#22 Greg Marinovich - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST - WTF-Stop Podcast - Photo Talk

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Zach Waters and welcome to another episode of
what the Geft Stop Forward Talk right chatty photographers about
their life and connection to the world through photography. Today's guest,

(00:33):
Greg Moranovich is a South African four journalist born in
Johannesburg in nineteen sixty two. He gained international recoddiction for
his work document the end of a part in South
Africa and the subsequent transition to democracy. Miranovich, along with
three other photographers, became known as the Bank Bank Club.
The Bank Bank Club, which included Moranovich, Kevin Carter, Keent

(00:55):
Osterbrook and Joe Silver, gain notoriety for their intention and
controversial images capturing the brutality of departed era. The title
came about when a local magazine that were at the
time Chris Morez, began writing about the group's exploits on
the field and gave them the title of the Bang
Bang Club. In nineteen ninety one, Mranovitch won the Politzer

(01:15):
Prize for his photography of the killing of Zulu Lindsay Dushalibar,
who was suspected of suspiring for Encarter and was executed
by the African National Congress supporters. Aranovitch has continued his
career as a fort journalists covering conflicts and social issues
around the world. He's also an established filmmaker, editor, university
lecturer and an established author, which we cover in our Chat.

(01:39):
In two thousand, he published his memoir of his time
working as a conflict photographer in the nineties with the
Bang Bank Club, Snapshots from a Hidden War, which was
an insight into his experiences during the troubled period of
South Africa's history, which he co aufered with Jars Silver.
In twenty ten, the Bang Bang Club film Premiere, directed
by Stephen Silver, which explored the themes of friendship of

(01:59):
the group, the ethical dilemmas of for journalism, on the
personal toll of bearing witness to extreme violence. In twenty seventeen,
Gregg published A Murder of Small Copy, The Real Story
of South Africa's Maracana Massacre. The book aim to provide
a comprehensive understanding of the Maricana massacre beyond the headlines,
exploring the human stories behind the events on the boarding

(02:20):
implications of South African society. It's a significant contribution to
the understanding of this tragic incident in South Africa's recent history,
which I didn't really know much about, but we did
talk about it at length in our chat.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Anyway, I was up there before dawn the next day
and I got to the site of where the shooting
was and the number of evidence markers. They'd run out
of evidence markers, the little orange cones, and they were
using Starofoam coffee cups. Why Starafham coffee cups. It was
just crazy. I started doing it, and I was doing pictures,

(02:55):
but really I was more interested in the writing side,
the reporting side of it. And as it went on,
the mine workers wouldn't let you talk to anyone who
was there. You couldn't get to speak and all these
meetings and all this gatherings, and but what had happened
is that all the survivors of the shooting who had
been close had been arrested.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
We also discussed the le Kevin Karff's Politic Prize winning
photograph of a starving Sudanese child and a vulture waiting
in the background. The image won the Politic Prize for
Feature Photography award in nineteen ninety four. Carter took his
own life four months after winning the prize.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
The aid workers said do not touch anybody. So anyway,
Kevin goes back to where was and he's buck in
the high state of agitation, and he's telling Jo about
this picture. And it's a remarkable picture, a psychonic picture.
This little kid is on its hands and knees and

(03:52):
the vulture is behind, I mean many meters behind, and
it looks like the vulture stalk the child. This is
not the true meaning of that or what is happening,
but that's what it looks like, and it's very symbolic
of what is happening in Sedan at that time.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
We went back to his early life in one of
his very first shoots in the townships.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Just one day, I thought, you know, you can't kid
yourself that you're covering the effects of apartheid if you
don't go and cover this violence. And so I drove in,
and you know that very day I stopped on this
bridge overlooking where there were these battles at this margrant
workers' hostel and the surrounding neighborhoods, and I could look

(04:40):
down and it had just finished, and I could see
lots of journalists on the side of the anc supporting residents,
and nobody with the Encarter, the Zulu hostile dwellers. So
I said, well, let me go there. At least I'll
have a chance. You know, I wasn't that dumb. I
knew I needed to sell pick let me go to

(05:02):
that side. And I'd spent a lot of time in
black areas. You know. I could speak a little bit
of Isuzulu. I could speak sort sital, you know, so
I could make my way.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
I was very excited about talking to Greig because I've
been a long time with my of his ever since
I've read The Bunk Bunk Club back in the day.
But at the same time, I was really nervous because
what do you ask a man who's been asked the
same sort of questions for over thirty guys. So anyway,
the day came and I asked him what he was
up to.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Zac At the moment, I'm in a plastic shrouded basement
scanning pictures and working on things. But currently, really I'm
a professor at Boston University and I teach at Harvard
every year part time. Most excitingly, I'd say, is that

(05:55):
I've set up a conflict and crisis reporting course in
the summer to be held in Padua Italy with Boston University.
Be you you say you're scanning your archive. It's been
some years.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yes, I had a look on the pig A website
earlier today, and because obviously you were associated with pig
A for a long time, I couldn't find anything. I
think I thought found a picture of Mandela or two
pictures of Mandela.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Do you mean AP, because not PA.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
That's why I didn't find it. I got the game
the pen middle didn't.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
I a PA is you're British guys. I was with AP.
I think PA ran the stuff. Might never direct you
with them. The fact you found anything on PA is interesting.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
We've got got Mandela and yeah, I've got two twenty
thirteen and I've got Nelson Mandela Civil Rights Actis they
just general shots inns Chambers or something? And one with
her looks like a sort of hammer and sickle.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
You're one of the unions, I guess. So who hold
your archive? Is it? I hold my archive? I always
get my copyright and AP was They agreed initially and
then you know, as I became more established, they had
some qualms about it. But a deal is a deal.

(07:22):
So no matter what I did, I always held my
copyright with them. Obviously with Stigma, I was with Sigma.
I hold my copyright.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
New setting stuff through thought shelter as well, don't you.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
I do use fish shelter, but it's very out of
date and I'm busy getting that together. I've I've been
putting a collection from my scans together for the Brenthurst
Library and Foundation. It's going to be on photo shelter,
but I've I got to get to it.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
When I was looking at your website and stuff, I
didn't see everything together because you've made lots of full
written books and published books, and you've got this rusted archive,
and I didn't see anyway. Celebrating you is one place
that's a good point.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Look, there is the Marinovich Photo Photography website, which is
my wife and I, but it's not an archived place. No, Yes,
these things what's happened maybe in my life. How do
you find teaching? Then? Oh? I love it? Do you?
I absolutely love it? So you're a professor technically a

(08:33):
master lecturer, but yeah, professor, I'm a senior lecturer at
Harvard and a master lecture at So.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
You're teaching fort journalism. I presume filmmaking, Fort journalism, what
is it.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Visual journalism because it includes documentary filmmaking, And then with
the Harvard one is not necessarily journalism or documentary include
it's any kind of photography. But just obviously my bent
is more towards document entry.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
What you're breaking down with the students in terms of
being a fort journalist, how do you approach to students
and how do you break it all down?

Speaker 2 (09:08):
So it's kind of staged. Do you have students who
are doing visual journalism because they're required to do it
as part of the journalism degree, and some of them
have never taken a fret on anything except an iPhone
and have no interest, And so it's about trying to
engage them and teach them how to do visual storytelling
and to work with audio and video and stalls. And

(09:32):
that's kind of more or less a boot camp over
a semester. Then some of those will come to my
advanced classes and I do an advanced documentary filmmaking class,
and I do an advance for the journalism class in
which they make a book, a digital book. Obviously, it's
very different teaching those different levels. Whereas I enjoy the

(09:54):
work that's involved in their advanced classes. More. I love
seeing people who have no two about photography, even though
they've been born with visuals and audio all around them,
have them understand how to work with it, and that's
so that's very rewarding. The Harvard is the continuing education,
and so that's open to anyone, and so you have adults,

(10:17):
you have school kids, you have university people, you have
people trying to get their master's degrees. These are very
mixed classes and it's a completely different.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Feel when you're teaching sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, or however they
got teenagers. You know, when you're trying to tell them
things and validate your knowledge of something, and they look
at you in a way to say, what do you know?
What can you teach me? And sometimes even after thirty years,
I actually feel that I'm like, I don't know anything.

