It’s a slice of the lives of the war correspondants in Libya that we are publishing execptionally in spite of the weak definition of the photographs. It’s Patrick Baz, special correspondant photographer for the Agence France Presse (AFP/Getty Images) who gave us his log book in images.
Photojournalist Patrick Baz was one of the judges in this year’s World Press Photo. With authorisation from the organisers, he took to Twitter to give unprecedented insights into the judging. BJP selects some of his best tweets.
Believe me, when I looked at the pictures on the screen, my hands were shaking. My heart was beating. I realized that this is a picture you take once in a blue moon. It’s being there at the right time, at the right moment, at the right place, with the right lens. If you want to shoot artsy stuff, you never have the lens for this. If you’re covering the war with a 35-millimeter and a 50-millimeter lens, you’ll never have this.
It was pure luck. I had to get the right fixer. I speak Arabic and I knew how to make my way through. The thing with dictators or with dictatorships is that they make you believe that you are not allowed to. You start self-censoring. It is amazing because nobody would stop you from going to take pictures of the Republican Guards. I realized that when the fixer took me to the Ministry of Defense and the guys from the Ministry of Defense said: “Why don’t you come to us and why are you the only one? We want to show that we are defending our country.”
