63S.P.: I find the play of intimacy and distance very
striking in your work. So much of what you do is
about adventure ‘out there’, but then in projects like
On the way to an ambush you pursue something much
more personal. In fact, by pursuing something so
entirely ‘exotic’ as the Karen independence fighters in
Burma, it’s like you turn inwards and begin to explore
really private feelings and the relationships closest to
home. Would you agree with this? If so, how is it, do
you think, that photography makes this possible?
B.C.: Hmmm, I’ve never thought about it as
adventure, that was never a motivation, although
some places have proved extreme. The very personal
nature of On the way to an ambush came after the fact,
not before, because I did not grasp then that this
journey came out of a tragedy. My first wife was
killed in a car crash taking children to school. We had
been apart for three years, but were close friends still.
The afternoon of the accident, 7 May 1987, I moved
back into our small house with our three young
children, the youngest, soon to turn six years old,
still in hospital, who had just lost their mother. Any
thought of that day can still bring easy tears. At the
time, I was preparing South Africa, my first book after
the 1986 exhibition of the same name at the National
Art Gallery, Wellington, under the directorship of
Luit Beiringa. During the collecting of that imagery
in 1985, when South Africa had declared a state of
emergency, I had been asked to apply to join Magnum
Photos, which I did the following year, but I was not
brought into the fold. I was asked at that time in Paris
to meet Henri Cartier-Bresson, and I declined, acutely
embarrassed; what could I possibly say to him, being
a working-class boy from Panmure?
Back to On the way to an ambush, I left my three
children with the next-door neighbour, two and a
half years after Barb’s death, and travelled to a small
war in the jungles of Burma. I didn’t know, but some
friends were furious. I came back with malaria that
very nearly killed me, and didn’t look again at the
collected material for two years. Not until I lay on
a languid, blue sofa at the home of honoured New
Zealand writer Lloyd Jones who would ask me an
occasional question, and tape my elongated and often
unexpected answers. It became clear on the couch that
the narrative involved the capriciousness of death
and the madness of grief, woven around Barb’s death
and a New Zealand mercenary who would later be
contract murdered in Bangkok, who took me with
him and his band of Karen raiders to lay ambushes in
the Burmese jungle. I had images of the war, trenches,
raiders and refugee camps, various paraphernalia and
letters from both the mercenary and others, and my
children who sent their notes by fax to a drapery shop
in a small Thai border town. Lloyd became the very
generous editor of my text, sometimes scrawling in
the margin ‘don’t be so fucking stupid’, and he was
right every time.
So, what was to be a focus on young fighters
in trenches became a very personal and cathartic
scrutiny of death. When the mercenary was
murdered, my children were sad because he had
become part of their story. I understood perfectly what
they meant.
S.P.: Your own family has a powerful presence in your
work. But unlike many photographers, you have not
chosen to photograph them extensively. Why has this
kind of domestic project not appealed to you?