Afghanistan Diaries olympus Afghanistan diaries

Our first ever campaign together as a team.  The ads featured Chris Steele-Perkins’ photographs from Afghanistan’s civil war in 1996, at the time a largely forgotten conflict. Steele-Perkins, then president of Magnum, had been unable to persuade either The Guardian or The Independent to run a feature using his photographs. Our campaign, he told us, was his way of ensuring his work appeared in magazines; in the end they ran as spreads in The Independent, British Journal of Photography and GQ.

The Afghans have a device for blowing up land mines. It’s called a human being.

There are worse places than Afghanistan. Like Toxteth.

For the last seventeen years Afghanistan has been ruled by a Russian. Mikhail Kalashnikov.

I could shoot everything safely with a long lens. I could also get a job working in a bank.