(10:47):
Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (10:49):
No? It does it? Does you know? I try and
teach as a journey with the class that I undergo together.
It's really everyone has knowledge and different knowledge, and people
know things we don't know and I don't know. And
even though it might be expert in ABC, they have
completely different knowledge. So it's trying to engage them where

(11:10):
they feel interested, and that's tricky. But then also I
think if people have come to your class, you know,
they acknowledge that you've got something to teach them and
that I want to learn. Well, they shouldn't be at university.
They're not required to be at university. So mostly it
works out well. There's always the odd hiccup, but mostly
I find it very interesting. What I really like is

(11:34):
when we dig into stuff that's difficult, and a lot
of people come with preconceptions about photojournalism about photography, and
it's breaking it down and teaching people how to look
in a much more personal way and responsible way. And
one of the things that's been missing from that, you
don't mind me segueing into this, is that I've never

(11:55):
taught conflict or war reporting because I just didn't feel
it was appropriate. You know what, Am I going to
do one or two lectures and then someone thinks, oh, yeah, okay,
I can go off to Syria now whatever. So I
don't want that responsibility. But once Ukraine started and are
seeing all my generation of people that i'd worked in

(12:16):
the field with in the nineties, they were the majority
of the people were seeing working in Ukraine, and I thought,
so I did a bit of research with people, you
know who have management positions in ap Routers, etc. New
York Times and what all. And there's a generation gap
because of what happened in Syria during the early part

(12:40):
of the Civil War with the execution and kidnapping of journalists.
And you know, these media corporations are so institutionalized they
run by insurance, so nobody wants to hire youngsters. Nobody
wants to take a risk on people. If you go
to a wars and this is good. If you go
to a war zone, you require to do training, hostile

(13:01):
environment training, all of which is good, but it does
tend to exclude people from a more working class background
and from outside of you know, the honeypots of journalism.
So how do you get a start? It's tricky. So
I decided to use the knowledge I have. And obviously
my knowledge ended in about My hands on knowledge ended

(13:25):
in about two thousand, which is twenty years out of date.
So drones and social media as a factor in warfare
are not something I know about, but I want to
involve up will involve people who do know about this,
teaching people how to approach war ethically, responsibly and safely.
My hope is that you know, some people have enough

(13:47):
to get through the first two weeks without dying, which
is critical, and then they'll start getting their own experience
or they come to my course and they go, h
this is not for me, and that's that's a win
as well.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Consideration at the end of the nineties in the Zeros,
with a digital edge taking hold, you would finding people
had access to camera and the Internet, and rather than
sending say somebody like yourself out to say Algeria, they
would just use local guys. They were using guys in

(14:20):
had a camera and who were aspiring photographers, but they
were all native to the land. In a sense, it's
a good thing.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
That's how I got my break because I was a
native to South Africa. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Now, if you look at a picture desk and you say,
let's look at Israel, there is obviously the groups of
the photographers going out you know, from all over the world,
but there is embedded with them lots of local regional
photographers who were just there sending images after images and
images back to picture desks. So somebody like me who
wanted to go out there, I haven't got really much

(14:52):
of a chance, apart from keeping myself alive of getting
stuff which is going to be in print.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
I do, I do, you know? And I're in the
AP bureau in Jerusalem, which covered Israel, Palestine, Jordan. You know,
I had people staff working for me who were both
Israeli and Palestinian. In there. I also had lots of stringers,
and some of them were journalists who picked up a

(15:17):
camera because you couldn't get into places right. Gaza is
its own little Even before this, Gaza has always been
weird and cut befo. Whenever there was conflict the Israelis,
you'd cut it off. So we had a strong Palestinian
team in Gaza. We had a strong Palestinian team in
the West Bank, and we were always upskilling people and

(15:38):
teaching them about you know, and obviously these are lands
that are torn by conflict and generations of conflict. Everyone's
got their bias and their preferences. You know, there's very
few Palestinians or Israelis who you know are absolutely neutral.
Would be impossible, I think, and we don't expect that.
But you know, making sure people honest journalism is the key.

(16:02):
So I get what you're saying about not being able
to travel that easily. But I think that's part of
the digital revolution, is that at a certain level of
what publications want, they're happy just to get content. I'm
not worried about more elevated thinking, but I think for
publications that are serious, they want to work with people

(16:28):
that they trust to know, be that people in country
or people that they want to travel in there. But
the market for journalism is terrible at the moment, so
that it was a double kick in the teeth for
all of us.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, I do notice with your Israeli Palestine stuff, you
were using square form a black and white. Where did
that come from?

Speaker 2 (16:50):
So I was photographing color negative on you know, thirty
five more cameras for AP and then I wanted to
keep I've always wanted it's throughout my care I've always
had a black and white body for myself, whatever that is.
And then I realized, you know that Jerusalem, being based
in Sriysdom, was going to be insanely busy, and I

(17:11):
thought the only way I could still photograph for myself
was to use a different format, And so I was
using a square range finder, the Mamia six, and that
helped me differentiate between my personal work, and it was
easy to carry. It would fold down. That's where that
came from. I've found a set of pictures there at

(17:31):
the end of it, and you know, I was very happy,
as your praiers when he looked at the images said,
you didn't waste your time there, so that is good compliment.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
It was a totally different approach though, in the distance
between you and your subject as well. In these pictures,
for once, you seem to be standing back as a
sort of observer. That's say war photographs and your conflict photographs,
you're right there in your face, you feel really there
with them. In these black and whites, you just sort

(18:04):
of step back and become the observer. There's a real
quietness about these black and white shots, which I loved.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
That's well observed. Was it purposeful that us back in
the nineties, Can I remember that kind of detail? No.
My idea was that it was the scars on the land,
so that lent itself to I guess stepping back that
it was more landscaping. But it wasn't only landscapes obviously,
But I think that kind of camera didn't lend it.

(18:38):
I mean squee does lend itself to stepping back a
little bit anyway as a compositional tool. And you know,
I had enough pushing and shoving and getting in close
with the journalism that I was doing on the thirty
five mile that was a little bit of relief from
that change of pace. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
And then your color work, which you did at the
same time with I presume our fat and the street
stuff you were doing was at the same time as
the black and white square stuff.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
So I guess eighty percent of the time I would
carry that black and white camera with me as well,
and I'd pick out the occasional shot. Yeah, but I
wouldn't try And you know, think on the website, and
I've got very little of that work up there, but
I think on the website, I've got some of the
There was a kind of drawn out a few days
battle in Romalain. I think that's on the website. And

(19:35):
I don't think I used the black and white at
all in that because it was just so intense and
important to get the news photographs that I let the
black and white sit at the back.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
It was at the same time that the same period was.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
A same period, Yeah, yeah, same period but not simultaneous.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
And the difference between the color work in the crowds
and journalistic photography, that repetage photography is so different to
that black and white. I was actually quite taken back
when I thought it was you and I ever expected
when I saw them. It was a lovely, lovely I think,
the different mindset and I really like them.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Thank you, thank you. I love that work. I really
am happy with that.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Is there not something in the pipeline in the future
for the retrospective if your work, because that's not something
you're not wanting to do, or oh it is I do.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Want to do. I don't know about exhibitions, but certainly
I want to do books, and that's what the scanning
and the editing I've been doing has been towards that.
So kind of on the periphery, I have some skeletons
of books, but for the main body of work, it's
very tricky work that spans a long time in a

(20:53):
country that you live in, like South Africa. Yeah, I'm
finding it impossible to pull a single monologue out of it.
I keep thinking, oh, maybe it can be a series
of books, and I don't know if that's a cop
art or a great idea, not that it's original, but
the other work is easier, Like the israel person work
could easily be a book. I think my Comora's work

(21:16):
could be a little zene think my work from Somalia.
Not that I think I would want to do a
book with that, but there's sets, there's entire sets. Is
it all bookworthy? Probably not, but certainly the South African
stuff has got a lot of nuance and coding that

(21:37):
doesn't appear in photographs that you know, people with knowledge
reads that you want to put it in a larger format.
As you can tell, I'm talkative. That's never going to
be one of those people who doesn't put captions or
anecdotes in a book.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
That's interesting, isn't it. I think it has to be
one book.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
That's great. You can edit it zech that's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Do you know what may I would love two, But
it has to be one book because what we're looking
at here eighty five, ninety five, two thousand and five.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Eighty five until twenty thirteen, twenty nineteen.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
Yeah, you fitted so much in from the end of
the eighties for the next fifteen years. You are not
going beyond the Zeros. You fitted so much in there.
There's a sort of timeline. As you said, you know,
you look at the Bank Bank Club book, You're not
just talking about Soweto, South Africa. You're talking about Croatia,

(22:33):
You're talking about the other places you're going to. And
I think when people haven't read Bank Bank Club, they's
just associated with this romantic foam of four guys shooting
in the middle of troubles in South Africa. But it's
actually not But we'll go into that a bit more later,
but it's actually not Visually, it's about you and what

(22:54):
you're doing in between all of that. In the same sense,
making a book now visualizing that period, because I think
it's a sort of way of making some sort of
sense of that period as you I think you did
personally in the Bank Bank Club. I think the Bank
Bank Club was you enjoy making sense of everything and
trying to sort of get it, whatever it was, out

(23:16):
onto paper. Would that not be the same way to
do the visual story now of that whole period, because
your life's being dictated by photographs, hasn't it.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Perhaps it's quite mistaken, I think about it so, but
it is.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yeah, but it has isn't it. I mean, you know, journalists,
you were there for the reasons to take pictures. You
met people because you were there to take pictures. You
that he died a few times because you were there
to take pictures and your friends sadly died.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Was it because of the pictures or were the pictures
the result of me just wanting to be there and witnesses? Well, yeah,
that's a really good point. And if we look at
the Bank Bank Club. You know, obviously you correct when
you speak about this wider sphere outside of South Africa,
you know, Angola and Somalia, Rwanda and Croatia, Croatia and

(24:15):
Chechi and whatever else. Afghani is done, of course, but
when you write about it, it's easy to link these
things because the gaps in between are fullable. There's no void, right,
you can talk through it. But with photography, if you
think of a photography book that will include all these places,

(24:36):
our presence in these places or my presence in these
places is so sporadic, you know, okay, Croatian Bosnia, I
spent a lot of time, but Somalia it is a
reasonable amount of time. But you know, once the world
interest ended Somalia has been going on and on and
on as a country and as a society. I haven't
photographed it Rwanda. I did several trips, but you know,

(25:01):
so it's kind of this telescoping in and I feel
it doesn't do justice to the larger story. And I
would not know how to put that with the South
African work, just technically, page by page. How would I
put this work together? You know, there's black and white, color,

(25:24):
good photography, bad photography, photography where all I'm trying to
do is learn how to be a technical photographer and
actually capture something on film. To when I'm you know,
confident about all those things and doing vastly different things
with the camera, what does that look like on the page?
I mean, even on a page black and white and color.

