No More War

Surrounded by keepsakes and mementos from his travels and career, we were privileged to sit down with Giles Duley at home in St Leonards. The table top is laden with stacks of books, lists and objects carefully curated for ongoing projects.

What first sparked your interest in photography?

Giles.  I was in the United States on a sports scholarship, boxing and playing American football. I was hoping to go to the University of Southern Mississippi; I was a Yeovil, Somerset lad, so quite the cultural change for me. After a car accident, I was flown back to the UK and told I would never play sports again. I was 18, in a hospital bed with no idea what I would do next. I’m not academic; I’m dyslexic and had already been held back a year at school. I had no possibility of going to university.

While I was in the hospital, my godfather passed away. The week he died, he’d bought an Olympus OM10 camera and a book by photographer Don McCullin. So when I next saw his widow Anita, she gave them to me. So I looked through the book at Don McCullina’s photographs, at these stark black and white images of the Vietnam War, famines in Bangladesh and Biafra. And I’d never seen photographs that made me feel so emotional. Until then, I didn’t realise a picture could do that. In that era, the 1990s photographs were quite precious things, as we weren’t online yet. So when you saw a photograph that really moved you, it’s not like you can suddenly Google Don McCullina’s photography and see thousands of images. You had to search for a book; it made photographs even more precious.

So I kind of knew that’s what I wanted to do straight away. And so I had this Olympus camera. I damaged my knees in that car accident. So I was on crutches for a while. But I remember going for walks and taking photographs of anything. I made any walk look like a battlefield, dark and gloomy because I was thinking about Don McCullina’s photos.

I had intended to become a war photographer like Don McCullina; I was also excited by his adventurous life, travel and everything that went with it. But, because I had some friends in bands, and I loved hanging out with them, getting wasted, and they were all doing relatively well. Being a photographer was a way to hang out with them without being a musician. I couldn’t play the guitar or sing and was not interested in being a groupie. It was before everyone had a camera on their phone, and every band had a photographer; a single photographer they’re connected with because it’s part of their whole image is how they’re portrayed.

Suddenly, I was on tour with bands, hanging out with bands, and I loved it. When I was 20, I went to Bristol to do a foundation art course where you learn the basics. Being in Bristol was great. It was the time that Massive Attack’s Blue Lines album came out. There was Portishead, Tricky, and a great music scene.

Then I went to study photography at Bournemouth Art College, which at the time was supposed to be the place to be, especially for fashion photography. I got on the course with a borrowed portfolio; I had just started photography and borrowed other people’s photographs. I remember Tony, the head of the course, a crazy old character, looked at my portfolio and said, you’re so full of sh!t. I was young and nervous. I said, sorry? He said none of those photographs are yours, are they? I said a couple of them are. And he said, yeah, the sh!t ones. He said, you’ve pulled it off; you managed to talk about every other photograph you hadn’t taken, pretending it was yours. Half the secret in this job is the bullsh!t! You’ve got that side sorted, we can teach you the other side.

But I got chucked off within a year. I wanted to take photographs, make money, and hang out with bands. It was an HND course, so there were modules, and I had to write essays; I’m dyslexic, I hated writing at the time, and struggled with it. And I thought I didn’t come here to write. Eventually, down the line, they gave me an honorary master.

How did you develop your photography skills and start to pick up work?

Giles.  So I went to some magazines in London and just started showing them my work. In pre-internet days, you had to see somebody physically and show them your portfolio. I looked through all the music magazines, and I thought there was no point doing something utterly different to what they do because the editors obviously like that style. But to break it down, I would look at magazines, and I might see that they’ve got perfect black-and-white studio photographs. They’ve got excellent colour studio photographs. They got awesome black-and-white location stuff. What is it that they’re missing?

I noticed that Select Magazine didn’t have substantial colour location work. So I shot my portfolio to suit them with the help of friends. It wasn’t really in my style of photography, but fitted that gap in Select Magazine. I then couldn’t get a meeting because I  didn’t know anybody. So I used
to wait in the lifts and spent days going up and down until the picture editor, Simon, was there. We started to talk, and I lied about going to Q Magazine in the same building. I said when I finish my meeting there, should I pop in and see you? And he said, yeah, great! So that’s how I got my first break, and I had a job within a couple of weeks; a band called Shed Seven up in Edinburgh. I was like, what have I done? Because now I had actually to do a shoot, I’d never assisted. So I had no idea what a shoot was, and that sounds a really stupid thing to say, but again, it is before you go on YouTube and check things out. What happens on a photo shoot? I’ve just taken pictures of my mates before.

