#25 Christopher Morris - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST - WTF-Stop Podcast - Photo Talk

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Zach Waters and welcome to another episode of
What the g F Stop Photo Talk Right Chatty Photography
is about their life and connection to the world through photography.

(00:32):
Christopher Morris is an acclaimed American journalist internationally recognized for
his fearless documentation of war, politics, and power, as well
as for his often surreal style fashion photography. A founding
member of seven fort Or Agency, Christopher has covered more
than eighteen on conflicts around the world, often working independently
and a great personal risk on the front line in

(00:53):
places like Manila, Panama, Croatia, Chatnia, Somalia, Iraq, and Yemen
to name but a few. Christopher has held shape the
visual language of war reporting throughout the nineties and thirty
two thousands, and I chop We went in quite deep
with the psychology and trauma of working at a conflicting crisis.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
On I made it into my little hut where I
was going to sleep, this little like mud building room.
I had a room in there with Enrico, and I
made my side a little stove, and I cooked myself
some instant oatmeal. And in the morning there was a
crowd of people that sat outside my hut. When I
say a crowd. I'm know ten or fifteen in the morning.

(01:30):
When I got up to go out, they were dead.
They were dead. So here I'm waiting for the wheelbarrow
guy with the unice of Wheelberg. I just start come
up and collect the dead in the pile. Some of
them are still alive, but they're dead. Their eyes are open,
they're covered in flies. And then when I remember one point,

(01:52):
I had this girl. She wouldn't let go all my pants.
She would not let go on my pants. I couldn't walk.
She had like a death grip on my pants. And
I had peeler fingers are my pants and walk away.

(02:13):
And I never ever, ever wanted to do that again.
And I told Time I would never photograph famine ever again.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
His commitment to bearing witness, even under the most horroring
conditions has earned him numerous awards, including the Robert Kappa
Gold Medal and multiple World Press of Foot Awards. In
a dramatic shift from frontline conflict to frontline of American politics,
in the early two thousand, he became Time Magazine's official
White House photographer during the George W. Bush administration. This

(02:43):
phase of his career led to the publication of My
America in two thousand and six as seeing the ironic
and at times surreal portrait of American political theater, military spectacle,
and cultural contradiction. He followed this with Americans in twenty twelve,
which is a continuation of his exploit into the symbols, rituals,
and the contradictions of American patriotsm on identity.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
I would listen to a lot of music too, and
the times you're covering certain things. I wear headphoneses like
I put myself into a film. You know, I became
fascinated with this whole thing of you're trying to trap
a viewer. Okay, you want them to stop on your image,
you have to trap them, so you have to trap
them with composition. If you leave, you have to build

(03:28):
some kind of circular movement through the frame that's not
going to allow the viewer to want to leave. Even
if it's a picture of a coffee cup next to
on a table, you want you can trap the viewer
with such. You look at Eggleston, you look at the simplicity.
You know, Larry Sultany has a picture of his of

(03:50):
his parents as a picture of his mother's hand on
the wallpaper. The picture makes me cry. I can stare
at it and cry and it's just a picture of
a hand and on a wall paper. I really love
that in photography. I love that where you can you
want you in in to try to get a message across,

(04:10):
but my message is not necessarily your message. You want
people to kind of feel and go through the image.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Beyond the conflict and political zones. Christopher has built a
parallel career in fashion and as a filmmaker and director,
working with top designers like Carl Lagerfield and publications like
Vogue magazine. Christopher's ability to cross boundaries from conflict zones
the Oval office to avant garde fashion spirits makes him
one of the most versatile and provocative photographers of his generation.

(04:36):
Both his still unmoving image work continues to challenge viewers
to question the nature of truth, image making and the
spectacle of modern life. I followed Christopher's work since the
nineteen nineties, when he had already established a formidable reputation
as a conflict photographer, had earned him world press awards
and significant recognition, and later during his time photographing in

(04:56):
the White House, that became clear that he was operating
at the very high of his profession, a photographer not
only documentary history, but helping to define how it would
be remembered from a distance. I admired his work deeply,
though I never quite knew how to approach him or
whether he would be open to any conversation. He gave
me the impression of someone highly self contained and not
easily accessible to those outside his immediate circle. However, as

(05:19):
I came to know him, but I discovered someone who
was not only exceptionally intelligent and perceptive, but also remarkably
kind and sincerely committed to the subjects and stories he
has spent his career capturing.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Empathy is weakness. Empathy is weakness. We're taught that empathy
is wrong. That's the problem.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
That to me is the.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Key raise your children with utmost of empathy of others.
I have empathy for trump people. I have empathy for
people I don't like. I have empathy for the killer
that was next to me, that took somebody's life. Did
how he ended up with such hatred that he could
kill his neighbor. You know, there's such hatred of others.

(06:04):
Don't like fat people, don't like trans people, who cares,
Who cares? Let everybody be him alone.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
You know, we covered a wide range of topics in
our conversation, from his ongoing efforts to archive his extensive
body you work with the help.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Of AI, Who I am and what I was doing?
Because it's interesting. I've been working with AI where it
analyzes my work, originally analyzes the work without any information,
no contextual information of what it's looking at, just to
challenge it to see if it can pinpoint. And it's
quite fascinating. And it's also been directed to ask me

(06:47):
questions about my work. And these questions that AI asked
me are quite challenging, and at one point I had
to stop because I realized the answers I will give.
I don't want to be training something on the craft
of photojournalism because my methods just because they're my methods

(07:07):
doesn't make them sound methods, sound methods that I want
to be training people on. The interesting thing is the
craft of photojournalism. To do it on the level that
I was doing it at and still attempt to do
it at, is you're trying to get into places that

(07:27):
nobody wants you, Nobody wants to be photographed, especially war criminals.
It's why like in Gaza, now there's no they don't
want any outside observers. The governments and societies take great
pains in hiding their dirty deeds. So as a photographer

(07:50):
to penetrate that, it's kind of like you have to
put yourself, kind of like in a Graham Green novel
or an Ian Fleming novel.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
On his working practices as a fault journalist.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
And what they want was a very formulated thing. You
go into a country, an example, my first country. It's
the method for photojournalism. You can apply it even today.
This is a good learning tool. It's what Susan Miidzellis
did in Nicaragua. It's a formula where you pick a
region in the world that has some kind of page.

(08:25):
And for me, it's easy to pag to America because
we have over one hundred territories around the earth. America
is everywhere, so all you have to do is pick
a region. I picked the Philippines. It has a dictator
martial law, it has US military presence, and it has

(08:46):
a communists and an Islamic insurgency all on an island.
So imbed yourself early document that place for two or
three years. And when I say document it, you document it.
You pick the first research. You pick the anniversaries in
that country when as their independence state, What are their
military anniversaries? What are that? Because that's when you can

(09:10):
go up and you go in and you go to
these events and you can photograph the heads of states,
the generals, all the top leaders in the society. Go
to these events, military parades. You arm yourself with a
three hundred two A with a teleconverter, so you can
do headshots of Noriego or Putin or whatever. It's the

(09:33):
kind of pictures that Sogato's not doing. It's the kind
of pictures knocked ways not doing this, the kind of
pictures Jill Perez is not going. These are pictures that
you need to It's what the magazines want. They want headshots.
So you apply this formula to a country, and you
do it from the top down. You do it to

(09:55):
all the way down to the poorest of the poor,
the people they're picking in the garbage dumps. You go
to the polo clubs, you document the polo clubs, You
meet people.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
As he revisits his archive, he continues to grapple with
the psychological impact of those experiences, including the effects of
post form my extress disorder PTSD. I was so happy
that you took the time out to talk to me
before he headed off in his next venture. So the
day came and I asked him what he was up to.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
I'm still even though of my age and how long
I've been in the industry, I'm still a working photographer.
I think people that do this profession or this craft,
there's never been into my mindset of the term retirement.
There is no retirement. It's just a point you go
until your body physically it can no longer continue to work. So, yeah,

(10:48):
where do I begin. I've had a long forty year career.
I can tell you what I'm working on now, and
it basically was kick started when COVID came. So what
is that now? Like four years ago, almost four years ago.
Prior to that, I was always working. I'm based here
in Florida. I had left New York in the nineties

(11:10):
ninety four to be exact, because it just became untenable
the cost. I was only there maybe a month a year.
I spent around eleven months a year traveling, so I
had to get out. Was basically working in Europe. Long
story short, I ended up in Florida, where I grew up,
in a very odd place, Tampa, Florida, place I never
wanted to be, ended up raising a family here and

(11:32):
stuff from while I work. But since COVID, it forced
me into this kind of like an isolation of where
I was. And I never was happy with here. I
never liked living here. Built my own little private Idaho
of a house and a place to you maintain my
archives and stuff and have my family and raise my kids.

(11:54):
But it's a place I don't like. I don't like Florida,
and I actually don't like this country, especially over the
last ten fifteen years of Veneer, of who we are
as a nation and as the people has been truly exposed,
and I don't like it. And being in Florida, I'm
in the epicenter of it, in that new political environment

(12:17):
in our country. So, long story short, COVID came and
I was just preparing. I just got back from several
overseas trips. I was in Bangladesh and was in the pall.
Came back right when COVID started and I had already
started the Seven Foundation. Was very interested in my Yugoslav archives,

(12:40):
and with Gary Knightight, we had discussed they had got
these scanner setups with the new Fuji thing, and they
had started. They sent me this whole scanner set up,
this close to twenty thousand dollars kit to start scanning
my Yugoslav And at first I have to understand how

(13:00):
my archive is kept and managed. It was stuff that
I never looked at. People have to understand I had spent,
especially in the film days, I would go from story
to story, and when I would come back to New
York and I'd come back to time and to Blackstar,
they would have what would they they had edited out
of the material, my selects or whatever, and I would

(13:24):
only kind of look at the selects and I would
move on. And basically a long story short. Over the
long career, I never went back and looked at my material.
All I knew is what were selected for me by editors,
usually two editors, one at time when at Blackstar, And
that was real traumatic for me to look at my work.

(13:45):
I didn't realize, you know, I've had all this material
in my home for all these years and I never
looked at any of it. I never the only work
I would look at was my chechen work. The chechen workuse.
It was easy to look at because it was on
contact sheets, it wasn't in work prints. At time with Preston,

(14:05):
it was work that I was the most proud of
in my career. I can go into later. Why that
is because I've covered so many different conflicts, So there
was a large I knew what my work was, but
I didn't. I kind of blocked it out into my
mind because so much of it of my word dealt
with you know, tragedy, tragedy of societies and mankind dealing

(14:30):
with war. So here's this whole COVID thing. I had
some people that I knew that it passed away that
were my age, that people that end up in hospitals
and don't get to see their kids or whatever. And
I realized, whoa shit, you know, I could die. I
could die tomorrow. We all have that, you just I

(14:53):
understood the fear of that initial COVID. But then I realized,
oh shit, I can't die. What about all these boxes,
what about all this material? It's just going to end
up in a garbage stump. So I set about trying
to Since that time of organizing my archives, turning down

(15:16):
a lot of work, not covering stuff that's happening, because
at one point I realized, I can keep taking pictures.
I can keep taking pictures, but at one point, what's
the purpose. What's the purpose is if all this work
is just going to end up in a landfill or
something or just lost the time. So I've been trying

(15:37):
to balance in these last years, organizing these archives to
get everything scanned. And I'll go into a little bit
in that in the second of what I'm doing and
who I'm working with on that. But then I still
had to work because I can't just not work. I
have to have income, you know. I've take certain assignments

(15:58):
still continue to work. So that's kind of what I'm doing.
And the thing is the project i'm doing now. I'm
not working for editorial clients. I mean, some of them,
I have a grant. The problem is with the work
now is projects you work, you can't post anything. You
can't if you're on long projects. The understanding is I

(16:20):
can't put any of that work to show my current work.
Because you can't, no one will know I'm doing a
long thing on the environment. I have a grant here
in Florida on the you know, sea level rise and
the storms. And I can't really share any of it
because then you can't. It destroys the value of that
of that that product that you're trying to produce and

(16:43):
eventually market. You'll never be able to sell it if
you're already posting it, you know so. And then also
doing a lot of I've worked on some documentaries, some
film work. I did a wonder of work on a
wonderful thing on Palm Beach County where Trump is in
mar Lago, and the whole everything from the billionaires down
to the street crime and the immigrants of the county.

