Finbarr O’Reilly is an award-winning photographer who has spent over a decade working in war-torn regions of the world. On Sept. 20, Carleton University hosted a book launch for his memoir Shooting Ghosts, and The Charlatan chatted with him to learn about the book, his career, and his approach to photography.
The Charlatan (TC): What do you see your role as when you’re a combat photographer in these unstable parts of the world?
Finbarr O’Reilly (FO): Well my role is the role of any photographer or journalist, to document what’s going on around you and to try to put in in some kind of context. But as a photographer you have to really be empathetic to the people and the subjects you’re photographing, and to try and understand what it is they’re going through even if you may not necessarily agree with their point of view or what they’re doing.
TC: Are there any characteristics that you think separate a good photographer from a great one?
FO: I think it is empathy, it’s the ability to really get close to your subjects, to be able to convey what their internal worlds might be like, and to capture that sense of emotion and feeling in a way that allows people who may never otherwise be able to understand what those lives might be like, and to gain a level of insight into the world of other people living across the globe. So somebody who can bring these different existences together in some way. It’s not often about having a technically perfect photograph, I can look at photographs that are in terms of the technical details absolutely perfect, but they can leave me feeling emotionally cold. Where something may have imperfections but contains something incredibly moving, that’s going to be a much more successful picture in my view.
TC: Let’s discuss your book for a little bit, what made you and [co-author Sgt. Thomas Brennan] decide to write it?
FO: The decision to write the book was really an outgrowth of our collaboration as [Brennan] was trying to transition back into the civilian world after he was decommissioned from the military and forcibly retired . . . He sent me stories he was writing about these experiences, and they were very powerful and I thought there was going to be a value in them beyond him just sharing his own experiences. So, I connected him with the New York Times editors I knew, and he wrote a year-long series of stories about the challenges of seeking mental health care, health in the military, the stigma attached to doing that, as well as some of the moral challenges he faced as a combatant, including having to kill in combat and also his own suicide attempts and how he managed to recover from that.
As we worked on these I started to think that he was doing something really important by sharing his story with other people.
One of the things about trauma is that it’s very isolating. Your inclination is to withdraw from the world and the people around you and those closest to you when you need to be engaging with them for support. On various occasions, he felt very alone, like on the night where he tried to kill himself, and I felt very isolated in my work as well.
As we worked on his stories, we started to think that maybe there was some value in the idea of sharing our combined story, and comparing and contrasting the role of the professional witness—me the journalist—and the professional soldier or marine in his case to look at how the experience of war was similar for both of us, but also very different in terms of the moral complexities that each of us confronts in our own roles.
TC: Was it challenging to have to look back on traumatic memories?
FO: I think probably less so for me because I had spent a year on an academic fellowship where I was studying the psychology of trauma . . . But certainly for TJ, [we were] confronting things that he ended up doing in combat, things he’s not proud of. On a patrol we were on, he got injured and three of his marines got injured and he lives with the guilt of that, as well as the guilt of having killed in combat, including civilians. In 2004, he killed two children in the heat of battle, and he’s had to grapple with these things . . . But there’s a value in it so he’s willing to do that. But overall, the writing of the book has been a very cathartic and healing process for us both.
TC: You mention there being value in looking back on these times and writing them down, tell me a little bit about that.
FO: [Austrian psychiatrist] Viktor Frankl, who was a Holocaust survivor and wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning wrote that everybody suffers, life is about suffering. I’m paraphrasing here, but if you can create meaning from that suffering, then there’s something to it and I think in a sense, that’s what we were trying to do . . . That was something we felt was worth doing and that’s why we pursued it and spent a couple years working on the book and sorting things out in our own minds and our own souls with a view to hopefully helping others and getting a conversation going about mental health for veterans and members of the media who have covered these conflicts . . . Ultimately what the book is looking at is war but also what happens after war and trauma. This is really a story about friendship and how we rely on those closest to us in our most difficult times and that applies to members of the military, and the general public at large I would say.
TC: What do you think is the biggest thing that someone doing any kind of combat journalism should know?
FO: There are so many things you need to learn about covering these conflicts, and the only way to do it is to be there . . . You’re going to need to prepare and you’re going to need to think about what your motives are, what you hope to accomplish and understand the risk that you’re not just putting yourself at, but those who are close to you because if something happens, they will be affected. That was something that took me a while to learn, it took the injuries, the severe injuries and deaths of friends of mine, for me to realize what this kind of work can cost.
TC: Is there a photo you have from over your career that holds any special meaning to you?
FO: There are a number of pictures but maybe there’s one I like most. It’s a photograph of a young woman in Congo wearing an orange shirt and she’s got a very flamboyant hairstyle, a very traditional Congolese hairstyle . . . She’s been displaced by war, she’s been displaced from her village and she’s in this camp for displaced people. And yet the look of strength and resilience on her face is typical of the kind of person I would meet in a lot of these difficult places. It was a very humbling thing, I mean I’m someone who chose to go to war, my co-author TJ is also somebody who chose to go to war. But those who have war inflicted on them are in a very different position than people like us. I don’t like the gruesome pictures, I don’t like the violent images. I like things that are a little bit more peaceful and focused on the civilians than the men with guns who inflict a lot of the violence.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
