically had a bit of a meltdown

and ended up kind of sobbing,

and I remember Eros putting his arms around me

and telling me that he knew, he knew about loss,

he knew how I felt.

- And Jason's just like,

losing it, and he just broke down

and just started weeping in my lap.

He was just like, like a child all of a sudden.

- This is how kind of the grief and emotions come out,

they don't,

they don't come out in the moment of receiving the news,

because there is an element of shock,

or an element of having really just

learned how to control your emotions,

because you are consistently witnessing

negative and traumatic things.

- It was just the beginning of,

the end, let's say, of a stage of Jason's life

where he was really beginning to understand

that he's got to, he's gotta make some changes

if he is to keep any kind of content, happy future.

Oh, there's no doubt about it

that Jason suffers from post-traumatic stress.

Without a doubt, and I know that because I suffer from it.

I see it so easily, in him, and many people.

The post-traumatic stress is deeply rooted.

It comes from before the war photography.

- I think the subjects he's chosen to get involved with

have overtaken him, overcome him.

(crickets)

- Being exposed to so much trauma in our adult lives

has just intensified it all, and brought it up in,

and maybe it's a really good thing

because it's brought it up in a way

that it's easily identifiable now.

(sombre music)

- How could he not be suffering from PTSD?

I mean I think, he would not be human if he wasn't.

And he's pretty human, he's extra human.

- Going to conflict areas and hostile environments

and witnessing high levels of trauma,

you're not gonna come back the same person,

and that's a fucking fact.

- Despite all his bravado and war stuff,

he's a pretty sensitive guy.

I think he takes things pretty hard, too, sometimes,

and I think the stuff that he's seen

and things have happened to him in other wars,

and he's had some close calls, I think it's,

I think it's had a pretty heavy toll on him.

(unnerving music)

- The damage done...

Distracts you from a lot of purpose.

It,

makes you look for strange escape routes.

- You can run from your demons until you're exhausted,

but one day you'll have to stop

and find out what they wanted.

So the only option for me really

was a complete lifestyle change.

Probably for many years I've been running from

one set of demons or another,

and quite often the next situation that you're in

just creates a whole load of new demons.

But the key really to winning any fight

is choosing the battleground.

So this is one of the main motivations

for moving to Andalusia,

so that I could pick and choose the time and place

when I would deal with these demons,

as opposed to trying to deal with them

in a war zone or something like that.

Or,

maybe in the sort of,

cycle of ways I'd had of dealing with things.

Maybe going to Thailand for three months a year

and just drinking and partying and so on,

and trying to get some sort of,

well I thought trying to get some kind of head space

from dealing with the problems of the war zones.

But of course just creating

a whole new set of problems, really.

- I was enormously fortunate,

when I had PTSD or was diagnosed with PTSD

that I was a staff correspondent.

I was able to get medical treatment,

I was off work for six months,

all of those things were given to me.

That would not happen with a freelancer, it's much harder.

- When I first got here,

this was in the months immediately after the IED strike

in Helmand.

I was stressing a lot about

whether I was gonna be able to get permission

to publish the pictures of the wounded soldier,

pictures that I felt very strongly about

because I was aware that they were really

the only ones of a wounded British soldier

still on the battlefield.

And I didn't want to ever be left with the feeling

that I'd taken those epic risks that day,

in particular, to get those pictures,

and then no one was ever gonna see them.

They were going to be basically censored out by the MoD.

So the pattern of life has changed here a lot really

because when I first got here,

I wasn't particularly healthy,

and I certainly wasn't dealing with any of those demons

at that stage.

I was really creating new ones.

My nights were kind of pretty regularly disturbed

by nightmares.

Generally,

I could never really identify anything specific

in the nightmare, so it wasn't, for example,

I would be witnessing the IED strike

when Bainbridge lost his legs, for example,

or anything like that.

