Giles Duley recently got a tattoo on his right arm. Fittingly for a man whose photojournalism documents the long-term impact of war on human lives, it is a reproduction of Guernica, Picasso’s iconic anti-war painting from 1937. Sitting in his flat on the Hastings seafront, Duley describes how he fell asleep during the long and notoriously painful process; “I was out cold for three hours,” he laughs, lifting a fish roll to his mouth between sentences.
Three hours in the company of a tattoo machine was, I imagine, positively restorative compared to some of what he has witnessed in recent years. He has been spending long periods in Ukraine with the Legacy of War Foundation, the charity he founded to provide help to civilians living in conflict zones. Since a life-changing accident in 2011, when he stepped on a landmine while out with US troops in Afghanistan, Giles has been a triple amputee; he continues to visit and document how lives shape shift around war, advocating for people compromised by it. His photography focuses less on conflict itself than “what happens around it”, how civilians navigate life against a backdrop of brutality: “I don’t document war, I document love,” he tells me, “that’s a trite statement, I know, but what I mean is that you don’t see tanks, soldiers or planes in my pictures… you’ll find an old woman brushing her granddaughter’s hair, a mother feeding a baby, families cooking.”
When he is at home in Hastings, he touches base with sea and sky, an uncomplicated horizon with “no sense of change – it’s a counterpoint to everything else I see,” he says. Here, in his raised ground floor apartment overlooking the English channel, I see clues of his interest in everyday civilian lives – mostly, food – on every shelf: towers of cookbooks from myriad culinary canons, the ordered chaos of a tiny, well-stocked kitchen, giant jars of pickled broccoli, morels and cucumbers made by Ukrainian babushkas, which he has hauled back in suitcases. Leveling and deeply emotive, food is, he says, “a lovely way to start a relationship”, and he always tries to cook or eat with people prior to taking their picture.
Now 53, Giles came to Hastings from London over twenty years ago, drawn here by the sea and the idea of a simpler life. In the nineties, he was a successful fashion and music photographer, capturing the likes of Oasis, Blur, Pulp – icons of Britpop – during the heyday of British magazine publishing. “I’m good with people and my work was very simplistic. I’d never used lighting, or been in a studio – it was just about hanging out,” he tells me, adding that his subjects would often thank him for capturing their truest selves. But Giles “struggled to see [his] worth in it all”, and the flipside of the glamour was irresistible hedonism; in Hastings, he found a job in pub, which, if not an antidote to the destructive pleasure-seeking that had defined his time in London, did give him the community and clarity he craved.
At the pub he met someone looking for a carer for his severely autistic son. This piqued Giles’s interest; “it was very difficult for [the boy] to communicate about his life and tell his story,” he says, describing the cycles of self-harm, aggression and restraint that precluded people from really understanding. Giles suggested they start taking pictures together, which they could share with his doctors, psychologists, even family; it was an exercise that helped all parties, not least Giles himself. “It was a eureka moment for me,” he says, “I saw what photography could be: a way that people can tell their stories. I saw that I could be an advocate for others through my photography.” He tells me he doesn’t like it when his work is described as “giving voice to people”, though. “I hate this phrase. They have voices, but I’m there to amplify them.”
There are relatively few clues of that era in Giles’s flat now, brimming as it is with things he has collected in war zones – army helmets, water canteens, an ironic bust of Lenin given to him by a group of Ukrainian soldiers. This second iteration of his career started in Angola, where he spent a year capturing lives affected by the civil war. “Sometimes people describe me as a photojournalist, but I’m not. I'm an angry man with a camera,” he says, “I started [visiting war zones] post-9/11. I could see what was happening in Afghanistan, in Iraq, around the world, and I felt I wasn’t understanding what it was like for everyday people in those places, what was really going on.” I get the impression that the channelling of Giles’s anger with his camera isn’t just a question of spreading the word, of making the incidental atrocities of war visible to more eyes; it has also given him purpose, quelling the war of “depression and spiralling addictions” he was fighting with himself.
His working life isn’t without the odd “bad day at the office,” however. This is how he refers to the incident in Afghanistan; a defining day which does not define him; a day when the reporter became the story. He describes the 46 days he spent in intensive care, intubated and strapped to a bed, unable to communicate beyond blinks, “a sensory vacuum” – nothing to see, feel, taste – except for the sound of bleeping and the distinctive screams of burns victims in the neighbouring beds. He was in hospital for a year; he had 37 operations; “nobody thought I'd live, much less walk again, work again.”
Giles is perhaps uniquely placed to see what those compromised by war might need to live better lives independently, from increasing frontline ambulances in Ukraine, where 1600 medical facilities have been destroyed, to Land for Women in Rwanda, where Legacy of War has set up seven co-operative of 25 women, of which they have transferred ownership to women survivors of gender-based violence.
“I have this big belief that you can't empower someone else,” he says, “[but you can help them] to break down the barriers, and so [they] empower themselves. In my own recovery, I had an amazing squad of people that helped me with prosthetics, with support, with love. Everybody was there, but nobody could get me out of bed to walk again.” He had to do that himself. With the Legacy of War Foundation, his intention is to sit with people in their community and ask what the barriers are “to effect truly local, sustainable change, where the power is actually in the hands of the beneficiaries.”
The Guernica tattoo is on Giles’s only forearm, his only limb left intact. Giles has arguably lost so much, but from unimaginable trauma a philosopher has risen, a wry one too. On the back of his front door there is a plaque taken from a frontline; it reads ‘MINES DANGER’. He tells me that he taught himself to focus on what he could still do, and be the very best at it. “I might not be able to go skinny dipping, or run a marathon, but I can still see, I can still take a photo. And that way of thinking has saved me.” He has continued to visit war zones and to advocate for people living in them. He cooks (on Instagram, his @onearmedchef feed charts his kitchen adventures). He has been made the first United Nations Global Advocate for Persons with Disability in Conflict. “I always think that resilience is life’s gift, you can’t teach it,” he says, adding, “It was a far greater battle to fight depression [as a younger man] than it was to fight losing three limbs. And I think the strength I was given from that battle was what helped me get through the next one.”
Now Giles is working on a new exhibition, The Things They Carried, a collection of beautiful still lives (“a bit like perfume ads”) of soldiers’ water canteens from various conflicts during the last 100 years – all very similar, each differently customised by the owner it once had. He wanted to tell the story of war in one universal item, he says, a very different kind of photography from his reportage on the ground, but Giles has realised over the years that, whatever the project, the purpose is always the same, “Rather look at different conflicts, we should look at war as one,” he says, “the themes are the same: loss, displacement, long-term injury, disability, psychological trauma.”
Soon it will be 90 years since Guernica – considered to be one of the first instances in which civilians were deliberately targeted in an aerial attack, and the inspiration for both Picasso’s painting – and Giles’s tattoo. He talks about how normalised civilian casualties are now in wars all over the world. “As soon as you talk about individual conflict, it becomes political,” says Giles, unflinchingly, “Let’s talk about war. Let’s ask: why do we still kill as a way of settling an argument?”
Giles wears the TOAST Alfie Overdyed Stripe Trousers, Kite Stripe Cotton Shirt and Cotton Linen High Break Blazer. .
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Elena Heatherwick.
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