The Tao of War Photography

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40. Learn what “Kill the Messenger Syndrome” means. If you cover world nastiness and your stuff’s in the public eye, sooner or later you’re going to piss off some windbag somewhere.

41. Chances are that your most vehement detractors have never walked a mile in your war-zone moccasins, or experienced anything more dangerous than a broken lawn chair.

42. A general rule: if you meet another photographer while on assignment and invite him to visit you at home sometime, he will invariably arrive when he’s broke.

43. Australian photographers, after a long night of drinking, have the best aim with their vomit... the record for my guest bedroom includes hitting the floor, the window, the dresser, the pillows, the bed and three of the four walls (only the ceiling and the far wall escaped this herculean hurl).

44. From our “Coincidence or Not?” department: once upon a time a kind and altruistic non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the horrors of a bloody, long-running ethnic civil war raised a large sum of money in order to put out a book on the subject. A publisher supposedly dedicated to putting out top-quality photography books agreed to take their money and wrest control of the project. The first casualty was the paying group’s choice of cover photograph: the publisher’s Exalted Executive Director/Editor-in-Chief decided that he didn’t want a gun on the cover (remember, this is a book about a brutal civil war). The photo in question ended up inside the book, reproduced in such a manner as to make it look out of focus, despite the fact that the original transparency and even the duplicate were tack sharp. And to make matters worse, the book’s reproduction included a big scratch or piece of hair snaking its way through this same photograph... Coincidence, or not??? Moral of the story: next time you give a large amount of cash to a book publisher, use a different aperture.

45. If you are “detained” by soldiers at the airport in Kinshasa, you get a free tour of the airport’s more dark and remote outbuildings. You will immediately call to mind the movie slogan “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream.”

46. In situations like #45, your host for the event and tour guide to the interrogation room will be the hulking and half-witted Sergeant Thug-Most-Likely-to-Thump-You, whose command of the English language consists of two words: “Give money.” He uses these two words in almost metronome-like fashion, sandwiched between examples of a much more universally understood language: “Give”-whack!-“money!”-whack!-“Give”-whack!- and on and on.

47. If you are detained by British soldiers in West Belfast, you get locked in an armored vehicle, driven to a heavily-fortified station, then locked in an interrogation room... no tea, no crumpets. Say goodbye to your film.

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