 Good evening. I'm going to go ahead and get us started. I know our time is a bit limited this evening And I know we have a great program lined up with the for you with some videos and photography So I want to make sure that we maximize our time together this evening for those of you who don't know me My name is a we stay at you, but I'm deputy director of the Fellows Program here at New America The Fellows Program brings on thinkers who are journalists producers practitioners and scholars whose work enhances the public Conversation about some of the most pressing issues of our day Louis himself was a fellow with us a few years ago, and so we're happy to welcome him back again today to New America I know we also have quite a few journalists who have RSVP'd and are here in attendance So just if it's okay to just put a plug in our application will go live mid November And so for those of you who are interested in applying to the Fellows Program You know feel free to talk to Louis about his experience as a fellow And then please also log on to our website to sign up to receive an update whenever the application goes live later this fall So what we'll go ahead and get started now that I got the Fellows Program taken care of but Today we're looking at the Afghan war and the event tonight is a lens on the Afghan war And we're very thrilled and delighted to have Finbar O'Reilly and Louis Pollow here this evening Turns out they're both friends from over ten years ago having met in Afghanistan And so it's a bit of a reunion ten years later, and it just so happens both their books out are out around the same time Since the 1850s photography has been a part of wartime media Grouping conflict suddenly became visualized and the public's accessibility to what was taking place in a war zone Increased with every technological innovation Louis Pollow and Finbar O'Reilly continue this long-held tradition with the release of their respective photography books front towards enemy and Shooting ghosts that capture the experience of America's longest war in Afghanistan through various perspectives both from the civilian and military side Award-winning photographer Louis Pollow was a fellow here in 2011 to 2012 His accolades included a Guggenheim fellowship and his works have been featured in the New York Times the BBC the Smithsonian National Portrait and the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery His latest book examines the five years he spent covering the war in Kandahar, Afghanistan Fronts towards an enemy attempts to highlight the chaos of war and how media influences public perception Finbar O'Reilly's work is a memoir co-written with retired US Marine Corps sergeant Thomas James Brennan reflecting on the experiences of the war and the unlikely friendship they formed during this experience O'Reilly is currently Based in London having spent 12 years in Central and West Africa as a photographer for Reuters winning the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year Award among many others To begin today's discussion. We do have two videos Given the nature of their work. We did want to show their photography They both prepared videos and just to give you a heads up. There is some graphic Footage in both so for those of you who might be very sensitive to that just please be aware of that now And then lastly please silent your phones We have a great conversation planned and that's probably one of the one things that Can ruin the mood so if you can just silence your phones before we begin that'd be lovely So Louie and by you to the stage each Louie and fan bar will both come up and just give you a summary of what the video Will be that you'll see and then we'll be joined together with all three of us on stage at the end And we'll take questions from there Yep Anyway, thank it's really great being back in America. It's like a little homecoming here. It's a fantastic organization I owe so much of my career Trajectory right now to the teaching that was given to me and how to work as a journalist and thinker here lots of old friends in the crowd that I'm seeing here and Really special for me to see all my old friends. So the little video here. I've clipped like it's about seven minutes From my film Kandahar journals Anyone sensitive to gunfire? There's gonna be a little audio just be aware, please. It's okay if you need to step outside of the room for that part I Think it starts with that, but I wanted to also showcase the other complex layers of What a war looks like and sort of the complexities of what happens in a war and things you face sort of covering it so Is finbar gonna come up and or just my video and then finbar come up. Okay, cool Turn these lights Very complicated player. I think they want to do well So a lot of times we'll go in we'll talk to people and you know, they probably want to tell you more But the fact that there's probably a brother or a cousin or a friend who's related with the insurgency Usually stops them from from saying anything that might get them in trouble The weirdest thing here is that is that there's no front lines. There's no Friendly areas or even necessarily enemy and area areas because there's places you go into that people will speculate and say Oh, this is a guaranteed contact for sure. We're gonna get hit and then there's nothing There's no easy way to define when trouble is coming or when trouble is not So far and in almost a year here, I haven't I haven't seen a single Taliban But I'm pretty sure I've talked to a lot of them. It's always far off. It's It's happening somewhere else, you know, or gunshots from a certain distance away from you and stuff like that Or ID's place where the guy's not even around anymore where he's been long gone But you sit in these villages and you talk to like 10 20 people well There's a good chance that one of them is an insurgent or a sympathizer or has a brother who is and just want to tell you anything There's probably a lot more rubbing elbows with the enemy than we even think we even know about They play on that whole mystique the whole History of the Taliban the actual Taliban itself here, right? So they can reap all the benefits Right associated with that negative connotation of the Taliban Even when they're not really Taliban themselves, they're drug renters they're You know just power-hungry people they're foreigners or this or that and They just call themselves Taliban and it all just adds it culminates You know it gives them a certain mystique, I think so let me explain While the fighting happens are on Kandahar city. So we get Kandahar city right here This goes to Pakistan this goes to the capital Kabul and this goes to Iran But what we also have here is a number of very significant sites What we have here is the holiest shrine in Islam in Afghanistan if not the whole region And what we have here is the tomb of the founder of Afghanistan the Taliban was founded in a small village right there Al Qaeda had their headquarters here Tarnaq farms, which is where they planned the attacks for 9-11 But I think the key thing to understanding the fighting is there are three agricultural districts West of the city Argendab district, Zari district, Andhra district and Within these three districts There are numerous small villages and the Taliban use these villages as sanctuaries to threaten and attack Kandahar city Oh just drop here for us So Fembarque, you'd like to come up and then frame your film as well? So mine's a little different, it's not a video. It's an audio slideshow, basically a series of photographs that I took during my time embedded on two occasions with my co-author Thomas Brennan, who was the leader of a small squad of 15 Marines at a remote combat outpost in Helmand Province. And I think it's just a way to set the scene. There's some overlapping themes that we would have picked up on in this film as well. But let's have a look at it and then we can have a conversation just about five minutes long. Right leg, right leg. Decorize, decorize, this is Coon Jack, are you copying the transmissions from the CP? I look back and I saw the warhead, it was coming straight towards Chun and I. I told Chun to get down, we both hit the deck. I don't remember the boom, all I remember is after the smoke had cleared I saw Staff Sergeant Gonzalez running towards us screaming my name. My name is Thomas Brennan, I'm a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. I'm with 1st Tine 8th Marines Alpha Company and I'm the squad leader for 3rd Platoon 4th Squad. The objective was to push up approximately 4,000 meters to a target building to potentially ambush the Taliban. But we left Opie Coon Jack at about 1300. We pushed down into the city in a book. Once we got down there we probably patrolled in about four or five