(25:46):
I hate it if you look at people whose work
I really admire. I'm Son too More for King, the
late Son tu More for King. He did a book
with Teetle or Startle ever one pronounces it. But it
was a collection and it was a set of stories
that were done in separate, little soft covered books put

(26:08):
into a box. And that is his their way of
getting around that issue, because that's got his his work
from Europe and our Schwitz that's got his South Africa.
It's got all different periods, and he's done it as
a kind of story, storified each book as a single story.
Then you look at Kudelka. I don't know if you've

(26:30):
seen his monograph, but it's all black and white, and
it logically follows his stuff from when he was doing
stage work and real that kind of check surrealism that
was from really twenty years before he started photography, or
that kind of feel through his frog Spring and through

(26:51):
his exile years, then coming back and doing this East
European mining on the expand the wide panoramic. But that
all works because it's all color and there's a sense
of trueflow that to me works. I cannot and obviously
that's someone whom we all admire. He's fantastic. But I
cannot see my work doing that unless I exclude vast amounts.

(27:16):
So I've done a couple of exhibitions of just my
black and white work from the Hostel War period, the
nineties before and after, and that's logical, But then it
misses entire things. That misses the Bisho massacre, it misses
the boy pertogue massacred missus critically important parts of that

(27:37):
story just because I wasn't photographing with that kind of
film and I'm loath to convert color to black and white.
So it's a problem, Zach.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
You were your own worst enemy on this, because why
are you so worried about black and white a color?

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Because it looks awful if you get off of that
bit and look at it.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
You taking the picture, not whether it's black and white
a color. It's your story, it's your legacy, it's your experience.
That's what you've got to look at it. You can't
look at it as black and white. It's all about you.
And I tell you what, people aren't that judgmental about
that sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
They want to hear.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
And feel it. And again, you know, like the way
you did you enjoyed did the Bank Bank Club. It
was a reflective process, and I think you know this
does just have to be an extension of that in
terms of the visual dialogue and everything. You know, I
honestly wouldn't get caught up with black and white a color.
It's a bad life and experience in who you are

(28:39):
and where you were, and the fact that you picked
up a black and white, you picked a color. I
don't think anybody would judge you on that. They want
to feel you in your pictures.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
You know that. You know that.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
I can't tell you that anyway. You know that, In fact,
get your students to do.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
It, because you're too too Now. I had a student
from another universe who wanted to do her piece to
It was god awful. So I like what you're saying,
You've given me food for thought.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
Ah, really good. It's good because it is. It's who
you are. It doesn't matter whether it's black and white.
It's not that, and with all true respect, it's not
that trivial. It just doesn't matter anymore. Going back to
the nineties, and I came through with a whole lord
of sort of really established photographers, and they were really
obsessed with using black and white and color together. They

(29:33):
hated it. But it's like, I think that was then
because we come out of that black and white generation
and color was always like voodooish, isn't it? But now
it's all color digital, and I just don't think it matters.
It's about the substance, the context, and what you're trying
to say is this is my life, and you know,

(29:54):
uh huh, And speaking of life, can we go back
to the beginning? Can we just start with where you
were in Jowberg, what got you through your childhood right
to when you went to Swapple Themibia Desmond Tutu University
and then obviously into the main part of the nineties
and then your filmmaking. Can we go to can we

(30:17):
gained around the small copy? Because I really want to
find out more about that mine worker's massacre and I
don't know much about it, and I would like you
to talk to me about it.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Can we go back to the beginning in joe Burg. So,
I was born into a Croatian immigrant family, which was
then in Yugoslavia. My grandfather had come out in the
late eighteen hundreds when he was a citizen of Austria Hungary,
came out to make a living in South Africa and

(30:48):
got interned in a concentration camp or in an in
tournament camp, I should say not concentration camp. I apologies
in tournament camp because he was a citizen of an
He was an enemy combatant right and after World War
One ended and he came out the country of which
he was, he was stateless. And so he got a

(31:08):
British passport, oddly enough, and then eventually a South African passport.
My grandmother came out from then Yugoslavia, and they came
from the same village and they were married there and
they came out here and very funny, you know that.
You know, there always these migrant men who came out
are always selling the dream life back to the girls

(31:31):
at home. So they came out on a ship, on
a cruise ship, which is probably really nice and how
they afforded it, but anyway, and my grandmother was pregnant,
and they docked in Cape Town, and they docked in
the night and shows up really early with morning sickness,
and she went onto the deck and she looked out

(31:53):
and she was shook. No one had told her there
were black people in Africa, so you know, so this
was the start of my family in South Africa, and
they eventually moved up to Johannesburg and then my mom
was the first of four children. That grandfather of mine

(32:14):
died young lung cancer. In that period of when my
mom was reaching her majority in eighteen finishing high school.
It was during World War Two and a lot of
my grandmother's family were killed. I mean, this is stuff
I haven't written about that I meant to be writing
a book about. I had a contract and then I

(32:36):
got out of it. But my mother had a first
marriage that was to an awful buck who turned out
to be a murderer and not of my mother fortunately,
you know, she was his third wife, and his fourth
wife he killed and chopped up into pieces and put
them different suitcases and dumped them in damns around Johannesburg.

(32:57):
So that I only discovered my mother's death. But so
she had quite the life while she was recovering from
having run away from this man. With my grandmother's help,
my grand took her to former Yugoslavia which is then
still Yugoslavia, and she met my father. He eventually came
out to South Africa. They got married, and then my

(33:18):
brother and I came into the picture. So that is
our early life. So being of these migrants, most of
the immigrants were really pretty racist, at least the European immigrants.
They fitted right into that apartheid mindset. Even though the Africanas,
the you know, the descendants of the Dutch and the
Huguenots who essentially ran South Africa hated these foreigners because

(33:44):
you know, everyone's just senophobic about something, but they saw
them as allies against the black majority. So that is
the kind of mindset I grew up with. But my
mother and my uncles they were very different. They saw
things in a much smarter way. And I think if
we looked at them today, I'm not sure we'd call

(34:07):
them leftists, But there was certainly liberal and I think,
you know, each generation finds its own path. But you know,
I saw a partner as a great evil and I
wanted to tell that story. Eventually, I kind of meandered

(34:27):
around and tried gating the university and that didn't work out.
And I worked in butcher shops, which was the Yugoslav thing,
and I worked in various things, and I did taking
people hiking and safaris and you know, the small, little
one man company. A friend of mine who became my friend,
and then I kind of drifted into journalism. How did

(34:49):
that happen? Though?

Speaker 1 (34:50):
How did you find the comera? There is some insight
into your early life in the Bank Bank Club. It's
mind blowing in a way, and it's really sad, and
you were rich in many ways, but through in other ways.
One thing, when I was reading through it, you never
really felt comfortable in your own skin, did you?

Speaker 2 (35:11):
No? I don't think I still do in fact, but
no I.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Didn't because you were saying about the way you conflicted
with the way the white South African lived our lives
and the way the attitude and the Whenui's from the Zimbabwe.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, right, I loved that. That was so funny, maybe
maybe for the readers haven't read it, Like when we
was these white traditions who lived Tradisha after it became
Zimbabwe a black irun country, and they would always warn
about how great it was in Radiesha. And that's why

(35:45):
we used to call him when we's when we were
in Radisha.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
It's such a good title for a book. Sorry, I'm
giving the ideas. I know it is rather Yes, what
made you pick up a camera?

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Then? So I was first writing as a journal but
my interest was really the black lived experience of apartheid,
and that included the townships around Johannesburg and then further
afield in the ethnic or linguistic homelands. It was pointless
writing without pictures, so I started taking pictures and I'd

(36:17):
had a I'd bought a camera just out of interest,
you know, a Nikon thirty five mile secondhand, obviously, and
I was not very good for sure, to put it mildly,
And I was more literate than I was photographic. I
was a copy editor at the Financial Mail and that
was kind of providing my money while I went off.

(36:40):
And then while I was photographing, my camera got stolen
a thirty five mile and I happened to through someone
have met an advertising photographer, an Italian guy, and he said, no, no,
let me help you. I'll take you to meet this
proker the store. You'll get a real camera. These are
not real cameras a gang, what are you talk? And

(37:00):
so I went to this wonderful second and store with him,
and he just bulldozed me. He said, here you're going
to buy this, it's large format camera as a learn
off technica. I mean, oh, this is cool. And then
here you're going to buy this RB sixty seven medium format,
my mia, and you still got enough money left over

(37:21):
from the insurance to buy the same Nikon that you had.
And suddenly I had all these formats and I didn't
know what to do with the bigger cameras. I had
no clue how to use them, so, you know, no internet,
no YouTube, had a look at books, God save us.
And that's what I fell in love with photography. And
I really learned, you know, using the four x five.

