Landscapes of the Apocalypse

I discovered several landscapes in my contact sheets that I don’t even remember shooting. I’ll have 36 frames of fighting, then tucked in among them there’ll be one frame of a street scene. I didn’t consciously shoot whole rolls or compose each frame. I was simply struck by the extent of the destruction, and I would just do a shot here or there. When you’re there trying to do combat photography, you’re so worked up—trying to find the guy with the gun fighting the other guy with the gun—that you miss so much. You’re not slowing down to think where you are. I regret not doing more, because there’s a lot to be said in photographing the aftermath. You can really see it in the World Trade Center pictures. If you look at Hue or the World Trade Center, Groznyy, or Yugoslavia - cities when man destroys them - they all look the same. It’s very apocalyptic.