hundred meters and that's when we started taking pretty heavy volumes of fire. We wound up maneuvering on them about another 75 meters down the road where we hit an open field and that's where we started taking AK and RPK fire. We set up shop inside a compound. We had the security out there with the ANP with the RPK and I had a saw gunner out there and I had one of my team leaders out there with the 203 providing suppression. I had Lance Corporal Roche and Lance Corporal Orr move to the next alleyway to set up our next mounting position and that's when they got hit with an RPG. We thought they stepped on a pressure plate and got blown up by an IED at first but then we seen them running back. They were pretty dazed. They suffered grade two concussions. We had the corpsman set them inside the compound, take a look at the two of them and that's when myself and Lance Corporal Chun we ran up to the same alleyway. That's when him and I got knocked out by an RPG at the ANP shot. It had the telephone pole right next to me. Him and I both suffered third grade concussions. My head really started hurting. I started having trouble seeing. My eyes hurt like hell. I kind of sounded dumber than I used to be because words weren't making sense in my head but after about two days my eyes started getting back to normal. I could start to focus. Trying to piece it all together but it's all kind of blurry. My squad watched four people get hurt. My team leaders still kept doing their job. My junior Marines still kept doing their job and even the guys that got hurt by the concussions. We were still trying to the best of our ability to do our job. I'm just really proud of my guys and I can't wait to get back to them and let them know. It's kind of hard to explain. We came together, family sticks together and as long as I'm good to be out there I want to be out there with them. We got a Hesco Barricades as our primary means of defense to keep the enemy out. In our living quarters we have Cayman heading over the top. We paid $35 for a giant trash bag to drape over the top of that. That way since it started to rain a little bit it'll keep us somewhat dry. But for the most part it's dusty. It's getting cold. We got the solar showers but pretty much we rely on baby wipes and clean socks. I showered once at Coon Jack in the month I was there just because the water was too damn cold. Baby wipes get the job done and we got cots and just whatever our family send us. I miss my wife and daughter. My wife sends me photos of my daughter and she's just growing up and getting so smart without me being there. It's kind of scary leaving when she's two and getting home but she's almost three and you miss so much. Being afraid of where you're walking each day that definitely takes a toll on you. The psychological aspect is tremendous here. They're placement of IEDs. They know exactly where you're going to take cover when they start shooting so they put them there. So you got to be careful where you run to once you start getting shot at. They've got IEDs on the corners. They've got IEDs in the middle of the roads and they're only going to strike you with an ambush if it's advantageous to them. You just got to trust your eyes and trust your sweeper up front with the metal detector. One thing I always tell my guys is if today's the day, today's the day. I mean, we do everything we can. There's only so much you can do. The mission can't stop because you're nervous. You got to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going because if you don't, you'll be standing still and that makes an easy target. You can walk up and talk to a local national and he seems like a straight up guy but then two days later you could be detaining him because he was shooting at you. Where they don't wear uniforms, you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys until you catch them doing something guilty. That's got to be the most frustrating thing about it. Before we couldn't make it 100 meters into the city without getting shot at. Now we can make it five, six, seven hundred meters into the city before we get shot at. So we know we're pushing them back and I noticed when we were on a patrol that more people were starting to come back. I mean, it's a slow process. Every 500 meters we're pushing back, that allows 100 meters worth of civilians to come back into the city but if we can get them back to their homes then we can really start trying to make a difference by telling them like, listen, we pushed the Taliban back. You're back in your home. We're keeping you safe. You know, now help us out. The biggest accomplishments to myself are we found the IEDs that they've put out there for us. Nobody's been killed yet from the squad and we've also killed Taliban. So in my opinion on the squad level, that's won the war. Bigger picture is a lot bigger than I am. I know I'm a piece of the puzzle and if we're not doing our job then the rest of the puzzle can't fit together. My guys have to trust me and I have to trust my leaders. If I trust them and accomplish the mission they want done then the bigger picture will fall into place. So thank you both for putting that video, both your videos together. And I think it's great as we begin the conversation to be able to have that in our minds and just to have that perspective from what you've both witnessed and experienced on the ground. Just to start off, I'd love to hear more about how each of you found your way into becoming a war photographer. Something maybe at the age of 10 that you necessarily decide that you want your career to be. But it'd be great to hear from both of you about what your journey was like into that field but then also Afghanistan and how Afghanistan came into your work and what it's meant for each of you personally to have covered Afghanistan, you know, America's longest war so intimately. Well, for me it happened by accident. I was based in Central Africa for Reuters as a correspondent actually as a reporter writing about another huge sprawling conflict that was consuming a large part of Central Africa. And I started making pictures to go with my articles because I always knew that there was a better chance of them getting published and getting more seen if I had photos and little by little I shifted into photography. And I'd actually gone to Congo the week of 9-11 and I decided to stay there rather than going to Afghanistan because I wanted to tell stories that there weren't sort of high on the news agenda at that time. But ultimately I became interested in Afghanistan after I'd been covering conflict for good six or seven years by then and had a certain level of experience both with covering hostile environments but also covering also photography which was pretty new to me initially when I was working in Congo. And it was the Canadian involvement actually that made me want to go to Afghanistan. Most of the focus when I first went there in 2006 and 2007 was still on Iraq at that time. But Canadians were the very front end as you saw in Louise's part of the fighting force in Afghanistan. And as Canadians we generally self-identify as a peacekeeping nation. One of our prime ministers created peacekeeping at the UN and the fact that Canadians were fighting for the first time really since Korea is something I wanted to know about. And I knew as a news wire photographer our clients in Canada would use those pictures and they did. I think initially I I have a lot of the same stories as Finbar is Canada was going on a combat mission and I thought well my country's going to war we haven't been in a combat mission since Korea and I thought this is like this really important moment and the focus was Iraq and but what I didn't realize after I made my film over the years is that sitting at my table I come from a family of immigrants and anyone who comes from a family of immigrants especially from the generation of children whose parents were in the Second World War my parents would always be like hey clean your plate off you're not leaving the table because when I was a child you know how poor we were and I didn't realize that I created my identity and how I identified with parents who had suffered this trauma in the Second World War it's very very difficult to learn these stories when your father passed away that when he was four German soldiers came into his house pointed a gun at him and arrested his father because that relatives were allegedly with the partisans and they would come into the house and search and do these kinds of things and realize that everybody is of some kind and it's I think really important to understand your connection to present conflicts so that's kind of I did that and then I went to cover the war and I got there in 2006 and I really I'm like wow the Taliban