062 - Finbarr O'Reilly
© Finbarr O'Reilly
Finbarr O'Reilly spent 12 years as a Reuters correspondent and staff photographer based in West and Central Africa and won the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year. His coverage of conflicts and social issues across Africa has earned him numerous awards from the National Press Photographer's Association and Pictures of the Year International for both his multimedia work and photography, which has been exhibited internationally. Finbarr was based in Senegal for 8 years, spent two years living in Congo and Rwanda and his multimedia exhibition Congo on the Wire debuted at the 2008 Bayeux War Correspondent's Festival before then travelling to Canada and the U.S.
Finbarr embedded regularly with coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan between 2008-2011 before moving to Israel in 2014, where he covered the summer war in Gaza. He is a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellow and a writer in residence at the Carey Institute for Global Good, a 2015 Yale World Fellow, a 2014 Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, and a 2013 Harvard Nieman Fellow. He is among those profiled in Under Fire: Journalists in Combat, a documentary film about the psychological costs of covering war.
Earlier this year, Finbarr, along with co-author, retired U.S. Marine Sgt. Thomas James Brennan (pictured above on the left, shortly after suffering severe concussion from an RPG round explosion), published a joint memoir with Penguin Random House about their experiences in Afghanistan entitled Shooting Ghosts. Their story about the unpredictability of war and its aftermath is told in alternating first-person narratives, and explores the things they’ve seen and done, the ways they have been affected, and how they have navigated the psychological aftershocks of war and wrestled with reforming their own identities and moral centres.
Finbarr is currently based in London.
In episode 062, Finbarr discusses, among other things:
Origins as a writer
The transition to photography
The wire photographer's life
The challenges of photojournalism
Becoming disenchanted with the job
His new book Shooting Ghosts
“What I was doing started to feel a little bit selfish. Because if something happened to me then I’m not affected if I’m dead, but all the people who care about me will be. And it really changed my thinking about the kind of work I’d been doing and the risks I’d been taking for myself and for my own self-gratification, and ego, and career aspirations. And if we’re honest about our motivations for what we do as young men going to war, a lot of it has to do with that.”
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