(37:42):
I really had to learn how to control a camera
and what photography meant technically, and that led to esthetic
and deeper thoughts.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
Who caught your eye composition? Because you are very good
with composition, and we're going to that on the bed.
But who caught your eye early on with the composition?

Speaker 2 (38:02):
So you know, I mentioned Juel Peirez earlier and he's
a good friend. Yeah. But when I was in high
school and had no interest in photography or journalism, there
was this kind of very a stationer store that is
also a bookstore called CNA, and they were like, they
didn't have many books. But I walked in one day

(38:24):
into one of their stores and on sale was this
vertical black and white book with a man's face on it,
and it was Juel Perez's telex eron and asked, what's that?
And it just caught my eye and I started paging
through this book. And I was a school kid. I
was earning money, meager money, you know, working on weekends.

(38:48):
I bought that book. I had no interest in photography,
but it was so compelling how he saw thing that
I wanted that book. I must have thrown it away
like a fool would be They're were worth a fortune? Now, No,
I was going to say that, yeah, they are so Ah.
That opened up subconsciously, I think, because I still didn't

(39:10):
go into photography for several years after that. It opened
me up to thinking about visuals on a much deeper level.
And I think Jill's work has done that for tens
of thousands of people around the globe. Absolutely so. The
way you'll sees, even though I don't want a photograph
like Jill, you know that smart, deep, fantastic way of

(39:36):
looking is what I aspire to, not to photograph like him,
but to photograph, to try and aspire to photograph with
his smarts and his death.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yours was a very different war photography, though, wasn't it?
If you look say, his rewinding stuff, and that was
the observing war photographer, wasn't it Yours was right in
front of you. So it's not just a case of
pointing a camera at somebody and taking the picture of

(40:07):
somebody being killed. That in itself is an unimaginable thing
and takes an unimaginable amount of balls to actually maintain
yourself and keep yourself there. But actually the other thing
is that the compositions were and your depth and everything
was so spot on, and that little bit of magic,

(40:31):
if you want to call it magic, was what set
you were part I think, and that's why you never
shot like Gulioporest. But obviously the little bit of magic
was there which you were taken from you foresk.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, that's very very complimentary of you, thank you. Wait
was it was it? What was it? Shot?

Speaker 1 (40:49):
South Africa? Some soldier was looking up to the looking
up and there were some bodies on the floor and
he was looking up the side of a building you
with there taking the picture. Somebody has just been shot and.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Shell house massacre. And this was when at the library
gardens when the Zulu warriors with think Carter, that's why. Yeah,
somebody was shooting at them from the rooftop. Then sbsequently,
I think Jon provocateurs, the government. You know, these were
people next to the body and that was in this

(41:23):
entrance to an underground garat. So the light was almost
cathedral like. It is amazing that.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
Skin of composition though. Yeah, let's getting it validating composition.
There's so many layers to it, you know, there's so
many layers. I mean, I've been in wars, orgs and stuff,
but I've never been on the front line. I haven't
got the balls for that. It takes a certain person,
Like you said.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
I think mostly our balls shrink up into our abanmen
in these moments. But what you've been shot four times,
haven't you? So wow, we'd like no more than four.
Let's get back at that.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
I'm not meaning to be about that, but let's what
interests me about that period is that you went and
covered the swapple? Was it on the Botswana on the border?
So that was before and that was about five, wasn't that.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
I'll take you back again. South Africa had conscription for
all white males and getting out of that was very difficult.
You could leave the country if you had the money,
or you could possibly join the a and see who
knew how to do that? Very few people. I was young, ignorant,
I didn't know how to do that. I did my

(42:37):
two years. I thought no, I'll just but I refused
to carry a rifle. So that is a pretty rough
two years. But I think I got away with it
because of my Yugoslav background. I pretended I could speak Russian,
which I could a little bit, but so that all
this guy's useful to us in translating documents and captured
stuff from the Soviets who were helping on the in

(42:58):
the border wars with in a learned such so that
tolerated my not being willing to carry a rifle and
all that stuff. And at the end of the two years,
I was a mess. I just so hated being a
part of that machine, and I saw I was never
going to do the rest of my army service. And
what it was is the first two years is essentially training, yeah, mostly,

(43:23):
and then you do what's called camps, and those are
three to six months whenever they need you. And so
I thought no ways. So when my first call up came,
I literally got on my bicycle and went into neighboring
Botswana to make sure I wouldn't get called up. And
that's when I ended up actually on the border between

(43:46):
northern Botswana and the caprevious strip of Namibia, which might
have been where the Army would have wanted to send
me in uniform, and I was there quite opposite, and
I connected It wasn't SWAPO, it was Carnu, who later
became part of SWAPO. It was the Caprivy National Union

(44:07):
people who were fighting against the South Africa. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
South African were bombing, right, they were bombing And you
went there, well I went there.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
I went illegally with gorillas, which the So Africans called terrorists,
with a dugout canoe across into it. But obviously the
sou Africans had spies everywhere. So within days a helicopter
arrived and everyone's going, that's for you. I'm going, what
that's for you? So they wanted me to spy back

(44:34):
on the gorillas. So after that little meeting, I went
to meet my contacts and I said listen and said no, no,
we let's get some beer. We put our feet in
the Zambezi and drank bian and made a plan on
how we're going to feed misinformation to the South Africans.
So it was it was an exciting time, but I

(44:55):
was out of my depth.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
Let me say, nineteen ninety was a massive for you.
Would you think that was a turning point?

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah for you? Oh yes, oh yes.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
Setting the scene in Africa, South Africa. Sorry, it was
a political ship show, really, wasn't it.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Mm hmm. That's all.

Speaker 1 (45:13):
You've got a and c you've got a carter and
you've got the government all at loggerheads with each other.
For those who maybe listening and not not about the
land being really basic, that's.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Really basic here they're about another five. Well, it's like,
oh yeah, those the main ones.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, it was a massive Yeah for you. What were
you looking for? What are you trying to answer?

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Oh, that's an awful question. Zech. Oh what I was
trying to answer is easier. What I was looking for,
God knows. I think I was looking to get out
of my life. I hated being a white South African,
even though obviously the privileges were enjoyable, but I hated
being you know, the immdiate thing is people see as white,

(45:56):
oh you one of us, you know, and black people
see you and they think, hmmm, what's here about? And
even if you try and show your bona fidees, there's
always like this deep susmission for Contriusam what I was
looking for? I'm not entirely sure. I think I was
looking for myself, and I think I was looking for
a way to live a life that where I felt

(46:18):
within my skin, where I felt I wasn't living a
false life. And the other part of your question, the
exact reading has slipped my mind. But what I was
trying to show was the effects of this awful well
four hundred years of colonialism and one hundred technically forty

(46:40):
years of apartheid legally, but you know, it's just a
legalization of what had been before. And I wanted to
document that, but I wasn't ready to cover violent. And
so there's violence was happening, starting to happen, the political
violence between mostly between ANC and Parter and the government forces.

(47:03):
I would listen, there was this REGA seven O two
that are pretty good, and they would keep hearing this.
Just one day I thought, you know, you can't kid
yourself that you're covering the effects of apartheid if you
don't go and cover this violin. And so I drove in.
And you know that very day I stopped on this

(47:27):
bridge overlooking where there were these battles at this market
workers hostel and the surrounding neighborhoods, and I could look
down and it had just finished, and I could see
lots of journalists on the side of the ANC supporting
residents and nobody with the encarter, the Zulu hostile dwellers.

(47:49):
So I said, well, let me go there. At least
I'll have a chance. You know, I wasn't that dumb.
I knew I needed to sell pictures. Let me go
that side. And I'd spent a lot of time in
black areas. You know, I could speak a little bit
of Issuzulu. I could speak sort stal, you know, so
I could make my way. And I went down and

(48:09):
they were like, what are you doing here, because everyone's
normally on the other side, and I should I tell
you a side of the story, And well, nothing's happening.
So they went drinking, and I went drinking with them
in these illegal shabbins and these are sprawling, one story
bungalow you know, bungalow buildings with very squalid hostels. And

(48:33):
it's called single men's hostels. Yeah, it's rough. It's rough, rough, rough.
And inn Karta had been ethnically cleansing, which wasn't a
word we're using then, the phrase we were using them
ethnically cleansing the hostels anyone who wasn't Zulu speaking, and
they were making a political war into an ethno linguistic
war as well as a political war, so it was complicated.

