 Good evening and thank you all for coming those of you who can find a seat grab one we are thrilled to have a filled to overflowing house tonight for Louie Pellew and his debut here at New America again I'm Doug Alavent I'm a senior fellow with the National Security Studies program we're thrilled to have you all here tonight we hope that you've enjoyed your socializing beforehand and I suppose without any further ado we'll just hand it over to Louie and let him talk about his work and then we'll get on with the show to check this working I wanted to thank everybody for coming out especially all my friends and colleagues and I want to thank Doug for agreeing to do this and Andres Martinez and all the my fellow fellows part of the fellow program have been really fantastic to work with and I'm glad we can do this because my fellowships actually from Mexico but because the field work is ongoing and I'm not finished the project this is sort of a great base to talk about how I approach doing long-term projects and how I'm working on Mexico at the top right now as showing my kandahar work which is what I showed as an example my work to get my fellowship here what I'm gonna start with can everybody hear me alright okay if you can't see this of course those two monitors back there will have everything as well what I'm gonna do is whenever I give a lecture I try to make it something different so that if you're not seeing the same thing all the time over the years so what I did was I'm kind of working on a secret project it's a documentary film on kandahar I have lots of footage and I met a filmmaker who a year ago said hey you know that you can make a film with that so I edited a never seen before except for a couple of people in the fellows program a little trailer that we're working on it's very rough and early and some some outtakes some cut foot uncut footage the important part about I think seeing the video before you see the photographs is because we all see these still photographs and you don't hear any sound you don't know what anything looks like what's happening what the people sound like and I think that a lot of times people look at these places on a map and you don't know what the place actually feels like and looks like I think the video gives a unique look into that so it'll be a little quick little trailer it's about eight minutes altogether and then some raw uncut footage there's no interviews or anything like that put into the film yet we're about a years out from putting this out so anyway if we can have the lights this light here turned off I'll start the video I'm just gonna give you a little heads up I think we all aware that we're talking about a place where there's a current conflict going on there are gonna be some graphic photos there's gonna be some blood there's gonna be some some dead people so just be aware that you're gonna be seeing that here tonight all right I think the thing I want you all to walk away from tonight is that the reason why I like to produce this work is it's all about having a dialogue that's the great thing about you America it's all about ideas and dialogue here and I think that that's what I want to promote when you look at my work so I just want to give you that that bit of video is this working just to give you photos what the what's actually set what everything sounding like and we're gonna have to keep that I guess it'll work we'll see anyone who's a student of history of the region has to excuse my really quick history lesson I'm gonna give here because I want to give everybody understanding what Kandahar is and how significant is second largest city in Afghanistan this is map from Alexander the Great's route is invasion route so here's Kandahar right here Kyra pass up here is Kabul Persia or Parthia Iran is down here India this ends up becoming Pakistan and I want you to focus on this little triangular area here where Kandahar is because this is an old map from that charts Alexander the Great like 330 BC and we're gonna come back to that in modern times now so this is a map of Afghanistan modern map here's Kandahar get my cursor out of the way Helmand here Herat up here Iran Pakistan the stands are up here so here's here's Kandahar and I'm sorry I'm going so quick so here's Kandahar and I want you to notice here's the highway one this goes up to Herat up to Iran this comes down to Chamin here's Pakistan Spinboldak major trader you can understand that the entire economy of Afghanistan runs on this highway one ring road they call it so if you blow up this highway you turn the economy off mostly of Afghanistan because most of the trade travels by highway so here's connecting from Pakistan and Iran up to Kabul this is Ahmad Shah Durrani he founded what was the Pashtun Empire it's the main ethnicity in Afghanistan the first capital of modern-state Afghanistan was in Kandahar it was moved to Kabul later on and I just want to point all these points out so you understand sort of the significance of this place when I went there I just went to go cover Canada was going on their first combat mission since the Korean War I had no idea how significant was this is the Battle of Maywan one of these you know these things the graveyard of empires comes from this one of these slaughters when it was the second-angle Afghan war when the Afghan slaughtered a British army out in Maywan district just west of Kandahar city if you read this book it's a really good book actually this is written by US General or I think Lieutenant Colonel and if you read the combat operations that the Russians did the Western forces did all the identical combat operations in all the same areas and the insurgents attacked them all in the same way the funny thing is when you go to the back to all the references Kabul in