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Stephen Dupont on ABC TV
24.05.2008
AFGHANISTAN – A SURVIVOR’S TALE
Foreign Correspondent, ABC TV
Tuesday 27 May 2008, 9.30pm
Tuesday 27 May 2008, 9.30pm
Next on Foreign Correspondent, a dramatic and very personal tale of survival.
Sydney-based freelance journalist Stephen Dupont, and his colleague Paul Raffaele narrowly escaped a suicide bomb in Afghanistan last month. The two men were just five metres from the blast, which killed at least fifteen officials and policemen who were about to destroy a crop of opium poppies.
Dupont, whose Foreign Correspondent story on heroin addiction in Afghanistan won a Walkley Award in 2006, was not seriously injured. But he was badly shaken. Paul Raffaele was hospitalised, with head injuries. Both men are now back in Australia and feeling extremely lucky to have survived relatively unscathed.
Acting on instinct, moments after the explosion Dupont pulled out his stills camera and his video recorder and began capturing the confusion and panic. He filmed himself, blood running down his face, as he searched for his lost colleague, not knowing whether he was dead or alive.
After twenty years of highlighting the plight of others, the photojournalist was now turning the lens on himself. He admits it was a strange feeling, but he was doing his job.
It’s not easy though, to get the dead, including a child, out of his mind. With a partner and young child of his own at home, “I just feel so lucky, so lucky,” he says. “I don’t know why I do this job.”
Combining stills and video, Dupont’s Foreign Correspondent film is a raw, gritty picture of what it feels like to be caught up in moment of modern day warfare – it has an immediacy and authenticity that no report after the event can ever convey.
Last year there were 140 attacks like this in Afghanistan alone, killing hundreds. In Iraq, there were many more. Audiences are becoming desensitised, used to the distant violence. If a story like this can jolt us out of our complacency, perhaps Dupont and Raffaele have done their job.
Stephen Dupont has won many prestigious international photography awards, and has worked all over the world. He’s a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Time, The Sunday Times Magazine and many other international publications.
