Photography as Advocacy: Origins of a Journey
Sometimes you can pinpoint the exact moment when you decide to change the rest of your life. For photographer Marcus Bleasdale, it happened one London morning in 1998 when he walked into the office where he was working as an investment banker. “Even at that point, I had long known I wouldn’t stay in banking, but that day there was just this trigger,” he recalled. “I didn’t even sit down, and I walked into my boss’s office and resigned.”
Not long afterward, Marcus first arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with an idea to retrace the river as Joseph Conrad might have seen it as he penned Heart of Darkness. The images he made then were the first of