(17:04):
It's a mind boggling county when you understand it's the billionaires,
and then you just go over even from where Trump
and Jeffrey Epstein lived, you just go over to Belglade
across that same county, and it's one of the poorest
counties in the nation. But I worked on it as

(17:26):
a photographer and as a cameraman, and I shot all
and I was able to shoot it in my way.
But the problem is I don't own it. I can't
show it, and I find it very frustrating to work
on even work on documentaries or stuff where you're hired
as a camera operator. I find that extremely frustrating because
you give them all your creativity and you get all

(17:48):
the things that you know and learn and how to
get access and all that, and you can't do anything
with it. And so I try to avoid. I prefer
working more on a personal project. That's kind of where
I am right now. I'm deep what's kind of controversial.
I've several years ago, I was contacted by Kia Pollack.

(18:11):
Kia Pollack was a former director of photography at Time
Magazine when I was there, and she started there I
think two thousand and nine twenty ten, and then eventually
she left and she was the director of photography of
Vanity Affair, and then eventually became the main editor at
Vanity Fair and then she left and now she's been

(18:33):
doing stuff with Academia, and she contacted me about my
archive because she had heard I was trying to do something.
And what I've done, Zach is I'm trying to make
something that's a little more than just a traditional archive.
I scanned when I started on my Yugoslavia, but I
stopped when Russia invaded Ukraine because I realized I had

(18:55):
such a Russian archive. Basically, starting in nineteen ninety when
it was still the Soviet Union and working from Time,
I was able to shoot a lot of film. I
didn't have. The thing is about my archives. It was
completely funded and supported by Time magazine, so I hadn't

(19:15):
I didn't have the restrictions that other photographers that had
when I worked, they would show up with they were
lucky if they could have forty rolls of film fifty
rolls of film. When you work for an organization like Time,
it's basically unlimited, so you had the freedom to produce

(19:37):
a lot of material. Not that I overshot. A good
day in the analog time, if you shot ten rolls
on a day on an event, that's a good day,
But if you think about it in digital term, that's
only three hundred and sixty pictures. What I've done is
I've been focusing back with Kiara on this thing. I'm
trying to create what's called a living archive. So I

(19:58):
had scanned initially close to ten thousand images from all
my I've scanned all my chechen works, all the black
and white nags, every frame, and then I went through
and I started scanning all my prushure work, and I
stopped at around one thousand transparencies and then I ran

(20:19):
into here is Here's the kind of like major hiccup
when you're dealing with large archives. Is the keywording and captioning.
I couldn't wrap my head around how I was going
to do this, but low and behold. Around two years ago,
with the advent of AI, everything has changed and I'm
able to now utilize this vision of how I want

(20:40):
to do my archive because what had happened with Gary
when he first asked me to scan my material is
when I went and opened up these folders. Now people
have to understand I've had these folders and filing cabinets
that are labeled. I had never looked at these folders.
I had never gone into my filing cabinets until just recently,

(21:03):
until just a few years ago. And it's like opening
up the brain because you have to understand every one
of these images. I was there. I was standing on
this square meter patch of earth in some society trying
to capture supposed reality with some chemical process of film.

(21:26):
And now that film I'm looking at on a light table,
and it opens up the mind it's like a door
to the mine. And I realized I need to record
myself because if I would wait and say I'll write
a caption later, I realize now with the way we
can have with cameras and audio, that I need to

(21:49):
be telling the viewer what they're looking at, why I
took the picture, what film I used, why I shot black,
and why that what gave me permission to stand over?
I mean, this is interesting. So with Cara, we started
working on all this stuff. We've been working with different

(22:11):
institutions from Harvard and different science labs Stanford and different things.
She's bringing in different people to try to formulate what
we can do with AI and trying to help create
these living archives. And she's been using me as a
test case for the last couple of years. But for me,

(22:33):
it's this way of creating a living archive. And also
what I discovered is we have what something it's called
rejects the return. So if I ship my film, let's
say I'm in Yugoslavia or Sarajevo and I shipped my
film my forty roles to New York, I'm never going

(22:56):
to see that film maybe three four months later. But
what happens is an editor at time will look through
that film and he'll take out what he needs. So
if one roll of thirty six exposures, he maybe only
takes out five pictures. It also depends on what the
story is for that week. What I discovered is in

(23:20):
these returns, these unseens, And this wasn't discovered until this
last hurricane last year, a year ago, when I had
two hurricanes that were going to basically potential of taking
everything away with it because I lived near the sea,
which is not good for hard drives or material. What

(23:41):
I discovered in opening up these boxes they weren't rejects,
they aren't out takes. They're a complete take of these transparency,
beautifully exposed Fuji chrome professional slide film. It's like movie film.
And when you start sequencing and feeding it through, I

(24:05):
realized everything has to be scanned. If I had started
this process of editing during COVID, of these rejects, these outtakes,
eighty percent of it would have went into the trash can,
because that's the way you edit. You just don't have
the means to store an archive all that. So right

(24:25):
now I'm heavy in the Yugoslavia I've consolidated all the
time black Star returns and eliminated all the dupes. Duplicates
are when you had the original, black Star would make
a story and send it to their foreign clients, foreign agents,
be it like in London maybe Network, and you had

(24:46):
Grazzianiri in Italy. You basically Blackstar had eighteen subagents. So
of a story they might make, let's say a twenty
image story, they'll make eighteen. Said to that, So I
had to purge my filing cabinets now just on Yugoslavia,
of just all the duplicates, and just narrow it down

(25:08):
to originals've what I've uncovers. I have around thirty thousand
original on file chromes from Yugoslavia. Now this is without
I call them AOU's archived original unseen. This is all
the stuff I'm having to sleeve. And what's interesting is

(25:29):
that timestamps, because now AI can read it, it can
see the image, you can see this line mount, it
can write the caption. I'm in this process of recording
my voice and building this living archive, so it's quite fascinating.
It's right there. And what I've discovered though, is that

(25:49):
there is a lot of trauma involved with it, and
that's what Kira has involved, is the especially when you're
dealing with the type of work we're doing. We're dealing
with conflict photography, which is actually going to bring me
to a shift in the conversation of what I've also
discovered in looking at my pictures and having me to
analyze who I am and what I was doing, because

(26:12):
it's interesting. I've been working with AI where it analyzes
my work, originally analyzes the work without any information, no
contextual information at what it's looking at, just to challenge
it to see if it can pinpoint. It's quite fascinating,
and it's also been directed to ask me questions about

(26:34):
my work. And these questions that AI asked me are
quite challenging, and at one point I had to stop
because I realized the answers I will give. I don't
want to be training something on the craft of photojournalism
because my methods just because there are my methods doesn't
make them sound methods, sound methods that I want to

(26:58):
be training people on. The interesting thing is the craft
of photojournalism. To do it on the level that I
was doing it at and still attempt to do it
at is you're trying to get into places that nobody
wants you. Nobody wants to be photographed, especially war criminals.

(27:20):
It's why like in Gaza now there's no they don't
want any outside observers. Governments and societies take great pains
in hiding their dirty deeds. So as a photographer to
penetrate that, it's kind of like you have to put

(27:41):
yourself kind of like in a Graham Green novel or
an Ian Fleming novel, and everything is off tables because
for me, I'm dealing with governments and societies that are
doing criminal things, criminal things that involve rape and murder
and genocide. So for me, there are no rules and

(28:02):
there are all no laws and sense of how I'm
going to penetrate to try to document, So I can't
be explaining these methods and things I do to AI.
You see my point, It's not like something I want
to be discussing and having it read through. I mean,
even one of the questions I was asked it was

(28:24):
a picture of in uh serio, some dead children and
the more one of my most traumatic experiences, and one
of the questions that asked me was who gave me
permission it's a powerful question. Who what gave me the

(28:44):
right to stand over these children and photograph them? And
so yeah, interesting, there's there's just there's a lot, a
lot to discuss, a lot to talk about.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
Somethink you said matter of fact there about COVID and
the realization that you could die because of your mortality. Yeah,
but did you ever think that in the decades you
have been a wolf photographer?

Speaker 2 (29:16):
It was more than a decade, it was more than No,
I know. Yeah, but and that's kind of where I
would like to I need to get back to what
my generation was and who I am. And this is
something I've never really talked to.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Were you never injured or anything? Either.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
I've been injured, but I've never been I've never been
impacted directly by where it's penetrated bullets penetrated me or
anything like that. But I've been I've been banged up
and scarred, yes, but never I've been very fortunate. I'd
like to kind of get off of that, which will
lead me to what made me are created in me

(29:56):
this desire to want to document conflict. It's something that
actually started quite quite young on my oarth. I'll just
give a background. So my generation, they have to understand
I was born in nineteen fifty eight, so it's a
long time ago. But to make me feel better, it's
the same year Madonna and Michael Jackson were born. It

(30:16):
was kind of an amazing generation. We came out of
the well. We grew up in the sixties. You have
to understand. Think, if you're born in fifty eight, by
the time you're sixty three when Kennedy skilled, you know,
you're just going into kindergarten first grade. You got the Beatles,
everything music, and if you look at everything that was
happening in the world in sixty eight. But I was

(30:38):
growing up in Tampa, Florida. I was going to a
Catholic Irish school. My mother, who was Italian and heritage,
had married my father, ran away with my father when
she was sixteen. My father was in the Air Force
initially for two years. She went out of high school

(31:01):
and I think fifty six and in fifty eight he
got out of the My parents got married I think
in like fifty seven, fifty six or something like that.
She was like seventeen or something. Two years in the
Air Force, he was immediately hired by the Raytheon Corporation.
People don't know what the Raytheon Corporation. It's one of
America's biggest weapons providers. My father immediately was assigned to

(31:27):
their air to air weapons systems because they realized that
they had a new fighter plane coming out called the
F four Phantom that was going to be deployed on
an aircraft carrier, which he deployed on the Kiddihawk. So,
long story short, my father ended up getting deployed to

(31:48):
Asia or in Vietnam, originally to Japan, and he would
go into Thailand and the Philippines because the war was
starting out We're talking early sixties, and he was originally
working with naval aviators that were doing bombing runs onto
Vietnam and he worked directly with the pilots. So in

(32:09):
nineteen sixty nine, as I got older, my father wanted
to move us to Japan and my mother refused to move,
and for other reasons they got divorced. But I ended
up going to the Philippines at nine ten years old
and nineteen sixty nine, I first went to the Philippines.
Flew unaccompanied with my sister from Florida via Chicago overnight

(32:34):
in Tokyo. Now we're talking eleven and ten year old
kids flying unaccompanied the Philippines. But whatever, we're all try
to make this how this is all relevant. But you
have to understand this is at the height of the
Vietnam War and my father is involved with the pilot. Now,
the pilots, the Americans weren't winning this. The North vietnamme

(33:00):
had these MiGs and they were and they were destroying
this phantom aircraft. The phantom aircraft didn't even have a
gun on it. It only had missiles. And the missiles
were my father's missiles, the sparrows and the sidewinders, And
on today's dollars, these missiles were I haven't done the

(33:22):
math or gone and done inflation, were probably upwards of
two hundred thousand dollars in missile each missile. But the
success rate and you can go out that it's all
been declassified, of these missiles was only five percent. Now
you think about that, you're going to shoot a hundred
of these missiles and only five of them are going

(33:42):
to work in terms of leaving the plane. So there
was a lot of pressure on my father to figure
out what was going on with these things, and I
understand that now because a lot of stuff has been declassified.
I understand the pressures that my father was under. My father.
What I also when I live over there, what I

(34:03):
discovered was and I didn't understand that in my youth.
I didn't start to realize it until I was nineteen
and after high school and I went back there. But
when I was there, I went to Clark Airbase to
a DoD school is eighth grade to live there for
a year. And it was the first time I had

(34:25):
been pulled out out of a private school into a
public military school on the military base. There were black kids,
there were Asian kids, there were Jewish kids. I had
none of that before, so it kind of like opened
my eyes. And what really happened was after school, my
father lived off base in this huge compound, very colonialist existence.