It was October time in Scotland, I met the band, and it was raining. I didn’t know how to use flash or have a flash. I had shot everything in my fake portfolio on a really low ISO colour film that was really saturated. So I found a location at Arthur’s Seat with amazing tall wheat growing, and as we pulled up in the minivan, the rain stopped. Rick took his shirt off, and stood in this wheat field as the sun came out. That image was used as the cover because they loved it so much. Everyone asked how I lit it like that in the winter. And I was like, no idea. That shoot and that image was my break.

I would watch documentaries. I watched Annie Leibovitz on Arts Night; she used softboxes for lighting. I didn’t know what they were; the next day, I went into a camera shop saying she had a big glowing thing. And they’d be like, you mean a softbox? I was like; I don’t know. So I’d buy it, come home, and then my mates and I would try to put it up. Then I taught myself photography; every time I had a pay cheque, I’d buy some equipment and figure out how to use it.

I get asked a lot how did I break into the industry? You have to make your own space because there will never be a magazine, for example, putting a job application out for a photographer. There are so many photographers out there, more so than ever in the sense of Instagram. The availability of amazing talent worldwide that you can grab from your phone is unbelievable. So the competition is enormous. So, you can’t sit at home and wait for somebody to call you because you’ve done all the right things.

When I was doing tryouts for American football in the States, the colleges had already decided on most scholarships. And then they had open sessions where virtually anyone could turn up and prove their worth. And I realised very quickly that I was not anywhere near good enough. A few hundred excellent athletes, running around, catching balls, and the coaches used to stand up on towers watching everything. I realised I was never going to stand out. So I started turning up in a pinstripe suit with a thermos of tea; everyone else was in their tracksuits. I knew people would be looking and making fun of me, but I knew the coach noticed me.

I realised then with photography, I was not going to be noticed because I wasn’t the best photographer. I was doing nothing particularly unique, and I would have to find a way to ensure my work was seen.

My strongest asset is the way I get on with people. And you can’t prove that in your portfolio because if you’re photographing your mates, that’s one thing, but what will you do if you meet a superstar? So once I was in there, I could hang out with people and then be comfortable with them, and they’d let me take photographs.

There are two ways I classify photographers in the work that I like, visionary and reactionary. Visionary is the high-end fashion and art photographer. In fashion, there is a photographer called Nick Knight, he was working in the nineties, and now he’s working with incredible digital techniques that nobody else uses. So Nick Knight has a vision of how he wants his photograph to look and creates that.

At the other end is the reactionary; for example, you could stand somebody against a white background, and I react to that person in the photograph and who they are. And that is me.

I always wanted to be more visionary, but I realised at a certain point I wasn’t, and I had to play on my strengths. I am good at talking with people, just chatting with them. Then when they’re in front of the camera, people often look at my photographs and say the subject looks relaxed and natural. When you find your gift or skill, you can stop beating yourself up if you’re not great at lighting, let’s say. If I’ve got an hour to do someone’s portrait, I will spend 50 minutes talking to them because ten minutes of taking photographs is quite easy. That 50 minutes of chatting and hang out is the most important part.

It’s a fascination with people. I’m interested in people, listening and engaging with them. So if you can capture that in a photograph, you have won.

How did that part of your career come to an end?

Giles.  After ten years of doing that, I became frustrated by it. I had always wanted to be the best photographer. I wanted to be Mario Testino, Nick Knight, Juergen Teller or whoever. I wanted to be on the cover of every magazine. But, when I look back now, I was relatively successful. I was shooting for French Vogue and GQ, travelling around the world and making a good living. But I saw it as a failure because it wasn’t the best. And probably, my talent wasn’t enough to take me to the very top, or my dedication to my abilities was not sufficient that I was going to become one of those great photographers. So I’d get frustrated by my limitations.

On top of that, celebrity culture was coming in. As a portrait photographer, I might be asked to photograph somebody because they’ve been on Big Brother. That didn’t work because the engagement with people wasn’t there, and the pictures felt vacuous.

I didn’t like how women were portrayed in many magazines. Every woman has to be half-naked in every shoot. It’s OK if a woman felt she wanted to be sexy and appear in underwear, but I’d been on shoots where they didn’t want that, and they were pressured.

So everything was messing around in my head, and I wasn’t happy. When you are relatively successful, travelling around the world, hanging out with bands, doing all that cool stuff, and you’re not happy, you question everything.

It climaxed when I was shooting in London with a young actress. Her agent and the magazine editor said she had to do shots without her top on. And she was crying and they were virtually shouting at her; well, she can f*ck off then. I thought this was not why I fell in love with photography. The story is I threw all my cameras out the window and smashed them in the road outside the Charlotte Street Hotel. But it was more like I threw them on the bed. A little hissy fit, but it was a very bouncy bed, and they flew out the window and smashed.

