AWARD-winning photographer Kieran Doherty has covered the Iraq War in 2003, the Asian tsunami in 2004 and a host of conflicts and world events from Yemen to Israel and Northern Ireland – where Doherty spent much of his childhood.
Yet one of the most harrowing stories he has covered to date was the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan. The country only came into existence in 2011 but, since 2013, conflict has seen almost two million people displaced, widespread killings and hundreds of thousands of people suffering from malnutrition, with many areas on the brink of famine.
Now Doherty’s photos from his four-week trip last year have been assembled for the first time for an exhibition in Belfast. The startling images, while beautifully captured, show the desperate situations suffered by the people of South Sudan.
The Oxfam Ireland-organised exhibition at the Linen Hall Library is called Make Them Visible and sets out to highlight the plight of the refugees in what is an often overlooked conflict.
“I think there are 60 million refugees in the world at the moment and South Sudan is so low down on the register of forgotten wars. It’s just not on people’s radar,” says Doherty, who will give a talk at the library at lunchtime today.
“You’re trying to tell a story and you know that the images are going to be put out to donors and into the Oxfam literature, so you want people to give money.
“I’m not naive enough to think as a photographer that your images are going to change things or stop the war, but these images had some sort of impact last year when we got back and they were able to raise money.”
Doherty – whose father is from Belfast – was born in Dover, but his family moved to Northern Ireland in 1968 and stayed until 1978. “Then we moved to Hong Kong, went back to Belfast for a couple of years and then moved to England,” says the photojournalist, now based in Hampshire.
One of the most moving stories he encountered in South Sudan was that of Elizabeth, who he photographed with her son Swampy.
“She gave birth to the baby in the reeds in the river when she was hiding. So she named the baby Swampy because of where it was born. Then her husband went back to their home in Bor to fetch supplies and was killed. That’s just one of thousands of stories. Everywhere you look there’s a story like that.”
Elizabeth is now living in a tent with her five children and five other families in a camp and says they have to beg for food to survive now.
“One of the UN camps we visited had about 20,000 Nuer tribe refugees at one point. It was a case of, if they walked outside that camp they would have been killed by the opposing tribe. And the camp was falling apart and had no sanitation. The people there are in an awful situation,” says Doherty.
“After the Asian tsunami, the South Sudan trip was the most physically and mentally demanding one I’d ever done.”
So shattered was Doherty that even the offer of travelling around with a world-famous actress couldn’t keep him in South Sudan.
“We were contacted and asked if we would mind staying on for an extra five days because Keira Knightley was coming out and they wanted us to take her to where we’d been, but we had hit a wall and had no energy left, so we couldn’t – not even for Keira Knightley,” he laughs. “But I met her briefly and she was so sweet. She had no entourage with her, which really impressed me.”
Doherty – who has also covered Olympics and World Cups and won a World Press Photo Award for his 2015 Wimbledon series Ground Pass Holders – returned to Northern Ireland in the early 90s to cover the Troubles and contentious Orange marches.
“I love getting back over to Belfast, because it’s where I grew up. I remember looking at [acclaimed photographer] Don McCullin’s pictures from Derry and thinking, 'I want to be shooting pictures like that’.”
:: The Make Them Visible exhibition is now showing at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and runs until November 28. Kieran Doherty will give a talk at the library at 1.30pm today. Admission free (www.oxfamireland.org).