(48:58):
While I was there drinking and photograph in the shebine,
I heard this whistling and I said, what's that? What's
and people picked up their weapons, you know, these spears
and shields and sticks called knob carries with these heavy
heads on them. Nothing, nothing, nothing, I'm going to assure
it's nothing. So anyway, I'm running with these guys towards

(49:19):
where the whistling was coming from. And they said, oh,
you see this. You know. When I got to this,
they were trying to force the steel door open to
get into this dormitory room. And I said, well, what's
going on? And I said, dot know. This guy was India.
He shot at us his anc. I never heard any gunshots.
But I'm smart and I'm not to say anything. And

(49:39):
I'm photographing. And like you said, with the war photography,
I was really close, stupidly close. The best pictures from
that earlier stuff worth a twenty mile lens. And even
then I was all over them, you know, they just
I mean I could have licked These people are so close.
Eventually they forced their way in and I was pumping

(50:00):
adrenaline and really scared and excited simultaneously. And after the
third or fourth in carter guy had forced their way
in and the door slammed behind them, this other guy
comes running out. The door flings open. He comes running out,
and everyone starts attacking him and chasing him but looks
like he might and me chasing along with them, and

(50:23):
then he goes down. I didn't see if he tripped
on his own or someone caught him or what it was,
but immediately they were all around him and they killed
him with spears and sticks, and I was there photographing
from within one or two meters. And then eventually, once
he was well dead, they realized, oh, so, what guy's

(50:44):
been taking pictures the whole time? They said, sir in Zulu,
and I said, Zula, don't worry, don't worry, you know,
you know, understand what. Then they explained what it was,
and I said, oh, that's okay, and then they asked
for portraits. The killers asked for portraits, which of course
I did smile and started walking out of this to
get back to my car and get the hell out
of Dodge. And that is the longest probably about half

(51:06):
a kilometer walk and they just let me. So that
was my start. And so from going from not doing
conflict to witnessing and photographing a murder on my very
first afternoon was pretty shocking. It really fucked us my mind,

(51:26):
and I'd say from that moment throughout, I was just
really it was just trauma upon trauma, and the kind
of guilt of feeling trauma about being a witness to
trauma as opposed to being traumatized through suffering violence yourself.
It's a very peculiar thing. Ah upon Thor who deserved
to die exactly. And they even had the ethnicity of

(51:51):
the guy wrong. He might well have been an in
Carta supporter. He came from one of those tribes that
bordered the Zulu speakers, many of them were infect in
Carter supporters.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
So and again that documented in the book. One thing
which doesn't come across in the film obviously, but generally
I think is the people in the townships and the
hostels when in general life over a period of time,
they must have got used to you, they must have

(52:23):
trusted you, they must.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
Have gone there's that great guy.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
He's okay, he's not able to do anything damage to us.
There was obviously there was a level of trust there
in a sense obviously not to everybody.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
No, No, I mean later when I got to know
these these child soldiers who fought on the side of
the ANC, they told me that they used to see
us when we used to come to Takosa, which is
a place who spent a lot of time in. They
were debate shooting us, but it always came down to
we don'tant to waste a bullet. They're not worth a bullet.

(52:58):
So we got to know people to the end. During
the first four years before the election, the first democratic election, No,
people did not trust enough because imagine if I was
mostly shooting for AP and Sigma, but Sigma didn't come back.
That the pictures never came back to South Africa in general,

(53:20):
but the AP pictures, every newspaper in South Africa subscribed
to them. If they let us into their world and
we took pictures of them close up fighting where they
could be recognized or they address the safers, they were gonners.
So there was that, and there was also I mean,
where I talk, where I was traumatized by witnessing one murder.

(53:44):
Is was sixteen fifteen fourteen year old kids who were
taking part in battle, killing people, having their friends killed,
parents killed. You want to talk about trauma, So no,
they didn't have much time for us.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
And so I can't remember where it is, but I
think it's at the beginning of your Bank Bank Club book.
We're talking about how paralyzed you felt. You were sort
of paralyzed by fear in a sense what could happen
or what you know? It could have been at the
beginning of pondor chapter actually where you were going out
and there's sort of fear was sort of paralyzing in

(54:21):
your sense of anticipation. But you obviously got Dare I
say addicted to that, didn't you?

Speaker 2 (54:27):
I guess i'd say, I mean addiction is a is
a slightly misleading term to use, I think, so let's
take it back. So I was never paralyzed with fear
in these situations. And I guess that's why I became
a good conflict photographer, is that my brain would keep

(54:51):
working and I could keep doing things, so it enabled
me to get photographs and also not get killed too easily.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
I met beforehunt, before you went out, the anticipation, not
while you're on the field.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Oh no, Well, the fear and anticipation was every time.
I mean, I yes, that's what I meant. Yeah, you know,
I used to wake up really early, well before dawn,
make a thermos of coffee, and my stomach was just
a not always, you know, I would have the shikes
and fear is you meant to have fear. If you
don't have fear, you're an idiot. So anyway, But the

(55:29):
addiction side part of it was an addiction to feeling
that you're on the edge of history being made, on
the edge of the news, and that you could play
a part in your recording it. At some early stages
I felt maybe the pictures could change things, and obviously
I came disabused of that reasonably quickly, but it would

(55:50):
surface now and again, like with Somalia. You know the pictures,
and I think they were important, those early pictures from
the family, but South Africa, nothing was changing because of
the photography and showing the violence, and I thought you
wanted to be better than other photographers, but you also
wanted to get you know, we would every morning you

(56:10):
would see dozens of bodies wherever that had been conflict,
and you never saw them being killed these poor people,
be it civilians or fighters. So you wanted to photograph that,
thinking that'll show the true face of this war. And
so that was a big driving factor and part of
the addiction, right, The addiction was chasing holy grails and

(56:32):
chasing a sense that you might make a difference or
you will at least document this. And then there's the camaraderie,
and there is an addiction to adrenaline and fear and
overcoming that fear and being a photographer, you get you
come back with photographs, it be they good or bad,
all showing what it was. But there's a material thing.

(56:56):
So there's a lot of factors.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
In some way, the Bang Bang Club film try to
portray that that sort of brotherhood that you can Kevin enjoy.
It's this sort of unstoppable, romantic group of photographers out
there on the streets.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
That is the idea, but actually reality in the book,
one of the first things I remember in the opening
part of the book, you actually go against that and
you say the bank Bank Club was everybody covering it?

Speaker 2 (57:29):
Yeah, club? It was in retrospect that the Bang Bang
Club and who which were the people in the Bank
I mean it sticks. I mean, you know, taking it
to a whole different thing. Before the Gaza War started.
Shortly before, like a couple of months before, I got
approached by someone who wanted me to go with her

(57:52):
to cover the Gaza Bank Bank Club. So there's a
group of there were is still I don't know who
the actual individual jewels were, but there was a group
of photographers in Gaza who called themselves and fashioned themselves.
I guess in a way after the Bang Bang club, right,
they saw themselves in there, and so you know, I

(58:14):
think the romanticization of it is normal, and the kind
of peering down of complexity to simplicity is also normal
the passing time. But maybe it also had a good thing.
It allowed people to feel a continuum with other generations.
Then they should read the book. They certainly should. I mean,

(58:34):
I hate the movie. I've never seen the final finished product.
I saw various innits that I just gave up.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
I can understand why you don't like the movie, but
I think why you may like the movie is what
you've just said. I think it has maybe had some
sort of positive effects or some effect, but in reality,
the book is for me. I would think it's more
an outpouring of from my extress disorder.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Certainly is isn't it though? Isn't it a medic It is?
And it's also historic, and it's also at a time
where it was the heyday of the analog film ERAa,
where we were going into starting to digitize and transmit
pictures digitally. And this was just a couple of years
before actual digital cameras came in, So it's kind of

(59:24):
got a historical apex of film photography. There were larger
than life characters. It was before social media. The Internet
came in just after that. You could use compu serve
if we remember that to get onto these weird flora
about is Elvis alive? And I guess nothing's changed. It

(59:44):
was an interesting time, you know, the Iron Curtain at fallen.
It was a reasonable time post colonialism in Africa and
Asia that things were changing, The next generation was coming in.
It was a fascinating time. Yudoslavia was falling apart and
was being formed, if not be sent many years before

(01:00:05):
it became a country.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
In the book itself, it's not like we said before,
It's not just about your time in South Africa. It's
about it's about your I must say you call for
this with jaw silver and yeah, we point out the
beginning of the book it's through your eyes, but you
both through auto and bought your experiences to make sense
of you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
Yeah. Yeah, so Joal wasn't comfortable writing and uncomfortable writing
even though you know when he actually backled down and
he would write his experience as good. But it all
turned out that it is best through one voice. And
so we co authored it and I did the writing essentially,

(01:00:48):
but we would edit every paragraph together. We would discuss
at length it is. It is a completely joint enterprise.
It's not a book about photography.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
It's a book about you, your journey seeing destruction, death,
It's a soul searching journey of trying to make sense
of this. We'll go back to the words shit show
a kaind of different parts of the world and how
you and Joe tried to make sense of it all.
And you come out to the point where you know

(01:01:18):
you've been shot four times and you lost Kevin, you
lost Ken.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Draw lots of people, yeah, yeah, nothing compared to what's
happening nowadays in guys, Like a lot of people died
in their note.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
Yeah, have you seen the depressed count It's it's terrific.
And I was just going to say jaw as well,
who had a who had a serious accident in Afghanistan.
It's interesting. I think when people look at the Bank
Bank Club, people need to read the book.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
People need to read the book.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
Because they don't understand what the real Bank Bank Club is.
And the Journey is not about. It's a photography about
human beings interacting and fighting and loving and hating and
just trying to make sense of all the shit. Really
gone back to our discussion earlier about you doing a
book about everything in trying to make sense of all

(01:02:07):
that stuff, you have to do it somehow, You've got
to do it again.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
I do agree, you know, I think the book has
Besides it's as this kind of historical mark of a
certain period in world and South African history, it's also
very much about the ethical choices we make about this
myth of objectivity and about neutrality and honesty as journalists
and storytellers. Absolutely, you know, I think it's very valuable

(01:02:36):
in those things because we break it down, we discuss it,
we talk about what we feel and the choices we
make and we talk about Kevin Carter's, you know, his
photography and He's subsequent suicide. You know, we talk about
I mean, we don't talk about, but you know, ten
years after we published the book, you alluded to it.

