I know that you’ve been working on ‘DEAD TRAFFIC’ for a few years as I’ve been following your progress throughout. Can you please take us back to the beginning and explain how it all started.
Sure. Actually, I didn’t go to Sierra Leone specifically with this book in mind. It was something that developed gradually over two separate trips, as I grew more confident within my direction, my surroundings and myself. This project has had various working titles and the editing process has been a very longwinded affair due to me constantly chopping and changing things. The fact that it’s now being printed as a book is like a small miracle to me.

Books are small miracles I think, but how did you end up going to Sierra Leone?
Well initially I was invited to document daily life at a re-established jungle hospital run by a Danish charity in the heart of the country. Whilst I definitely felt that they were carrying out an honourable course, I soon however realised that photographically I wasn’t inventive enough to escape the stereotypical and self-perpetuating images of impoverished Africans, too often force fed to us by the general media. Everywhere I looked I saw images that seemed familiar to me, images of the malnourished child, of disease and poverty. Images that, rather sadly I feel we have all largely become immune to. I acknowledged the realities and decided not to go down that route. Instead I headed for Freetown – the capital city – to start another kind of visual rummage.

How did you decide what to photograph and where to focus your attention once you got there?
It was difficult because I found Freetown a bewildering and chaotic space with endless visual possibilities. In the beginning I would simply spend hours on end wandering the crowded streets to soak in the vigorous atmosphere whilst trying to find my ground. During this time I met a lot of inquisitive faces and shot sporadic street scenes, but I was struggling to make a genuine emotional connection with anything I saw and I was starting to get lonely. Then after about 3 weeks by pure chance I came across an isolated area of Big Wharf – the largest slum area of the city – and things changed. I instantly sensed a different behavioural emphasis in the people that were there, a kind of immediacy and rawness that I was very attracted to.

What kind of people were they?
They were a mixed bunch really, but mainly they were young angry people disillusioned with their prospects of a better life. A dysfunctional kind of family, grouped together from all parts of the country, believing in strength in numbers but still forced into counterproductive activities such as crime, violence, prostitution and drug abuse.

Were they using this place as an escape?
Yes you could definitely say that. Many had come here in search of quick and easy money, unwilling to accept the rural hardship they had been exposed to in the villages they had come from. For them I think this was a more exciting and rebellious place. A kind of transient playground with lots of gangster attitude and a very bad name amongst the rest of the population. A place inhabited by hard-bitten individuals that unlike the malnourished child in the hospital I could somehow relate to. I soon felt strong echoes of myself within these people and I knew I had finally outlined a territory to explore and found a project to call my own.

How were you perceived by this group at first?
Generally, I was met with a warmth, openness and respect that I have struggled to find anywhere else in the world, but the beginning was tough and many understandably weren’t exactly sure what to make of me turning up on their turf like that. I think initially, due to their previously limited interaction with other Westerners I was regarded simply as an easy handout by the majority. Also because of my conspicuous appearance as a bald, blue-eyed Dane covered in tattoos I was seen as a bit of a novelty and I soon acquired random nicknames such as ‘Vin Diesel’ and ‘The White Gangster Journalist’.

‘The White Gangster Journalist’, that’s so funny!
It was definitely funny and you have to play along with it. There were a lot more names like that, my personal favourite though being ‘The Notorious K.I.M’. It was all kind of silly, but it felt affectionate and confirmed to me that their main reference point to the West had come from watching American music videos and reduplicated action films. They seemed to live through these things and believe in them. Most had never been to school and they had next to no access to the Internet.

Did you get as close as you wanted?
I would say yes. Generally, as a photographer I’ve experienced that closeness is something you must earn in a sense, but given Sierra Leone’s difficult past and current state my situation there was somehow very different. Trust there seemed to be more easily earned, perhaps because many felt they had little to loose by opening up and expressing their feelings towards me as a Westerner. A hugely complex photographer/subject situation of course and even more so when dealing with Africa. It’s intellectual fuel for endless discussions, but I chose not to dwell on it, utilized the situation in my favour and simply regarded this forthrightness as a privilege to work with.

What piece of advice would you give to fellow less-experienced photographers trying to carry out a project with similar social and cultural implications involved? How should they approach the whole thing as an outsider?
I’m normally quite careful dishing out advice to people I don’t know, but perhaps I would suggest that time is the key. I was never the kind of photographer to just rock up somewhere and bang out the rolls straight away as I’m always cautious not to force my images before they present themselves. Be patient and have confidence in the fact that eventually situations and people will take you to wherever it is you want to go photographically. The main thing is to recognize when you’re finally there and to be ruthless with your camera once you find yourself in that moment. Psychology and mind games as we discussed are inevitable parts of it, use them both within reason to your advantage and remember that you are the biggest variable in the whole process.

The biggest variable. Are you suggesting that by being an outsider you control the detail because you are the detail?
Yes exactly.

In your press release you stated that this book was made “without staking a monopoly on a specific kind of truth”. What did you mean by that?
I think the only truth ever worth speaking about is your own. So, for me to authenticate a story or situation via a series of photographs and claim to provide a genuine insight into other people’s lives would just seem absurd and naïve. Of course I place this work somewhere within the realm of documentary photography, but that’s not to say that I’m at all concerned with accurate depictions or facts. Photography in my world will always be a subjective pursuit, which transforms and distorts. An individual take on something, which more often than not is multilayered and complex, and which should not be accepted as an all-encompassing truth.

Is that also the reason why I’ve never seen you use any captions with your photographs?

Do you see this as a problematic tendency within documentary photography?

What kind of limitations are you talking about here?

Please tell me about the title you’ve chosen for the book.
One afternoon during my second trip I came across an old abandoned car wreck dumped down a side street. It was during the dry season and the car was covered in red dust kicked up from the road by passing cars. Someone had scribbled the words ‘DEAD TRAFFIC’ presumably with their fingers on the windscreen. At first I simply found it mildly amusing in the same way I do in London, when I pass one of those builders vans saying ‘I wish my wife was as dirty as this’. Yet somehow the words stuck with me and it soon became apparent that they could in fact easily be applied as a metaphor for everything that was going on around me. The overpopulated city with its relentless queues and roadblocks and the dysfunctional family, moving at a frantic pace yet at the same time in terms of financial and social advancement going nowhere. They became two key words in my subconscious and I started shaping my imagery around them. Two days later I encountered the eagle and the title was confirmed.

Yes the eagle is a strong statement throughout the book.  
Well I’m hoping that the eagle’s continuous presence may help stir up different connotations and project certain feelings towards the remaining image.

Susan Sontag once wrote: “To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do and pictures taken out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.” I don’t see you as a war photographer but this is not the only place I sense a notion of death throughout this work.
Death is what all life is measured against. It’s an unavoidable and engrossing theme. Sure, I use it in my work.

Okay so lastly I get a sense that you intentionally wanted to remove hope, almost as if only through its absence we would be reminded of its importance. True?
No, not really. Hope is there and hope is good. It was never my intention to remove it. My good friend Jason once told me to remember that photographers only see what they choose to see and I’ve since come to realize that I’m certainly no exception. This book is what it is, a tightly edited accumulation of photographs. Perhaps it reveals as much about my views and me as a person as it does about anything captured inside. Here it would be nice to finish with the words of the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, who expressed my sentiments beautifully and much more eloquently when she said: “The unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme that we carry inside ourselves.”

Okay, thank you.
You’re welcome man. Thank you Luca.