are not defeated Al Qaeda is not on the run and I was at the global mill time I got back and I already started planning to quit my job and sell half my furniture for years pretty much to covering the war so that's what I did I cashed in part of my retirement and I bought my own cameras did not tell my photo right at the time and then I just started covering it and I covered it as much as I could so for those who don't know I am Afghan and I'm from Kandahar my family is from Kandahar I was born in Kabul but came here as a young child and so during one of my first trips back to Afghanistan in 2006 as an adult I did sports programs for girls in Afghanistan and I heard about a boxing program for girls so I went to the gym and I started to take photographs of the girls boxing and I distinctly remember one of the girls coming over to me and asking me where I was going to use her photos and she said you know since 2001 photographers, journalists they come here they take our photos they put them online sometimes you're making money off of the photos or other times they're bringing in donations and they're putting our photos on their website and I remember that moment very distinctly and I deleted the photos afterwards because I wanted to be mindful of making sure that I wasn't sensationalizing their story and I'm not saying that you were but I guess there is an inherent tension often times that you're in these war zones and I know Finbar you wrote about it pretty intimately in your book as well is that there is this tension either from the civilian level or even from the military level that you're there to cover this story but others might not want you to cover it the way you want to cover it and I guess I'm curious to know how you handle that tension how did you feel sometimes covering something that was a very intimate moment in someone's life and even sometimes covering death and just how you handled those moments and those images well for yeah certainly for me when I first moved from writing into photography I felt it was all part of telling the story and I would photograph various crises in Congo or Sudan or Chad or any number of places of where I was working and initially I definitely did feel like it was that was my job I was there to bear witness I was there to take photographs but the longer I did it and the more times I returned often to covering similar events whether it's political violence or election violence this kind of thing there was this kind of repetitive nature to it and I would go back to the same places and photograph the same scenes often over and over and sometimes actually the same people and at a certain point I really did start to have a kind of moral and ethical dilemma about this idea that I exist on one side of the lens and in a way have a comfortable lifestyle a career, a salary, a staff job and the company that I work for is making money from the images that I produce and then they're making money from the clients who publish those pictures are also making money and meanwhile I'm photographing people who are still in the same situation and at a certain point it does begin to feel in some ways exploitative and that became a problem for me I haven't really found a solution to that but the only thing that I could maybe say that I tried to do to assuage my own sense of guilt that comes with that would be to try to have just very human interactions with people because those are the things that they'll remember that you've come there to listen to their story everybody wants their story to be heard and if you do it in a sympathetic empathetic way often those encounters are more valuable to me as a person and then the pictures may ultimately be as photographs and probably all of us who have worked in these environments have become involved in some way or another with supporting local NGOs that do stuff and that's not something we generally talk about but these are things that most photographers I know who work in these places would be involved in some way with local organizations who do things on the ground I think we also in no way am I criticizing like being a wire photographer because I think that all journalists no I know it's okay I can never shoot as fast as you all or Ed files fast but the reason why and this is in no way a criticism of the Globe Mill I was working for I realized if I wanted to cover the war the way I thought I was seeing it I had to quit my job and do it on my own and I thought the opening quote in part of my book is Eugene Smith is resigning from Life Magazine because he feels like Life Magazine was changing the meaning of his story the way he saw it compared to how the editor said and that's not a villa that's not me criticizing editors because I have a lot of great editors I work with but I think it's a little bit about me saying this war is so complex I cannot cover it on a daily news assignment all the time I need to go there and spend a lot of time out I can't be pressured to be filing all the time and this is something that we all struggle with because there is this I hate calling it a machine because journalism is important I mean we wouldn't know about so many important things in the world people weren't covering things and I raised whatever money I could and I would pay for my own trip and I would go out and shoot and when I edited something that I thought was looking right I would then approach publications and say hey if you want to publish this so I kind of had a little bit of a reaction like you just doing the daily news coverage all the time and thought this is a really important piece of history and I need to cover it in a way that when I get a phone call from an office from a news organization they're telling me what I'm supposed to be covering because that's the story but they're in New York and I'm on the ground in a trench and I'm like that's not happening here actually and that's not even an important thing because I don't understand what I'm seeing here I need another two weeks like this is very complex like that video is a seven minute vignette of my five years from a 76 minute film I can't tell you how many times people would go into villages and you want to make a change and there's just a thousand years of history that you're trying to fix and we're trying to we all want it fixed in a few years and Afghanistan might be a weak state but it is a powerful nation that is much older than the United States or Canada there's a lot of wisdom there but there are a lot of roadblocks to connecting the wisdoms that we want to bring together to fix the country and so I really felt like it was really important and in terms of the exploiting definitely the reality is is cameras cost money, trips cost money health insurance cost money insurance for a journalist working there if you get kidnapped or shot or hurt I was really lucky the military when I worked uninvited as well and there's so many complex layers and I thought my own get kidnapped ain't no one going to come looking for me the government might try to come and help me but there is a very expensive to operate there and what I ended up doing recently because this is a big thing that I'm always conscious of as you are and all my colleagues who work ethically was recently I think I was approached by Jeep I'm like no way my selling my photos for an ad to a US Marine and my friend said whoa whoa whoa you can actually do something here I don't believe photographs change anything I think photographs help people understand things and then policy makers can be educated and go change things I don't have that idealism built into me for photography but he said look it's Jeep, it's an ad you can make a lot of money from this and you don't keep the money, donate it somewhere and I thought wow I talked to the Marine, I talked to Jeep and I made everyone the ad agency agreed to donate $100 to our choice of a charity and so now I have two charities that whenever I have so much money from working I have them on my website and I promote them one is helps Afghan women train teachers and one is for severely disabled veterans build mortgage free homes for severely disabled veterans so I just feel like it's important to give back when I can but even for photographers who cannot do all that I still think it's important that if someone, people are dying or there are human rights violations going on that there's someone has to show those policy makers where to sort of point their resources and I still think that the reality is is that a lot of soldiers and civilians are like I understand what you do, please do your thing I've had soldiers say look I'm not going to block you from doing this sometimes people are sensitive to all the case-by-case basis like with death sometimes I could take photographs