(01:02:57):
But Juao stepped on a eye in Afghanistan and lost
both his legs, you know. And you mentioned me getting
wounded four times. I was wounded four times. Jo was
wounded once in a way that is just so awful.
I mean, he was in intensive care for two years.

(01:03:18):
What how'd you cope with that? He is just the
most mentally tough person I've ever met.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
So you are, let's set the scene with Kevin, because
you mentioned that Kevin's Pictures is a photograph. I Shaw
students a lot without telling them any contexts. What the
book did for me was make me understand Kevin and

(01:03:44):
the questions which were asked of this picture. It goes
down to the ethics things, doesn't it. The questions were
asked about the picture, did he help the little girl?
Did he do anything about it? And that is a
massive back of worms, which you talk about in the
book and rightly sold and I understand it. And as people,
the viewer majority of people may not understand it. Do

(01:04:06):
you want to set the scene with the picture and
just briefly touch on the aftermath of the picture.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
Sure. So this was in the southern part of Sudan
where there was a war induced famine. Had an assignment
to go in with. I forget what the UN body was.
Now they have these bodies that deal with certain countries
in the long running contexts and such trises. It was
a food transportation, wasn't it. Yeah, down the ribbon exactly,

(01:04:32):
and Kevin wanted to go with because Kevin was in
a bad patch. He was a very heavy drug user,
various drugs which we didn't fully understand. I think Ra
had a much better idea than me, but I certainly
was pretty naive about it. I didn't understand the depth
and extent of what he was doing. So anyway, he
wanted to go to Zrao. He needed it to Dra said,

(01:04:53):
sure they went together, but it was so difficult to
get into Sudan. It is a World Food Program flight
that was going in, and in fact, Kevin got on
a flight earlier and he went to the border area
Loka Chokio in Kenya, which was a staging place for
going into Sudan, did some photographs, came back likens like
they're both so frustrated, and eventually like it is suddenly

(01:05:16):
you can go. They could both go. They could get
in for one day with the flight that is dropping
food and come back out of the same flight. So
they were in this village, there were photographing, there were
that earlier in the day been photographing soldiers, and then
there were photographing the food distribution and these health centers

(01:05:36):
with these awful seams. And then Kevin happened across seeing
this kid and the vulture behind the kid, and he
positioned himself and took the pictures, took the pictures and
then scared away the vulture, but didn't pick up or
help the kid. Later he would say it's because they

(01:05:59):
were told not to touch the kids because of disease.
Both ways, right, vulnerable people, especially children, you bring some
fresh new disease, bang, you've killed the kid, or they
have other diseases cholera, et cetera that you get and
you pass around. So the aid workers said do not

(01:06:20):
touch anybody. So anyway, Kevin goes back to where was
and he's in a high state of agitation and he's
telling Jo about this picture, and it's a remarkable picture,
a psychonic picture. This little kid is on its hands
and knees and the vulture is behind, I mean many

(01:06:42):
meters behind, and it looks like the vulture is stalking
the child. This is not the true meaning of that
what is happening, but that's what it looks like, and
it's very symbolic of what is happening in Sudan at
that time. Tells, Oh, my God, says, Jou goes off
to where and he sees several kids, but he doesn't

(01:07:03):
see this kid or the vulture anyway, So I was thinking, oh,
that's nice. Kevin's got an amazing picture, and I'm here
on assignment and I've got fuck call. Anyway. They came back,
Kevin processed and that was on color slides, so processing
in a lab, and he invited us to come edit
with him. So it was myself, Juu Ken at Ken's

(01:07:25):
house with his wife Monica, because Ken and Kevin were
the closest, right, they were really close friends going way back.
That's who Kevin was closest to him. So we were
at this nice big light box that Ken had and
looking at these images and it's like, what the hell,
look at this image. It's amazing. The next day I
get a call from New York Times, who I did

(01:07:46):
a lot of stringing for. In this it just so happens.
We're running it, did you you know, because it's Africa,
we must all have pictures of Sudan. Do you have
any pictures of Suddan? I said no, but you know,
I've just seen amazing pictures by Kevin Carter. They're amazing
and described it. She said, oh, so gave her Kevin's
number and Nancy Bursky and she got hold of Kevin,

(01:08:07):
and you know, you go to the He went too
the AP and transmit to the picture. And in the
book she talks about we interviewed her about watching that
fact it is, you know, it's a leaf fax, not
a real facts. So the image, the printed image that
comes out is in this awful quality paper. It looks
like hell. But that image just pops like what the hell.

(01:08:28):
So they ran it initially on page three and then
on page one. It had an immediate impact. That picture
was huge, raised a huge amount of money for World
Food Program and for the Sudanese feeding and it also
raised terrible controversies, and when later on he won the
Pulitzer Prize for it and went to collect it, questions

(01:08:51):
just got more and more. You know, this was it
wasn't just tabloid journalists who are hunting a story there
it it was like what So Kevin didn't know how
to answer this properly. He didn't have an answer that
would satisfy people, So everyone assumes the kid died right.
Twenty years later, a Spanish journalist whose name I haven't

(01:09:13):
got at the tip of my fingers right now, spoke
to us at length. It's mostly to ju about where
they were and all this kind of stuff. He wanted
to go find out about Kevin because Kevin had become
a kind of photographic icon. I mean, Japanese school children
are writing poems to him, immense in terms of cultural impact.

(01:09:35):
So this journalist goes to find this village and stru's God,
as we say in South Africa, Stru's God. He finds
the village, he finds this child's father and leone, behold,
a child was not a girl. It was a boy,

(01:09:57):
despite what all the Sudanese experts that, oh, that's definitely
a girl, because you couldn't see right in the picture,
but from the jewelry and that, oh it's definitely gone.
It was not. It was a boy called Kong, and
Kong survived. Kong lived to be twenty one years old,
and of which he then died of some fever dngy

(01:10:18):
malaria not sure, but the father was very happy that
the picture had been taken, that his son's struggles had
been immortalized. I mean it was fascinating. Nobody there blamed Kevin.

Speaker 1 (01:10:33):
It's easy to criticize, and I think there is spaced to
criticize Kevin.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
But you know, Kevin isn't the one who created a
famine lader wall Yeah, come on, he did his job
as a Furni journalist. Someone with a different approach. Mar said,
oh my god, I've got to have saved that kid,
went and picked up the kid, and the picture was
never made. So you helped one kid. But instead Kevin

(01:10:58):
did his job as a fury journalist and raised hundreds
of thousands of dollars for helping many kids. We have
to be neutral, had disagree. I'm not neutral. I was
never neutral in South Africa. I think we've established that
in our discussion. Yeah, and certainly helping the kid afterwards

(01:11:19):
makes no difference to your work as a journalist. Helping
the kid before obviously huge impact, but it wasn't in
immediate danger.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):
Yeah, when I've worked out in Famint in the Okkadin Somaliga,
and I understand going back to what you said about
you have to stay a distance. If you haven't been,
you don't understand what it's like, the smell, the heat,
the disease, the color. Even when you're in feeding stations
and stuff, or you're out with some nomadic tribesmen and

(01:11:51):
they're all suffering with severe malnutrition, you have no idea
the impact you can cause by even just being getting
in for in terms of touching the kids and picking
them up and helping them.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
That's not your rule there, and it's almost a death
sentence really, because if you have a cold, even or
even something that's innocuous to you, a person who's hanging
on to life by a thread, if you give them
a new thing, virus something to deal with, it's over.

Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
And you've got to stay healthy too. Is that you're
quite vulnerable in as well being out there. Actually, you
know you're sitting out in the bush for a week.
You need to be on your egg game. You don't
you don't want to be.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Your purpose in going there is not as an aid worker.
There are aid workers there. That's not your job. Your
job is a journalist. You've got to do your job.
If you're not, they're not the people who are into
great effort and maybe you risk their lives. Your fixer,
the driver getting you on a flight instead of an
extra bag of grain, whatever it is. You've betrayed all

(01:12:59):
those people. Where did Sebastian Balat come from? So? Balich
is my mother's maiden name, and Sebastian is my middle name.
How do you pronounce it Sebastian Balich Bullich? I'd have
an accent on it in the Yugoslav che sound, but
it got anglicized and it was spelled c h And

(01:13:23):
as he got his own section at AIRP. That's a
great question. That was your non deplume? Is that the
word non along the care? Yeah? Now, to avoid the
military once I was, you know, publishing, I had to
use a different name. Otherwise, you know I would have

(01:13:45):
been arrested very quickly. Yeah. So Sebastian Bualich took those
early pictures and took the let's get out of Africa.
This is all I'm going to say to anybody. Listen
to this.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
If you want a lot of answers to the boys,
Greg Jaw, Kevin and Cal. If you want some monsters
to their story, by the book, read the book. Now
we'll leave in Africa. We're in the thousands. Now you
traveled everybody, you've been throughout the nineties. You were everybody,

(01:14:19):
weren't you, Indiga, Somalia, Russia, We met you, Croatia, Angola.
Tell me about the twenty ten project you're working on
in the twenty ten World.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
Cup, So that is remarkable. That is the World Press Foundation.
And I've been a judge twice by then. I think
I had quite good relations. But they wanted to do
a journalism training program leading up to the World Cup
in South Africa, which is the first football World Cup

(01:14:50):
in Africa, and they wanted to train multi media journalists,
you know, different media journalists, different of media. And they
asked me to be a photojournalism trainer. That was great,
and I met another photojournalism trainer who is Chris de Burda,
who was a wonderful guy. Is a wonderful guy. And

(01:15:12):
the first place was Nigeria, yeah, and anyway, so we
did that training and the World Press Foundation people liking me,
so they offered it to me to be editor in
chief of the project, which was great and I said,
of course, I'd love to do that. So that was
being kind of the editorial chief of all the different trainings.