(34:48):
He had a rank of like a colonel, so we
had all the officer clubs you have that maids, the
whole servitude of society. What was happening was when I
was off of school, I had no chaperone. I would
take the bus, get all go out the main gate,
and I would get in what's called a little It's
called a tricycle. It's a motorcycle with a side cabin.

(35:09):
I would go home. But you have to understand, if
you think of Vietnam Saigone in the seventies and the sixties,
what is happening on outside of a military base. It
is a den of criminality, It's a den of pedophilia
and prostitution. Everywhere around three hundred and sixty degrees outside
of any military installation was prostitution. If it's been documented

(35:35):
in films. But I grew up around that, and when
I was after school, I became friends with the tricycle drivers,
these eighteen nineteen year old things, and they had a
value in me. Because the value in me was the
commodities that I could buy on base and then my
father could buy. So I used to steal packs of

(35:57):
cigarettes and I would sell a pack of cigarettes. Now
this is nineteen seventy two, nineteen in the Philippines, seventy
three for ten dollars one pack. Now think about that.
That's a lot of money, because because off base cigarettes
were counterfeit, they weren't real. The Marlborough my father had

(36:18):
real and it had the tax stamps, so my father
would buy them by the cases. Because you go to
the BX and he would store them, so I would
steal and with that I would hire, you know. And basically,
but long story short is I discovered a people that

(36:39):
were being shipped on by a society that used them
as basically slaves and treated them as slaves. The bid.
I remember my you know, the bit about you don't
want to spoil the economy, meaning you don't want to
pay them too much because you'll spoil the economy. Whenever

(37:01):
my father would catch me giving somebody money, he said
that it doesn't help because you're ruining the economy. A
very kind of colonialist upbringing. And what I was exposed
to was in the newspaper. The daily newspaper was arriving
pictures from Vietnam. Now these are the stars and strife

(37:25):
was a military newspaper came in every day. But in there,
every morning I would see pictures from Vietnam. And at
night my father would have pilots that have just come
from Vietnam. I'm talking majors, colonels, captains, lieutenants, and they

(37:45):
would talk about their friends. He knew twenty thirty POWs
and I was even there when POWs were released and
my father knew a lot of them. But that's also
when I first discovered a photographer. Was during when the
Pewodo was released. They came to Clark Airbase and my

(38:06):
father had access to the pilots and there were all
these press photographers, you know, the David Burnett tiles and
the five cameras and all that, and it clicked to
me then as a child, those of the guys that
take the pictures that I've been looking in the paper,
and prior to that, I always thought it was soldiers

(38:26):
that took the pictures, which a lot of them were,
because they were just the stars and striped. It was
mainly UPI or it'd be an army photograph. But there
was one specific photo that profoundly affected my childhood and
my fascination as I saw a photograph from Vietnam, and
it had like three or four American soldiers standing in

(38:51):
this kind of like muddy field, almost like on the
side of a river, surrounded by another ten or fifteen
South Vietnamese soldiers. But this group did not look like
a normal group of people. They looked wild. The American
soldiers their bandanas, their weapons, their faces, and at their

(39:12):
feet were heads there were heads at their feet and
behind them was like a pile of bodies. And I
stood there. I looked at that and realized, I'm like eleven,
twelve years old. It's like, whoa, whoa, what is that?

(39:33):
What is that? What is that? So later in life,
and also it's something very interesting at the time. A
movie was being made at the time while I was there,
and it was called Apocalypse Now by Francis Vot Coppola,
and it was being made very nearby where we lived,
and my father, my father and his friends were always

(39:55):
talking about it, this leftist anti war movie that was
going to be coming out. You have to understand Jane
Fonda and all those people. They came and protested. I
was surrounded by these hawks, these you know, defending the
world from communism, you know, listening to them top But
then I was being exposed to the people, the people,

(40:19):
you know, and it was just formulating my eyes so
growing up. And then the film came out and I
saw Apocalypse Now in New York City. I think it
came out in seventy nine. I was I saw it
in New York City at the Zigfield. My father hated it,
but I was kind of like I was mesmerized. And

(40:40):
I became mesmerized about that scene with Dennis Hopper and Heads.
And I went back to the Philippines in nineteen eighty
one to go visit my father. My father was going
to get remarried, and I was already like interning a
black star and I was going to start working. It
just so happened to be playing in the Philippines and

(41:03):
I went and I watched that thing like fifteen times,
twenty times. But about the.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Dialogue, was it the romanticism of it?

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no no, it was
a romanticism. It's like, how do you put yourself as
a photographer next to society, killers, to psychopaths and come
out of that?

Speaker 1 (41:27):
How do you do that?

Speaker 2 (41:29):
How do you do that? That was the question. That's heavy,
that's heavy. So in my mind it was this kind
of like that Joseph Conrad, that Heart of Darkness. And
you listen to the dialogue, just you can pull up
the dialogue of the Marlon Brando Colonel Curtis and he
talks about the snail, you know, where you go, where

(41:53):
man goes, where he's walking on the razor edge, you know,
and what leads me now to what I've discovered was
I found it? And I found it on November eighteenth
and ninety one in Boukovar, I found that. Man, you know,

(42:17):
I stood next to executioners, you know, and then I
wanted off. Now I have to understand I spent the
eighties grooming myself for this, and ironically I can't tell

(42:40):
as a kid, I want to be a war photographer.
My pilot, my father wanted me to go to the
Air Force Academy. They were trying to get me into
calculus and algebra and science, and I was dyslexic. I
wanted In high school, I became a yearbook photographer and editor.
I discovered the freedom that journalism gave me. I saw
that on the runway when the POWs came, the photographers

(43:03):
could go there, they're on the roof, they're over there.
It gave them an excuse. The camera gave them an excuse.
So in high school I pushedtatus like, oh my god,
Oh my god. And then I didn't want to go
I want to go to an art school. I ended
up going to the Art Institute of Fort lauder Deal.
It's like a party school in Fort Lauderdale, A one
A on the beach, and but I learned. I learned

(43:27):
they I had to, you know, you had to learn
everything from architectural, food, still live journalism. And they had
a thing with the Miami Herald. I had an internship program.
And the photographer ahead of me, the class ahead of
me and the internship was Carol Goosey. I don't know
if you know who Carol Goosey is. She's a Washington
Post photographer, probably the best photographer in newspaper photography that existed,

(43:53):
you know, from my generation. And from there, I did
that internship at the Miami Herald. And then I heard
that they had this art institute. They had I don't
know ten fifteen of these four profit schools across the country.
They had a thing with a school in New York
called ICP, the International Center Photography. They had a scholarship program.

(44:17):
And then my editors at the Miami Herald said you
should send your work up there, and I sent my
work up there and I ended up getting a scholarship
to New York to ICP. And you have to understand
it was Corneil Kappa. The school was only I don't know,
three or four years old. It was up on ninety
fourth Street. But up there, that's where I was exposed

(44:38):
to Kappa. I was exposed to Don mccollin, David Douglas Duncan,
and I lived at the teachers I had and all
that an interesting thing, and then I ended up getting
I needed a job. I had no money. I was poor,
you know, I had no money. I wasn't getting any
support from my family in the essence of rent or

(45:01):
any of that. So I got a job and I
ended up getting a job at Blackstar filing slides. But
they fired me after a year because I was too slow,
but they kept me on. But I learned so much
I was dealing. There was a man Howard Chapnick. He
was like established from the sixties, you know of photojournalism

(45:22):
in America. You know. It was Howard Ben's brother. Well,
one day was the cousins. Ben took over. They were cousins,
but Howard Chapnick was the real Ben. Ben didn't like
the resources that photojournalism took away. He was more into
the corporate. Yeah, it was interesting. So but then my

(45:45):
the education I got at ICP was weird. I was
in this weird program and there were only two of us.
There were only like ten or twelve of us in
the class, and only two of us were into like
documentary photojournalism. The rest were like wives of wealthy people
in New York and stuff that could afford the class.
And there one woman for a year, she took pictures

(46:09):
of her leg in the bathtub, you know, that's all
you look prints every every every week you would see
prints of her legs in the bathtub, sometimes with blood,
you know, shaving or whatever. And another woman photographed just
body parts of horses. So I wasn't getting so long
story short. I go to the Philippines in eighty one
and I you know, I'm gonna I'm going to try

(46:30):
to document So I went into these these bordello's outside
the base and I was going to shoot black and
white infrared film with an infrared stroke because I had
learned that at ICP about shooting infrared, so you can
shoot in total darkness, you make a you create an
infrared stroke. So I did this thing on these gis,

(46:53):
these military and these sex places, you know, getting blow jobs,
all kinds of stuff, and I shot it in a
kind of like a Mark cohenway. Now it was like,
I did a lot of chopping of heads. I didn't
want to show the girls. I wanted to show the men,
so I cropped a lot of the heads off. There's
a lot of weird cropping, so whatever. So when I

(47:14):
got back to ICP, it was the first time ever
they would talk about my photograph. Originally I was doing
stuff on the subway and the South Bronx, not very dangerous.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
So were your first big essay?