Kandahar Kandahar is about three times as many references actually in this book over Kabul in terms of its significance Mula Omar he started the Taliban movement in in Kandahar west of Kandahar city this is Tarnak farms after 9-11 this was al-Qaeda's headquarters set up just outside Kandahar city this was bin Laden's compound down here so remember that that that triangle I talked about so here's Kandahar city see this triangle right here here's Kandahar city now here's that same triangle okay here's the Argandab river that runs right through it and almost all the fighting in Kandahar province the place where almost the biggest part of the surge that did any fighting went into this triangle right here the same place the same route that Alexander the Great went through in the same shape actually let me just go back for a sec Sangasar that's where Mula Omar started the Taliban there's highway one right there housing my dad all the British troops they got slaughtered up in Maywand trickled down to here and any survivors made it to housing my dad largest operation in NATO history before Helmand happened here called Operation Medusa this was the first in 2006 this was this was the first big battle where everybody's like oh the insurgents are back first large-scale operation launched when the insurgents came back in 2006 was headed by Mula to Dula and it was like almost 200 suicide bombings in Kandahar city that was the biggest campaign in the entirety of the country now let's get to the photos which is I just want to give some foundation there and understanding of and I didn't know all this till over the years while I was there so I got there in 2006 and it was during the suicide bombing campaign this was like every day every second day there were scenes like this suicide vehicles guys with suicide vests and the urgency had definitely returned but I don't think people realized every year is going to come back bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and definitely the east was taking a lot of heat as well but the south was taking the most heat and I think that a lot of times the world was seeing the war through whatever countries troops were in that province so Canadians saw Kandahar because Canada was in charge of Canada was charged at Kandahar the British were in charge of Helmand so all the British you were Helmand and the US mostly was RC East the regional side on the east so every country was seeing the war by provinces not by the whole country so I think that there was a big disconnect sort of what was going on and what was happening where for I think a lot of people back home was all the same place Kandahar is surrounded by grape fields mostly especially on the west side it's the bread basket of Afghanistan there's a lot of underground agricultural and irrigation systems which has made it a significant place for agriculture in the country you walk through the grape fields all the time this is a member of the Afghan army I spend a lot of time with the Afghan army I thought the best place to learn about the place is being with the Afghans actually but the funny part is most of the Afghan army was not from Kandahar they were all from the north actually and it was a loyalty issue I think strategically I spent a lot of time with the Canadians their mission was Kandahar from 2006 to 2011 Kandahar is very different everything's deserts and mountains well Kandahar especially in those fighting districts it's perfect for guerrilla warfare so we're in a firefight right now in the middle of a grassy field swamps forests tree lines it just seemed to never end and the grape fields were like a bunch of trenches it was like World War one non-stop this is your standard view of that this is this is in Pangeway district or sorry Zari district and it's just your standard agricultural farming area there's some hills that and mountains that pop up here and there this is a road that the Canadians built called Summit Road it connected Highway 1 into the next district Pangeway and most of the buildings are built of mud there's no electricity no running water the populations of these districts Zari Pangeway Argendab these are the three districts around Kandahar City no one could ever really count but you know 50 60 maybe 80,000 per district depending on when they cleared out depending if there's fighting people move to another area detainees Canadians caught a proportionately higher number of detainees not by any sort of policy but I think that there are many more insurgents down in Kandahar that stayed in Kandahar and did not run across the Pakistan border all the time the bottom half of the districts was desert you couldn't really it was very difficult to travel through there these are Afghans and housey Medad they're peeling potatoes and Afghans really fascinating they're really easy to photograph I think a lot of Western troops are really aware all the time of being photographed whereas the Afghans were not and they really let their guard down which is fantastic it took a lot longer to get the photograph Western troops because they're aware of the camera this is sort of a standard scene you never know who's who civilians insurgents you have no idea so it was this constant sort of trust and distrust you don't know who's who these are police their Hazaras they're a small ethnicity in Afghanistan and one one experiment was to bring a Hazara unit down in the midst of the Pashtun ethnicity so that there could be no infiltration by the Taliban these are minor birds and they're common pets for Afghan army and police and it was like this nice little human moment in the middle of all this fighting every day it was really nice to just see this guy was like singing and talking to these birds they clip their wings so they can't fly away these are