Is that when you moved down to the coast?

Giles.  In 2003 when I was 32, I packed up and moved down to Hastings. I didn’t want anything to do with photography. I didn’t know what to do; I was very depressed. I spent the first six months living in the old town but didn’t know anybody in Hastings. It was a random move. I just wanted to be by the sea. I was in a stupor for pretty much a year, drinking, taking drugs and not in a good place.

Then I started meeting a few people and working in the Hastings Arms, which I managed at weekends. But, honestly, we just got wasted all the time over three years. I didn’t want anyone to know about anything I’d done; again, it was before people could Google it. So I hid from it all; I didn’t care about my life or where I was going.

Then I got a full-time job doing care work in Crowborough, looking after Nick, who was 19 and has autism. I was Nick’s live-in carer for two and a half years. We are friends, we still see each other regularly, and I see the family. Nick always says I was really helpful; he needed support 24/7. It gave me purpose in life when I couldn’t see any purpose. Supporting someone else meant that even though I was depressed, I got up because it gave me a sense of well-being that I was doing something helpful in the world. It was the first time I could see the positive and direct impact I had on someone else’s life.

Then I started to think, well, maybe I could use my photography to do something similar, rather than it being about my ego or the ego of bands. Photography is a pure way of storytelling, so I could amplify their voices and advocate for them. So, I started to document Nick’s life and work with Nick to tell his story because he struggles with verbal communication, and we could edit them together.

I realised the power of photography to help somebody tell their story. So that’s what I decided to do. I was still working in the bar but taking time off to visit Angola, for example. I’d travel there to document stories. I would self-fund each visit because I didn’t want to be held back by editors again. Like my move to Hastings, I wouldn’t know anyone when I arrived. So I found somewhere to rent. I lived there for about four or five months, and then I’d contact local non-profit organisations and ask, can I come and make some photographs? It was a pure instinct to make photographs and not worry about making money from them. So I would fund it by doing the care work and other things.

So, that sounds like the beginning of a new chapter in your life.

Giles.  Well, I got a job in London doing care work, which was live-in. So I had no rent to pay and worked six weeks without a day off. Then used that money to go off on a trip which I’d fund myself, come back and work and so on.

After a few years of doing that, my pictures started getting published and I was a finalist in the Amnesty Media Awards. And although I didn’t win, I was one of the final three photographers. I took a night off my care job to attend the award ceremony. The place was filled with incredible photographers and filmmakers. I kept the awards programme because all of the other images had logos of news agencies alongside them. Mine didn’t have anything. It’s my name because nobody had supported it. I don’t mean nobody supported me; I mean that I had made it happen.

By funding projects myself, it gave me complete freedom to tell the stories how I wanted. So it’s possible, but you must believe that nobody would do these stories otherwise.

There is a good image I did early on in my documentary career in Angola. It’s a beautiful photograph of a community of widows living in these semi-derelict buildings that had been a Catholic mission. Their partners had been killed during the civil war. It was a local priest that told me, you should go and photograph there. So I went, and it was how he’d described it; an editorial dream. I thought I needed to be making dramatic pictures. My unconscious bias told me a documentary photograph is supposed to be reverential, and that’s what I’m supposed to do. And I was imprinting my vision of humanitarian photography on the lives of those people and creating that.

The first day I turned up, all the women ran away. Understandably, this strange white guy, me, turned up in their area. They were already worried about government forces. I would go back every day and sit there, and that was one of my first lessons about being a good documentary photographer. You need to be boring in a room, unnoticeable, and the people start returning. Then I got these dramatic pictures, which are beautiful but don’t tell their story.

By this point, these women, a lot of them, were in their sixties and seventies. They were in a complicated situation but had created a lovely community. And they had a game with me that when I was trying to take one of these photographs, one would sneak up behind me and try and pinch my bum. And then all the women start laughing. But I didn’t take photographs of them laughing. I thought that was not how I was supposed to represent them. It’s supposed to be about these poor women who have lost everything and look at this serious photograph. So sadly, I didn’t photograph them laughing.

That is 20-odd years ago. I look at how I work now; I would only photograph them laughing. I have a rule now: I will only photograph a community if I have eaten with them first. I build the friendship up before I get my camera out. I start the conversations and laughter, then document that.