(01:15:33):
And then also when the journalists were working in South Africa,
and that was going to be eighteen of the best
from the various training programs, the ones who the best
from everything sub Saharan, North Africa, Southern, East and Western,
the whole two d and they would all work together
in out of common newsrooms across South Africa covering the

(01:15:57):
World Cup. And that was just fantastic. It was who
are you teaching them? Well, I taught them for the journalism,
but then I was editing and overseeing the editing of video, audio,
writing stills. It was also hard to look for, you know,

(01:16:17):
stories off the main beat. How do you in this position,
you know, work and we encourage people to get their
work into other media as well, and we were. It
was fantastic. It was really cool and I loved that.
I thought that was a great experience for me, but

(01:16:38):
also a great project by will Press foundation and friends
with most of the people still from from that.

Speaker 1 (01:16:47):
It was a great period for South African sport, wasn't
it that era?

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
It wasn't it being in football, football, rugby, crickety. Oh yeah,
you play cricket as well. I forgot who's your team? Then?
Who's your football team? It used to Morocco Swallows, but
they just kind of don't exist much anymore. So I

(01:17:12):
guess Orlando Pirates is is my next favorite team? Is
that in America? Yes? What's yours? Oh? Mine is?

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
It's a little humble team in the northeast called Sunderland. Yeah,
you haven't heard of them?

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
Have you? I have? I have? Have you? I follow?
I follow British soccer.

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):
So come on hit me with it. Who who's the
team in England?

Speaker 2 (01:17:39):
Like all good Africans arsenal? I can't it be.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
Somebody something like Grimsby or something, or Erick Rangers or
something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
So you think I've ever seen a match by them
with them in it? Things happen by accident, you know,
not enough to develop a relationship.

Speaker 1 (01:17:59):
I wonder how any times I've said that in my life.
Throughout your career, your CV, you weaved in and out
of editing, associate editing, the writer, photographer, filmmaker, which I
don't really know much about, I have to admit, But
one thing which stands out for me around the around
twenty twelve is the small copy massacre of the miners.

(01:18:23):
Now on your website, I had a look and there
was some color pictures of miners.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:18:27):
I don't know if that's associated with the small copy.
I'm really fruscinated by that. I know nothing about that
and I haven't researched any of it. Tell me about
this sure.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
So twenty twelve I was doing long form projects for
various organizations, some corporates, working with the Daily Maverick, the
startup website that's maybe the only good journalism in South
Africa at the moment the last ten years consistently at least,
there was this mind strike happening in the platinum belt

(01:19:03):
and at the time I was doing, my wife and
I were doing a long form project for a mining
house with this fantastic guy called some Gezo Zebe who's
now in politics in South Africa started his own party.
I hope he gets it and he's great. And I said,
you know, you must have contacts because the journalists were

(01:19:24):
barred from going to the mine workers weren't allowing anyone
to come amongst the strikers, and it sounded really interesting,
and from what I heard of it, it sounded like
the nineties. There was fighting going on between strikeing different
striking faction, different mining unions and factions, and the police

(01:19:46):
were involved, and there's a bit of a mess. But
it sounded like the wars of the nineties. You know.
People were doing traditional medicine for protection. People were attacking
and killing different post using ideas, and people who wanted
to be in the strike ord different unions. And the
union that used to be so great, the National Union

(01:20:08):
of mind Workers, had become this puppet of the government
and of management, and people would now refer to them
as the National Union of Management accurately. But they were
huge and powerful, and there was a small startup union,
but I wasn't really aware of it. So I asked
song Getz. I said, can you get me in touch
with mind workers that I can get to them without,

(01:20:30):
you know, And while he was trying this or working
at it, I decided to go up this one afternoon.
And it was the afternoon that some of the mine
workers said, okay, journalists, you can talk to some of
the people who are willing to be spoken to the
leadership and some and if you were in anywhere near
the people who didn't want to be they would whistle
and yell at you. And women weren't allowed because of

(01:20:53):
some of the quasi traditional magic medicine people were using,
called intellect in Zulu but broadly called by everyone into lerzie.
It was amazing. There were great photographs, and then the
unions and were being brought the union leadership from the
two different unions were being brought in armored vehicles by

(01:21:15):
the police to discuss things with the miners. The cops
told all the journalists to clear out, and I thought,
fuck you, I'm not clearing out. So I just hung
and they came and I and our photographed these idiot
mine worker unions trying to talk through a hole in
the armored vehicle to these mine worker leadership. I mean,

(01:21:38):
they were never going to solve a problem. What I
didn't know is that they didn't want to solve the
problem anyway. I photographed until it was dark. I went
back to Johannesburg. I'd done interviews, I had a great
story and this being a website, I could happily write
five thousand words in a wooderi on and lots of photographs,
and the pictures were nice as a beautiful light digital

(01:22:01):
and no black and nhansye. And I told the journalists
who are working there for AP and Reuters and City
Press and all these people, I said, listen, just give
me a call tomorrow I'll be writing in it, and
just give me a call if you think it's going
to go down, because it did look very dubious. And

(01:22:21):
so during the day while I was working, I would
be in touch. And then Speary called me and he said,
spare Cole. He called me. He says, I think you
should get here. They're shooting. I said, shooting what? Tear guests, rubber,
no live being what? And then he put the phone down.
I'm going, oh my god, but it's too late. It
said hour and a half to get there, And I thought,

(01:22:43):
just who thought it was going to be a massacre? Anyway,
there was a massacre. Cops opened up with automatic weapons
on the mind workers, and of course all the journalists
speak to the cops as spokespeople, and they said no
cops opened up in softer being attacked by the miners,
and there was a history of violence by the miners

(01:23:05):
against them and by them, and that killed cops three
days before, two cops, so there was history. It was possible. Anyway.
I was up there before dawn the next day and
I got to the site of where the shooting was,
and the number of evidence markers had run out of

(01:23:25):
evidence markers, the little orange cones, and they were using
styrofoam coffee cups, white styrofoam coffee cups. It was just crazy.
I started doing it, and I was doing pictures, but
really I was more interested in the writing side, the
reporting side of it. And as it went on, the
mine workers wouldn't let you talk to anyone who was there.

(01:23:46):
You couldn't get to speak and all these meetings and
all these gatherings, and but what had happened is that
all the survivors of the shooting who had been close
had been arrested and charged with murder and being held
in communicado by the police. Two hundred and seventy six people.
Thirty four people had been shot dead. That's a lot

(01:24:08):
of people in a non war situation to be shot dead.
It was the first post democratic massacre in South Africa,
and it was remarkably similar to pre democratic massacres. So
I got really interested in trying to cover it and
find out. But I couldn't find anyone to talk to eyewitnesses.
And I was trying and trying and trying, and eventually

(01:24:29):
one of my colleagues at the Daily Maverick, in her
piece like about Paracraft seventeen or something, had this one
thing about these university researchers had found another site of killing.
I'm geting what, So I said, do you mind if
I contend it's finally because she didn't go out and
do reporting in the field. So I said, okay, And

(01:24:51):
then I contacted this university professor and he said, okay,
I'll put you in touch with my people who are
in the field, these two researchers, and I met up
with him the next morning and they took me to
a cite a kilometer essentially away from where all the
people meant have taken place. Acculdn't to the police press
releases and what the spokespeople were saying. And there at

(01:25:15):
the other side you could see all the spray painted
crime scene numbers, and you could see blood in many places.
But also these were these low broken copy as you
call it, a small broken hill, and it was really
where the people from the shantytown the shanty towns would
go to defecate because you could be hidden by various

(01:25:40):
rocks and clops. For privacy, it is far enough from
but here were all these sights, and everything was marked,
and there was pools of blood and soaked into this
and the earth is pretty red, but the deep red
of the blood, and it was like so I photographed,
and the research ears were Tappello, who would become my
close colleague in working with me for the next year,

(01:26:02):
did a map which I thought, good boy, real anthropologist.
It was clear that this was not self defense. This
was people being hunted behind where they were trying to
highly rocks. But I still didn't have witnesses, and kept trying,
kept trying, and eventually cops were lying through their teeth.