Afghan police unbinding the feet of two Afghan police who were hung and shot in the face by the Taliban a common tactic is these two police actually this is the the I heard two stories is one they were they walked off the base the Taliban kidnapped them and they were found the next day dead well first they were hung in the in the town to scare the local villagers what happened is is the two local police went out to try and rob to two locals of their motorcycle they disarmed them and gave them to the Taliban and this was a common problem is corruption in the Afghan police force and so the Taliban sort of sent a message like hey come to us if you have a problem don't go to the Western forces don't go to the government forces we'll take care of your problems this is right near Senghisar it's a place just between Senghisar a place called spin pier this is right near a place called Taliban road contact corners all these nicknames for places we're about 50 meters from the insurgents right here the insurgents I would seal I had friends who covered the regional command the east side the firefight seemed further away here it was really flat lots of vegetation and the Taliban would fight a lot closer because their artillery and airstrikes were ineffective what had happened a lot so this Afghan soldiers terrified because we're actually going to get overrun we had to run above 400 meters back to the base this is very rare a lot of times the Taliban would totally be overwhelmed by Western forces but this is what war was for me the experience of war it's fear it's not just the bullets coming out of the guns this is the white school house there's these two white school houses in in Pashmool right near afghan Kandahar city one was completely destroyed there are some famous battles there that Canadians were involved in this is a common thing where the insurgents would set up in schools attack the Western forces they would fire back and destroy the schools hence negating the whole building of the schools schools are a big target it's all ideological these are women begging outside of the one of the most sacred mosques and shrines in Afghanistan if not the region it's the mosque of the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad this is civilian who's just walking down the road again these are all in the districts west of Kandahar city all the fighting happened in the rural areas a lot of times I would hear people from different either governmental or military organizations say you know if we take Kandahar city we control the south but really you got to control the rural areas if you're going to control the city if you don't control the rural areas you cannot hold the city because the rural areas surround the city and then all the citizens feel like they're surrounded all the time there's a stranglehold on them what happens to Taliban would ambush government troops and they would fire back and civilians get caught in the crossfire that happens all the a lot of times actually mostly with Afghan troops I thought to understand Kandahar you got to go even to Helmand Helmand there's sort of a big connection between Kandahar and Helmand they're connected the Argandab River I mean of course rivers are very rare there so anytime they're there there's a lot of life along them there's a lot of work along them because of jobs in agriculture and I went to Helmand and when the Marines returned in 2010 and I just wanted to sort of document what the experience is to go to I mean Helmand is a very difficult place to operate it's 125 degrees 55 degrees for people who are on metric I'm from Canada so we're metric so I thought I'd throw that in there but I went at the end of their tour and I just did these portraits every day after fighting in patrol because I just wanted to capture the experience which was a little more universal of any sort of soldier army or fighter that goes to Afghanistan what the experience is like because I think that the land and the challenge of the terrain is just as much your enemy as the people you're fighting there and I think that that's why for centuries Afghanistan such a been such a difficult place to operate in in any way even as a non-governmental organization even if you're just doing development work it's very very very challenging place to operate and anyone who's been there understands what I'm talking about the average age of these Marines 20 21 years old another thing I want to do is follow the route of Alexander the Great he was one of the first major invaders foreign invaders of Afghanistan so I went up to Farah and I sort of followed his route this is in the bougie bass pass and these are areas that you know I'd be staying on mountain at someone to say like hey you know I got the GPS this is where I think Alexander the Great started fighting first and it just it just blew me away that I was following in the roots of Genghis Khan Alexander the Great and there are very few places in the world where you can go they have that many famous and infamous military leaders and armies and empires all go to the same place to invade fight control fix whatever they're trying to do there it was so bad that this is there's a lot of fighting there the Marines gave their interpreter hand guns they actually offered me a gun at one point I just said I'll work the camera but it just the threat was really bad this is the top of the bougie bass pass and you can see if you're the army walking down the valley you're up in the mountain sort of all the different things that suit armies that are fighting each other these are Canadian troops in Zari district which was a lot of fighting happened in Zari in Panjway district this sort of for me is too full it has that whole thing of enter the abyss going into the dark place this is a caress this