Odd Andersen

For me conflict is mostly about mankind, and civilians in particular. Although no stranger to the adrenalin rush you get when the fighting flares around you, in my work I always come back to the people living and making the best possible life among the hardship. Being based in Sarajevo, I remember always putting the death toll into captions, but however important the combats shots were, I always found it more interesting to focus on the hundreds of thousands that found themselves faced with extreme living conditions. For instance, the elderly man with his cow on a lead who told me in northern Bosnia: "Since the war broke out, my cow is worth three times as much as my car". Africa is another example on how people are forced to cope, be it floods in Mozambique or famine and war in Somalia. Although I find African conflicts to be incredibly savage I’ve also found there the most generous people I've ever come across. One of the most difficult moments I witnessed during the Rwandan exodus in 1994 was a plastic sheeting filled with babies, many dying of cholera and many more facing a future without their parents, but as an MSF doctor explained to me, as long as they could find their villages most of the orphaned children would be taken care of and brought up by their extended family, and avoid life in an orphanage. Zimbabwe was another story which changed as we found it was not all about white farmers, but a huge section of the black population who found themselves under threat from their government when their support for change was suppressed by Mugabe’s thugs. Israel and the Occupied Territories is a place I return to regularly; when it comes to journalists it's the most densely populated hotspot in the world. However with a bit of forward planning on AFP’s part I ended up being one of only two photographers with the Palestinian resistance as they fought Israeli troops from corner to corner in Nablus in April 2002. As I write this it’s only a month since I returned from Iraq, which for me brought back memories of the first Gulf War in 1991. We all had our moments of following the returning Kuwaiti soldiers and Americans greeted as heroes in Kuwait City, but I decided to head for Basra in southern Iraq where we had heard rumors of an Shiite uprising. Meeting local Shiite leaders near Safwan, we -- me 21 at the time and a very experienced Norwegian TV reporter -- decided to accompany them to Basra. For the Shiites it was a lost cause, however, and we were captured by Iraqi Republican Guards in Basra. A ceasefire meeting nearby saved us from being dispatched on the spot and we were handed over to the Red Cross 10 days later being released as POWs. This time around, it felt special to be able to go back to the same area that almost ended my career 12 years earlier. Teamed up with an AFP reporter, we set out into Iraq following British and US troops from Kuwait. As the battle for Basra raged we quickly found we were privileged not being embedded; being on your own obviously had its drawbacks with no protection, but on the other hand we were able to send pictures and reports of Basra on fire and people fleeing days before the British allowed the first group of embedded reporters to even get close to the action. Even then their material was censored. The biggest disappointment for a photographer is to return from an assignment and not find in your images the story you want to tell. However, I hope some of these pictures tell the story and that you will enjoy some of them as much as I have enjoyed taking all of them.