Giles Duley’s life has been punctuated by a series of accidents which, with hindsight, might even have been fortuitous. At 17, both his knees were broken in a car crash. While he was recuperating in hospital he was given an Olympus OM-10 camera and a copy of legendary photographer Don McCullin’s autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour . From that moment, Duley, now 48, knew what his career was going to be. Fast-forward a decade and Duley – born in England but half-Italian – was snapping some of the biggest names in film, music and media, highly paid and even more highly praised for his artistry. But halfway through shooting a petulant TV celebrity in a London hotel Duley lost his temper and threw his camera onto the bed; it bounced out of the open window and into the street below. Depressed and rudderless, Duley ditched the high life, moved to the south coast of England and found a job caring for a boy with multiple sclerosis, whose life he started to document on film. Photographic work for charities followed, with subjects as varied as acid burn survivors in Bangladesh and former child soldiers in Angola. Then, on February 7, 2011, an assignment in Afghanistan led to Duley’s third and most perilous accident. He stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while on foot patrol, leaving him a triple amputee, losing both legs and his left arm. But – as he managed to gasp to his sister in an intensive care ward – he was “still a photographer”. How Hong Kong became the Asia base for war photographers As the years to come would show, rather than crippling him, being blown up by an IED was to be the making of him. “People have asked me if I regret going to Afghanistan and whether any one photograph is worth losing your legs for,” says Duley, who is currently engaged on a long-term project photographing health workers in Britain and their battle to contain the coronavirus. “It’s a stupid question, because of course no one image is worth that cost; but I’ve always believed that the principle is.” Duley had flown to Afghanistan to record the work of an Italian charity, Emergency, but also wanted to document the effect of war on a small unit of American soldiers. While on patrol with the 1st Squadron of the 75th Cavalry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, in Sangsar, which the GIs had nicknamed “Heart of Darkness”, the troops stopped to investigate a suspicious-looking compound. Suddenly, Duley felt “a click in my right leg” – the pressure plate that set off the IED. “I was tossed by the blast but there was not much noise – just bright, white, hot light,” he recalls. “I remember seeing myself from outside my body. Not a religious experience but intense heat and fire and the strangely calm sense of flying through the air.” Duley was sufficiently lucid to run a personal stock check. “I could see clearly, I had my right hand. I could think. And I thought: I can still work as a photographer.” It was touch and go, but Duley was determined to hang on. Paramedics fought to keep him alive on the helicopter back to base, and he spent two days undergoing emergency surgery before being evacuated to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England. Some 37 operations and two prosthetic legs later, he was physically and metaphorically back on his feet. Together with expert medical care, stubbornness pulled him through. The following year, he returned to Afghanistan “quite frankly s******* myself” to complete the assignment for Emergency. It was not easy. He would lose his balance every time he closed his eye to look through the viewfinder; he had to rest his weighty Canon EOS-1 on the stump of his left arm; he was, needlessly as it turned out, perturbed that his work would not reach his previous high standards; and he was confronted daily with injuries as horrific and more so than his own, and the knowledge that Afghans lacked the levels of care and support that he had enjoyed. “Wherever I am, I am in pain every day,” Duley says. “Prosthetic legs are like wearing a pair of clogs that come up to your thighs – they’re solid plastic. When they were first fitted I was told that it would never be easy, so I just made up my mind to grit it and carry on through. “My work takes me to some of the most inhospitable places you can imagine, but the alternative is sitting at home and not working, and that would be a lot more uncomfortable.” I’ve witnessed so many terrible stories that I have not been able to publicise, and I feel like I’ve let the victims down. That’s what haunts me, that’s what means I’ll never have a decent night’s sleep again Photographer Giles Duley Duley was later commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to document the refugee crisis across the Middle East and Europe, and in 2015 he founded Legacy of War, a charity that takes him around the world to work with the survivors of conflict. “I see myself as a storyteller, and like to work visuals into the mix,” Duley says. “People’s emotions are heightened at rock concerts so I’ve collaborated with singer-songwriter P J Harvey and trip-hop group Massive Attack, who use my photos during their live gigs. We’ve also produced a free newspaper that’s given away after the show explaining the backstory to the photos.” Despite taking a battering on life’s roller coaster, Duley says he is rarely bothered by anything that has happened to him. Rather, it is the suffering of others that continues to disturb him. “My nightmares come more from what I’ve seen in the world’s trouble spots – in Palestine, in Africa, wherever – than my own injuries,” he says. “I’ve witnessed so many terrible stories that I have not been able to publicise, and I feel like I’ve let the victims down. That’s what haunts me, that’s what means I’ll never have a decent night’s sleep again.” Five years on from launching Legacy of War, Duley has had time to reflect on the almost unreal divide between his photographic career’s meteoric genesis in the 1990s, when he was shooting – and partying – with the likes of Christian Bale and Mariah Carey, and nowadays when his assignments bring him into contact with others’ tragedy. “On my second ever major shoot, I flew to Detroit and got on a tour bus with The Black Crowes, who then were at the height of their fame,” Duley says. “The guy I was sitting next to was drinking Jack Daniel’s. He looked over and asked if I wanted some. I thought he was going to let me have a slug, but he simply reached for a new bottle and passed it to me. For just about anyone in their 20s, that has to be a pretty cool job.” On another occasion Duley was assigned to take a portrait of Marilyn Manson at his home, having been repeatedly warned not to address him by his birth name at the risk of the shoot being called off by the temperamental star. “I rang the doorbell and his dad answered and shouted up the stairs: ‘Hey Brian, it’s somebody for you.’ “I’ve no regrets about those ‘celeb’ years. I learned a lot about magazines, editing, how to sell a story. I wouldn’t be the photographer I am now if I hadn’t done that wild stuff when I was young,” he says. Duley has been showered with awards, accolades that he acknowledges with humility before turning the conversation to the subjects depicted in his photos, who he sees as being of far greater importance than himself. Independent, and single after a long-term relationship with a Hongkonger came to an end (“my personal life now is my camera”), he is very much a one-man band. “I’ve got a Hasselblad medium-format camera, but I mainly shoot on film with the same Canon I’ve had for 25 years. I’m a bit of a Luddite,” he says. “It has a wider latitude than digital, and I love that the process slows you down, and there’s so much more information on a roll of film.” Closing the gap on his half-century, and lucky to have got this far, Duley radiates contentment with his lot. “I’ve never been happier,” he says. “When you consider all I’ve been through and all the challenges, right now I’ve never been more fulfilled. “I’ve said as much before and I’ll say it again. One day, if they write an epitaph for me, I hope it will not say I was a triple amputee, [but] instead just say that Giles Duley was a photographer. For that is what I am.”