is what makes Kandahar so important and so unique it's an underground river system you could say in an irrigation system and a lot of the Afghans it's centuries-old irrigation system they dig down to find the root of the caress and they divert the water into their fields that what that's what makes Kandahar unique in such a massive way the other thing too is that when the Russians left the century-old irrigation system they did a scorched earth policy out in the districts because they're having such a hard time and they destroyed centuries of irrigation which was controlled pretty much by shovels for centuries this is in a madrasa in Kandahar city I did a lot of work without the military I thought it was important to get outside of the military as much as possible as well this is in Chalgor this is one of the many villages where they were started in 2010 conducting counterinsurgency operations and what I started doing is you're wondering why there's this panoramic I just over years I was shooting everything the same and I thought I want to start looking at space differently in Afghanistan it's such a unique place for its space for what happens in those spaces and how you occupy those spaces and it's a toy Russian camera and the lens moves from left to right and it was filmed so I didn't know what I was getting and I would only shoot one or two frames per scene and this is just they caught these two kids digging this is a common thing you see someone digging you're a soldier they're planting a bomb or a landmine usually so they've got one guy at the mine detector digging up the bomb the guy in the center is taking forensic tests to see if he has explosive rather than his hands and they've got his partner and they're crushing him separately on the right but you can't normally do this with a regular 35 millimeter camera it's this 120 degree field of view and it's just another way of showing sort of the space and the place this is in Spinboldak you don't need a passport to really cross Spinboldak people just walk back and forth Spinboldak chain and it's the Pakistan border south of Kandahar very strategic important place a lot of sort of training camps and and sort of resources for the insurgency happened in Pakistan these little boys their job is take these veal barrels and and go back and forth carrying things across for people who can't carry them themselves this is in Kandahar city there's some local cabs local river system you know if when you ask someone in Kandahar what their base complaint is it's not violence it doesn't come first it's we want electricity we want running water and this is one of the main channels where you know a lot people are running water in their house so this is sort of the water source for a lot of people I did a lot of color photography and I'm gonna speed through this story because we got such a short amount of time this is during the Eid festival that's henna stained on their hands you know you're in a firefight nature is ever present and sort of the symbolism of nature in war is really important when you're in a firefight that the crickets and the birds don't stop doing their thing the birds are still chirping they're flying around bugs are still walking around so I just wanted to sort of have that sort of ever presence of what nature is and what it can symbolize and that nature itself can be cruel just like the thorns are I did 150 medevac missions I want to cover casualties even civilian casualties so in 2010 during the surge I spent several months with a US medevac crew this is about one second after an IED blast by 2010 the insurgents have kind of realized that the IED was like the stinger missile during the rushing war and they started using it to their effect as much as they could this IED was in a tree they started making IEDs that would blow people's heads off spent a lot of time in trauma rooms on the front lines there are three blood brothers who are blown up by an IED set by insurgents while walking their donkey it's two US soldiers after an ambush this is all in the back of a helicopter this is after a mission in Argendab district this is your standard infantry soldier morning before battle and just the youth that will how young guys were as they got younger and younger over the years really struck me this is after an IED attack at night this is a casualty in the back of the helicopter this is a casualty in Bandy Timor which is a little stretch of land that connects Hellman province to Canada province I just want to talk quickly about sort of how we consume our images we see this is a lot of place where my pictures were published but this was a series on Newsweek they wanted color for commercial reasons I just want you understand the social and the political choices that when photos are chosen it's not just hey that looks cool but that there are political and social implications of these things so like you know when you when you have a headline embracing the Taliban you have someone closing the eyes of a dead person sort of editorial choices photo editing you know how you can connect sort of different visuals like like the grass the photo editor found that I didn't find that which goes to prove the importance of having good photo editors that's an IED or some old shells on the left this photo on the right would no one publish it in color but actually no one really publish it period but they would publish it in black and white so the choice of using color black and white for the politics of showing graphic pictures I like this one this on the border of Pakistan Afghanistan it's like the guys dreaming about the jaguar up above sort of the play of ads you know I mean this is psychologically this is how we experience pictures and I really this is you know I started talking to some about