sometimes I'm like I'm not touching that that's not going to work when I first met both of you I mean you both have shown me photos of your time in Afghanistan you grew your beards out I mean I'm Afghan, I'm Afghan but I would have thought that you were from Kandahar if I was still living there and so I'm curious to this idea of your own identity and being able to be embedded on various levels of actually being embedded with the military but then also being able to blend in in a way that maybe someone who is blonde and blue-eyed can't and what that experience was like in terms of being able to capture stories that others couldn't in the line of work that you were doing and just how you may or may not have been able to take advantage of your own identity and even your features in terms of what you could do by blending in I think I've got to be honest because you think it's cool at the time I mean it doesn't really help I'm embedded with the military so I'm not going to go and stroll around the streets I'm very strict I worked there as part of a bigger organization so I had my Afghan colleagues who would cover the civilian side of life in Afghanistan or the conflict or they would get they would source material from Taliban contacts for that side of the story my role was very strictly within the military framework I didn't think anybody really it was just like you wear your khaki clothes and all that kind of stuff it was like it was just part of the thing and I didn't know that if I was interacting with Afghan forces I might be afforded a little bit more respect than a clean shaven 18 year old soldier or a marine in that sense just because of the culture and the way that people interact there with respect is afforded to men with beards basically but I think it was anyway, Louis won the beard competition in all of Kandahar for all journalists forever it was about down to here it's hard to imagine now you look so clean he scrubs up well because I was there independently it's what I always wanted and I've been a journalist for 26 years and I knew what I needed to do to be able to go to my own and I don't know about my Italian heritage what on the ancient roots from the Roman Empire into Asia but when I grew a beard I fit in very well the US special forces called it my in with bin beard as in bin Laden it was like a kind of bad joke I didn't make it they called me bin Laden but when I did when you go out it's valuable when you can and I did a lot and I became well known for it especially say 2009 and 10 and it's very, very dangerous most importantly for your fixer because you though kidnap they'll just execute your fixer who's your local guide and translator and we figured out a whole because as soon as you pull the camera out that's it, they know you're not local especially back in 2010 and I devised something where I was my friend Khan I was his servant and he would yell at me on the street and I had a Russian little plastic camera that had a little panoramic lens that would shoot and I'd have to focus it and he would yell at me and say stuff and I would not speak I pretended mute so we'd go and check points and get searched and they would be like why do you have this guy from the countryside with you you're so well kept from Kandahar with this guy from these farm districts out the city until they started roughing us up and then I spoke English and Afghan police checkpoints were like who are you, I used to pull out my media card that said NATO on it I said general undercover that was the only way we used to get out of those checkpoints sometimes but getting out into those like those homes and really I embedded with Afghans soldiers as well all those different there's a lot of criticism of the embedding program but all of these points of entry are really important to understanding the war especially for you back here home because your neighbors people you go into a shopping sorry a convenience store sometimes that cashier is a young man who probably was a marine who did three tours I know a marine who's a cashier now I have a friend who cleans pools who did two tours of Iraq or Afghanistan these are all and immigrants I followed an Afghan family for 12 years they escaped to Peshawar in Pakistan they came to Canada I've done three follow up stories over 10 years the highest selling four dealership in Manitoba and Winnipeg is run by one of the boys who was a refugee these are all our citizens and our friends so understanding all these different sides of the war is very very important I think for the audience here tonight I'll just ask one last question before I open it up but your titles of each of your books can you just talk a little bit more about what that means what it represents for your book yeah sure I mean my book is very much about the American military experience it doesn't focus so much on the Afghan experience of the war at all it's very narrow in its focus in this sense but it's about the psychological and emotional costs and the issues to engage with it rather than those who haven't inflicted upon them I think it's an important distinction to make so it's my friendship with this US Marine who gets blown up on this ambush and suffers a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress and has to readjust when he returns home into the kind of civilian roles that you're talking about and he wanted to turn to writing as a way of finding his way as he was ushered out of the Marine Corps into writing and he started doing a whole series of articles and went on to go to journalism school at Columbia and start his own news website covering the military and this year broke the Marines United story about the nude photo sharing scandal scandal in the military so he's now doing great journalism himself but the title shooting ghost is really these guys were out trying to fight the Taliban and you heard in both of our videos the Taliban were this ghostly presence that they were so it kind of refers to that and as a photographer I'm also shooting pictures and the story talks about, the book talks a lot about things that I photograph and friends of mine who work in this business who got injured on the job who got killed on the job and so these parallels they kind of tie into the intertwined story of myself and my co-author actually this was not the my idea for the title, my publisher for the title, I had a really not so good title fighting season which everybody's named 13 different photo essays after that it was just my go-to for a while when we designed this book I just thought it was going to be really boring and useless to just like have a hard cover a series of photos in our hard cover because you can just do it on my website and when I was a fellow here when I covered the Mexican drug war what I understood I was covering like 140 assassinations a month that I started encountering every time the drug war came up you only show bodies and drugs that's all you do man you media and then there's more to Mexico than that and then there's other camp like do you know how much killing is going on here you guys don't show enough and there's a lot of injustice and a corrupt government here in Mexico and you got to show that side and I just thought it wasn't even about the war anymore it was about these two camps that were fighting over in America and you could re-edit the newspaper to what you thought the narrative is and it was a really beyond more powerful way than I realized I'd go into schools and I would get students to take the newspaper apart and it's 16 photos and they could only show 8 at a time because they're photos on each side and so they started editing photo editing and I think it's really important it's like who looks at the byline of their photo when they read the news here because that's who you know who took the photo like if you don't know the source of your photos you could be manipulated into doing things that you don't even believe in and I think that when we talk about the rhetoric out there these days about fake news and alternate facts I think we got to be careful when we look back at history imagine if we start calling the holocaust fake news because the photographers who photographed that George Roger from Magnum Margaret Burke White from Life magazine goes up for me some of the most important war photographs of all time and that is not fake news and that's not alternative facts so when I created this book I wanted to make something that you could re-edit and that would make you work to read about the war so I just thought of the history of I wanted it to be like a little military dossier that got delivered to you so there's the slip case oh yeah Front Towards the Enemy is written actually the way it first came out is it's written on the front and you'll see it's in this