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A couple of years after the “Arab Spring” (2011), my photography changed. I moved from Morocco where I was running a mountain tourism company, to the UK where I did a MSc in Post-Conflict Development. I stopped guiding and started working in the humanitarian NGO sector, initially in Sudan, then Iraq, then Afghanistan.
Photographing mountains, pretty much exclusively, quickly became a thing of the past. Now my context was war, displaced people and misery. One in which I was initially reticent about taking photos as it just didn’t “feel right”.
As with Picasso’s Guernica, and evidenced by children that lived in Mosul during the entire time of ISIS, conflict changes the subjects depicted but creativity lives on.
Indeed during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid 90's, artists continued to create underground whilst musicians performed concerts with the background noise of sniperfire. In this context, art becomes a tool for survival.
For a game that originated in 6th century India before moving to Persia (Iran) and then finally finding its footing in Spain thanks in large part to the spread of Islam, chess is taken very seriously in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
I rumbled onto an intense match between some local champions, watched on eagerly by a disapproving, gesture waving, chain smoking men-only group. I tried to initiate some conversations anxious that my camera wouldn't give another reason for two finger gestures - or worse.
Beautiful in colour. Fragile in nature. Resilient in thriving.
The red poppy worn around the world in remembrance of battlefield deaths has nothing to do with the blood shed in the brutal clashes of World War I - as I once thought.
Instead, it symbolises the wild flowers that were the first plants to grow in the churned-up soil of soldiers' graves in Flanders, Belgium. Little else could grow in the blasted soil that became rich in lime from the rubble.
When it comes to defining words such as "success" and "failure" - what do these mean in the context of mountaineering? Reaching the summit may seem the obvious "success" definition - but what about coming back down alive regardless of whether the summit was reached? Surely that could be a success, as dying on the mountain, would, in most people's eyes, be seen as a tragic failure…
From "Where the Streets Have No Name" to "Street of Dreams", my former classmates U2 (yes!) - have journeyed.
I'd like to think, I have, in my own way of course - also journeyed.
Where Bono, Edge, Adam and Larry have written and played about social division, poverty, and religious conflict, I've photographed. Not literally in the same places they sing about, but in places like Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia.