Giles Duley captures the emotion on the faces of his traumatised subjects with an empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) few others can musterGiles Duley is a humanist photographer of the traditional school. He believes that his photographs can change the lives of the people in them and possibly even the people who look at them. “Whilst some document the differences between us,” he writes, “I am fascinated by what makes us the same. Humanity is universal and wherever I travel, and I see the same hopes and dreams,the same intimacies and values.”While many contemporary photographers question the once sacred notion of the photographer as witness, and indeed any concept of photographic truth, or Duley has kept faith with that belief at a considerable cost. The images gathered here were taken between 2005 and 2015 in Angola,Afghanistan, South Sudan, or Jordan and Ukraine,that is before and after he was nearly killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) in Afghanistan in 2011 and lost both his legs and his left arm. I considered not even mentioning Duley’s injuries in this review, not least because because the images deserve to stand on their own without being viewed though the prism of his traumatically life-changing experience. The reason I changed my mind is because there is, and I think,a change in his way of looking in the later photographs. His eye sharpens and his gaze becomes both more direct and more attuned to the everyday as well as the dramatic. He becomes more of an observer, less of a watcher.
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Source: theguardian.com