Joerg Colberg: Over the past few years, you spent time both in Afghanistan and in Iraq as a photojournalist. The risk of getting killed in these countries seems awfully high. How did you decide to become a photojournalist covering war?
Peter van Agtmael: I was interested in war from a very young age. I loved the shapes of fighter planes and the confidence and strength projected by uniforms. For a time I wanted to be a soldier. But I was also a sensitive child, and had no real conception of what war meant. Several events changed me. The first Gulf War ended when I was ten. I had rigorously followed the buildup to war, spewing statistics to anyone who would listen and laminating pictures of U.S. troops I had cut from The New York Times, and which I carried in my pockets everywhere I went. Sometime after the war, I was in the local library and came across a photo retrospective of the conflict. Inside were the obvious jingoistic icons but there were also images of the road of death leading back to Iraq, the Kenneth Jarecke picture of a horrible burned Iraqi soldier, the David Turnley picture of a wounded soldier weeping next to a body bag containing his buddy. Those pictures shocked me. Until that point my conception of death was the exaggerated, bloodless, noble kind from old war movies.

Jörg Colberg