Blood is spattered high into the ceiling of a central Bosnian farmhouse. An elderly married couple had been sprayed at point blank range with high velocity machine gun fire in a grisly execution by Bosnian Serb Forces in the Village of Uzdol, Bosnia. Their heads exploded instantly, spraying arterial blood onto the walls. The white fragments at the bottom left of the screen are the shattered remains of the old couple’s skulls. Although I was present when the bodies of the old couple were still lying in situ, the image was far too horrific for anyone to publish and also, in my mind, quite unnecessary to photograph. However as I turned and was about to leave with the British United Nations soldiers who had the awful task of clearing up this ungodly horror, one of the young soldiers carrying the remains looked back at the wall and said ‘fuck me mate just look at all that fucking Claret up the bleeding wall’ (claret being slang for blood). For some reason I had been so preoccupied and consumed with the dilemma of how I could shoot this image in a presentable way I had failed to see the horrific message so graphically painted by a Kalashnikov hand on the wall. It struck me that this image was so much more powerful without the couple’s bodies and perfectly acceptable for any publication. Your imagination runs away with you at the thought of what went before! This is a lesson to any budding so-called war photographer that you don’t have to stick your lens and nose into the gore to get a truly shocking picture of war.
Bosnia.

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