“Don’t take anything at face value” – Interview with war photographer Gary Knight

What was the spark that ignited your interest in photojournalism and took you on a journey from rural England to Southeast Asia?
Photojournalism was, for me, really an opportunity to be myself and to leave behind the expectations of others and an environment that I found limiting. It enabled me to go out into the world and discover something about it and about myself. The real spark was reading a book by Tim Page who made a similar journey in the 1960s, leaving England to go and photograph the American war in Vietnam. I felt that if he could do it, then so could I, because I saw similarities in our upbringing. We met in the mid-1980s and I asked Tim how I could start a career as a photojournalist. He told me that I could either get a job at a newspaper and wait for an interesting assignment to come along, or I could just go out there and do it. I chose the latter and went to Bangkok because it was cheap to live there, there were wars on both of Thailand’s borders and there were enough news organisations based in Bangkok to sell my work to.
 

Has your work always focused on documenting “tough topics” from conflict to human rights violations and poverty? If so, what motivated you to focus on these themes?
I have photographed many things, not all of them connected to human rights and poverty, but the principal focus of my work has been examining issues that I felt were urgent and important. My photography has always been at the social justice and humanist end of the spectrum because that is an extension of who I am and what has always motivated me. I have never felt the need to use photography to be creative.
 

In the early days of your career in Cambodia and later in the former Yugoslavia, how did you develop a sense of where to draw the line between what should and should not be captured through your lens?
Generally I try to photograph everything I see and then later reflect on what should and should not be shown, often in collaboration with editors and other professionals. We may then discuss what needs to be shown to inform the public and hold people to account. It is often difficult to make that decision when events are unfolding rapidly in front of you. Some images may also be useful in contexts outside of journalism, such as in war crimes tribunals.
 

You have covered many civil wars throughout your career, including your work in Zaire and Kosovo, for which you gained global recognition and won prestigious awards. How can photography contribute to dialogue or support conflict resolution?
I have never felt the need to use photography to be creative. Very few things I have seen and experienced as a journalist are as simple as they appear to be, and our view of the world is often shaped by oversimplification, bias and dogma. Like all forms of communication, well-researched and thoughtful photojournalism can reveal things we don’t know or that may be hidden from us. Photography, like other forms of storytelling, can help inform discourse and can trigger debate. It can hold people to account, it can memorialise and validate human experience. For example, at the VII Foundation we used photography to create a huge public project called “Imagine:Reflections On Peace”. In collaboration with legal scholars, former combatants, peace negotiators and human rights activists, we examined where peace processes have worked, where they haven’t, and we learned from countries we have photographed at war and at peace so that we can imagine and implement more effective peace processes going forward.
 

When you are surrounded by devastation or suffering on a daily basis, how do you stay resilient? Do you have a particular coping mechanism?
I am not sure that I am resilient insofar as I don’t have a suit of armour. I think I have been able simply to manage the pain or live with the discomfort and anxiety that comes from this. One of the things that has always helped me to put my experience in context is that I have always been photographing people in a much worse situation than I am. By that, I mean that my country has not been at war. My home has not been destroyed. I have not lost my family to violence. So whenever I have felt fragile, I think about the people I am photographing and whose lives I am documenting. That enables me to put my own life in perspective.
 

Can you ever be a neutral observer when performing your work? In other words, can you ever take your own feelings and world view out of the equation?
I think one of the challenges of being a journalist of any kind is overcoming your own prejudice and that is a very difficult thing to do. I like to start from a place of neutrality, more or less, but my job is to understand what is going on. If I see something on the ground that indicates that one side is the perpetrator of something and the other side is the victim – if it is that clear cut – I think it is my job to say so. But I think it is very important as a journalist to try to be fair and to be open to having your own prejudice and your own lack of understanding challenged and to examine that constantly.
 

Does photojournalism have a role to play in combating the spread of disinformation or “fake news”?
Yes, and tools that allow the public to see if and how images have been manipulated are key to achieving that. Differentiating between the work of professional journalists and everyone else is a challenge that we are confronting. The work we do at the VII Foundation in training young visual journalists in the majority world is a core and critical component of this. In countries like Myanmar and Congo, we need to have informed and reliable local journalists who are trained to the highest international standards if we hope to have useful information that is essential to making critical investment and political choices.
 

With the advent of new technologies, we have seen a huge shift in the concept of authenticity. How big a threat does AI pose to authenticity?
I think that AI, for all its benefits, is a massive threat to journalism. Forget for a moment the research side where AI has its uses; the ability to fabricate imagery is extraordinary now and in two or three years’ time, it will probably be impossible to differentiate between what is real, what was witnessed by somebody and what was created on a phone or computer. And that is a real threat not only to journalism but to society. It is a threat to democracy. I think authenticity comes through authorship and from bearing witness. When consuming information, we need to know that it was researched properly and tested. We have to be able to make assumptions that what we are looking at in the press is real and that it happened. If we can’t believe that, then the press has no function and democracy is seriously challenged.
 

You referred earlier to the VII Foundation, which you co-founded more than two decades ago. Can you tell us more about its mission?
The VII Foundation has three areas of work: Report, Campaign and Educate. First, we initiate ambitious long-form reporting projects engaging multiple disciplines. Whereas our journalism used to end with publication, we now see the act of publishing as the beginning of the project, as we use it to engage in a public discourse. Second, we campaign for a free press and advocate for journalists’ safety, especially in conflict zones and in the majority world. This can include hazardous environment training or trying to help journalists in serious jeopardy. Our third and principal activity is education, and we are now the leading trainer of visual journalists in the majority world.
 

Do you believe unreservedly in the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” or are there some subjects so raw or stories so complex that they are still best told in writing?
Well, I believe we need multiple perspectives to understand anything. I do not subscribe to the view that pictures are worth a thousand words, or that some things are so complicated they are best told in writing. Good storytelling sometimes requires complex long-form narrative storytelling that provides context, and sometimes it needs condensing to one single image to have immediate impact.
 

If you had to offer one piece of advice to young photojournalists starting out today, what would it be?
Don’t take anything at face value.
 

If you had the opportunity to be present on the front line and to capture images of one momentous event in history, what would it be and why?
It would be D-Day for sure. I can't think of any one event in the last century that was more terrifying, more powerful and more impactful. I think it would have been the most incredible thing to test oneself under those conditions and to try and tell that story. After all, it was not only a massive strategic story but the most intense human story. I believe that would be the hardest assignment and the most rewarding assignment ever.
 

The latest edition of EFG’s InTalks magazine features a selection of photos taken by Gary Knight.