Dispatches

I used to lie in my bed as a boy and read the poems of Wilfred Owen along with those of Sassoon, Brook, and Graves. On the black and white television in the sitting room, I would watch the American war in Vietnam on the BBC and ITN news with my parents. It was from there that my journey into photojournalism began.

I was raised on heroic and exaggerated histories of adventure, conquest, and warfare, as were many boys in England at that time. I found my first stories on the staircase leading to my grandparent's attic, books that my father had read at the end of World War Two. From there I migrated to the poems of the First World War where my romantic ideas about war were challenged for the first time. Every stanza bled with layer upon layer of horror, indignity, and inhumanity. I learned from those who lived it, that war was anything other than romantic, noble, or heroic.

In my teenage years, my parents’ marriage disintegrated, and with it any influence they had over the course of my life. I was lost, damaged, and angry. Photojournalism found me when the librarian in the village library introduced me to the work of Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan. From there I found Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, Philip Jones Griffiths, and Tim Page who had all photographed the war in Vietnam. I sought out Tim Page, and on his advice, I went to Thailand to find my own war. I found more than I could imagine.

GK