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Was it? Well? Yeah, it was because I was a
student and I wanted to become a war photographer. I
couldn't tell anybody I wanted to be worktar but I
realized I had to understand fear. How do you get
over fear? So the subway was the most dangerous place
in New York, and I used to go out at night.
I would ride up into the Bronx at night on

(47:45):
the Number six train. It's extremely dangerous. I wanted to
I wanted to challenge myself. I needed to find this
little skinny white kid going up to the South Bronx.
So that's what started at ICP, But they weren't really
that interested in the pictures. My teacher's a guy named
Mets Gary Metzer. I think that's his first name. He

(48:09):
took me on to Helen Levitt her work because I
was photographing children in the South bronx and stuff. But
they would talk around fifteen minutes about my pictures and
then leave, and then they would spend two hours on
the legs in the bathtub. So I was very proud
of what I did in the Philippines. I printed it
in the dark room. I went back to Blackstar and

(48:30):
went to see Howard. He brought me in the conference room.
He said, welcome back. How did it go? Show me
what you did? Was standing next to him in the
conference room on this light table where he would look
at photographers work, and he slowly he went through the
pictures and he looked at me, and I could see
he wasn't happy. And he pulled the trash bin, the

(48:52):
waistbind from under the light table and he took the
prints around fifteen of them, and he put him in
the waistbin. Oh yeah, in front of me, and he
said do you think that's good photography? And I was speechless,
and he says, Chris, you're going to have to decide.
You're going to have to side between uptown and downtown

(49:14):
uptown meaning art photography, ICP galleries or downtown photojournalism pictures
that we can sell. He said, we can't sell this.
There is nothing we can do with this. You're going
to have to choose. And what they want was a

(49:35):
very formulated thing. You go into a country, an example,
my first country. It's the method for photojournalism. You can
apply it even today. This is a good learning tool.
It's what Susan Miizellis did in Nicaragua. It's a formula
where you pick a region in the world that has
some kind of peg. And for me, it's easy to

(49:57):
peg to America because we have over one hundred territories
around the earth. America is everywhere, So all you have
to do is pick a region. I pick the Philippines.
It has a dictator martial law, it has US military presence,
and it has a communists and an Islamic insurgency all

(50:21):
on an island. So imbed yourself early, document that place
for two or three years. And when I say document it,
you document it. You pick the first research. You pick
the anniversaries in that country when as their independence state,
what are their military anniversaries? What are that? Because that's
when you can go up and you go in and

(50:44):
you go to these events and you can photograph the
heads of states, the generals, all the top leaders in
the society go to these events, military parades. You arm
yourself with a three hundred two A with a teleconverter,
so you can do headge shots of Noriego or Putin
or whatever. It's the kind of pictures that Sogado's not doing.

(51:07):
This's the kind of pictures Knocked ways not doing this,
the kind of pictures Jill Perez is not going. These
are pictures that you need to It's what the magazines want.
They want headshots. So you apply this formula to a country,
and you do it from the top down. You do
it to all the way down to the poorest of

(51:29):
the poor, the people that are picking in the garbage dumps.
You go to the polo clubs, you document the polo clubs,
You meet people, You immerse yourself into a society and
the law. You have one hundred two hundred beautiful chromes
on a nation, in a society, and you're going to
be able to sell it. It's the same with Ukraine,

(51:51):
any of these places that you go to. So it's
a certain formula. I did that all through the eighties
and became quite successful because I applied it to the Philippines,
which I knew. I was advised everybody was going to
Beirut now Salvador in the early eighties, Nicaragua, El Salvador
Bay Route, Iran, Iraq War, Afghanistan very dangerous. Somebody told me,

(52:17):
he says, Chris, go to the Philippines, and the Philippines
blew up in eighty six and basically that kind of
kickstarted my career. Fast forward to nineteen ninety. Time offers
me a contract which was like the Golden ticket. And
the reason they offered him part of that. Jim was
their main photographer, Jim Knocktway, and he was doing everything.

(52:40):
But Jim all of a sudden in eighty nine started
doing a lot of work for National Geographic. He wanted
to move on. He wanted to do longer projects, basically
you know, the pollution in Eastern Europe and Romanian stuff.
He was unavailable, so they needed a new kind of
like who can we get to go somewhere and who

(53:02):
knows how to get in? Because that's the other thing.
It's not only are they choosing you, because they like
your photography. They're choosing somebody that they know can get
into Yemen and get out of Yemen where there's no
airports and there's no entry, no visis. How do you
do that? How do you get into these places? So

(53:22):
that's the key is once you have convinced them that
you were good at this craft of living, you know
this like I call it the Grand Green Novel, you
know the Quiet American or whatever, that you can penetrate
and get material er out, you're pretty sad. The problem

(53:43):
is also you have photographers that can do that, but
aren't really good photographers. I've had a lot of photographers.
They put themselves in let's say, these extreme situations where
they could easily lose their life. You're basically put in
yourself next to man trying to kill another man. You
can get hurt. And they don't know what they're doing. Photographically,

(54:06):
they don't understand their tool. They don't understand the camera.
You have to be able to work your camera with
your eyes closed, you know. And people also don't understand
what conflict photography. The tip of the spear theoretically is
the most dangerous. But that's a false complacency in conflict,

(54:28):
especially now it's even expanded out. But for me it
was always a thirty kilometer radius. Once I got into
thirty kilometers of that area, I knew that any minute,
any minute, my life can be snuffed away, even while sleeping,
anything can tear through your apartment window or roof or whatever.

(54:49):
So it's a real kind of like psychological psychological journey
that you have to learn to prepare yourself with. Which
is that bit of training, the understanding fear year. I
had an incident in the Philippines during the when Marcos
was overthrown, where I was chased by a mob into

(55:10):
a house and when I got out of that, I
was almost killed. And Alan Tannebau'm a photographer. He saw
me and he grabbed me and he shook me and
almost wanted to slap me in the face and said,
you know, hey, you got to snap out of it,
either that or go home. It's hard to see your
fingers and see f stops on a camera when you

(55:31):
think you're going to die, You just your eyes can't focus.
It's just not going to happen. You become like that
man in a private Rye in the film when he's
bouncing around when they're having him bring the the mo
back and forth. You don't want to become that person.
Was there a lot of emotional fatigue, Yeah, a lot
of emotion fatigue in preparing yourself before and all that.

(55:53):
But basically so after jim So time it took off,
and prior to that December, I ended up going down
to Panama. When the invasion happened. There were only four
photographers in country, and three of them were wounded. One
of those was killed. So for several days I was
the only Western photographer working in Panama. And then right

(56:17):
after that I saw that what I did and now
that it had raised me on a pedestal where all
of a sudden I was because I had these heroes
in my life that I looked up and we all photographers,
We're all down there. As a kid, even at Blackstar,
nobody was paying any attention to me. Howard, even after

(56:38):
the Philippines, I was still like the kid in the library.
You know, he had to realize he had knocked away,
he had Tony Suaw, he had the Turnley Brothers. I
was just like the kid in the library. I was
kind of ignored. But after Panama I kind of like changed.
It was mainly you know, Graziani area. Everybody. I was realized, Wow,

(56:58):
that was easy. It was like, now, well I've kind
of like stepped off the ladder. I'm now recognized. It's like, wow,
how did that happen?

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
So it just put this kind of like internal pressure
on me, like okay, here we go. And then the
next thing was the US military is gonna Saddam Hu's saying,
you know, I went. I went to Liberia after that,
and then Saiddan and Bates Kaway finds out time the
US military is gonna they're gonna create this super pool.
They're gonna create this pool system for covering the war.

(57:29):
And they're gonna embed four photographers, just four on the
extreme tip tip of the spear, two with the Marines
and two with the army. Now you've got hundreds of journalists,
but they're only going to allow so and I ended
up getting picked with one and to be the Marines.
And you know, just going through all the prep and

(57:49):
being in the desert in the trench warfare and working
and all that, I basically pushed myself. I realized, Okay,
this is like a Robert Kappa mom. I can't fuck
this up. You know, the night before the kickoff of
in Kuwait. You know, I'm with a unit. They've got
ten of those amphibious track vehicles. You know we're gonna

(58:12):
lose three on the first day. Everybody will be killed
in each vehicle. That's a hundred marines are going to
die on the first thing. It's just numbers. You're gonna go.
You're gonna attack two hundred thousand entrenched supposed iraqis in trenches.
So which vehicle are you in? Where are you going
to ride? Who are you going to die next to?

(58:36):
That kind of stuff. They even bring a guy to
do a will. You know, you have to sign all
this stuff so you're prepared. You're you train with the
guy who I trained with, the guy with a shotgun
who goes into the trench for the first day. But
then I realized they're not dismounting. I'm on top of

(58:56):
the vehicle and I saw a humbi with the first
the marine, the gunny sergeant who was riding around next
to the lead tanks with these humbies that had tow
weapons on top. I realized, I need to be on
the roof of that Humbye. I don't want to be
in a in a an armored vehicle. I actually I
actually always rode on the roof. I refused to stay inside.

(59:20):
I saw what happened inside in in Saudi and Coffee
when the Iraqis came in, and that they attacked and
the Marines had to go in and push them out.
And I went in there and I saw these armored vehicles.
And I opened the door to one of those armored vehicles,
and the armor and on the door of the armored
vehicle his arm a charred arm and inside you see

(59:43):
the faces of these skulls screaming, and I'm like, what
the he and you know they're in an American equipment.
The Saudis are in American APC's and they just they
just turned into little Christie's like, oh my god, I
don't want to be in there. So I'm gonna ride
on the roof. So even in two thousand and three
when I did it, I wrote on the roof, I'm

(01:00:04):
not getting in, and I only i at night or
during dust storms. I might get inside, but I want
to be on the roof. Let me jump off and
get whatever its story. So but yeah, I had that
I've always had that. That was the intensity that I
was putting it into the search. Long long story, short
is then here comes Yugoslavia. I'm on my way a

(01:00:28):
bit of Tibot. I was trained a lot by Jill
Para Jill Peas in the late and working in Columbia
and Panama and stuff. I met Jill Paris and got
to be good friends with him in the late eighties,
and he's the one who told me, look this this
contract you're going to get with Time. It's either going
to ruin you as a photographer or it could make
you as make you he said, use it as a grant.

(01:00:51):
And that comes back to that bit of with Howard,
that thing, if you shoot in a certain way, it's
just going to ruin your career. So I've always had
that kind of in the back the head, always kind
of shooting for myself along. It's like it's like when
I morphed into politics and I did the My America.
It's like, none of that book. Time doesn't need any
of those pictures, So they don't need any of that

(01:01:14):
I give. I give the thirty percent of what you know,
the head shots and all that stuff. But then the
next seventy percent. I'm gonna shoot for myself. I didn't
come to that formula til much later, because you know,
once you had digital, you could understand. It's like having
a polaroid. You understand what you're what you're getting. But

(01:01:35):
but then fast forward into this thing was yield and
after after I had I had been married, I missed
that it was somebody from a Columbian woman, Jacqueline Esclaro,
who had met at school in Fort Lauderdale. She followed
me up and went to Ice Peace a year behind

(01:01:56):
me basically, and ended up getting a job at Black
Star and job at Newsweek. But my original plan was
her and I would travel, she would do video, and
I would do cells the video footage like in Panama
where she was with me, but she wasn't able to film.
I did the filming because also she determined. That's when
she realized she didn't want to do this, because she
didn't want to die, and she realized she was married

(01:02:18):
to a madman who was willing to kill himself for
video or whatever. Long story short, after the goal for
I came out, she divorced me. She left me, and
she left me for Jill, you know kind of like
one of my best friends. So I was kind of
like I was thrown for a loop. It was kind

(01:02:38):
of like I couldn't It became that thing, this thing
like fear where I couldn't see the hands in front
of my face. So Time saw that and they sent
me Marian Golan and Michelle Stevenson. They sent me to
Paris to do a story on Paris. And I went
to Paris, and then from there they sent me to
do the Year after the War in to do the

(01:03:00):
oil fires, you know, the famous Sogatto pictures. They wanted
me to go back. And I was in the airport
in Heathrow and I see this photographer with these blue
donkey bag and he walks up to me and he says,
you're Christopher Morris. And again it becomes that thing. It's like,
how does this guy even know who I am? And

(01:03:21):
it's Paul Lowe and he says, I'm on my way
to Yugoslavia. There's a war on Slovenia and I'm gonna
fly to Zagreb and rent a car. And there's two
cities he's mentioned to me. I've never even heard of.