set of cards a Marine wrote it on the front of his helmet and actually it's written on the front of a claymore mine which is a weapon that you have to aim in a direction when you may do an ambush so it's like so you aim it toward the enemy and for me a little bit of it is about you know the media can be used as a weapon against any enemy that whoever's wielding the photographs can turn into an enemy so to speak I thought I'd make it a little bit of a history about all the different ways we see photographs so you get a magazine which is stapled so you cannot change my edit by the way by the way my two photo editors helped me on this I'm going to shame them a little bit here is Sadie Corrier and Coley Coleman they're right here stand up come on photo editors never get credit National Geographic and Washington Post so I locked this and there's a great essay by Rebecca Semp from the Center of Creative Photography in here I'm going to have to stand up this is a little more interactive here so you get a newspaper oops you get a newspaper kind of built on that Mexican where you got to take it apart to see all the photos you can re-edit the order of the pictures you can remove all the NATO soldiers and just make it Afghans or you can put all the NATO soldiers back in you can change however you can do whatever you want with this so there's that then there's these marine cards so there's so there's 10 of these and there's captions how many tours they did where they're from on the back because I think it's important that we know their names and where they're from what town they're from so there's these now this whole thing I get to the last part can be hung in this exhibition because it comes apart right so we thought we'd give like an Ikea furniture guide of how to hang it as an exhibition and I know it's going to be impossible or someone's not going to look at this there's going to be three screws left is there a helpline you can call maybe just don't give me too much work but there's like hammers and I want it to be fun a little bit of course if you want to put a nail through the book that's your choice but it can be hung as an exhibition and I think one of the last parts is I'm going to need two volunteers to do this let's see a community event you can look at this as a book or you can pull it apart and it's 14 feet long we're going to keep it horizontal first Gina Gina you're going to and then I just thought we always see one photo and no wars explain one photo so this is like a full photo essay you can see all at once if you want to photograph it and post it but it's just war is a lot more than one photograph and I think this book I wanted to do something that pushes you to look at more photos and engage with more windows to what the bore can look like or is and I tried balancing it throughout the whole thing and the captions are on the back and there's these little dots where you can put magnets or clips however you want to hang this I already have like five invitations to exhibit this in places because then you can be the curator right? then you can be the curator or the photo editor I'm not replacing my photo editors but there's a lot that goes on beyond the photographer that you need to learn about and photo editors are extremely important to that process and I want you to understand how important it is how good photo editors really change the way you show stuff but as I was working on this I just thought yeah there's one more thing so you basically couldn't make up your mind? no no no I need my phone here no no no I just thought because then someone was like oh yeah well you don't have TV in there well I can get you for that so if you download a free QR code reader this is like anyone from the CD generation I don't see anyone here who's just mp3 download maybe there's a few in the audience here but remember there would be like bonus hidden tracks and I thought so if you download a free QR code reader you uh it doesn't say what it is but it says to email me but you can scan the QR code and uh you every month or two you'll get a short film from where I took all the photographs will be interviews like that you saw and you can play like a short film festival on your phone so you'll get like I bought this Jack White album recently and I put the needle on it and the album was not playing and I realized that he made the album for the album to play from the top to the bottom and I thought why can't print re-control the internet so you get a book and online multimedia pieces that we said is the future is now controlled by what is thousands year old technology so you'll every month or two you'll get one of these you gotta email me to sign up for this if you buy the book by the way the book will be available I have a bunch out there yeah it's here tonight they're just cleared customs actually so anyway sorry that's that's it so our mutual friends said that if I'm doing a presentation with Louis I'd have to really fight to get a word in edgewise you get all the questions sorry I just wrote a book that's it with that we will shift to the Q&A if you could please also just state your name and your affiliation it's helpful for both Louis and Finbarge to kind of have that in terms of responding and then please I know there's a lot of you tonight so just please be sure it's a question we'll have plenty of time afterwards if you want to have a conversation with either to really have that outside of these doors but we'll start in the back there and then you my name is Kami but with the Pakistani Spectator thank you very much for your wonderful presentation my question is that you probably interacted with average Afghanis, Afghanis Afghani or Afghanistan people can you tell me something that why many of those Afghan are unable to accept or appreciate American involvement in an affair where America has given so many lives and America has spent like billion of dollars but still they think American as a foreigner rather than somebody who is benefiting them sending you know arranging school, building infrastructures building health structure why are most many of those people unable to see these benefit for their society and they are still rejecting these American values and they are fighting against it, thanks yeah please start I've met many Afghans at all spectrums like government, the army civilians and I think it's recognized war is not a, you can't make a perfect plan there have been mistakes made and it's not just America there are many many countries involved in Afghanistan, Germany has almost 5,000 troops there, 4,500 troops Canada is still financially helping United Afghanistan even though the military component has been removed I have to say being on the ground I'm hard pressed to have met many Afghans who said we want although we're unhappy about a lot of stuff we want you to just leave I talked to my fixer quite frequently he's went to university in Kuwait and he lives in Kandahar I have not met many Afghans who want all Western forces to leave because I think they understand that just as if Western forces left Afghanistan things would deteriorate I think it's in Germany and in Korea from wars that are 50, 60 years old so I think on the village level they want them to get out of their small little area but I think if you speak to most Afghans I think there's very much an appreciation to a degree of how many lives have been lost how much money has been spent there there have been frustrations in all wars that are going on because it's not it's not a black and white plan that you can say I'm going to do this and I'm just relaying from the people I've spoken to my interaction with Afghans was very limited because of the environment I was in so I think rather than be repetitive that was a good answer if it's okay I'm just going to go outside of my moderator hat and respond if that's okay but I think that's a very broad statement that we're not going to get into a back and forth conversation but I'm not sure it's very valid and so many Afghans very much appreciate American forces and just international forces being in the country and when it was announced that troops would be withdrawn years ago that was not always met with the most celebratory response either and so I know that there's an intention for many Afghans to want a commitment from America specifically to be in there for the long term and so I don't know if that statement is very valid it might be in some places but I don't think that's the majority of your point and so I'm going to just respond and leave it at that Hi, thank you for the presentation pertaining to the moderator and Finbar particularly the whole agitation around the veracity of a photograph in a place like Afghanistan or Congo versus the written word I'd love that you both speak to