How to Become a Combat Photographer

Video Transcript

"My name's Anthony Maddaloni. We're going to talk about how to become a combat photographer. Now there are different to become a photo journalist or a photographer who photographs or documents combat. And obviously this is a very hazardous way of making a living or making your work as a photographer. And there are probably half a dozen ways of becoming a combat photographer. One of the most obvious is to join the military and work in that capacity as a military photographer. And the military does have photographers and they certainly use combat photography for what they do. The other way would be to work for a news agency and to essentially have an agency send you on an assignment into a combat zone. This isn't anything to be taken lightly. And one of, I would say, the most important things about whether you work for the military, yourself, a news agency, is that you have to have a certain level of trust for the people that you're photographing. You're in an incredibly, incredibly intense situation where really lives are being lost potentially in front of you. So your trust level has to be extremely high. If you're a journalist, right now it's quite popular to become embedded with the combat troops; where you will see you know, things that you'll never get a chance to see as a photographer had you just not created that level of trust with the people that you are embedded with. One item that I like looking a lot at is blogs. And I see the way that people use their photography and also their journalism to write about things that are going on literally the world away from me. And I would say that that is one way that you could become sort of get your foot in the door at to combat photography, is to write about it. And that if you could be in the military, if you could sponsored by a news agency or even just do it yourself, I mean I've seen people do it. And that is how I would go about becoming a combat photographer."