this and I think it's really really important to consider what's on your page and what you're taking in this is an exhibition those Marines in Amsterdam they made the see-through giant prints and hung them in the cathedral just gonna show you some quick logistics I was there on and off from 2006 2010 and I spent a lot most of my time I would eat and hang out with the Afghan Army guys not with the Western troops because I wasn't gonna really learn much from them and I started out doing that looking like this and fitting in as much as I could for being with them and this is in 2010 during the surge in the Argendob and then I want to do work outside the military and I'm really blessed with this Italian beard I can grow this is in the Khyber Pass but you have to understand that that hat and how I look here will not work in Kandahar you'd stand out so you got to understand your scarves this is when I was working Kandahar city my camera bag was a plastic bag and I would use I mean you have to look at how Afghans do things I put duct tape on the handle because nothing is thrown away right and I used a pillowcase from either camera bag so I would spend a lot of time at police checkpoints and I would talk to them and they would tell me what's going on because when they would tell me things going on I wasn't getting the spin from anybody I knew exactly what's going on I would watch operations from Hills that that the NATO would do with Afghan police so I could watch it sort of as an observer and the police would tell me what the insurgents were doing too so I could get kind of both sides what was going on these are Afghan police just one of the checkpoints entering Kandahar city this is me in Argendob district this is with me in my I work with Afghan journalists I don't believe in the whole two-week parachute in and out sometimes that's the reality but this is we worked in Kandahar city extensively this is my website if you want to follow up on my work it's www.luipalu.com you want to keep abreast of what I'm doing yes I have a Facebook page an artist page you can click on that and that'll let you know what's up and I think now Doug will come up and we can chat hopefully I stuck to the time as much I sorry to bombard you it's so much but well after that presentation bombard is the right word in several senses but let's you you talked about it briefly in passing but yeah let's let you reiterate why Kandahar well what ended up happening is after 9-11 I think Afghanistan if it wasn't on our minds definitely everybody knew about it and up through 2006 I'm emerging from Canada and up through 2006 Canada had a general war role somewhere in Oregon Afghanistan known near Kabul and then Canada took on a combat role in I think they announced it in 2005 in Canada hadn't taken on a combat role in any sort of outside of peacekeeping since the 50s in Korea so it's like this major event as a Canadian that we're gonna we're going to combat in Canada has never really been attacked since like the war of 1812 so Canada's always gone to war it's true by the US actually this is the centennial I think there are some yeah bison time sorry I yeah but which goes to prove hey maybe one day we'll be friends with the other side I mean who knows but I thought wow Canada's going to war we always go to work to help other people like the US the British usually and I thought I want to see what's I want to see what my country's gonna do over there so I immediately found out I was working in newspaper and I went and I will be straight out I had no idea how significant Kandahar was or what it was I just do it was a big city in the south that's it so okay so you kind of stumble into Kandahar yeah what five years why why so long what would kept your interest over this duration of time I think I think they're prize in a single room person in this room who was affected in some way by 9-11 and I think that that was sort of the foundation of it but it didn't drive me to want to go there yet and when I got there I realized that I couldn't cover the war the way I thought it should be covered in a parachute style and I don't mean to demean any other journalists who have to go in and out because that's valuable as well to do quick reporting like that but I like I wanted to do a long-term study I wanted to keep looking at something over and over and over and over again because I think that things reveal themselves if you look at them over time and after 2006 I got back and I already started plotting going back and I already knew I was gonna quit my staff job and I was gonna go on my own and I wasn't gonna have to know a lot of times your editor will call you anyone who's in this room was a photographer writer gets this the editor calls you and tells you the story from back in New York or Toronto or whatever and you're on the ground you're like that's not actually what's happening here but they're like but that's the story we're going with we just had the news meeting and I just felt like I really wanted to say hey look I'm gonna stay here when I figure out the story then I'll report it and I did sell stuff sort of on a per story basis but over the years as the pictures started coming together they started telling a new story they start explaining things more than just the bombings and the bodies they started explaining the culture the place its history and I really think it became a unique story and a unique dialogue about the place talk to us about both how you split your time and what you learned and how you approached differently dealing with the the Afghan army and police with Afghan civilians and then you clearly spent a lot of time with the Canadians and a little bit with the Marines as well how were those experiences different and how did you approach them differently well the