that is it also invasive to go in there and write about the boxers for instance is there truth in what you say that's more valid perhaps than a photograph some thought on that and then secondly for both Louis and for Finbar what's the end game in Afghanistan I know it's an intractable question but look into the future for us what's going to happen in that part of the world well I mean I'll speak to the first part of the question whether reporting and writing words about a specific story or situation or if we're talking about the boxing club in Kabul I think I think it's all in how you do it as I was saying it's the interaction that you have with the people I know that when I'm in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad dealing with people who've crossed over from Darfur that whatever pictures or story that I write about that family is not going to change their life at all but I can have an interaction with them I spend day with them and a lot of times what I would find is that people would value the fact that somebody had come from far away to listen to what they had to say and whenever I could it wouldn't be so possible in a place like that but in parts of Eastern Congo where I worked I could go back into the bigger towns and I could get images printed in little photo kiosk places and I would if I had time I would take them back to those places myself or I'd have my fixture do it if I didn't have time to get back to the same place and in that way you can feel like there's some kind of reciprocal feeling to these interactions and sometimes I would go back like I said I would photograph the same people a couple of years later often and revisit the towns and the villages that I would go to so I can't really necessarily address whether writing about it is less exploitative than photographing it I think it's all in how you approach any given place or situation or if it's a boxing club or a soccer team I think that has to be an understanding from your subjects that things may not change because you're there but you're there anyway to listen to their stories and to tell it I mean I know for me I changed names I mean it was very sensitive to being Afghan or writing about Afghanistan and I had permission but it was I was also very sensitive to the stories I would actually share and write about and there was tension actually with my editor at various points in the writing process because they wanted something more sensational and it was so hard for me to really be okay with that even if I was an Afghan I think just inherently I'd rather understand the stories and humanize the people rather than exploit it and so I think every writer is different for me that was just the framework that I worked within and that I was comfortable in but changing names for me I think photography I think you want to do justice and honor the story but I think with photography you can't really change a face or an image or you can but at least it's out there and I think for writing that was something that at least I had in mind you know I was able to do and then do you guys want to answer the second part I didn't get your name I'm sorry I just want to say Jamie supported my work a lot when I was there he's a really great guy and he's another photo editor that is a great ally to photographers any photographers in this room know how good he's been and I want to just acknowledge that and sorry what was the question again sorry the end game no it's okay I kind of like the challenge of being asked and I mean this so affectionately he's got the answer the policy question it's all going to be fixed by 8 o'clock no no no no the policy answer to the journalist but I mean look we're dealing with statues from the US Civil War here right now I mean wars have traumas that go on for decades and I think that there are I mean I worked in the tribal regions of Pakistan you cross the border into Afghanistan and the people I was just with in Pakistan and the people I was just with Afghanistan have been divided by a British map maker on the Durand line like there's a lot of hundreds and thousands of years of history going on here the area outside Kandar city that I drew on that map that was like I don't know some dystopian Afghan dystopian story which is dystopian about this Russian scorched earth campaign they did around Kandar city to keep the Mujahideen out in the 80s so you almost got like 5-6 different wars that are going on in Afghanistan Afghanistan is a huge drug war like 70% or more of the world's opium for heroin comes from Afghanistan that's a war that and Matt talked about that the soldier sometimes you think you're fighting the Taliban they say they're Taliban but they're just drug cartels it's one of the world's biggest sort of drug producing region so you're going in there and there's like a thousand things everybody wants to fix and you're fighting a war against six different militant and surgeon groups of six different leaders and I think that the end game is is to stay involved and stay managing the situation until look the Afghan army from 2006 2010 was like night and day until something takes hold I think and that's I think what people have been doing in different parts of the world there's still conflict going on but you worked in Africa and I wonder what you'd share about that I mean I think we kind of need to keep the conversation focused on Afghanistan but I'd echo what you have said in terms of long term commitments from foreign partners but from Afghans themselves and from the establishment of a viable political system that it's going to slowly weed out the people who are working to the detriment of the country and for self-enrichment but that's not an Afghan problem we have the same problem in this country in many other countries so these are human flaws these are human problems and we'll always be grappling to come to terms with them two questions in the front Maryam and then you and then thank you it's good to see Avastagh again after a long time my name is Maryam Atash I'm an Afghan-American attorney I have my company Prime Council but I'm also a founding board member of Nuristan Foundation we've done education programs in Afghanistan in rural areas I had a question for you related to you know telling the narrative I did a TED talk in Afghanistan about three years ago and it was called rebranding a nation because Afghanistan has a negative brand now and the people the government the country has to share the positive stories in order to rebrand what is truly happening so first I want to ask each of you if there are three words that you can use to describe the Afghan people what comes to mind and second is do you think that I know you covered the war and there's a need for that but do you think that journalists need to cover more of the positive stories so that people can get a balanced view of what's going on inside the country to your last point absolutely one of the things that I tried to do during my 12 years of working in various countries across Africa was yes as a news wire photographer I had to go and cover the news events but I would use those assignments to try and cover more nuanced aspects of life there and show a much more rounded picture of the places where I was working it was easier to do that in those places because I could move more freely it's difficult as you heard from Louis in terms of your own personal security moving around in a civilian environment that is still largely the case in vast swaths of the country I'll be going to Afghanistan in two weeks which will be interesting for me because I've been back since 2011 so I will certainly be keeping my kind of antenna tuned to the kinds of stories that might apply along this life but yes we need to cover all aspects of any country or any story that we're documenting three words that I would use to describe Afghans who I met well I didn't meet any Afghan women so I would say bearded no but very hearty and proud and very serious but I was always struck by these hardcore warrior types that I met and they'd be like keeping these tiny little dainty birds and kissing them whispering sweet nothings to these little you know these birds that they would keep the minor birds yeah so you know in some ways that's part of this nuance of the places that you and the people that you meet along the way so I spend a lot of time with the Afghan army like a lot of time they usually had a base connected to the Canadian base I was on and I ate there every day so strong I'm going to go backwards from the way you answered strong funny and sorry it's two words good food that's I mean we're about to go on an assault somewhere and this is what you know I think about war war is also about humanity not just in humanity and it's just we're about to we're getting