(01:03:41):
I never heard of Zagreb. I'd never heard of Lubliana,
and he tells me, oh, it's just next to Italy,
next to Trieste, and because of my American and ignorance,
I can't place it. I can place Belgrade, I can
place Sarajevo just because of the Olympics and stuff. But
he says there's a war there, it just started. It's
on the border with Austria and Italy. And so I

(01:04:03):
don't get on the plane to Kuwait. I get on
the plane to Yugoslavia with Paul. And so Paul was
my introduction to Yugoslavia and we basically went to the
border area and that's where I photographed my first first dead,
you know, death of Yugoslavia and the start and then
I stayed around a week and then I left and
went did the oil fires and then went back to

(01:04:28):
the beginning to start the creation war, which at this point,
because of losing my wife, I had a lot to
prove to myself, to my father and to Howard Chapnik
and the people in the industry that I'm going to
do war photography. Like I'm going to say it now,

(01:04:55):
I was really ready to kill myself, and sadly I
took ron Habiv along for the ride and Ron, And
initially I had to stop working for Ron because he
started working for Newsweek, and Time was upset that his pictures,
you know, he shoulder to shoulder. We can't do that

(01:05:17):
fast forward. I did the whole six months of that war.
I would do three weeks month, go to New York
for a week, look at film, pick up new film,
and go back back and back and forth, back and forth.
And each time I left New York, I prepared my apartment.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
For my mom, meaning I didn't want to. I remember
I had some pornography, some BHS tapes, and I remember
I would throw.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
Them away, anything like that. I didn't want anybody to
find anything, mainly mainly my mother. You know, anything in
my life that I didn't want her to see. So
when you do that, when you leave an apartment each
time and you lock the door, and I'm not saying
I only I only didn't once through it all at once,
but I'm saying, each time you locked your apartment door

(01:06:11):
and you looked inside, I would leave it as if
I was not coming back. And I'm not saying I
did that throughout my career. I'm saying I did that.
In the Croat part of the Yugoslav the first six months.
Fast forward to Vukovar, the end of the war November.
This is the key where I realized I had found

(01:06:35):
that Colonel Kurtz moment, I had found that heart of darkness,
and what I learned frightened me. It frightened me that
all mankind has this murderous societal, violent nature of hatred

(01:07:00):
where they can kill, they can kill. Everybody has it.
And there was an incident where the people were coming
out of the basements they've been under siege, and the
Serbs that just captured it outside the city. The Yugoslav
army had a cordon around it and they let loose

(01:07:22):
the They let loose the psychopaths, the rapists and murderers,
the onto the to clean it. And they do that everywhere.
That's what armies do. They're really you know, that's why
you see what happened in Bucha. It's that kind of stuff.
So in Vukor you could hear the gunshots and I

(01:07:44):
literally ended up next to a guy who shot a
guy in front of me. Basically, I've seen the pictures
now I've now just started scanning and I'm doing something
as we speak. I'm supposed to have this audio recorded
on this experience today. I'm buying that. So I'm looking
at these pictures now, and that's why I have this
clarity of thought where this man from two menors execute

(01:08:08):
somebody and around him are other dead people that are
lying on the ground. Well, I'm in an execution spot.
I've entered a spot on the planet Earth where man
is face to face just snuffing them out. And I'm
standing next to him with a camera with a camera,

(01:08:29):
and I can't pick my hand on my camera and
take a picture because I realize if I do that,
I'm going to be possibly on the ground and I'm
gonna lose everything in my thing. And after this gunman
sprayed around six bullets into the chest and the stomach

(01:08:50):
of this guy, he turns to me and he's literally
face to face. I could smell his breath, this alcohol
fueled evil. He looked at me without a word, but
his eyes said, what are you going to do about that?
He knew I was in America, he knew I was Western.

(01:09:14):
And Ron heard the shots and came running up to me,
and I told him what happened, and let's get away.
Let's back off. These people are executing these people. And
later that night Ron said to me that he would
never allow that to happen again. Where if he's in

(01:09:37):
that situation where they shoot somebody, he's going to try
to document it. Fast forward a month or so later
and Beleigne where Ron made that picture, the most important
picture of the war, with the guy with a cigarette
kicking the body. You know, with Zach. What happened to

(01:09:58):
me after that of going back to Belrade and what
I had witnessed that day November eighteenth and ninety one
in Ukwar, when I made it to the Hyatt Hotel
in Belgrade, when I walked and I went into the elevator,
and when I made it to the door of my
room and my hand touched the doorknovel, I started to

(01:10:21):
weep uncontrollably because my fingers were so sensitive to the
touch of the metal that I could feel this energy
coming off the doorbell, the door handle, and I realized
I had my arm, I had my hand, and I
had seen so much that day of death, and I

(01:10:43):
couldn't believe that I was alive. I ended up going
into the bathroom and I discovered that I was covered
in life from the dead people. That was standing near
the hospital was a field of dead people. And I
was photographing all these dead like a police photographer. And
I was covered in lice. And I remember getting into

(01:11:04):
the path and this is life that had been feeding
off of the lice that had been feeding off of bodies.
And I crawled into this bathtub. It I wept, and
I realized I didn't want to I found it. I
found that, Colonel Kurtz moment. I found those people. People

(01:11:25):
with no empathy. This is what I discovered. All of
us we must teach empathy. It must be taught. Our
children must be taught empathy, empathy, because without it, all
of us can be pushed to the extermination of others

(01:11:46):
and we don't realize it. I see it, seeing it
happening in this country. So and then what's interesting is
I want it off.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
I don't want to do it anymore. The next day,
I drove the twelve hours to Zagreb to get with
my girlfriend at the time, Vezda, and we went to
Venice to shift film. I'm done. I don't want to
go back to war now. Granted, Granted, Ron calls me

(01:12:17):
a few weeks later, says Chris, I'm with ARCon. We're
going to be going into Belenye. I says, I'm not going.
I'm not going to cover Bosna. I don't want to
do it, but like a hamster on the wheel, you
can't get off. So basically that was the peak. That
November of ninety one was where I realized I really

(01:12:39):
didn't want to do this pursuing the man with gun anymore.
But if you look at my career, I continued up
and all the way up until twenty eleven with Libya was.

Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
The last time, you know, was this the beginning to
give your post to my extress?

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Do you think this real post amatic stress didn't come
until I really started examining my archive. I didn't want
to be known as a war photographer when I in
ninety eight, you know, I had my daughter was born,
my first daughter, and I was still doing war. And
in ninety nine I had to go back to chesch

(01:13:15):
Now and I just recently found this role of film,
a role of film, with my daughter a year and
a half old, in a Samsonite suitcase, surrounded by boxes
of film, hundreds of rolls of film. I was deshelling them,
and I remembered I had I told my wife I was,

(01:13:35):
I'm not going to go to the front. I was
just going to do the refugees. I was, you know,
going back to do the Second Chechen War in nineteen
ninety nine. What the fuck am I doing?

Speaker 1 (01:13:44):
But in nineteen five you were in Chechny as well,
ninety five ninety six, that stuff was reading in your
face as well.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
Yeah. I always pushed the legacy of what a war
photograph was. Dmitri Baltermont's the Don mic Colon, the soldier
throwing the hand grenade, Raymond deeport Own, the Christian Militia
fighter going down the street in Beirut. It's that kind

(01:14:11):
of like go pro perspective. You have to be next
to the gunman, and it's not easy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
My work.

Speaker 2 (01:14:18):
I've always said it, it wasn't about the civilians, it
wasn't about the victims. I set out the document in
a very selfish way. The man with the gun I
call it, not the idiot with the gun man trying
to kill men. What I've discovered is in finding all
these returns that I'm going through, is I didn't just

(01:14:39):
photograph the man with the gun I did photograph society.
I did photograph everything. It's just nobody has seen it
because nobody was looking for it. Yeah, I'm just discovering
so much more. But I'm also discovering trying to analyze more.

(01:15:00):
You know. The whole thing of how eventually I wanted
to run away from war photography was I after that incident,
this final incident in ninety nine where I was almost killed.
I called time and said, when I got back to Moscow,
find me something else. And that's when they assigned me
politics during the recount with Bush and Gore and then

(01:15:22):
the elections, and then I was assigned the White House.
Is a man in a suit. It was something that,
to be honest with you, I dreaded. I actually even
have a picture of Cornell cap But when he first
brought me to ICP and he's showing me his work
of Kennedy the first hundred Days, and I remember while
they were showing it to me, thinking, oh my god,

(01:15:42):
that's the most boring photography I've ever seen. It's just
a man in a suit in a room. I don't
want to do that. I was looking for that Dennis
Hopper in Vietnam, you know, Cambodia.

Speaker 1 (01:15:54):
Someone looked buck at your archive who didn't know you
from the ages to two thousand and three four. What
kind of person do you think they would imagine you were?

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
You know, I I've never really thought about that. What
would they think?

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
I would think that this was They would think he
was a foolish man. A foolish man to do that.
You know, it's a very voyeuristic thing, Zach. I don't
have this illusion that all my peers have, that Jim has,
that other colleagues have, of saving society and exposing exposing things.

(01:16:36):
You know, I haven't had that. I understand pictures cause change,
but a lot of times pictures cause negative change. You know,
pictures cause wars. You know, pictures can be used by
governments for their own propaganda purposes. Even I'm understanding now
how my work was used to promote this, this colonialist

(01:17:01):
empire of America's might. You know, my work was used
for propaganda. You know, I was part of that that machine.
But but but when I look at my work, I
know I was there as an outside of deserver. It
leaves the picture editors control. I'm the original capture. But

(01:17:22):
then it goes to a picture editor who decides what
to show an editor, and then an editor decides what
he wants to show the public, what message they want
to put on the cover. So there's a real kind
of disconnect, at least there used to be. You know,
it's even now you're working let's say you're working for
the New York Times, what image is the New York

(01:17:42):
Times is going to be published? You know, So there,
you know, there's great collaboration, but there's there's great, great
stuff to analyze. But I had a bad taste about
the industry on the sense of the journey holistic part
of it. Yeah, I just kind of wanted to run

(01:18:03):
away from it. And the only war work that I
paid any attention to was pretty much the Chechen work
through through my White House years and all that. I
wanted to run away from it, and then eventually I did.
Nine years so Obama became elected, and I was excited.
I thought, oh my god, it's going to be a
great presidency. But in two thousand and nine time was

(01:18:25):
sold and they decided they weren't going to cover the
White House anymore. And so two thousand and nine I
took like a ninety percent pay cut overnight. I had
to like scramble for clients and stuff because I had
put all my you know, when I wasn't working, I
just wouldn't work for anybody because I didn't want to work.
I wanted time with my children. You know, I'm talking
in the.

Speaker 1 (01:18:46):
I think for me, your time as a conflict photographer
to me and to everybody else was evident of what
you put in, what you sacrificed and stuff. But I've
always been a treat by you. All of that time
you spent as a war photographer. Where did it leave you?
And obviously that's what we're looking at and talking about
in this conversation, and where it left you as a

(01:19:06):
person as a photographer. I started to see, I don't know,
I felt my America and the Americans. I think you
sort of found authorship in your work. For me, I
just thought, this is the real Christopher Morris.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
I have dyslexia, and the way my mind always compart
mentalized things, the way of wanting to It's constantly trying
to eliminate visual pollution in what I'm looking at. If
I'm trying to read something I can't have, I have
to have the book isolated because of the visual pollution

(01:19:44):
of a painting on the wall or something. My mind
is always trying to deal with with visual pollution. What
the real kind of discovering this is important because you
deal with photography. Once I started at the White House,
I didn't kind of know what am I going to
do photographically? You know, And this is still pre digital.