problem with working with with Afghans even if they're army as much as what we're hearing now about sort of some infiltration by you know where some Afghans turn and shoot Western forces is am I gonna get kidnapped in my primary role goal my the thing I was most terrified of was one that my fixer and if you know what a fixer is it's a local guide a translator a local journalist that helps you in the area working in if you're in a foreign place is that he would be hurt or killed because he had a family had kids and the first thing the insurgents or the criminals a lot of criminals there as well just like anywhere else do is they either kidnap you and take you or they kill them and I just thought he is just as important as I am and so every time we plan something he was always in mind with the Afghan army and police there's some basic stuff like the guy with the rocket launcher don't walk behind him because if you get attacked he'll just lift it up and start shooting and he'll blow your head off but I think that what I had to do is I would go to the Afghan army's Mula and I would sit down with interpreter and I would learn everything that was offensive and not offensive these are really important things because little simple things would offend people you know you think I'll come on but you know it's a whole other culture and religion a whole other history so it's really important to learn such as let's see don't go into their mosque you know I think hey let me go shoot some video in the mosque you go ask you have a sit-down with the Mula and you get permission and you say you explain why you want to do it I think that even sort of images of women you know within the army what you show what you don't show what you talk about when you don't talk about and I think that religion is definitely something you have to be sensitive to and I think that you know we have a lot of we have things where we joke around a lot and for them some of these things aren't jokes and they could get you they could get offended very easily and I really tried to spend as much time with the army before going out into the districts as well like hey you go on a patrol you drink lots of water you operation during 8 leaders well what's the natural thing you're gonna have to go to the washroom well you can't just there's no washrooms out there like you have to really plan what you're gonna do you can't just whip it out in the bush and go because well it sounds funny but you find that you can offend an entire village and I wish to be like Western guys came here and they're peeing all over our town and then that's that's the message that goes out and suddenly the entire town says they were naked and then the story gets switched around and you could cause an entire storm there and the Taliban will use it as propaganda against you or hey they were looking at our women some guy came in town took a photograph all our women they're gonna photograph all our women and show what our women look like major problems and then you become something that causes conflict so I would write my name on the back of my helmet in Pashto so everybody could call me and talk to me and I've made little business cards with Pashto information on one side English information on the other so I could give it to them so like hey this guy's putting an effort in you talk to again in passing you give us a lot of information about the various ethnic groups you interacted with in Afghanistan you did the Pashtuns largely in the south you had the the Afghan army mostly Tajiks coming from the north you talked about the Hazara police that they brought down what were your observations of the interaction between these groups officially their interaction with the population did this give you any hope for a post-ethnic Afghanistan well I think that even within it's very complex because then there's even tribes within each of the ethnicities that sometimes are fighting each other but say Pashtuns from Kandahar and Pashtuns from up north in Kabul they're very different kinds of Pashtuns and there is definitely a prejudice from north to south that's for sure a lot of people a lot of the guys in the army be like oh people in Kandahar they're not very educated and right away I'm like come on you know I'm thinking don't be prejudiced but I think that you know the Hazaras were definitely they were slaughtered in there's a number of cases where the Taliban slaughtered the Hazaras there's some like almost ethnic cleansing so in some ways you could bring down another ethnicity and they're like hey it's payback time or you have the right kind of guy and that that you police force was actually very very the New York the New Yorker did a story on that base where I was at and it was very fascinating the problem is is these guys can't seek Pashtun they come down they're speaking their language so sometimes they can't even communicate with the locals I remember my fixer who driving to Kandahar city and they brought down police during the surge in 2010 and the police were from Kabul and they spoke Dari which is a Persian based language and it's different from Pashtun and my fixer got into the fight with the police at the checkpoint we're gonna get arrested because he was calling he was telling off the guy from up north hey don't tell me in my city you came and speak my language they started yelling at each other and I thought this is the classic little argument and fight and end up war in Afghanistan you're clearly aware of a lot of the ambiguity of so many of these situations how do you go about capturing you know ambiguity and what's inherently a visual you know somewhat unambiguous medium how do you how do you resolve the tension I think I think a lot of the times is you have to spend a lot of time with people after a