![]() “That was a very, very dark place,” he recalls. At his bedside in hospital, old friends and editors would tell him, “Don’t worry, Giles, we’ll get you working again.” But in his bedsit it was clear those promises had been quickly forgotten. He’d worked for fashion and music magazines before he’d gone to conflict zones as a determinedly “antiwar photographer”. The first words Duley had spoken, having been airlifted from the battlefield, were, “I am still a photographer.” Taking pictures had been his obsession since his godfather had bequeathed him an Olympus camera and a book of Don McCullin’s war photographs, aged 18. In hospital you live by goals: first survive, next learn to walk, next achieve independence. I couldn’t get my wheelchair in there, it was so small. ![]() I just had this horrible a bare room with a bed and a chair and a little oven. “I lost everything when I got injured,” Duley, says. The worst of times were the months, having been released from hospital, when he was sitting alone in a bedsit in Clapham, south London, waiting for the phone to ring. It wasn’t the year of rehabilitation when, having been told he would never walk again, he walked again. It wasn’t even the 45 days he spent in the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, undergoing countless operations, initially learning to communicate by blinking his eye while coming to terms with the fact that he had lost both his legs and one of his arms. W hen Giles Duley looks back on the past 11 years, the worst of times, he suggests, wasn’t the moment that he stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan while on assignment photographing a US regiment at war.
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