“Everywhere I pointed my camera I saw mangled bodies, people shredded like mince meat, their clothes ripped away. Then I pointed the camera at myself – an act I still can't adequately explain.”

Stephen Dupont is describing a scene in Afghanistan in 2008, when a twelve year old suicide bomber blew himself up just metres from Dupont and Australian journalist Paul Raffaele. “We were in a car outside a police station. Paul took the full impact of the blast and was badly wounded. I briefly lost consciousness, then I grabbed my Leica and video camera and started to make pictures. Then I pointed the camera at myself – an act I still can't adequately explain. 

“Perhaps I needed to justify what I’d just been through and seen and needed to talk about it and not knowing whether I’d survive.” For twenty years Dupont returned every year to cover the conflict in Afghanistan. 

We met at the home Dupont shares with his partner, documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Tadic and their ten year old (?) daughter Ava.  The house seemed at odds with some of the desperate situations and locations that have become Stephen’s place of work. Perched halfway down a the Illawarra cliff face, I found myself in a cosy cocoon overlooking the ocean – a room lined with warm timber panelling, books and prints. Was this Dupont’s bolt-hole, away from noise and business of destruction?

For nearly three decades Dupont has covered, with dignity, compassion and intimacy, the human face of the world’s disaster areas. Inspired by the work of Don McCullin, a photographer he describes as “haunting my soul. I never saw myself as a news photographer, although I was making news photographs for Time, Newsweek and Bulletin at the same time I was making essays. It was McCullin’s vision and his ability to capture this incredible sense of humanity in a place that has no humanity left, that became my inspiration.”

But things have changed and Stephen looks back with nostalgia at his documentary life making portraits of the Raskol gangs of Papua New Guinea to the confronting images of Angolan asylum inmates chained to engine blocks. “War reporters and photographers once enjoyed a degree of neutrality, but these days they have become targets for groups such as Islamic State. With the result that there are not enough credible writers and filmmakers willing to go into places like Syria with the time to tell the story correctly. Instead we're getting a lot of citizen journalism, which is often just propaganda."