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ASHLEY GILBERTSON - PART 1INTERVIEW BY ROCCO CASTORO  War photographer Ashley Gilbertson’s mindset in late 2003 could have been summed up thusly: “If you haven’t experienced Iraq, you are a worthless piece of shit.” Earlier that year Gilbertson [seen with his camera in the photo at left] was charging around Iraqi Kurdistan in an old beater with a trunk full of beer, documenting a nation without a country. And then, after completing his first rotation shooting the war, he was back in the US, reeling from the collective complacency he saw there. People who hadn’t seen carnage, war, and mayhem firsthand couldn’t tell him nothing, no-how.
Gilbertson is only 30 years old but, luckily for the rest of us innocent bystanders, he’s learned to cope with the insanity that he has witnessed ever since that beleaguered first round. He no longer thinks you deserve to die for not knowing the difference between Shias and Sunnis, but he still probably thinks you’re stupid. (Which you probably are.) Vice: When did you first pick up a camera? Ashley Gilbertson: I had been skateboarding for about a year, and I was really shit although I thought I was cool. I just learned how to ollie three stairs and I thought I was Mike fucking Carroll. At some point I asked my father to take a picture of me skating. He was sort of an amateur photographer so he bought me this little Ricoh SLR and I tried using the self-timer to take pictures of myself skating, but of course it didn’t work. So I started shooting my friends who were actually good at skating. By 16 or 17, I was a full-time skate photographer. I did a little news here and there but skating was my passion. The sense of knowing the decisive moment of when to shoot all comes from that experience. It’s important to get all the necessary information captured in a news picture, just like if someone’s flying down two flights of stairs, you have to depict all the technicality and risk involved in the execution. There seems to be a continuity in your work—starting with skaters and hoodlums, moving on to refugees, and now documenting a nation that has been devastated by war. You’re drawn to outsiders. There is a connection, without a doubt. These are subcultures on the fringes and in many ways they haven’t got their own voice. They are all marginalized, and the progression to Iraq was natural because I was giving more exposure to yet another group who I felt were misunderstood. Approaching things with an empathetic eye is really the main theme in all of my work.  But the transition from skate photographer to war correspondent must have been rough. When I got my first big jobs it was a nightmare. I had no fucking idea what I was doing. A bureau has ten journalists who have to answer to an editor every single day. I had to file pictures when they wanted, not whenever I got around to it. At first they had me on these stories about infrastructure crap in Sadr City, where I had to photograph yet another pile of shit or some politician. I did a lot of that stuff because nobody else wanted it. Everyone was after a front-page story. Up until that point, the relationships I had with editors were pretty much one-on-one, but when you’re working with a paper that has 80 photographers around the world on any given day they don’t have time to call you to kiss your ass or shout at you. Then all of a sudden the real war started. The invasion was kind of a cakewalk compared to what followed. I didn’t know about this until recently, but one of the first editors I worked with told me she had a photographer in the same place I was working. After filing his pictures he called her to say, “Keep an eye out for this Ashley guy’s pictures because he is absolutely fucking crazy. He is running around the battlefield as if there were no bullets.” I look back at myself then and it was really bad. I had no idea what I was doing—I probably should have died. I thought all these experienced war photographers were being pussies, when in fact I was a total lunatic running around without a helmet or flak jacket. So I wasn’t wholeheartedly accepted by the other photographers until 2004 in Kabul. Fallujah took place later that year, and now I’m like blood there. TO BE CONTINUED ASHLEY GILBERTSON | 1 | 2 |
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