while you're there so much and you're photographing so much that the people that you're photographing are like oh that's just Louis or as the Afghans call me Mustafa that's just Mustafa he said don't worry about it he's fine and I would eat with them and you and like the Marines I mean I took it took me a month to get those photos the photos only took about two minutes to take but I lived with them for a month so I was with them every day and I think that you have to demonstrate to people that you're willing to be understand and respect everything that they are and where they're from and I think that you got to be there every day over and over and go on patrols I think some units I'd go on with every single section I would go like on eight patrols a day and they thought I was insane but I just thought I need to be out there as much as possible because even if you are against being embedded there are areas of Kandahar that I don't care who you are you cannot go out unembedded it's just wait it's way too violent you can't just hope for a battle show up and take pictures objectively because you could be in the middle of it and get blown up release they could think you're an insurgent from a drone and drop a bomb on you so I think I look for a lot of subtle things and I would try and be quick and there are things you just taking a photo as much as a great photo is our security risk or I would start a fight or a riot or I photographed a woman so I would have to really careful that I would have to just bite my tongue and just not take the photo sometimes you were there from 2006 to 2010 you know 2006 is just when the violence really started up dick I don't think the Canadians really understood that they're getting into you left around you know 2010 when such that it's peak you know what was that like what lessons did you take away and what's your what what are your thoughts on what that means for Kandahar in Afghanistan at large well I think it I guess I just kept looking at it and I I always said I'm not an expert these are just things I learned and and these are things I photographed and saw but I just kept thinking wow this there's just so much about this place that makes it such a significant place its population and I just felt like it was like this from from 2006 it was this buildup of like oh yeah okay this place is important we better put more troops or more resources here and then by 2010 they're like of course Kandahar is really important and sounded everybody kind of came together and everything finally came in that it should have came in but I think that it's that it's almost sounded like a cliche but if you don't study your history you're destined to repeat it and I think that when you look at some of the old maps and all the different people went over the years all the things that happened to them hey it was from spears to arrows to m16s to whatever weapon came after that but pretty much history had kept repeating itself and I think that the one difference right now that's gonna make the biggest difference is to train an Afghan force and let an Afghan force deal with Afghans so it's not hey you foreigners hey you Westerners that I think is the solution and I think that development building roads you cannot go building you can't not go wrong building road the things that the insurgents cannot blow up that was ideological was a road because once the locals got used to certain paved roads the canyons built they're like hey don't pull up that road we got to get our stuff to market we got to go to the city so I think that you can't go wrong building infrastructure at all and I think that the road building and read your history as thoroughly as possible okay I'm not gonna pretend that I'm technically sophisticated enough to ask this question but someone asked me this beforehand so I will film versus digital how did you balance this how much do you work in and really 35 millimeter and how many how many times is it this is a plant from one of my friends this question okay film and digital you know really in the end I mean without sort of that the semantics and the small details of it I don't care I'm just there to take photos it's it's all just a tool but I will say the panoramics are film and everything else is digital now when I first started shooting there I made everything black and white because I just wasn't very good at color and as I got to no color it made a difference in the field because I'm out there for like four or five months in the middle of nowhere I can't there's no Kodak store like you know having memory cards was very helpful and moving pictures selling pictures and having revenue come in to pay bills pay my Afghan employees is very very important I think that film conceptually and psychologically is very important because you don't know what you got the way you're thinking is you're like did I get that I don't know but the problem is is there an interruption in the creative process with digital is because you do something what we speak disparagingly of the term we use in the professional photo will be called chimping because like a little monkey looking at the back of your camera there you meet me included right instead of just shooting and then like okay like you just let it your flow you're letting it go like just keep shooting just keep thinking about the picture so I think the choice of camera is an important one whether it's film or digital and I think that your approach is very very different especially from the generation I know I have a few gray haired friends in the audience here I won't point you out who started with film and in the end we're all achieving sort of an excellence that's our own personal goal for image making but I think that the image making with film was very very different because