I have spent a huge part of my career filming scenes of death, war, genocide, terrorism, tragedy, and misfortune. Not at the decisive moment, but in retrospect. Often recording interviews of people who have experienced huge loss or witnessed horrendous sights in such disasters. It makes for dramatic program making. We hunt out the jeopardy, other people's misfortune. I'm not sure why the general public have such a high interest in other people's misfortune - perhaps as our life's become more and more sanitized and absent from seeing death we are more intrigued to exploring it, almost as a proof that we do actually die, or are actually alive?



Perhaps I too have been drawn to it, not in a murky basement macabre sort of way, but with an intrigue. An intrigue into our general dislocation to the simple reality that we will all die. Unlike most people my job often involves listening to and recording this misfortune, and yet with all my twenty years of recording the numerous accounts of devastation and loss, I am still not really convinced of my inevitable end.



I shall die.



I don't disagree that, but somehow I can't really grasp the fact that I will die. This muddled juxtaposition of what is inevitable and what our mind eye see's as a reality is hopefully echoed in this collection of images - they aren't all real, whilst factually correct, they might have been reconstructed. They sit on the murky line of the real and unreal, not that dissimilar to our anticipation of our own death.