To collect the material for my book Index, I sifted through 30 years of photographs, trying to make sense of what I’ve seen and what these experiences have taught me.
Most of what I’ve learnt from photography came from being in places I had no business being. For the better part of 16 years I went where the world had come undone. Iraq. Afghanistan. Lebanon. Gaza. Wherever the map bled red. A passport stamped in ash and blood.
My job, as I saw it, was to make photographs that communicated something about what it felt like to be there. What it smelled like. The view from my shoes.
I want the viewer to connect with something emotional in the photograph. Something that cannot be explained with data but can only be understood with the heart. That’s the thing that matters.
Not the composition. Not the light. Not the cleverness of it. All of that is mechanics. Useful. Necessary. A kind of party trick.