So it’s interesting to see from fashion and music editorials straight into documentary photography I had to relearn the craft, not the craft of taking photographs. Music and fashion were about egos, mine and anybody else’s. Documentary photography is about losing the ego and trying to genuinely represent somebody else’s story, which is a different skill. So it’s a long process, but slowly I’m getting there.

Photography is relatively simple. You point a camera in the right direction and press a button. But it has taken me 40 years to determine which direction to point the camera.

I look at what I do now, and sometimes, technically, they’re not great, and the lighting may not be perfect, but it represents that person. So documentary photography is honest.

You’ve mentioned only photographing a community if I have eaten with them first. Some people might know you as The One Armed Chef. So where does food come into your story?

Giles.  My mum was a servant in the 1930s. So my mum had me late in life, in her forties. So she came from a very different generation. In the 1930s, she was living in East London. She was a jockney, a word I’ve learned recently, a Scottish person born within the sound of Bow Bells, so a cockney. By the age of 14, she was sent to be a cook in a country house. She had never even been to the countryside. So she was suddenly in a stately home in a different world. That was the last era of country houses like that, pre-World War II. And she learned to make everything.

So I was brought up where everything was very traditional British food; I didn’t appreciate it then. Suet puddings, spotted dick and homemade bread, everything was handmade, that’s how she was. I took it for granted; I thought, this is what everyone has.

She taught my sister to cook. I don’t think she thought, as a man, it was so relevant for me to learn; she came from a different generation. I wish she had taught me more to cook, but I watched a lot and helped. An appreciation of food and the tactile nature of hand-making everything is partly from that. I never had a takeaway as a kid. So even at 17, 18, when I left home, I made everything, because that’s what you do. Plus, I was vegetarian back then. So it was challenging to get vegetarian food.

Building relationships with people I photographed over food was meaningful in my work. When I turn up at a refugee camp and meet a family, I tend not to have the prerequisites of the families I will meet. I’ll meet lots of people, and eventually, there’ll be some family that I connect with; I don’t over-analyse. Then I’ll always say, can I come back tomorrow and cook with you? Rather than say I’m coming to take pictures of you? Which immediately puts people on the defensive. I’ll turn up the next day.

Usually, people are confused about why I’m there to cook with them, but it’s a break from the norm for them and they are hospitable. If it feels right, I’d ask, can I come back and make some photographs?

So food became an integral part of the way I built relationships. So then I was always cooking, whether in South Sudan, the Congo, or Lebanon and learning all these amazing family dishes. And I realised that was a respectful way of turning up, and you say, can you teach me how to make, what you make? So when I’m on a trip, I gravitate to where I see people cooking.

Also, cooking has become part of my therapy in terms of work. I see a lot of the worst in humanity. It can be brutal when you’re in hospitals or frontline areas, what you are seeing. So for me, cooking is how I switch off because it’s a manual task. And so, you know, watching a film, reading a book, I don’t switch off because my mind’s so racing, but cooking is therapy because it distracts me from whatever’s bothering me. So  I document war and need food as a balance to show the good side of humanity.

Food is the antithesis of war because war is about destruction, hatred, and food is about bringing people together and building communities, and it’s how we express love.

When lockdown happened, I said I’ll be a professional chef by the end of lockdown. It was a joke challenge, but I was doing so much cooking at home that I got two offers to be a chef in restaurants from people who had seen my stuff on Instagram. And I had a commission from Vice to do a TV series about food travelling around the world.

The Vice, Munchies - One Armed Chef series is captivating and combine much of our discussion. How did they come about?

Giles.  Documentary photography can be serious and show one perception of wars and the effects of war. And, of course, nobody needs to know more than I do, that war is brutal and violent; I got blown up, but that’s another story. So you have to show that side of it. But you also show that life goes on and that laughter and meals are shared. And I realised it was the same in documentaries.

I did a couple of documentaries for Channel Four on Syrian refugees and one about acid burn survivors in Bangladesh. I love those documentaries, but I wasn’t involved with the editing; I was just the presenter. So all of the laughter and joy was edited out. The documentaries became so heavy.

I said let’s make documentaries the way I work when I photograph, which shows that part of the process, sitting down and eating with families. So we will have meals and conversations. Initially, we were supposed to visit Afghanistan and other destinations we needed to fly to. Because of the lockdowns we were restricted in where we could go. We had the commission to do six episodes, so because we couldn’t travel anywhere, I said, why don’t we go to Scotland? I love that because we probably wouldn’t have made those episodes without lockdown. So it opened up another aspect where it wasn’t just war-torn countries; we could still tell stories through food. We are looking to do a second season of it.

