Restrained images

Amid the press pack to be found in Kabul, one face, and voice, stands out. It is Tim Page's. He has been photographing the drama, poignancy and horror of wars since arriving in South East Asia in the 1960s, in the twilight of his teens. It seems natural that Kabul is his new territory. Of all the dramatic biographies traipsing through this latest of conflicts involving the West, Page's story of 65 years could encompass those of dozens of photographers.

Born in Kent, England, in 1944, Page left home at 18 and travelled overland through Europe, Pakistan and India to South East Asia, where he became an accredited freelancer, capturing life and conflict in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. He also covered the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967.

As one of the "wackies" in Vietnam — a journalist taking incredible risks to snap lasting images — Page has inspired books, documentaries and films for decades. His was the character on which the journalist played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now was based. And Michael Herr documented the eclectic photographer in Dispatches, his book on Vietnam.

Far from the jungles of Vietnam, Page is now based at the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan's (UNAMA) headquarters in Kabul. After spending the past ten years training local photojournalists in Cambodia and Vietnam, he is working with UNAMA and takes master classes in photography for Afghans. Sitting cross-legged in his office in khakis and a chequered scarf, he apologised for the standard of coffee. The standards he sets for his pupils, too, were high.

"The aim of it, I suppose, is to produce one jewel in the crown," Page says. "Basically Afghans should be doing the thing themselves, they should be interpreting their own country."

Narrowing down his search over the past two months he has been here, he refers repeatedly to one "star". His tanned and weathered face could never be described as expressionless but he reserved enthusiasm for an intense and cynical rhetoric carried with a polished English accent.

Training Afghans is tougher than training the Vietnamese, he stresses, waving one hand for the emphasis that never shows on his face.

In a country where people never grew up with visual awareness brought by reading magazines and experiencing art and instead expressed themselves through poetry or perhaps sculpture, instilling that awareness in his young stars is his main challenge.

"They look at something such as a beggar on the street and don't care about it. It's just part of the pastiche of existence," he says.

Of course, he adds, there will always be a need for quality local professionals and top international journalists to flock to conflict zones. In his impressions of photojournalism throughout the past eight years of conflict in Afghanistan, however, he takes no prisoners. Page's sharp, critical eyes gleam as he reels off questions he feels those photographing this war had failed to ask and answer.

"You don't really know what Afghans eat, how they sleep, how they conduct themselves, the wedding parlour syndrome — how much does it cost to get married?" he said.

Photo essays

His office filled up with photo essay ideas as Page stressed the need for pictures of the Afghan people and their lives: improvised explosive devices killing civilians, poppy fields, warlords, farm projects, villages.

"Do we get inside the mental asylums? How many people in this country are completely and utterly gaga? I have no idea how many mental asylums there are in this country stuffed with shocked people," he says. "Nobody has put a face on this war of the Afghan suffering."

This war, Page says, has only been photographed from military vehicles and bomb blast sites. The photographer is forced to work under new pressures from editors and stiff rules imposed by the military as attitudes of the media and the military towards journalism have changed over the decades and the paradigms of journalism have shifted.

Vietnam was never like this for Page. Gone are the days when "you could literally thumb a chopper", he says.

Side-stepping puritans who regard being embedded with the military as poor journalism, he believes this is simply something every photojournalist in Afghanistan has to do.

"You haven't much choice now. Vietnam was a very special place. It was the first war of colour, the first war of television, the first war of freelance agency, the first war America lost, the first war with no censorship," he says. "We'll never have it the same. We didn't have it in Bosnia, we didn't have it in the first Gulf War. Because we made the military very nervous and the military still likes to think somehow that we lost the war for them."

However, considering the dangers posed to journalists and the military when media interest caused hordes of inexperienced persons to rush to war zones, Page is on some counts forgiving of the military's regulation. He points to Bosnia as a stark example, where a conflict geographically more accessible to freelancers resulted in media "cannon fodder".

"I can't say I blame the command structure for trying to clamp down because every time a freelancer goes out there and endangers himself, he's not just endangering himself, he's endangering the people he's with," he says.

This, he says, comes at a price. Without the "wackies" who arrived by themselves and searched out the best images, "you lack that edge".

Page is synonymous with risk-taking — a reputation built in Vietnam where he was seriously injured by shrapnel four times. In the early 1960s a motorcycling accident brought him close to death and since then, as he wrote in his book Page after Page, he came to regard the rest of his life as "extra time".

In 1970, when recovering from an injury in the United States, his best friend photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of famous Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, went missing in Cambodia and Page spent the next 20 years trying to solve the mystery until Flynn's body was found in a Cambodian village in 1990. The search led him to establish the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation.

Page acknowledges the complicated nature of risk-taking as a journalist, however, with the media no longer having any form of safety blanket as an objective group from entities such as the Taliban. However, beyond avoiding putting others in danger, he is adamant that encountering danger in Afghanistan will always be a part of any journalist's job.

"If you are going to get to the core of this country you have got to put yourself on the line," he says. "This is not a picnic."

Changes in the media are the real reasons why images from the conflict in Afghanistan have been scant and the reality is weighed down with images of gunfire and blasts. As editors come under pressure to allow more space for advertisements and consumers want entertainment, there is only room to obsess over body counts and gun battles.

"I suppose the unfortunate part of that is it is what you put against how to fix your garden. Magazines want feel-good stories and ‘bang bang shoot 'em up'," he says.

As newspapers work to ever tighter budgets they put added pressure on freelancers to get the shots that sell, he adds. Farming projects and village life "don't make editors jump up and down and feel excited".

"[A freelancer] is not going to get paid for pretty pictures," Page says. "He's paid to get bomb blasts and people kicking doors in — all the negative stuff."

Investing properly in a team of photographers in countries such as Afghanistan requires money that was too often questioned by editors, he said.

Indeed, costs have spiralled with insurance, technical equipment, drivers and hotels — far from the days when a journalist could rent someone's back room in Vietnam. "I can't think of too many editors who have got that kind of money anymore, because they would rather buy a story about Kylie Minogue. It'll get more readers," he said.

This also stifles the flow of pictures portraying suffering for the military — as beyond politically useful body counts and feel-good stories, the real life of a soldier is lost. "Therein lies the thing. Magazines and papers want to sell stuff which pays for advertising. If we put in horror stories about how bad it is for our boys down in Helmand, is that going to sell a magazine? Probably not. And editors have got to satisfy their publishers and their backers. This business is run by bean counters and men in grey suits. It's not run by imaginative editors and photo editors — for there are no photo editors anymore, they are ‘picture managers'."

As a cheaper option than sending in permanent staff, freelancers were increasingly being used in Afghanistan, Page said. The environment for them is painfully competitive. He said it had become difficult for him to find places that had not already been taken over by packs of them. "I wouldn't want to be a young freelancer starting over here. Not on your nelly," he says.