(01:26:23):
And the getting hold of the pathologists and private pathologists
that George Beaz's is, you know, wining into the details
for international augit. But I had enough from this private
pathologist that yes, people had been executed, even though he
wouldn't go on the record, but I had enough, and
so we told the cops were going to publish and

(01:26:46):
puere wrong. The whole publication would have died, right, My
reputation would been shattered. My editors we said no, We
thought we'd I bet you the better resource. People are
just waiting for some want to publish, and they're all published.
So we published. Everybody published, republished our piece, and nobody

(01:27:09):
else had something. Channel four was busy on something and
he had good stuff, and he go Gilmore. But just
a few days after that, the mind workers who'd been
arrested for murder were released and I went go meet
one of them, who can't REMEMBERHA got in touch with him.
But he was amazing. Any criminal lawyer will tell you

(01:27:31):
the worst witness is an eyewitness. There's nothing worse than
an eyewitness. But this guy, he agreed to be interviewed
on tape and the things he said stood up to
all forensic and evidentiary testing later. He was amazing. He
was a fantastic witness. And he was at the second

(01:27:52):
sight of the massacre and he was watching people getting executed.
He saw people come out of hiding with their hands
up and getting mowed down. There were two shots fired
at cops. Nothing they got one pistol from there, which
a shot hadn't even been fired from. They executed seventeen
people there. They had encircled them, They had nowhere to go.

(01:28:15):
They weren't trying to fight, they were trying to escape,
as one would. So that was the big story that
we broke and kept on breaking, and that led to
the book Murder at Small Copy. This place was called
small Copy, and that was a very important body of work,
and the book went on to win nonfiction awards, and

(01:28:37):
it was very important. It circled back to poor people
being murdered by the powers that be, even though the
powers that be were now the representatives of the majority
of the people. It was like, what the hell? And
there was a lot of peculiar stuff. Our current president,
sil Ramaposa was a shareholder in the mining company that

(01:29:00):
essentially wanted the cops to kill them to get people.
A lot of shit happened. Not one person, not one cop,
has been charged or arrested for that massacre, despite there
being an inquest and being found that all my reporting
was correct and finding out much more stuff, you know,

(01:29:23):
because they had the full access of a proper investigation
behind it. So I don't know. Makes one very disillusioned.

Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
I was going to ask you if there was some
conclusion to it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):
So the truth is out there, we know what the
truth is, but there's been no judicial consequences for the
people who did this and who ordered this, and those
who covered it up. No consequences.

Speaker 1 (01:29:51):
I asked Chut GPT or whatever it's called, to ask
you two questions, and it did a care.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
Which were those? Have you asked them yet? Nope?

Speaker 1 (01:30:06):
Go go, go go question impact of photography? How do
you believe powerful images can influence public perception and contribute
to social or political change.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
So I believe photography can does and has done. It
just needs a certain point in time where that particular
photograph of photographs can have that effect. I think the
most famous examples are from Vietnam, from the Tet offensive,

(01:30:42):
you know, from that Viet Kun general in the Eddie
Adams photograph. I think the Nikut photograph of the poor
little girl who'd been burnt by the napalm. I think
those were pictures that were instrumental in turning public the
public against the war in Vietnam, and that's the politicians
looking for a way out. So I think there was

(01:31:03):
an effect there, but it was it was kind of
like the crest of the wave of as tsunami. That
is the way history was already going in South Africa.
My pictures did not change the course of the hostile war,
and they were pretty horrific, you know, the Pulitza ones

(01:31:24):
were astonishingly graphic and violent and it would make anyone think, God,
we should stop this wall. It didn't. Kevin's picture had
a huge impact, yet Sudan is still at war. I
don't know. Pictures can have an effect. News reporting can
have an effect. You think about you said you're in

(01:31:46):
the Agaden, You think about the Tigrave famine and band
aid and all that. I mean, visuals played a huge
part in that. Can it do it entirely on its own,
no question.

Speaker 1 (01:32:01):
In the current media landscape where misinformation is prevalent, how
do you see the wall of fort journalism evolving and
what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for the industry.

Speaker 2 (01:32:15):
No, you're gonna have to join. My summer course is
one of the topics. Do you know. I knew you
were going to say that. So disinformation, misinformation and absolute
fabrication is our new world. So whereas previously us being

(01:32:37):
honest and not stage managing, and not putting on fake
captions and not editing in a peculiar way to misinterpret
the truth of what had happened. Those are the important
cut lines in ethical journalism. Nowadays, you've got all those
problems post production with easy digital manipulation and AI generated images.

(01:33:03):
So and I'm just talking about images. Yeah, I'm even
talking about the verbal disinformation, the representation of pictures coming
from an entirely different war at different time, being put
on social media and getting traction. This happens all the time.
But AI generated images.

Speaker 1 (01:33:23):
Yeah, did you see the thing with Gatti having wasn't
it Adobe? There might be the law, yeah, of the of.

Speaker 2 (01:33:33):
Kids I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:33:36):
But I put that, I put that out on Twitter,
and I thought which picture editor would use that?

Speaker 2 (01:33:44):
None? Would they? But but what if it went out
in social media? So let's say it goes out in
social media. Let's say somewhere buried in the caption it
does say it's AI and even says so in the
text that goes up social media. Very few people read
that stuff. They see the picture and an impression forms,

(01:34:07):
oh my god, that's terrible. And then later they discover,
oh no, it's AI. It's fake. So it discredits all
the work of the genuine journalists who are facing death
and dismemberment and the loss of their families, who continue
working in gas. Of these gars and photojournalists, their work

(01:34:28):
gets undermine because why would you believe their work if
the other stuff is AI. It's awful. It's an awful situation.
And what it means is that we've got to double down,
treble down on being so ethically correct and transparent. So

(01:34:50):
transparency is key, not just that we can defend it afterwards.
We've got to be transparent upfront with the production of
those images into the public space.

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
There's two things I want to briefly mention before we
wrap it up. I want to go back to something
and correct myself. When I said you were you were
paralyzed and scared. The word I meant to say was
abstractly scared, which at the time of reading it it
really stuck in my head. So I apologized for using paralyzed.

(01:35:23):
It was abstractly scared.

Speaker 2 (01:35:26):
What does that mean? Do you think I remember writing that?
I'm not sure what I mean by what I meant
by that. It's amazing. Honestly, I can't. I can't. I mean,
I I think I know what I meant, but I'm not.

Speaker 1 (01:35:39):
I'd have to re read the section deeply intense. I
just thought it was a beautiful way of saying it.
The other thing, we were talking about you, Peest earlier,
and we were looking at we were talking about you
visualizing a narrative for your book. Have you seen his
Troubles book collection?

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
Oh, I've seen it. I've got it. Have you?

Speaker 1 (01:36:00):
I haven't bought you, so you had to quit us
something wasn't it? Maybe four hundred dollars in something?

Speaker 2 (01:36:05):
It was? Luckily it was a lot cheaper Target. I
mean I was going to buy it was seven hundred,
and then it was half that price at Target, so
I ordered it immediately. And then I thought, that's quite
a lot of money for a book. But you know,
support Shelln's going to be. And I'd seen in nineteen
ninety one, I'd seen his Irish work in his loft.

(01:36:28):
He had this big loft in New York and he
had some guy printing for him in the darkroom, his
own docroom, and he had them spread out on the
floor as he was making a book and this has
taken how many years? Thirty years instead to come out
as a book. So I've been waiting for that Irish
work for a very long time, and I thought I
knew what was going to look like and I was

(01:36:49):
absolutely wrong. So anyway, he's like, you l Greg, he's
you know, did not really stop doing stuff? Yeah? I
mean he's Yeah. I wish I was more like shield
you don't you are who you are charming than I am.

(01:37:11):
So this box arrived on my doorstep and I'm going,
what the hell is this? Did somebody order a hearse?
The box was massive and weighs a ton. It's like
what it is a beautiful object and it is unbelievable.

(01:37:31):
It's two volumes plus an accompanying text volume. It's the
most remarkable book like object.

Speaker 1 (01:37:39):
And regardless of black and white versus color, and your
skills as a writer, as a filmmaker and your history
in visuals, you can do this.

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
Man. You've got to do it all right, Zach. I'm
gonna readdress it. You've got to be a piece for
the mate. I think I've just got to let go
of a lot of things and just choose images based
on images.

Speaker 1 (01:38:04):
And listen how excited you are about talking about Jesus' body.
You've work and the way to present it and other people's.
You need to be excited for yourself about that, mate.
You have a lot to give.

Speaker 2 (01:38:15):
Enough. History needs to.

Speaker 1 (01:38:17):
Come out and you've done that with the Bank Bank
Club book and you've got to do it again. But
you've got to add all your journey as a photographer.
And that's just my opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:38:26):
Many publishers listening out there and they want to talk.
I'd love to have that chat. Greg. You are for me.

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
I've always admired us a photographer, just for you your
bollocks basically as well as your amazing pictures. But you
know what, you're such a humble guy and I really
respect that. Thank you for taking the time, mate, really good.

Speaker 2 (01:38:48):
Thanks Jack. Thank you for really intelligent chat and I
really enjoy Thank you for empathetic questions and responses and
that's been most enjoyable.

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
Thank you all the best, mate, U

All Episodes

#22 Greg Marinovich - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Fudd Around And Find Out

Crime Junkie

The Breakfast Club

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#22 Greg Marinovich - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST