In March, Duley was in Ukraine to photograph people involved in mine action, including Oleksandra Yevdokimova, a deminer in Kyiv Oblast.
Giles Duley
Renowned British photographer Giles Duley is speaking at the Ukraine Mine Action Conference in Switzerland on Thursday. He explains why it’s time to end the use of weapons that continue to kill long after wars are over.
It’s nearly 8pm in Ukraine, and British photographer Giles Duley has just raced back to his hotel room near Kharkiv to take our video call. He’s spent all day on the frontline with Ukrainian soldiers, photographing the men in quiet, ordinary moments – and plans to return there once we finish speaking.
“I’m not interested in tanks and explosions and planes,” says Duley. “It’s about these individuals whose lives have been devastated. I photograph them looking at photos of their children – children they have not seen in over two years.”
London-born Duley has been criss-crossing the globe for more than two decades, taking photographs of people dealing with the consequences of war. Since 2015, he’s made between 20-30 visits to Ukraine alone. Among his subjects are landmine survivors and their carers, mine clearance personnel, prosthetic technicians, and farmers whose land is littered with mines.
In Ukraine, an estimated 30% of land is thought to be contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance such as grenades. It is now the most heavily mined country in the world. “Ukraine [mine contamination] is on a scale that I’ve never seen before,” says Duley.
This week, the photographer is in Lausanne to speak at the high-level Ukraine Mine Action ConferenceExternal link co-hosted by Switzerland and Ukraine. The aim is to coordinate international support for demining efforts in the Eastern European country. To mark the event, an exhibition of Duley’s photographs of anti-personnel mines he’s collected over time is showing in the Swiss city until the end of October.
For Duley, 53, the subject is as much personal as it is professional. One of his first assignments as a photojournalist was reporting on demining efforts in Angola. In 2011, while in Afghanistan as an embed with a United States regiment, Duley stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED), a horrific accident that changed his life forever. He lost his left arm and both his legs.
“I always say that I was injured because of my passion for telling stories” about the legacies of war, says Duley.
Giles Duley/Legacy of War Foundation
After spending a year in hospital and enduring multiple operations and months of rehabilitation, the triple amputee made a decision that few facing the same situation would have made. He returned to Afghanistan and made a documentary about civilians who’d been maimed.
“There was no question in my mind about making photographs again,” he says. “I realised I would not be as creative because I can’t get all these angles, but I will have a [human] connection that nobody else has. I’ve always been lucky in the way I connect with people. That is my strength and actually, it’s become even stronger following my accident.”
This realisation marked the start of a new chapter for Duley, who’s become an indefatigable advocate for survivors of conflict. He set up a charity, Legacy of War FoundationExternal link, and is the first United Nations Global Advocate for people with disabilities in conflict and peacebuilding. He also starred in the One-Armed Chef, a show on YouTube channel Munchies by Vice in which he cooks and eats with families in places ravaged by war.
Duley is speaking in Lausanne for the same reason he’s done all he has since his accident: “If my work means that one child does not have to go through what I go through every day – the physical pain, the emotional pain, the challenges of society looking at me differently – then my work is worthwhile.”
Across the globe, 60 countries or areas are contaminated by antipersonnel mines, according to the 2023 Landmine Monitor ReportExternal link. In 2022, nearly 5,000 people in the world died or were injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war. That same year, Ukraine saw a ten-fold increase in the number of civilian casualties (608) from landmines and explosive remnants of war compared to 2021 (58).
Duley believes the focus on Ukraine today could help other countries down the line.
“Ukraine could be a tipping point where people see how big the problem is and how we can solve it,” he says. The country, he adds, is developing innovative technology to address this challenge.
Technicians in Angola making a prosthetic leg for a young boy, Sapalo, who lost his legs when unexploded ordnance blew up. “They had no funding and their equipment was broken but they would go in there everyday and try and make those legs. There was a humanity in that,” says Duley.
@Mag / Giles Duley
This includes the use of robotics, drones and artificial intelligence to detect mines – technologies that “have the potential to revolutionise the [humanitarian demining] sector”, writesExternal link Paul Hislop of the UN Development Programme in Ukraine. They are also low-cost and high-impact and could save millions of dollars, Hislop adds.
Ukraine is currently the biggest recipient of donor money for mine action: in 2022 it received $160 million (CHF137 million), far more than the next biggest recipient, Iraq, at $89 million.
“The scale of the problem in Ukraine, the money put into it, but also the innovation of Ukrainians – all of this means they will develop new technologies that will then help mine clearance in other countries,” says Duley.
The advocate sees Switzerland, one of the first signatories of the 1999 international treaty banning landmines, as a global leader in humanitarian demining alongside donors like JapanExternal link – which is planning a conference on demining in Ukraine in 2025 – and South Korea. The Alpine country, which has financed mine action projects around the world for the past 30 years, is committing CHF100 million to demining efforts in Ukraine over the next three years; Japan has pledged $70 million. Their leadership is needed more than ever, says Duley.
“It’s a very dangerous moment because for many years landmines were becoming obsolete,” he says. “Suddenly we’re dealing with a situation where mines have become a used weapon again. We have to make sure this doesn’t become acceptable.”
For the exhibition at the Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Duley wanted to remind visitors that landmines are part of a global arms trade, which is worthExternal link an estimated $127 billion. To do this, he’s presenting the mines as precious objects, or Objets de mort (Objects of Death), as the exhibition is called.
“In the exhibition, it was important for me to show weapons from [conflicts] now,
but also from previous wars and all the way back to World War One [pictured] as a reminder that this weapon is still killing.”
Giles Duley
“You can buy these weapons at trade fairs,” he says. “I wanted to photograph them as if they were an expensive watch or a perfume – as if they were in Vogue or GQ magazine. I like the idea of enticing people and suddenly they’re looking at images of weapons designed to kill or maim.”
The approach harks back to Duley’s days as a young photographer capturing shots of Lenny Kravitz and other musicians for the world’s top fashion and music magazines. By his late 20s, however, he’d become disillusioned with his career path, he toldExternal link Euronews in 2023. Inspired by war photographer Don McCullin, whom he’d long admired, Duley decided to start recording the impact of war. Soon he was meeting landmine survivors as part of that work.
“In most of the hospitals that I visit in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, children are missing their hands because they pick up [landmines] thinking they’re a toy,” says Duley. “The focus [of the conference] is Ukraine, but this problem is in Yemen, Palestine, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Colombia. It’s all across the world. These weapons will kill even when we’re gone.”
Young Ataqullah being fitted with a prosthetic arm in Afghanistan: “The simple fact is, we cannot keep targeting civilians as a way to find peace,” says Duley.
Giles Duley
In recent weeks, Duley’s work highlighting the legacies of war has taken him twice to New York and to Ukraine, with brief stops in London. Next on his agenda after Switzerland are trips to Cambodia and Lebanon – but not before a short break at home to catch up on his foundation work and cook for friends, his favourite way to unwind.
“Food is the opposite of war, because war is hatred,” Duley says. “Food is about bringing people together. Food is love.”
“I don’t photograph war,” he adds. “I photograph love. I photograph a mother feeding her baby or a grandmother brushing her granddaughter’s hair. I’m looking for that shared humanity, because it doesn’t matter where I travel in the world – most people just want to support their family, and feel safe, and dream of a better future for their children.”
Edited by Virginie Mangin/ac
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