360Photography

Agniputhri 25-07-12

From Somalia’s painful struggles, to Liberia’s apocalyptic civil war. In fact before he was killed Martin Adler recorded pretty much every war going. His blood-stained but very human dispatches helped define the way we saw foreign conflicts for over a decade. His quiet sensitivity while in the heart of darkness bought him awards and acclaim. For the first time his photographs and thousands of hours of video have been brought together to produce a riveting profile of an extraordinary man. “This bloke knows what he’s seen but he’s not talking!”, cries a US army troop embodying the gung ho attitude at the start of the Iraq war. Haunting scenes from Martin’s life flash before our eyes – women sweeping the ground in the middle of a bombed-out Chechnya; a Liberian warlord holding an AK 47 in one hand and a baby in the other; desecrated landscapes from Uganda to Algeria. Martin allowed the images to speak for themselves, fuelled by a fearless curiosity, which would eventually get him killed: “I want to go to the place where nobody else goes to and I want to listen to the people nobody else listens to”. It takes a particular kind of man to be a war reporter – living on your wits on an unsteady income, never knowing what the next day will bring. Yet as Martin’s friends remember: “he was not the kind of guy who could have done anything else”. Riding along with Martin as we watch his fifteen year long journey through forty different war-ravaged countries, is a terrifying experience …