(01:20:05):
We're still I didn't go digital till two thousand and three,
So the first few years is still shooting a film
and you're going from Tungsten the Daylight as a nightmare. So,
long story short, is myself and wrong. We get an
advertising assignment from ogilvm Mather for IBM since incredible assignment

(01:20:25):
each get ten portraits, ten subjects at ten thousand dollars aportners.
So it's like, well that's one hundred thousand. You're telling
me you're going to pay me ten thousand dollars to
do a portrait. It's like, what the heck? So, long
story short, my first meeting this guy, John McVay. We're
up in New Hampshire. We're going to do the Inventor
of the Seguae and Dean Kagan. This the night before

(01:20:47):
and he calls me in my room. He says, can
you meet me downstairs in the lobby. I want to
talk to you before the client comes down. And I
meet him downstairs. It's this young guy. And I'm already
established in my forties. Here come this young guy in
his thirties. He looks at me. He says, Hi, Chris.
So happy to meet you, so happy to work with you.
But I need to get something. I need to tell
you something. The client really loves your work, that's why

(01:21:10):
you're here. But honestly, I think you're a terrible photographer,
and it's why we don't use photojournalism. And he says,
it's your lens choice. He says, photojournalists rely too much
on distortion to tell their story, so just be aware
of that going forward. I'm not happy with any distortion.

(01:21:31):
We only use white angle for humor. He says. Go
back and study the masters. So for the next week
I'm working with this guy, I'm a little I'm kind
of like freaked out. And then I went back and analyzed.
It's true. So in nineteen eighty nine, prior to eighty nine,

(01:21:54):
as a film photographer, you had to have three or
four cameras because you did not have any zooms. The
only zoom was a twenty four to thirty five three
point five as spherical by Cannon. It's like, why am
I going to carry that? So you had to carry
a twenty four, twenty eight to thirty five, a fifty
and eighty five, a one to thirty five, and a

(01:22:15):
two hundred. That's a lot of weight. Nineteen eighty nine
a revolution happened. Cannon comes out with this magical twenty
to thirty five and there hence begins the nineties photojournalism
trend of what I call the Salvadory Dolly distortion of

(01:22:35):
reality of the world. So all this cryane and I'm
not a white angle because you can look at is
Giel Perez telex Iran. It's all shot pretty much on
a twenty eight. Even my subway in New York City.
The only lens I'm using is a twenty milimeter. It's
how you learn to use it. And the reason I
did that was because I grew up with skateboarding, and

(01:22:56):
it's like the first lens I bought was a twenty
after the kitch. But whatever it made me, it made
me realize that. And at the White House, I realized
I would never shoot anything below forty milimeter, And because
what happens is with the human eye, when you when
you look at something with a normal lens, it's hard

(01:23:17):
to what do I do with that? It looks boring? Well,
it looks boring because it's human vision. It's the vision
you've had since birth, and it looks boring. But the
minute you look at it with a twenty eight or
it just it's it's different, different, It's not real, and
it's that people think it's the width is the problem.

(01:23:37):
It's not the width, it's the depth. It's from fore
ground to middle ground to background. There's the optical thing
that makes a picture stand the test of time. And
the best area I found the human eye depth is
around sixty five milimeter and the peripherals around the forty
forty one something like that. So with that in mind,

(01:23:58):
that's how my America it was born. I would only
photograph with that vision, an attempt, and that style, and
it just kind of fit me back. I took great
pride in like you look at a Gregory Kretson picture
or Steven Shore picture pictures that look like they were

(01:24:20):
on a tripod, these big ten eight things. I was
trying to do that like my tree agent garage is
and I have three seconds to make that picture. I've
got an agent pulling on me, saying we can't stop here.
I got to get in the motorcade. That book was
made with me trying to slow everything down and isolate people,

(01:24:41):
to create a mood. Working in symbolisms and metaphors is
the beauty for me of photography. I hate captions. I
hate captions, but they are important, But I hate captions.

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
Were you influenced by John Houston a Ol or Fritz
Langhol No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (01:25:02):
No no no. It was more of that Gregory Krets
and that loneliness of despair, of isolation. I would listen
to a lot of music too, and the times you're
covering certain things, I wear headphones, like I put myself
into a film. You know, I became fascinated with this
whole thing of you're trying to trap a viewer. Okay,

(01:25:25):
you want them to stop on your image, you have
to trap them. So you have to trap them with composition.
If you leave, you have to build some kind of
circular movement through the frame that's not going to allow
the viewer to want to leave. Even if it's a
picture of a coffee cup next to on a table,
you want you can trap the viewer with such. You

(01:25:48):
look at Eggleston, you look at the simplicity. You know,
Larry Sultany has a picture of his of his parents.
There's a picture of his his mother's hand on the
wallpaper makes me cry. I can stare at it and
cry and it's just a picture of a hand on
a wallpaper. I really love that in photography. I love

(01:26:10):
that where you can you you want you, and then
to try to get a message across, but my message
is not necessarily your message. You want people to kind
of feel and go through the image.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
How did you perceive that sort of pageantry and that
whole retoric of American politics when your life it's been
spent in war zone spot to this source surreal almost
corporate environment.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
Which shocked me about the Republican world and covering this
American pad this this pageantry around bullsh and the presidency
because even then I called him a dear leader. It's
very cult like when the president comes out on stage
and the people they stare up him, they're in awe

(01:26:55):
and I couldn't understand it, especially when you hear the
stuff he's saying and you realize lying to you. I
used to sit under the stage and listen to books.
I'm right under that podium in the buffer hours and
hours of speeches.

Speaker 1 (01:27:08):
And you realize he's lying. You really know he's lying.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Because you've heard stuff and it's being told to the world.
And now you fast forward to this administration, it's off
the charts. It's like, how can you hold a straight face?
How cannot this stuff be called out?

Speaker 1 (01:27:29):
When you think about what you just said in respect
to My America? Was it a form of critique, then
that was.

Speaker 2 (01:27:36):
A yeah, it was a It was absolutely a critique,
Absolutely a critique. America is not white. America is not white.
That book is a white America, a white corporate perfect.
No trash, no people in wheelchairs. I would go to
a Hillary Clinton event. You got people in birkenstocks tiedite shirts.

(01:27:58):
I couldn't photograph. It was a trash on the ground.
The Republican world, privately, it doesn't exist anymore. That world,
it's gone. Trump destroyed it. That maga is not that
world that my America is in. You know that that
was that white Christian nationalist you know, kind of the
whole cult of personality. Any nation is susceptible to it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:22):
It was that period. It's at of closure for you
or of discomfort.

Speaker 2 (01:28:27):
Well, to be honest, no, I it became a closure,
not by choice. I wanted to continue it. I would
like to. I would have loved to have been covering Trump,
you know, flying on Air Force one, traveling the world
with the President, and I would like to have carried
that into my retirement. Didn't happen, which ended up my
style of work. I had never I had come This

(01:28:49):
is an interesting story. So I'm going to back you
up right after I went to Somalia in ninety one,
three times during the fighting when nobody was there, and
then one of the first to go during the famine.
And the only reason I went to do the famine
was because I did the war part. And time asked me,
could I get back into Somalia. I go back into

(01:29:12):
Somalia and I go to a place called Baidoa, and
we're talking. There were maybe three or four aid workers
there at that time. It was in the summer, and
we're looking around three hundred several hundred people a day
were dying in this town. This desert town. And when
Enrico and I showed up the Satalian photographer, you have

(01:29:35):
to understand, we are white, and you've got hundreds of
people that have been walking for months through the desert
looking for food. They see you, they run to you,
and they run to you, not to have your picture taken.
They're running to you for help, for food and water.

(01:29:56):
So to arrive in this town was probably my greatest
like experience of I'll never do that again, even far
worse to me emotionally than what happened to me in
Vukovar with the extermination, because you end up trying to

(01:30:17):
photograph these people, adults, children, and they look at you
in the eye and you're focusing on their eyes and
they are dying. They're dying in front of you. Their
diarrhea is pouring out of their their behinds on the ground.
They're lying in their puddles of putting and flies. And

(01:30:45):
where do I eat? What do I eat? Where do
I sleep? Where are we going to sleep? In this
desert town? They had the fight, had the bodyguard that
a restaurant in Bidoa and was actually called the Bikini Restaurant,
had a little sign, a little palm tree on it

(01:31:07):
for the fighters, and we sat on these. It had
like a meter high earthen wall around this little restaurant,
restaurant in Bidoa, and I say restaurant whatever, it's a building,
it's in the desert, it's in by Doa. We're sitting
on these wooden tables and they bring out the food.

(01:31:29):
They bring out pasta, the somemal easy lot of pasta
because of their Italian heritage.

Speaker 1 (01:31:35):
But next to the wall I have that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
There's probably thirty forty people staring, some of them older
wrapped in the blanket, their children peering over the walls.
Few of the children are inside the restaurant area around
the tables. Now you're dealing, these are gunmen. They're eating.
These guys all have their guns. And I couldn't eat

(01:31:59):
the food because it was covered in flies and the
flies are on dead people, and the dead people are
just outside there on the street. So I got there
in my stomach, got a little sick. And the gunman
that my bodyguards, they took my food and they ate it.
And what they didn't finish. There was a young boy
or girl, I don't even know the sex that was

(01:32:21):
on the ground next to me. It kind of looks
like that famous picture of Gym's from Somalia, from Baidoa
that he did like a month later, of somebody crawling.
I've got this kid next to me, basically the guy.
He scraped the food onto the ground, and I watched
this person eat the spaghetti out of the sand, and
the whole group came up like scowy. I made it

(01:32:45):
into my little hut where I was going to sleep,
this little like mud building room. I had a room
in there with Enrico, and I made my side a
little stove and I cooked myself some instant oatmeal. And
in the morning there was a crowd of people that
sat outside my hut. When I say a crowd, I'm
know ten or fifteen in the morning. When I got

(01:33:05):
up to go out, they were dead. They were dead.
So here I'm waiting for the wheelbarrow guy with the
unice of wheelberg. I just start come up and collect
the dead and the pile. Some of them are still alive,
but they're dead. Their eyes are open, they're covered in flies.
And then when I remember one point, I had this girl.

(01:33:28):
She wouldn't let go on my pants, She would not
let go on my pants. I couldn't walk. She had
like a death grip on my pants and I had
to I had to peeler fingers off my pants and
walk away. And I never ever, ever wanted to do

(01:33:50):
that again. And I told time I would never photograph
famine ever again. Never. There's other people that can go
do that and go on television and win awards and
document that, but it's not for me. It's like this
whole bit of exploitation. It's as yeah, and but the

(01:34:13):
document you can't say it has to be done. It
still has to be documented. But yeah, at one point,
it just pushes you harder. That's why for me, it
would just give me the guys with the guns. They're
idiots with guns. I don't cry when they when they
die in front of me or get wounded in front
of me, I don't cry for I lose no sleep.

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
There's obviously a lot of things within you. Turmoil.

Speaker 2 (01:34:37):
Yeah, I have a lot of trauma. I have a
lot of PTSD. I had ignored it and deal with it.
I've never had therapy. It was very interesting. I was
never offered counseling all my years at time, no one's
ever said, hey, do you need help. It was never asked,
because you know, it's kind of like, have you ever
come back and say, look, I think I need some help,

(01:34:59):
and then they're never going to send you again either.

