Conflicts of interest

Updated

Meet Sebastian Rich, a photojournalist of war and occasionally peace, who takes his audience inside the world's deadliest conflicts.

"I remember the screams, those screams are just piercing, those sounds will never leave you."

Photojournalist Sebastian Rich has spent 43 years walking into warzones as others flee. He has been shot, kidnapped and subjected to a mock execution that left him vomiting and crying, imagining the sound of his own head exploding.

A regular in refugee camps, he captures the faces and stories behind the fleeting news headlines.

"Some silly bugger once said war benefits no man. It's been paying my rent since I was 16, unfortunately," he says.

"It's sad to say but photographers don't have to work very hard to get a shocking picture."

WARNING: This story contains graphic images and accounts of war.

The 62-year-old Briton, who describes himself as dyslexic almost to the point of illiteracy, turned to photography after running away from school.

There was a stint as a fashion photographer – "I was crap because I kept looking at women" – before a career as a "photographer of war, and occasionally peace" was born.

Rich insists he's not on a crusade to end war, though admits, in a naïve way he hopes one of his images might be a catalyst for change.

But he says thrusting pictures of horror and mayhem down a viewer's throat turns people away. Instead, it's about giving his audience a glimpse into the lives of those he photographs, and leaving them to piece together the rest.

Unseen enemies

Rich has covered every major conflict of the past 40 years.

His first – the "so-called" Troubles in Northern Ireland – came after he was mistaken for a newsreel cameraman and decided, in his words, to bullshit his way through.

"I never know why they were called the Troubles, it was bloody war," he says.

The following day 20 bombs went off in Belfast, his baptism by fire.

Rich's first foreign assignment took him to El Salvador's civil war, to replace a cameraman killed on the job.

"I left the newsroom full of bravado — I'm going to war, I'm a big shot," he says now.

"I remember being in a hotel in Miami watching the footage this dead cameraman had shot on the news and I just started crying, burst into tears, what the f*** have I got myself into?"

Rich's best friend and mentor was killed while he was there.

But for all the horror he has seen, it was the unseen enemy of Ebola that really unsettled the veteran photographer.

"I was a coward when I was asked to go and cover Ebola, f*** that," he says.

"Bombs and bullets you just take your chances, but germs on the doorknob, I don't want to go that way. I wasn't brave enough."

Eyes of the innocents

Rich is familiar with the soundtrack of war, but says the screams of a young girl undergoing female genital mutilation still haunt him.

"I was once – I can't even remember which country it was – invited to sit in the room next door to some old f***ing horrible crone performing an FGM on a teenage girl," he recalls.

"I remember the screams, those screams are just piercing."

Rich admits his role as a father compounds the impact of much of what he sees, adding war's youngest victims "always bite into the soul".

"It's terrible for grown-ups but grown-ups understand what's going on. They understand it's a war," he says.

"A little tiny child of four or five, someone comes along and shoots their parents in front of them, they have no clue what's going on.

"It's that horror in the innocent's eyes."

He says he lost the plot when he met young leukaemia patient Sabina in Tuzla, Bosnia, who had striking similarities to his eldest daughter.

Rich downed tools and tried to persuade British UN forces to get her through the frontline to a hospital in Split, to the medication she desperately needed.

They refused — do it for one, you must do it for all.

"Sabina, when we finally got her out with some help, died in the coastal town of Split, but it was all too late, we failed miserably," he says.

Rich went on to name his youngest daughter after Sabina.

But for all the horror, there are success stories like four-year-old Nyajima-guet, who Rich met while in South Sudan.

Severe acute malnutrition had stripped the little girl to a skeletal nine kilograms.

Braced to witness her death, Rich visited the hospital ward daily.

To his surprise, he found her getting stronger and stronger.

"In the end, there she was with big smiles with mum and dad. Yes! This works," he pauses.

"Sometimes."