They were nearly always kind of hypothetical situations,

and generally involved a situation

that I needed to escape from or,

a situation where I was fighting.

In my nightmares I used to kill quite a lot of people.

I used to quite regularly kill my brother

by crushing his head with rocks.

All sorts of like, really, just,

dreadful, frightening things, really.

You just wake up sort of in a cold sweat, shaking,

and exhausted, when you woke up in the morning

with your neck and shoulders aching

because you'd spent all night fighting

and struggling and trying to escape.

And they have gradually diminished.

I now just kind of have really weird dreams.

Like last night I dreamt

I was in the British Prime Minister's house

giving him some advice on interior decorating.

And for some reason he had a picture of me on the wall.

So yeah, be interesting to see

what the psychotherapist has to say about that.

The problems I had were that I couldn't really switch off

from thinking about my security and my safety

and that kind of thing because,

it's been 12 years really that I spent living in places

like Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia and so on.

Places where loud noises in the night

are generally a precursor to something bad happening.

So one of the big things that really made

a great difference here was having the dogs.

When I first got here, if they barked in the night,

I would get up and go out with a flashlight

and have a look around and see what it was.

And I was very,

well, still very much sort of paranoid

and on edge a lot, all the time.

At one stage I was actually even sleeping on the balcony

outside because it meant I could come into the house,

I could close the door, I could then go upstairs,

which is the furthest away from the obvious entry points,

and I could then go outside and lock another set of doors

and then sleep on the balcony.

So that if something bad happened,

all I've got to do is drop off the balcony

and sort of head off into the bushes.

(panting)

Here you go.

Taking away all of the emotional crutches,

or I don't know if they're emotional crutches,

but they're just crutches that help you get through,

through stuff, whether that is drinking, or smoking,

or taking drugs, or whatever it is you do

to distract you away from actually dealing with

the issue at hand, once you take all those away,

the only thing you're left with

is the problems and dealing with them.

Your emotions are now, like, really sharp,

and you're gonna start having normal reactions to things.

And that's quite hard to deal with,

because if you've had several years

of emotional reaction management,

and you've become an expert in it,

to suddenly start having feelings again is pretty,

is a difficult situation to deal with.

Your emotional release will sometimes come

when you're least expecting it.

I would find it would come in the most insane times,

be watching a chick flick, eyes are welling up with tears,

and your Adam's apple's bobbing up and down.

Or Lassie dies at the end of the film or something

and you're like, bawling your eyes out.

And people are looking at you

as thought you're completely mad, which,

clearly, I was.

But back then I couldn't really understand

why those things were happening.

I think also it takes a long time

to get those emotions back in balance.

And I wouldn't say certainly now that they're in balance,

but they will at last be heading in the right direction.

(laughing)

Too many kisses, too much love, too much love.

(contemplative instrumental music)

- I think his Colombian work, it was his best,

it was really incredible.

And that one image encapsulates his whole entire career

before he even had a career, oddly enough.

It's almost in reverse.

- One of the things that has motivated me

in my photography, and still does motivate me,

and would make me perhaps want to go back

and do that kind of work again once I've got myself

in a better mental and emotional place and so on,

is that I really love the idea of shaking people

out of their horrible little insulated bubbles.

(yelling in foreign language)

(camera shutter)

(camera shutter)

(camera shutter)

- [Male] Come on, man, show me the tat.

- No, it's too cold.

- [Male] You got a t-shirt on.

- No!

I've got a long sleeve thermal fleece.

Oh, microphone.

Just because at least one person's gotten,

what the fuck is going on with me?

And it's clear that you can see it's going to be Harold.

Right.

There it is, right, that's it.

- [Male] Hold on hold on hold on.

- The tattoo you want, I gotta stay warm.

- [Male] That's fine, you can do that.

- [Jason] Who says I'm not normal?

- Thank you, Jason.

- You get to post some extras.

Well, you've met Harold.

(gentle instrumental music)