ready and they're appealing potatoes and this soldier just pulled a flute out of his body armor and started playing a flute it's in the book I'm just like where did this come from or there's a photo too where the police officer is wounded and he has two pet minor birds and he's singing to them and those are those are the stories that's what spending months and years covering that side of the country can turn out as photographs I never think of positive or negative because that for me is more of a public relations view no I mean I mean that in a friendly way I look at it is it's all reality it's all there and I try and give as much diversity as possible and that's why I kind of designed the book like you can pull things out if you don't want to see us treat you can come out of the book if you want also when I say Afghanistan it's kind of like it's like United States like a farm in Oklahoma to New York City that's like two different countries it's like people say I have a candidate Canadian accent anyone who's Canadian gets the about joke but a third of Canada's French so there is no a or a boot that it's French and if you talk to someone in yellow knife or if you speak and you go up to say you know Baffin Island there is like there's just Canada's a thousand different things this is America's in Afghanistan like from Ghazni to Kandahar to Helmand I mean especially Afghanistan the amount of invasions that have gone through there especially Kandahar I mean there's always a story about something being burned down or destroyed by eight different emperors and I always think of Afghanistan being many things and I always think of everything I cover it's important to show as many different layers of things that's the way I look at it but that is a very important question and a very important way to start looking at any country that has a conflict going on in it I'll just quickly answer that you asked me also but my three words would be resilient hospital and grateful and I think I think I share the same concerns you do in terms of just with this current media cycle how any story any positive story from any country can be covered in the news today and I don't really know I'm not a journalist a working journalist and I think that's really for journalists to maybe kind of be more reflective in terms of their own work and how they can get that out there but I mean I've spoken to authors where they can't get booked on TV anymore because there's so much breaking news that's happening on a daily basis that they can't get pre-booked out when their book is about to come out so I just I think that's a pretty interesting reflection on just what the media industry has become so hopefully there is going to be some thoughtful inward thinking moving forward so thank you I want to be mindful of time and I did see quite a few hands so I'll take two questions at a time and then you can either choose to answer both or one I saw your hand up a while ago can you just for the mic and then I'll go to you yeah how do you come home after this so seeing your pictures I don't know what the time frame is but it was a pretty intense scene seven days later are you in London how do you transition that mine is kind of playing off that actually how did your experiences covering Afghanistan impact your future coverage of events or did it so yeah yeah so I would come back I would usually spend a month or between six and eight weeks normally I would spend at a time in Afghanistan Louis would spend longer there but my stints were usually six to eight weeks and I would do it twice a year on average and it would be very strange because I would leave from that combat outpost on a truck drive to another base about two hours away wait for a helicopter and maybe within 24 hours I'd be in $600 a night five-star hotel in Dubai on my way back to London or Paris or wherever and it was always a very strange dissociative kind of experience and that was the case probably more so from Afghanistan than most other places because when I was covering Congo I would live there for two years the same with Rwanda and a lot of these other places or I would be returning to my base in West Africa and in Senegal so those are quite different experiences and well I mean the short answer is I would try and go and spend time with friends or family but the longer answer is you write a book and try to make sense of it all and what it means and how you kind of redefine yourself because I stopped doing this at a certain point this kind of work and it's a question then of how do you once you become identified or self-identified as a photographer who does this work it's hard to leave it behind and how do you recreate a new identity for yourself away from the front lines and the battlefields and that kind of thing and it can be done but it's challenging it takes time it's taking me the two years of writing this book to feel fully removed from it now and uncomfortable moving it in a different direction that involves writing as well as photography and yeah I suppose it did change the way that I worked in ways that we can maybe have a longer conversation about afterwards yeah for me the way it changed me is there like at seven or eight months at a time and I realized that you're pushing so hard you come back you're still there you're pushing so hard to get all this done and you have a photographic goal career goal that you don't realize if something happens to you that your family is impacted and I just started having this nightmare in 2010 and my mother was going to get that phone call and that's when I started realizing that covering that very frontline kind of tip of the spear stuff was not the way I wanted to cover wars anymore and I was going to step back and let other people who were doing that do it for me so there and then we'll hop over to there so we'll take two questions at a time and then very back hi my name is Wajid I am from Karachi but I work here in DC so I have met several refugees coming from Afghanistan so with the course of events you have met several refugees we don't talk about IDPs who were affected by the war not necessarily right there you don't capture them but have you seen their struggles and this is same this is the same team in Syria this is the same team in Rohingya Afghanistan Chad for example so how do you humanize that element or I would say have you ever had a story pictures on how the IDPs and refugees are impacted which are usually not they're not sensualization items so they're not really covered in a day to day but this is like 10-15 year journey like you mentioned there are family who move from Canada to Canada from long process thank you and then you're Mary Beth I'll get everyone's questions thanks so I work at the Washington Post I'm an editor there on the word side but I'm just curious about the frame or the lens that you guys use when you think about the value of your work or the ethical part of your work and I can totally see where it's really frustrating where you can feel very powerless when you see all the suffering and violence over a long period of time is the right frame that it's only valid if you manage to change a family's life or like end the war in Afghanistan I mean isn't there another level that you can look at I mean exposing people in other parts of the world I mean would it be better if we didn't send war photographers to these crisis zones no we were talking about this earlier on so yeah I think we still need to document these things of course I think as Louis said the idea that it's a very rare picture that's going to really change the course of a war or of history or even a family's life but what is important is to keep that flow of information going so that people do kind of see what's happening from an independent perspective because we've got all this information we're now user generated content all the various sides fighting in conflicts in Syria it's not like we don't know that there's a chemical attack in Syria anymore but all of that information is that it's information it's not journalism parsing through all that stuff that gets put out on social media by the various parties in any conflict is different from sending in a reputable or professional photographer from a serious news outlet I think sort of what we talk about a little bit is that we reached the point where we felt pretty exhausted emotionally from having done this for extended periods of time so we started I don't want to speak for Louis but certainly I felt like although this stuff needs to be covered still I'm not going to be the one to do it anymore and you talked about letting the next generation come along and do it so I certainly now focus a lot of my efforts on speaking with younger journalists and talking with them and you know