In 1999, at the age of 23, fresh out of college, before I was even thinking about putting images together into larger stories, I ended up in Taliban madrassas in Chaman, on the Pak/Afghan border. I didn’t end up with a cohesive photo essay but I did end up with hell of an adventure. Above is a short film about it. 8 years later I was living in Kabul, we were in the middle of a war with the Taliban fueled by the sale of raw opium, and I was and traveling into the provinces to document the eradication of massive fields of poppies. While on assignment for the New Yorker I ended up on a 4 1/2 hour rolling ambush with Jon Lee Anderson and was nearly killed. Read the story HERE. Some of the images are below. When we finally escaped the ambush I went back to Kabul and asked Kristin Moore to marry me. The story of that ambush and our marriage is HERE.