there was a process where you did not know what you get and you kept shooting and focusing on the scene instead of going ooh I got it let me go move this picture and then there's the whole let me go file right away there's this pressure to move pictures like hurry up get me that photo I needed on the line right away you know in the film days or when I'm shooting film like I'm not going anywhere I'm gonna keep following this thing and there's some picture an hour two hours later that you miss because you're in a hurry to go send your picture somewhere so I say both I like both and I still very much still use film I think the choice of larger format cameras isn't cuz it's cool or it's different I think that psychologically the way you approach taking the photograph is different and that's the way I like to use the camera great can you briefly tell us about your your follow on project and what you're doing in Mexico and how the lessons that you took from from Kandahar playing there okay my fellowship that I'm working on now is Mexico and I'm focusing on the border of course it's all in the news there are things I have to cover like the violence in Mexico but they're also social economic issues in Mexico that I think it overlooked and get drowned by by the whole over coverage of and there is a lot of killing going on there definitely but I think that we're not really learning from just seeing bodies I think that we need to learn about what Mexico is what its history is what its visual history is look at the history of what Mexico is in pictures if you look at the famous painters and the people of depicted Mexico violent death and oppressed workers and that's still very much happening today and I think that Mexico is probably one of the most important countries strategically to the United States in the world and I think that if people aren't paying attention to Mexico they don't realize that you've turned Mexico off you pretty much you could collapse the U.S. economy by turning Mexico off vitally important as well you know it's funny is the United States has Canada and Mexico and I'm not speaking because I'm Canadian but imagine taking those two major trading partners away I mean Mexico is a security gate from the rest of Central and South America to the United States I mean when you think of the billions of dollars of trade that come from Mexico that affects the daily lives of almost every American everything that comes from Mexico manufacturing trade the economy and same with Canada 39 states in the U.S. their primary trading partner is Canada or Mexico so I'm working on it I am not going to show it and it's learning from Canada hard is it's looking at things differently not just going in there for two weeks and coming out and saying hey this is what I saw in two weeks is getting to know the situation and watching it develop over months gives you a different view of what's happening somewhere and that's what I learned from Canada actually okay great as a as we wrap up a what did I not ask you that I should have oh geez I'm good with pictures but what did you not ask me actually you know I'd like to ask you now a lot of you may not realize but he worked in the eastern side in the U.S. Army up in the east and one of the things that I thought was very interesting was Afghanistan was a sort of one of the first big contemporary sort of international tries at fighting a war development and different countries took different areas and I always wondered you know I went up to the east and I always wondered and I almost don't want to turn it on you but seeing Kandahar and being up in the east there there are such different places the people were different the culture is different the fighting was different the insurgencies the insurgents and the leaders were different what sort of what did you come away from you know sort of understanding so we're talking about the eastern side of Afghanistan and Kabul's up in north and it's the south and the east where most of all the fighting is happening and what would you sort of what would you sort of reflect on sort of seeing what you saw from here and sort of being in the east and what you're doing up in the east I think our our experiences are similar in that you've got the the place is divided and you have different nationality on different nationalities working in these different areas that are so different the the far west you have Harat which is very Iranian influence and you the Italians out working that and the north is very tied to the former Soviet stands to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and the Germans are up there and then the east very tied to Pakistan as is the south but the the Americans were there and then the south was run by the Canadians and then very lately transitioned to the Americans and so you had not only the different national colors of each each intervener but you had different cultures within Afghanistan and it just it just made it so hard to put it all together and you're right the east is is very different that there's none of the jungle like vegetation you saw it's much cooler much more temperate much more mountainous the engagements were further away but the Tajiks and Uzbeks were much more intermingled with the past dunes it was just different all right with that we're not going to take audience questions because we're going to not let him leave here until seven o'clock we have an open bar we have and he is at your mercy here in the front we want to thank you all for coming we've enjoyed this discussion and again please to have him here really appreciate his candor hard work look forward to seeing Mexico and again thank you all for coming out tonight and we will not let him leave until seven o'clock so feel free to accost him with all your questions