Discovery Channel Magazine: history of the camera
1 December, 2012Smart Investor: Earning It, January 2013
1 January, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine, December 2012
Finbarr O’Reilly has covered wars, revolutions, famines and the like in some of the most hostile parts of the world – most thoroughly in the Congo but also Afghanistan, Rwanda, Chad, Sudan, Lebanon and Libya, among many others. He was the 2006 winner of the coveted World Press Photo award for a shot taken for Reuters in a refugee camp in Niger, and has won numerous other industry titles. Normally based in Dakar, Senegal, today he is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and spoke to Discovery Channel Magazine from there.
What are the logistical challenges involved in combat photography?
In Africa, about 95% of my job is logistics, chiefly getting to places. The areas are remote and difficult to get around, the languages are different, you need to rent cars or hitch lifts on aid trucks going into the bush, you have to get local translators, you are negotiating with hostile militias or with government troops who don’t want you in certain areas – these things take the bulk of your time. Even flying: Dakar, where I live, to Liberia, should be two hours as the crow flies, but it takes 21 hours because African airlines don’t fly direct and they’re always delayed. Logistics is the biggest part of what we do as photographers in Africa.
How do you begin to capture a conflict on camera?
You have your local resources on the ground, our local reps who know the area who can guide us and direct us on local knowledge to navigate these places. Or we may rely on the UN networks. Then there’s experience: if it’s a zone of conflict you will have your contacts with the government side and the rebel side so you can negotiate your passage through things. It’s not always easy to do; people don’t want you in places where things are happening. You have to assess the risk as you travel. These are all things you get used to doing – I wouldn’t say it’s routine, but you do become accustomed to working in these situations.
Technically, what sort of picture works best to illustrate a conflict?
It depends on what you are going for. If you want an immediate hard news picture that shows what happened that day, you need something dramatic and full of action that captures the moment and could only be taken that day at that time. That’s what the newspapers usually want. What I like to do is more contextual. So when I was in Libya, I was not only traveling with rebels to the front each day, but would sometimes take an afternoon and take portraits of them at their base. There’s no one way to tell a story: there’s the hard news angle, the human angle, and you incorporate all of these to provide the complete picture. But individual images that work are those that have a connection and an impact and drive people to find out more about the context.
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This article appeared in sequence with The History of the Camera