In one of the Scottish episodes, a lady who’s cooking for us says, I hate people calling themselves chefs because it’s so pretentious. It would have been easy to edit that out because I had named the show The One Armed Chef. But we kept that in because it was also essential for me to produce and edit the episodes. It was not an easy sell to get the series commissioned. It went ahead because of lockdown. When lockdown happened, most shows couldn’t be made for obvious reasons of travel, big crews and all these other challenges. So I contacted the people I knew at Vice in New York and said I can make that show now. Apart from the Scottish shows, I knew the people in virtually all the episodes already, and we were just a team of three people. I can decide within a week, we plan it and could go. So they said if you can make a show now with just three of you. I said if you let me produce it. It was a very low budget, and we just went off and did it.

I may not be the most talented person, and I may not be the most skilled, but it’s about seeing opportunities and realising that you must persuade the person who can commission you. So let them know I’m the best person for this right now and get them involved.

Can you tell us about the Legacy of War Foundation?

Giles.  The Legacy of War Foundation again emerged from an opportunity I didn’t plan. I never wanted to have a charity because I didn’t want to have a structured job with people telling me what to do. I love my freedom. So the idea of an organisation involving other people, structure and meetings never appealed to me.

So I would visit and photograph these people, and nothing would change for them or happen to that community. So I feel like I betrayed their trust a little bit. I met a woman living in Lebanon called Khouloud, who a sniper had paralysed, and I photographed her with her husband. They were living with their children in a cardboard and plastic makeshift tent. A beautiful couple; he was holding her hand, even though she was paralysed from the neck down. I did that picture as a part of a series of particularly vulnerable Syrian refugees in Lebanon. I returned two years later; I found them in the same place. Nothing had changed. And I remember crying when I saw them in there. I said I’d failed. Their picture was published around the world, and nothing had changed. So I decided to spend more time photographing them.

Jamal, the husband, this man’s lost almost everything, and he whispered to me his greatest fear is that his wife does not love him as much as he loves her. It’s a love story.

I had the photograph I’d taken of them two years before, and I wasn’t sure about giving it to them because everything had stayed the same. But I showed the picture to Khouloud of her lying in bed and Jamal at the end. As I gave it to them, the scene was almost identical. When I took this photograph, I did not photograph a refugee with a disability; it was a photograph of a couple in love. And that was when I decided I couldn’t walk away from one of these stories and not directly change the people who trusted me.

These photographs of these moments are the complete opposite of the ego of a celebrity. It shares someone’s worst moment, not their greatest. So as a photographer, there’s a huge trust that somebody’s giving that story. So I decided I couldn’t keep walking away; I needed to do something. So we set up a crowdfunding campaign with a guy called Misha Collins who’s an American actor, and we raised about a quarter of a million in a couple of weeks.

So we rehoused Khouloud, but also about six, seven other families. And then suddenly, I had this budget, and I had to look after it. We didn’t want to give them the money because that could cause more problems. So instead, we rented houses, paid all the bills and everything. We decided to set this up formally and called it the Legacy of War Foundation.

Then over the years, I started thinking I could change things a little bit and do things my way. Because I work in that sector and I see the things I don’t like. And I wanted to change this kind of white imperialist idea of charity, where you go to a country and say, this is what’s best for you, and we’re going do it for you. It’s a very paternalistic thing, which is not to say that it doesn’t come from goodwill.

I met a survivor, Olive, living with a disability. She made virtually no money from growing potatoes in a small cooperative with friends. So I thought I couldn’t empower women; I realised my role if I was going to have an non-governmental organisations was to break down the barriers that stop people from empowering themselves and from putting back maybe some of the things years of colonialism had done.

I looked at Olive’s situation; if we bought the land that they work on and we don’t even say give it, but return it to them, and then we provide education for five years to help them to understand climate, smart farming, organic farming, agriculture, then we’ll break down those barriers. That means they can empower themselves. So we set up Land for Women, cooperative farms in Rwanda, and just opened another one.

What is fantastic is that in the space of a year, the women are growing vegetables; they’re landowners, so suddenly, people who looked down on them now respect them. We see the education rates have improved. No kids are working on the farms; they’re even giving out vegetables and fruit to the needy in their community.

We’re working in Ukraine, we’ve raised about a million so far and we ensure that all the money we raise ends up in hands of Ukrainians in some way. We work with local partners and ask how we can support your work. What is it you need from us?

I never expected to become the CEO (chief executive officer) of a charity. We have projects in Rwanda, Lebanon and Ukraine, and it’s great to see we’re building a fantastic team of people.

Giles Duley
www.gilesduley.com
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The One Armed Chef
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Legacy of War Foundation
www.legacyofwarfoundation.com
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