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Some guy named Simon Goldstein doesn't know it, but he is responsible for the stellar international career of photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale.
The reason?
This sentence he uttered one morning at 6:45: "What do you think that's going to do to the price of the exchange rate?"
It was 1996, and Mr. Bleasdale was working as a trader of interest-rate derivatives for Bank of America in the heart of the financial district in London. That morning, the papers were carrying a story on their front pages about the discovery of a hidden massacre site in the Balkans, several years after the murders had happened.
Formerly a trader, photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale now documents international humanitarian crises. (Peter Power/The Globe and Mail)
Mr. Goldstein was a colleague, and as the men settled themselves at their trading desks, he casually asked if Mr. Bleasdale had read the news item. "I said, 'Yes, it's horrific,' " he recalls.
Mr. Goldstein's next sentence changed his life.
It was not that the question about the effect on trading was inappropriate, but it served to remind him of what he cared about and what he could no longer do. "I just looked at him, completely stunned," says Mr. Bleasdale, a 39-year-old from the north of Britain who now lives in Oslo with his wife. "I walked into my boss' office and resigned. That was it."
It was a Wednesday. By the Friday, he had flown to the Balkans. "I was walking around aimlessly with a camera taking bad pictures for several months, not knowing what to do or how to put a story together, just clueless."
He had been taking photographs as an amateur for a long time, dreaming that maybe some day he could make a living at it. But for seven years, he had been a trader, "sitting in front of 12 screens and answering phones all day and screaming and shouting."
"It's a horrible life," he reflects. "Good money, but I had this fear of still being in front of those computers at 40. It's difficult to pull yourself away from that financial security."
Single at the time, he returned from his sojourn in the Balkans and mounted some of his photographs in an exhibition for a non-profit organization. Nothing of his sold. He figured he needed to be more serious about learning the craft of storytelling through photography, so he completed a post-graduate degree in photojournalism.
In 1998, after having won an award for being a rising young photojournalist, he was on assignment in Sierra Leone and later in Central African Republic for The Sunday Times. He became intrigued with the Democratic Republic of Congo. "I was reading [Joseph Conrad's] Heart of Darkness and thinking that nothing had changed, and I thought it would be a good idea to document what's going on in Congo using Conrad's words as a guide."
For the past nine years, Congo has kept drawing him back. Conflicts among warlords, rebel groups and government forces over control of the country's gold mines have left almost 4 million people dead since 1998 and created a humanitarian crisis in the country. Memorable lines from Mr. Conrad's classic novel, such as "the horror, the horror", were not hard to represent in a photograph, he says, gesturing to one that shows a young mother whose arm was hacked off and eaten in front of her by her attackers when she was trying to protect her son.
"Cannibalism is not the right word. I prefer to call it ritual killing," Mr. Bleasdale says with the calm assertion of someone who has encountered it. "The consumption of the flesh is empowerment. You destroy your enemy's spirits and you take them on, you take on his power."
A hushed urgency informs the way Mr. Bleasdale speaks of his work. In Toronto before the holidays to attend a Human Rights Watch exhibition of his work, he expresses dismay that the world is often preoccupied with inconsequential trivia.
CNN's Anderson Cooper travelled to the Congo last year, he says. "He was sent to cover the massacre of six gorillas," he continues, with the kind of resigned disappointment a parent might show for a wayward child.
Mr. Bleasdale has had a hard time persuading editors of magazines to run stories with his photographs about the crisis in Congo. "One of the pictures editors even apologized to me," he adds.
Does it make him cynical?
"It pisses me off," he replies. His eyes display a steady, patient understanding that what he knows is not what others can or want to grasp.
What does he do about his anger?
"You go back. You take more pictures. You shout and you scream," he says calmly. "You put pictures on walls like this," he says, indicating the display of his work in the central courtyard of Toronto's Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place), which is filled with fuzzy Christmas music.
Beauty in the composition of a black-and-white photograph can make the horror more palatable, he asserts. "If it were straight horror, people would be shocked, whereas if you approach the photograph with an emotional angle ... people will take more time, taking it in and learning more."
Recently, a prestigious photo agency called VII added Mr. Bleasdale to its roster, a testament to his rapid ascendancy as a photographer of international note.
Does it bother him that the pre-Christmas exhibition was in the heart of a financial district, populated by traders and bankers, the very people whose preoccupations with money he abhorred?
"It's exactly where it should be," he shoots back. "Look, everyone needs bankers. They do a great job, and a lot of them fund the work I do, especially George Soros and [other philanthropists] through the Human Rights Watch. I just needed to do something else, " he explains of his career shift.
Compared to his old desk job, the hours are longer as a photojournalist of humanitarian issues, the pay is worse, and a warlord can be crankier than a disappointed investor. But Mr. Bleasdale would never trade his career again.
"There's an immense amount of freedom in a place like DRC. Some of the best times I've had are getting up in the morning, putting cameras on your back and jumping on a motorbike and going off in the bush for three or four days, and thinking, 'This is my tube ride to my office.' "