I'm never going to tell somebody to not go and do this because they won't listen to me and I wouldn't have listened if I was the younger journalist but what I can offer are some caveats and some thoughts on how they might want to think about things and look after themselves and look after their colleagues and also the people that are photographing too I'm going to start making notes because they're the double questions IDPs what was really unique to the area that I covered was the amount of combat that was there I think it was like every day or every second day it was like a maneuver to contact all it was like hold them out of the city and I have to say that to your point and talk about IDPs in the same sort of moment I think by 2007 or 2008 I think there were Air Public Affairs officers saying Louis do you please want to come cover because we have no journalists coming here anymore it was permanently staffed and now it wasn't I remember in 2008 I think I covered a firefight every day for three months it was like a daily combat every single day and I saw hardly any journalists come to that area anymore and a lot of times it was it was kind of sad like there's no US troops here so we're not covering it or they would come out for a day or two and they would leave and I would stay on the front line it was like I would have to embed because the area was so violent I could only get out there to the civilians if I went with the military and I do think it's super important also it's personal even more and it's a tragedy that's more personal now because people like David Gilke died doing this and he was a really close man he was like a big brother to me a little bit and there's a few others sorry and it is worth it it's important that we know about all these things going on in the world and when it comes to IDPs there's so much fighting the IDPs were like from village to village there's shelling going on right now so we've come to your base please we can't be there or they just hung two guys in our village and we're scared and we don't know what to do and the IDPs in that area around Kandar city those districts it was like kind of on a daily basis depending on where the shelling was there was an airstrike or there was a lot of new Taliban in the area so it's definitely something you try to cover unfortunately that that area is extremely violent that area outside Kandar city is also controlled by a lot of drug cartels especially in Helmand and it is almost impossible to get out and cover it sometimes so I think kind of talking about those two things the UNHCR for anyone else in this room is a great resource to study sort of the movements of people and the committee to protect journalists which right now if we look at journalists in trouble please look at Mexico I put a little plug in there for what's going on in Mexico there's a lot of people being killed there trying to cover the news so I do I think we downplayed a little bit and I think to your point it's true it's really really important to talk about that the woman in front of you hi my name is Lauren thank you so much this has been really interesting I was wondering Louis you mentioned that you made a decision to not be embedded and I'm curious what why you chose that and how being embedded affected your imagery and just very open-ended if the policies required to become embedded had any effect on it hi my name is Madeline Cook I'm a student and I just wanted to ask what would you say to journalists that want to go to these conflict zones and tell these stories are you also aware of the oversaturation of media in some freelancers who might come for the wrong reasons and how you respond to that I'm thinking a few months ago a freelancer released all of his photos because he was angry that people weren't buying them and it really undermined the journalists that were there and just how to respond to that as an upcoming journalist I'll take care of the embedding question I'm embedding I just wrote a paper for I had a painful five fifty-five hundred words I had no idea how painful your job is when you do the writing I had a twitch in my eye when I was done and it was for an academic public journal actually on kind of how ISIS and Al Qaeda make their own videos and photos right now and populate the visual sphere what I also talked about is the embedding program and people need to understand that embedding in Iraq and embedding in Afghanistan are sometimes similar I took photographs a lot of times I did not write anything that would get inflamed things I did not take any photographs that once in a while people would be like we're not happy with this photograph the embedding rules from the British to the Canadians to the Americans there's some fundamental similarities but there's a lot of differences as well the British were the most strict actually and gave the least access actually Americans from the Marines to the Army from the 82nd Airborne to the 101st Airborne these are different interpretations depending on who your public affairs officer was I did Medevac and there was no control whatsoever the only rule and I had no problem respecting it was that if someone was killed or seriously wounded that they were you would wait for them to notify their next to kin first like their family and then sometimes the photos were so graphic they were just really bad moments where guys are just so badly wounded I couldn't even show that I couldn't even take photos of them just for my own ethics and I think there are times where you want to go somewhere and do something and there was someone saying no you can't go do this or you can't do that for me everybody's got a different experience for me it was the basic rules I don't want to get anyone killed I think that's going to get someone killed like don't go on Facebook and say we're going on a secret attack tomorrow someone did that that wasn't me there was a TV cameraman they were actually about to attack what was the birthplace of the Taliban and a TV cameraman in the dark turned his light on on his TV camera and started filming the troops about to launch the attack which well yes so you start seeing and you don't really sensitive stuff secret radar antennas those were never in my photographs anyway you have secret radar antenna no it's very dense anyway but I just I just did it embedding and un-embedding because you just lots of different ways of seeing it so I'll leave if you want to respond yeah so for students who want to go and do this kind of work you really need to understand what the story is why you're going there and assess your motives is it to tell a story is it to advance your career is it a combination of those things is it ego and I think you really need to feel a genuine interest in that story that you'll be covering and be willing to invest time and effort and most likely a lot of money of your own before you see any results that was certainly the case when I decided to move to Central Africa and base myself to Congo for a couple years and then the important thing is that you're going to have to develop your own voice that might take a little while I think the challenge that that photographer who released his pictures may have been facing is the fact that the images he had to offer weren't any different from any other number of photographers who were producing images from there and so that's not to come down on him but it just highlights the fact that it's no longer enough just to be there anymore because these pictures are out all kinds of all sides as I was saying before are releasing stuff on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook there's imagery of pretty much everywhere now so as a photographer or as a writer who's telling stories you're going to have to find a way of telling these stories that's unique to you that's what you're going to bring to this game and really just find a voice that's distinct and a way of telling stories that will separate you from all those other people who are doing it and that's not easy and it'll take time but that's what you're going to have to do in this saturated market that exists today so we are right on time and it's we're very grateful for having you both here today I think your final words were really we're really great and on point very much to the work that you both have been putting out into the world from Afghanistan for several years we do have copies of Front Towards Enemy and Shooting Ghosts available for sale and they'll both be here to sign for a bit before you leave this evening so please pick up a copy they're both great books as you saw Louis's book is very interactive so you can get a good work out in terms of being able to assemble it and put it together so thank you both for coming and for showing your perspective on it