peter
“I was in Ethiopia, with these nuns who owned the orphanage, and they said “we’re going to take you to a place in this jeep, but there’s only enough room for six people, and if we take you, we have to leave a doctor behind. Do you think if you go, you will be able to make some money back in Ireland to pay for medicine for these people?” Now you feel it. We were going to a place where two villages were at war with each other. They cut the water supply and built a dam. These are just villages, not even countries. They had no water and were literally dying. They had no clothes because they sold them all for food, and all the children were blind, because their eyes were shriveled up and dried out… I took a picture of this little boy – he was putting his hand up to sort of shake mine, he was about twelve, but his hands looked like the hands of a 90-year-old man. So I took this picture and a few others too, but I just sent 2 photos back to the newspaper. The second photo was of an Irish school teacher who was helping to build a school. I was actually there to cover her story. The photos appeared in the newspaper the next morning, and we had no phones or anything so I had to go to a drug dealer’s house to use his internet connection to send the photos. All he wanted to do was to look at my cameras and take pictures with them while I was uploading. But anyway, the next day, we were like, in the fuckin’ middle of nowhere, and a car pulled up, and a guy said “are you Niall Carson?” I said “yeah”, he replied “there’s a phone call for you.” And he handed me a mobile phone, and it was someone from Today FM, the producer of the Ray D’Arcy Show. They said “can you talk to us about this photograph you took? Who is this kid and what the hell happened to him?” I told the story, and gave them the bank account for the school. It was printed in the newspaper as well. In two days there was something like 50,000 pounds on the bank account. I don’t even know how much money went in after that. This was the time I realized photos can really make a difference.”