'The sin-eater'

While not a man of religion, Rich draws a comparison between his work in warzones with that of a sin-eater, a Roman Catholic Church priest from medieval times who absolved the sins of the most hideous people.

"You're sucking in these people's sins and they get some kind of cathartic value out of that," he says.

Rich listens — he sits with his subjects, it's emotional for those on both sides of the camera.

"When I was younger, I would just get in there and shoot and forget about it but now I spend time ... I will not just go in and hose these people down," he says.

"I go in and sit down and chat ... the photography side of it is almost by-the-by. I know this sounds high and mighty but it's just a gentler way of getting people's stories."

Collateral damage

Rich is quick to admit he's "shit scared" on assignments, but says you soon learn the tricks to surviving, where many don't.

"It's like being a plumber for 40 years, you know where the water's coming from so you kind of work it out," he says.

"But it doesn't always work because I've been shot three times."

In 1983, he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Lebanon, medevaced out and patched back together.

Not long after, Rich trained as a paramedic, his way of "not just being the wanker standing there with a camera" when the bullets rain down.

"I understand the pain, I wouldn't want to be left lying on the ground, with someone photographing me without intervening somehow," he says.

"If I come across a wounded soldier, I'll very quickly rattle off the shot as I'm walking towards him, put down the camera, get my kit out and if there's not a medic around, I'll treat him."

Then there was the Sarajevo shoot-out — Rich with a camera, a sniper with his gun — which saw the photographer shot in the face.

Rattling off his catalogue of injuries, he mentions the time he was shot in the chest in Bosnia.

"It cracked a few ribs and put my heart out of sync and set my flak jacket on fire, much to the amusement of those I was with," he laughs.

"And then there was the rather unpleasant experience here in Beirut of being kidnapped and mock executed."

'The worst possible thing'

When he heard the unloaded gun go click, Rich vomited and cried while his kidnappers burst into laughter.

"When it happened to me, when the hammer was pulled back and there was a click, I shat myself, I pissed myself, screamed for my mum and lay on the floor beating my fists.

"That's the reality. Maybe some braver man might handle it better but it's the worst possible thing. You think you're going to die on that spot."

Rich now knows the Arabic screams of "kill him, kill him, kill him" were for the drama.

"They cock the Kalashnikov, pull it back to get a bullet in the chamber and it's a noise that I know very well," he says.

"You know the next sound is the sound you're not going to hear because that's the sound of your head exploding.

"It's almost like taking a baseball bat and hitting you in the back, they've taken all the breath out."

It was 1983 and his kidnappers were chasing money, rather than a political statement, and Rich and his colleagues were later released.

Why, despite the close calls, does he continue to charge into the world's worst conflict zones?

"It's the human brain's great ability to put anaesthetic in when you need it."

Trading bullets for ballet

And then perhaps there's the ballet, Rich's "pro-bono cathartic photography" at some of the world's great dance schools.

The son of an artist father and a musician mother, Rich dismisses suggestions ballet is a tactic to preserve his sanity when faced with the horrors of war.

"It's not like I'll take this [war photography] pill, and then take a different pill [ballet photography] ... it's just something I love doing."

Instead, Rich had an epiphany after he was asked by the United Nations to host an exhibition at the National Press Club in Washington.

"Everyone kept saying these photographs are beautiful and they kind of are because a lot of war photography throws up a beauty in it somehow," he says.

"After that exhibition, I decided I wanted to take a photograph of something that's really beautiful and when I hang it up on a wall, and someone says 'that's beautiful, what's the story behind that?', I can just say 'there is no story, it's a beautiful dancer doing a beautiful thing with his or her body' and that's the story."

"I love with a passion photographing dance in all its forms, so thankfully I've found something else rather than rotting corpses."

Sebastian Rich's work can be found on his website.

Topics: photography, unrest-conflict-and-war, human-interest, human, england, lebanon, syrian-arab-republic, afghanistan, bosnia-and-herzegovina

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