Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Adventurous photojournalist who wrote a bestselling book and made TV documentaries on Afghanistan, and photographed Britain's social classes.
On the island
Eight records
I think they really opened up for me that there is another world out there. I came from a a a privileged, if not very privileged, background. Certainly what appealed to me was having my eyes opened to other parts of the world.
The Girl from IpanemaFavourite
Stan Getz, João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto
It relates completely to that experience, which is Stan gets his version of the girl from Ipanema, the original one, and really brings back to me everything that sums up the Rio and Brazil.
Well he wasn't at Chelsea, he was an art school graduate, but a true artist, I think, lived with incredible passion, his disability, everything I he's a sort of hero with incredible energy.
This um really sums up Afghanistan because it's a love song, but deeply rooted in every love song in Afghanistan, there is some tragedy and it's called Lehli Kwadam as Binoi Bamast, which is music from Herat, the first city that I ever visited in Afghanistan.
Completely different. Cuales la idia by Tito Puente and I would like to add that this is a song that basically reminds me that my nomadic life isn't just one aspect. I'm now very much in love with a woman that I met in Colombia who in fact was negotiating with paramilitaries and guerrilla factions on the conduct of war, that there are rules and conventions that apply to people who take up arms.
My documentary work took me to Zambia to focus on the problems of HIV AIDS, and it was mind-destroying, to say the least, what I found there. I mean, literally, it was the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every month. Nevertheless, there's this incredible spirit and soul about people living in sub-Saharan Africa, and this song for me reminds me of my nights in Livingston, where every evening everyone gathered to dance and drink, and particularly to listen to this song.
Well, the reason I've chosen this is is my children, when initially I taught them English and subsequently French, it was a song that they enjoyed singing. And still today, occasionally at mealtimes, we might break into song. But the remarkable thing is that they can sing this both in English and French.
This is a song that originally was written by Stevie Wonder. More optimistic when he composed the song, I feel, than the days when this song was around in the mid-90s when I basically came back to Britain because I didn't really know anything about Britain. I'd rarely travelled out of London and I wanted to discover something of my own roots, but found a very different Britain to the one that I'd expected to find because I ended up finding maybe a Britain that was very similar to my foreign travels, people who are marginalised, and often their aspirations were to go into, as it were, illegal activities. And this song in a sense represents those days.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:13Have you ever found a picture so painful that you've turned away from it?
Sometimes I I actually want to give up taking the pictures, for example in Sierra Leone where men, women and children were deliberately mutilated, had their arms and hands hacked off. Taking portraits of some of those victims I found incredibly difficult, difficult particularly because of probably reviving in them the memories of those terrible moments that took place for themselves. And so I suppose I'm driven back and back again because voices go unheard.
Presenter asks
4:58What was your first big adventure?
My first adventure was at the age of thirteen when I announced to my parents that I was going to Paris for a week. And they didn't believe me, and I set off. I had no passport tickets or anything, and I managed to get to Paris.
Presenter asks
6:18Can you remember the motive then? Was it just you wanted to put yourself alone in an unknown place?
No, I was really curious about other cultures, languages. Living in Switzerland, you hear many different languages, and I wondered where all of these people came from. And I was also inspired by art. I was very keen to either become an architect or an artist, a painter. So part of it was people and places, and to see the kind of great monuments and works of art.
The keepsakes
The book
Gabriel García Márquez
I think the first really big journeys that I made were through Latin America, and it conjures up all the kind of rich aspects of life in Latin America, very complex interweaving of so many different stories.
The luxury
pencils and watercolours with the paper
I think without any question of a doubt, pencils and watercolours with the paper. It's something that at the moment I'm very frustrated because I don't have the time to go back to my first love.
Presenter asks
18:43How does having witnessed such scenes [of atrocities] affect your view of the situation today?
Well, I think again we don't hear enough from ordinary Iraqis. It's impossible for ordinary Iraqis to voice their opinions. I still have contacts with Kurds in the north of the country, and they certainly want this regime to end. They want a quick change of regime now. And it brings me to think of what happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, that it was a vile regime, and the only way that they were going to be removed was by force.
Presenter asks
26:39How old are [your adopted children] now?
They are now sixteen, eighteen and nineteen.
“I think it's very difficult to be objective, certainly when you get involved in these very difficult areas of the world. And for me, the most important thing is people's lives, how they're trying to get on in very difficult circumstances.”
“I think it's very important to give people a voice, people who usually go unheard. We hear the politicians, they have a platform, whereas most of the people that I focus on don't have that platform.”
“I think what we don't see is the terrible trauma for everyone who lives through violence, whatever violence, it can be violence within our own societies.”