June 27 - The Photographer

I'm at a gallery opening for a career retrospective of my work when a woman asks me the question.
"How does it make you feel?"
That's what everybody always asks me when they see my work, the photos I've taken in Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Thailand, Russia, Gaza, etc. How does it make you feel?
But they already know what they think I should say, which is some sort of projection of how they think they would feel if their job was to take pictures of genocide, the work of death squads, the aftermath of natural disasters, and all the other stuff you see on the news every night.
Shell shocked, disturbed, depressed, words like that.
And it used to be that way, but the truth is it doesn't bother me anymore.
Sorry if that sounds blase, but it's true. I've been doing this work for almost 15 years. If I was still affected by it as much as I was when I started out, I would've killed myself years ago. And I don't know exactly when it was that I shut it all out, but I've gotten to the point where I don't even feel guilty about not caring anymore. This shit is just work to me. If I go out and I don't see something fucked up or disturbing, I'm not relieved. I'm disappointed.
It wasn't always this way, though. I still remember taking shots of child prostitutes younger than my nieces in Cambodia and laying in my bed that night crying.
Now when I see the same shit in Thailand I just scan the faces until I find a baby face that's visibly younger than the rest of them.
I remember seeing child soldiers in Congo and taking hundreds of shots and actually stressing over getting the exact right one, the one that captured the story, because it was important to me that people saw it, that people understood what was going on.
Now I just focus on the first barefoot kid I see with a machine gun and faraway eyes, snap the "loss of innocence" shot, and move on.
No matter where I go, when they see me with my camera, people always tell me in broken English to "show the world" what had happened, and it's their desperation that used to get me, and their belief that if people could just see the truth then they would have no choice but to do something real about it. And I can still remember taking it all to heart, feeling a responsibility to them.
Now I just wish they would shut the fuck up and let me do my job.
I remember shooting the aftermath of a suicide bomber in Iraq: 17 dead in a marketplace, five of them children. That was when I told my first wife I didn't want to bring a child into this world.
Now my second wife and I are expecting our third child in October.
I've shot a convicted adulterer getting stoned to death. I've shot Afghan girls with their faces scarred with acid. And I'm not going to stand here and say I'm not affected by it at all because that's not true. I'm still human. Yeah, I still get shaken sometimes. But I sleep fine every night.
And given the subject matter, it might sound strange to say this, but I enjoy what I do. Not in some disturbed morbid death-freak way. And not in some adrenaline junkie way, either. What I mean is I like getting a good shot. I feel good when I do my homework and I'm where I need to be when I need to be there and I capture the moment and I know that other people will see it.
It feels good.
For some reason, people are surprised when I make references to friends. They assume I should be a loner, but I'm not. I have plenty of friends, both in the media and otherwise.
I'm not incorrigibly cynical either. I give money to Oxfam and it's only partially out of guilt. I also think it will help in some small way, and I do want the world to be a better place. That's part of what drew me to this job. I wanted to show people the injustice and corruption and violence of the world and shake them out of their catatonia and move them to outrage and maybe even action.
But now? All this shit? It's just a job. And yeah I like it. And yeah, I do my best at it. But it doesn't really affect me. When I'm done at the end of the day, I leave it behind me.
And that's the truth. But people don't want to hear that. So I give them something that makes them feel OK and then we move on.
"A lot of what I see disturbs me, but that's part of the job."