Speaker 1 (01:35:01):
You know, it's also making sense of the help as well.

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
Yeah, and making sense. I feel I'm doing better on
my own self diagnosis and kind of understanding. You can
see on some of my ventings, on my postings on
my Instagram, how I feel about certain things and certain
issues about man and society and photography. Photography is so
important to document reality, especially now with AI. What is real?

Speaker 1 (01:35:27):
Go back to My America? Is there a continuation of
thought with the what would the post Trump, post pandemic
landscape look like?

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:35:37):
If you did this sequel to the book.

Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
Is darker, it's meaner, it's more exposed. It's like, if
anybody wants to look if you get if you start
with My America, just switch over and then go to
Peter van Atmell's book. Peter van Atmel, he's kind of removed,
stripped away to the veneer with this country he is,

(01:36:00):
you know, he kind of followed after me of continuing
the document. But I feel that the fact that they
re elected this man with all that was known about him.
It really, to me exposes who Americans truly are. And
I'm ashamed of it. And I'm even estranged from pretty

(01:36:23):
much all my family, my relative It comes down to
that thing of lack of empathy. When I was like
ten or eleven, I had a bb gun here in
Florida and my friends we went out shooting, and I
had an incident where I ended up shooting a bird.
My friends were shooting birds, so I ended up standing
over this bird and these older kids are with They

(01:36:46):
were very proud of me, and they were jumping up
and down that I hit it. They were kind of
like celebrating the death of this bird. And I remember
standing over this little blue bird and watching its wings flutter,
and it's to me. It just looked at me and
I had such pain of loss of life, but I

(01:37:08):
couldn't express it because of my friends. I had to
stay in this macho male dominant. I'm a killer, but
I never got over that. I could never kill again.
I could never kill anything. I don't. I have a
hard time even with insects. Killing insects, I have to

(01:37:28):
let them go. It becomes such an empathy. Empathy of life,
even gardening, even pulling weeds out of the ground and
cutting trees. It's life. It causes me some pain and
what society has done. Empathy is weakness. Empathy is weakness.
We're taught that empathy is wrong. That's the problem. That

(01:37:52):
to me is the key raise your children with utmost
of empathy of others. I have empathy for trump people.
I have empathy for people I don't like. I have
empathy for the killer that was next to me, that
took somebody's life. Did how he ended up with such
hatred that he could kill his neighbor. You know, there's

(01:38:14):
such hatred of others. Don't like fat people, don't like
trans people, who cares? Who cares? Let everybody be him alone?
You know whatever that to me has become this kind
of like deep sensitivity of myself. I have such a

(01:38:36):
deep archive. You I have no idea the amount of
material I've had of how many dead children I photographed, mutilated?
And it just goes on. You know, when Ukraine started,
you know, like everybody, I gotta go. I couldn't tell
my wife I was planning ongoing. It's gonna buy a
car and pull in and drive in I had to.

(01:38:58):
I was teaching some high school students up in New
Orleans and I had to delay a trip. And then
one night Mariopole happened in the hospital on CNN and
they I couldn't believe it. There it was live on CNN.
They're bringing out a dead baby and they're broadcasting it.
Oh my god, finally they're going to shock people. There

(01:39:20):
it is. And then after that comes on the TV
is one of the Turnley brothers. I believe it was David.
It could have been Peter. I think it was David
with Anderson Cooper and they're talking about these pictures, his picture,
his pictures. I got so violently ill that I actually
went in the bathroom and threw up. I could not

(01:39:42):
believe it was on TV that they went from that
to that some photographer talking about himself. It just disgusted me.
And then that night, Zach I laid to go to
sleep and I had the most horrific dream of my life.
It was images of children, children that I stood over,

(01:40:08):
but they were alive and they were coming at me screaming,
and I immediately woke up and I didn't sleep for
two days. My wife shoodn't need to checked at hospital.
It was that path and I had to question myself,

(01:40:31):
why why was I going to go back to Ukraine
to photograph another dead child? So yeah, it's been hard,
it's I realized. And the message in the dream, what
they were yelling at me is I did nothing. I
did nothing with their pictures. I left them alone in

(01:40:53):
a in a box, under a bed, never to be
seen by anybody. The horror and tragedy that was brought
upon them, that mutilated their faces and snuffed them out,
you know. It was this horrid dream, you know, And
I couldn't go back to sleep because I was I

(01:41:14):
didn't want to see them again. It was so real.
And the ironic thing is I was working with high
school kids in a cemetery making a vampire movie and
me being the consultant. So the imagery I was having
to deal with was just my body. So in the end,
I didn't cote and I've kind of like settled here

(01:41:36):
into my life and getting this. I want to create
this living archive. I'm supposed to be recording this audio
because AI understands when I'm crying. AI understands when I'm hurt.
It can feel it, it can feel my emotion.

Speaker 1 (01:41:50):
Have you ever thought of permanently deleting all them?

Speaker 2 (01:41:54):
Like, No, No, that would hurt me more to delete them,
because to me, they're a true document of men, of
what he does to his own people. So it's like
now with this Yugoslavia, I've developed a system where I'm
going to scan everything. I'm going to scan fifty sixty

(01:42:14):
thousand images because now I have AI that can help
me assemble it. It can identify every boy, every it
can even identify things that caused me trauma. How was
I going to catalog these images? It's now kind of
simple in the sense of you just link. You link

(01:42:35):
the audio and the text together. You know, it's whatever.
I'm developing something and working on something to make this
all accessible. Still, So why I don't have a website.
I pulled off my website.

Speaker 1 (01:42:47):
There's not a platform with your journey on.

Speaker 2 (01:42:51):
No. No, I've pulled it all off because I realized
it wasn't right. I've also I've also have not done
anything new on Instagram that has not already been seen
because I realize that I'm releasing it kind of in
the wrong way. I'm actually doing these I have around
thirteen different archive books. I'm trying to design that I

(01:43:14):
want to have published these like catalog books.

Speaker 1 (01:43:16):
It's a fast shot. Yeah. Yeah. I was devastated that
there isn't any way really to celebrate you because it's
fragmented everywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
The only place that my work is is on my Instagram.
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:43:29):
Yeah, I think you're what you're saying is absolutely right.
You need to get lumped all in one place.

Speaker 2 (01:43:35):
Yeah, And the problem is, it was like I don't
want to. It's like it's like Gille Periz. I don't
know if you've seen his new book on Ireland or
had a chance to sit down and flip through it.
It's the most stunning book I've ever seen, and it's
just this anthropological study of that time period. It's brilliant,
brilliantly done. And I realized that, yeah, you don't need

(01:43:59):
to be I don't need to be showing all this
stuff that I've done. Like I've said, I've scanned so
much stuff, and I could be uploading something new and
creative five times a day, you know, if I want.
But I just don't want it. I do. I am
trying to redesign a website, but it's difficult for me
because I start a war, politics, fashion, kind of like celebrity,

(01:44:21):
you know, and it's hard. How do you put that
all in a design?

Speaker 1 (01:44:26):
Well, would you start at the president and work backwards? Maybe?

Speaker 2 (01:44:29):
No, not even because the thing is for me, I'm
not looking for work. I'm not a website. It depends
on what's the purpose of a website. It's not like
I'm having a website, so so I'm going to get work.

Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
No, But I think there's a lot of things you
could speak about on that website because I want to know.
I'm sure lots of people want to know You've had
one incredible journey man.

Speaker 2 (01:44:50):
The more into the thing is that I think more
important for me would actually to actually have almost like
a YouTube channel that's my channel that has that deals
with history and photography, this overlapping and I could have
episodes on so many things, so many different regions. I

(01:45:11):
don't really like putting myself out there. Something is going
to be happening, especially this stuff I'm doing with Kira
and trying to create this living archive. I'm supposed to
be leaving the next month. I'm bringing thirty to fifty
thousand images to Sarajevo to do this living archive there
at the Foundation in Sarajevo, So it's kind of ironic.

(01:45:31):
I'm bringing that material out of my home back to
Yugoslava at former Yugoslavia because I want to have the
assistance that I'm putting together that are going to work
with me on it. I need some people knowledgeable about
that region of the world for stuff that I want
to feed into the AI, for the captioning and the

(01:45:52):
information on the images.

Speaker 1 (01:45:54):
Can we go back to the empathy theme again with
your second book, Americans Spoke? Was that way of you
showing empathy to the machine. It was trying to broaden out.

Speaker 2 (01:46:07):
I understood that my America was so narrow, It was
such a sliver of a section of America that I
needed to broaden it out to a broader section of society.
And the time I started working for that fashion magazine,
they had hired me to do a road trip across
America during the Census, and they wanted me to go
into people's homes and do portraits of people's homes, you know, Asians, Blacks,

(01:46:30):
American Indians. I couldn't use anybody I knew. They had
to all be strangers. It was hard assignment, so some
of that is based on there. I made a lot
of road trips, and to me, I felt the country
was in a state of depression. It was the end
of the Two Wars, you know, we're still going on,
and the Econda crash in two thousand and eight, two

(01:46:51):
thousand and nine, the unemployment, and the country was depressed.
It was in the depression, and I wanted to kind
of pick up on that fear. If I saw a
kid on the street and he was playing with the
ball and smiling, I wouldn't take his picture, But if
I saw him sitting on the street with his hands
in his face, I would take his picture. So I would.

(01:47:12):
I'm editorializing. I'm deciding how I'm going to photograph to
convey a certain mood, And it was a more mood
about depression in my mind, that they had so kindly,
blindly believed their dear leader about weapons of mass destruction
and everything, and the whole country was basically brought back

(01:47:33):
down to his knees, very similar to what's going to
be happening now. America's about to collapse, you know, you know,
all the stuff with the tariffs and everything and all
the roundup of the immigrants, the people that run the country,
you know, lack of empathy.

Speaker 1 (01:47:50):
I found it very reminiscent of Puss. Yes Fudal treads, Yes, Yes,
he minded me. If I shot out of the car
when the morning and you're amost sort of doing the
same thing in a sense that you were saying, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:48:06):
Weird how things you see later you discovered I didn't
really know poles were till after I had done it.
The same if I don't know if you know that
Mark Colin dark eyes, I had never seen that work,
and I'm selling it's like, oh my god, we had
the same vision. It's like I'm copying him, but how
can you know. It's like it's just like kind of
it's kind of like a way of seam. It's that
whole bit when you photograph, that whole bit. I left

(01:48:29):
that off, that bit about composition and trapping the viewer.
If there's a message I wanted, Let's say, if it
was in the first lady's diamond necklace and her dress.
If I show her eyes, You're never going to see
the necklace. You're never going to see the dress because
you're going to go to the eyes, so I would
in camera, I would do the eyes, but then I'm like, oh,

(01:48:50):
they're just trying to start. I would eliminate the eyes
and then all the noses bothering. Let me just crop
it at the lips to focus the viewer. And I
would do these odd in camera croppings, and because I
wanted to focus people in more on the fashion that
they were wearing, which ended up leading to this woman,

(01:49:10):
the editor in chief of Amica, wanting to work with
me because she loved the way I photographed Republicans. And
that's how I ended up falling, you know, going down
that rabbit hole of beauty and fashion. I had that thing.
I tell you the story of Somalia. When I came
out of Somonia, I went back to Paris. I spent

(01:49:30):
a week with Carl Laugerfeld. So I went from that
little girl cleaning in my pants to hanging out with
Carl Aaugerfeld in ninety two. And that's where I was
exposed to that fashion world, that beauty and the amount
of money that these people were spending on clothes and handbags,

(01:49:51):
just that whole world. And I remembered when I was
there I had a really really hard time looking at
the people. The people with Carl these beautiful He had
all these beautiful assistants, these model assistants and stuff, and
they were so friendly with me, this long haired kid
coming out of Somalia. It was like, who's this and

(01:50:11):
they were all they were all kind of like fawning
over me. But I couldn't look at them. I couldn't
look at them because they were too beautiful in the
sense of I would see my victims. If you listen
to the song painted Black became like a sound track
for me, you can't look at I had to turn away.
I wasn't turning away because of any kind of sexuality.

(01:50:32):
I couldn't look at them because I would see their
beauty and then their beauty would be mutilated. In my mind.
I would have these like dark flashbacks of a young
girl that I could see in the back of her head.
You know, there's no brain. You can see like a
mela and her blonde hair. So when you're looking at
somebody and you get these kind of visual flashbacks, is

(01:50:53):
you have to turn away. And so I was in
that world, dancing around it. So all of a sudden,
fast forward two thousand and nine, twenty ten, I'm working
for a fashion magazine in Paris and Milan and just
doing beauty and yeah, but at that point I had
I had through my politics. I had so detached from

(01:51:17):
the war photographer Moniker. I didn't even want even when
seven we did, we were going to be in Vanity Fair.
They had to do a group photograph and I was
in a suit, and they didn't want me in a suit.
They wanted me in like photo journalists clothing, and I said, no,
this is what I wear to work. I covered the
White House and I refuse to change. If you see

(01:51:38):
that photo, I'm in a suit.

Speaker 1 (01:51:39):
I didn't want to be in it.

Speaker 2 (01:51:41):
You know. They brought me all these scarves and Safari
clothings to put on. I'm not gonna wear any of that,
you know whatever. I kind of disturbed the photograph. I
look at it now, you know, But I wanted to.
I wanted to run away. I didn't want to. I
didn't want to rely on. Oh, I'm a war photographer,
and if I'm going to do politics, I'm want to
do it well. And if I'm going to do fashion,

(01:52:04):
I'm going to try to do it well and not
try to rely on the fact that I'm a war photographer.
It would able me to penetrate the whole like celebrity
and fashion world. Was the fact that I had photographed
presidents and world leaders. They would see that, and you know,
and the war photographer thing was just more of kind

(01:52:25):
of like a side note to them. It's in a
completely other world than those people. They don't really pay
attention to that stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:52:33):
You are quite toptual fashion photographer, though, if I'm allowed
to do I have. The problem is with that they don't.

Speaker 2 (01:52:40):
There a lot of times you're not allowed to do
what you kind of want to do, you know, if
you're not given the creativity. And the problem is with fashion.
To be honest with you, I wish I was still
doing it. But the problem is you have to to
do it well. You have to invest so much of
your own money because the if you're working for Vogues
or or any of these fashion magazines, your your day

(01:53:03):
rate is just a standard day rate, you know, five hundred,
five hundred euroo whatever it is. That's it, that's it,
and they expect you to pay for everything else, you know,
and uh, and with fashion you can't. You have to
if you're gonna if you have ten selects, you better
have ten different outfits. You can't have ten selects of

(01:53:25):
the same outfit. So it makes it very You can't
just get your friend who go out and photograph if
you do well. What I found hard is you make
a beautiful image in this beautiful outfit that's done, take
it off, because you can't make another masterpiece with that
same image, that same outfit, and then there's not gonna
want it. They're gonna want another masterpiece, but it better

(01:53:45):
have some other clothes on. So it's very It's not
as easy as you want, you know, in the sense
of to style it properly. And also with me, I'm
also trying to deliver a message in the photography I
don't like I want again, it has to have some
kind of message in what I'm trying to do with
the images, even when it's especially if it's fashion. I
just don't want to do pictures of people just wearing clothes.

(01:54:08):
I want to have some kind of message. Where I
live here, there's Scientologies headquarters in Clearwater, full of Florida,
and it's like this weird town. I'm dying to do
a project in there with some actors to create some scene,
but the scene with a message.

Speaker 1 (01:54:26):
Do you enjoy that real ownership of the competition?

Speaker 2 (01:54:30):
Yeah, I have problems sometimes with clients. It ended up
not working with me again because I don't do well
with doing something that I don't really like or want
to have my name on it, you know, and and trying,
you know, battling with somebody. No, I'm going to do
it this way. It's like, you know, I'm not I'm
not the best of.

Speaker 1 (01:54:52):
This might sound like a crazy question, Bob, you've made
a little films. You're going back to when you were
talking about your flashbacks and your dream the turmoil in
the head. It's your filmmaking and the way you're being
shift lensing, the way you've been playing with frames per second.
There's a weird, obstruct surreal element to these videos. It's

(01:55:13):
not when are you processing these dreams and where you
see the world in your head.

Speaker 2 (01:55:19):
It's trying to slow everything down so you can observe it,
almost like into a film. I want you to kind of.
There's so much visual stuff going on, and it's even
initially when I first started playing around with the video
in two thousand and six, I did this thing called
the deer Leader was a little sane. I like moving images,

(01:55:41):
but there's something about it's about I just want to
analyze the frame. I want to think about what's going
on there. I want to see this person walking down
the street. So in the essence, I'm just trying to
slow down the mine to observe. Especially when you're working
with that phantom camera high speed cameras, you're looking at time.

(01:56:02):
Just before you've captured time, meaning a single photograph, you
stop time. You know, it's like the cover of a book.
You stop time where the pages all that flip through
a book in your hand, all those other pages or
all those other time dimensions. When I say time dimension,
I'm just talking frames per second. Humans see somewhere, I
don't know, twenty four to fifty frames per second. I

(01:56:25):
don't know what it is, but that's what we see
at And when you start working in these other frame rates,
especially in the thousands of frames per second, you realize
that the reality is something that we can't see. Just
because we're seeing at this things, there are things that
are at other frame rates that we can't see. Infinity

(01:56:47):
in either other direction. So you start to pay a
lot more attention to trees and the sounds. Also, if
you record the audio at that same frame rate, if
you record a thousand frames per second at audio, your
two second audio clip is now a five minute audio file.

(01:57:10):
But there is sound there, and that sound is saying something.
It's just not at the wavelength or the frequency that
we listen to it. So you start to understand when
you record these extreme sounds at different levels, you hear things.
It's like the trees are talking. It's like when you

(01:57:33):
start to understand that life is life, and just because
we see it in one way, it doesn't mean that
that's all that's really I can go off on that,
but it's not. It comes down to me the power
of photography, and I think it's lost on everybody of
what it is. This magic of us being able to

(01:57:55):
stop time and look at it and analyze it. That's
what was so fascinating several hundred years ago when it
first was invented, they'd never seen That's one of the
first things they did. They started photographing their dead children
and as like they're alive, you know, setting up these
scenes to recreate it. And we take it for granted,

(01:58:15):
especially now with phones and everything else.

Speaker 1 (01:58:18):
But yeah, I was gonna ask you about the worst
of Does really the viewer ever really understand what emotion
and even the technical elements?

Speaker 2 (01:58:28):
No, everything is kind of lost. I mean, it's just
they just become generic. A gause is a prime example.
How many images of how many it just looks the same.
It becomes ineffective. It's ineffective. It's ineffective. If the message
is not getting across, something else must be done to

(01:58:50):
get the message across. And the problem is to get
the message across is so vile and so horrific. Western
society is won't stand that being allowed to show. It's
like gun violence in America. All you got to do
is show the police photos of the Sandy Hook school shooting,

(01:59:10):
publish them, put them on billboards. Show some five six
year old little girl with their head splayed open up
against a blackboard with the brain all there. I'm telling
you that's going to cause change. But we don't want
to see reality. We don't want to see reality of
some munition that's dropped on two Hamas terrorists, but it

(01:59:33):
obliberates thirty other people, turns them into vapor. Their DNA
is just splattered all over the wall. It's just criminal.
It's criminal us in the West, we complain about terrorists
and suicide bombers. So you guys are stupid, stupid. So
what they came in on a walked in with a

(01:59:55):
suicide vest and blew themselves on a bus. So what
we sit in McDill Air Force Base in an air
conditioned room flying some reaper drone that's gonna rip you
and your family apart, and then we go to dinner
and play with our kids. So the moralities there's no
So yeah, empathy for the suicide terrorist. You know, come on,

(02:00:20):
we've pushed these people to the is what takes. What
takes a Palestinian to get on a hang glider, fly
over a fence and go start massacring children and other
civilians would push that man to that level of insanity.
He's going to die, but such hatred. He's lost all

(02:00:42):
empathy for the Jewish people. He has no empathy. The
Palestinians aren't teaching empathy to their children because they can't
teach them empathy. You know, that's the problem. It's criminal.
I saw it, and I saw it in all these
operation just cause you know, all this restore hope all

(02:01:04):
the way we name our our military operations. You know,
when i'm when i'm when I embed myself with these soldiers,
they're not liberators. They're not liberators, they're conquerors. They're taking
out lives. They kill a thousand to save one, they
kill tell a thousand to save one hundred. That's not

(02:01:26):
morally right. There's another way to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
It's a much easier way to get some asaying, and
they know how to do it. It's called money. You
just pay them, you know whatever. Just just this guy
look at I look at my pictures, and I get
so disgusted. I just get so disgusted about discontinuation of

(02:01:49):
like you know, and like like Ukrainian, I'm all, Ukrainian,
defend yourselves. Ukrainians are defending us all from pure evil.
You live in that right empire. You know, finally Armenia
and Azerbaijan are finally breaking away from that nightmare. So
to me, I'm not saying men should not find Ukrainians

(02:02:12):
are not idiots with guns. Ukrainians are defending us all.
So I need to be clear on that. You know,
sometimes you can be you can be smitten and destroyed.
You have to rise up and protect your families, you know.
So yeah, that's part of my empathy. But I also
have empathy for these these poor Russians that have felt

(02:02:34):
felt themselves into a society that's being led by psychopaths.
The same way with in America. We are now being
led by psychopaths. And who knows what can happen in
this country and what this psychopathic government's going to ask
our young men to do. What we're going to invade Norway, Greenland, Panama, Canada.

(02:02:58):
It's stupid.

Speaker 1 (02:03:00):
Thank you. I've wanted to talk to you for a
long time. It's been really hot when doing a little
listening to you talk about your life as a photographer
and how you've collected Thank you so much for giving
me the opportunity to listen to you.

Speaker 2 (02:03:19):
Good luck and editing it down. But I tried to
be as honest as I could. And I had a
nickname that I picked up in Somalia that I carried
over into Yugoslavia was they called me mister Crazy. It
was even my radio call sign. And yeah, I feel good.

(02:03:43):
I feel like I need to talk at some point,
and I realized that I have a lot inside, and
I'm very isolated. I'm not involved with seven anymore. It's
kind of like a self imposed exile, so i can
concentrate on getting this stuff cataloged and archive so when

(02:04:05):
i'm dust that it's there. And that's kind of my.

Speaker 1 (02:04:10):
You know, I'm happy to talk about anythink you want again,
just give me a shot and I'll do.

Speaker 2 (02:04:16):
I really appreciate it, you know, don't don't give me
a heads up, and you can if you want to
start going into looking for pictures. But definitely, okay, thank
you so much, Christopher, all the best, tek Her, thank
you so much

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#25 Christopher Morris - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST

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