2003. Catherine, a wounded nine-year-old girl, flees Drodro village on a makeshift stretcher following an attack on the local hospital. Militiamen from the Lendu ethnic group massacred 14 patients in their beds. Slashed in the leg by an attacker, Catherine was too frightened to remain at the hospital for treatment, fleeing to the bush for safety.
2003. Catherine, a wounded nine-year-old girl, flees Drodro village on a makeshift stretcher following an attack on the local hospital. Militiamen from the Lendu ethnic group massacred 14 patients in their beds. Slashed in the leg by an attacker, Catherine was too frightened to remain at the hospital for treatment, fleeing to the bush for safety.
Photograph by Marcus Bleasdale

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

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