Tripoli!

Terrible things happening in Libya at the moment, and I hope things work out for the best very soon. My blog's just about photography, though, so without wanting to be trivial I just wanted to tell you about the time I was on assignment there. A reporter and I travelled to Tripoli for the Manchester Evening News to cover a story back in the 90's - during the 25th anniversary of Gaddafi's rise to power, actually! You couldn't fly directly to the country, so we had to first fly to Malta, where we caught a cockroach-infested ferry from Valetta for a 14 hour journey across the Med. Once in Tripoli we firstly had our Duty-Free whiskey confiscated, and were then collected by our 'minders'. It took a couple of days for us to get settled, find the subject of our story and arrange a meeting. That meeting happened briefly, one night, in a crowded bizarre 'holiday camp' on the outskirts of the city. It didn't go quite to plan, and I ended up having to snatch shots with a telephoto and flash..in the dark. Pretty obvious where the photographer was! All the time we'd been there, though, there were jets zooming overhead and tanks rumbling down the streets. Not as dramatic as it sounds! They were rehearsing for the 25th Anniversary celebrations of Mr G, and I decided I would stay on to cover them. Our minders, however, decided that, no, I wasn't going to stay on to cover the event, and as we'd finished the story we came for we were politely pointed to the boat, and off we went back to Malta! Of course, this was still back in the days of film, so once back in Manchester I zipped into the darkrooms, desperate to see what shots I'd got. Well, the pictures were fine, and the paper rushed to get the story out. I went home, happy and unwashed, then dashed out at lunchtime to buy the first edition of that day's newspaper. There it was - a front page picture- and a story all about how "Our Reporter" had returned from Libya with his exclusive story! No mention of me at all! Tut!! More on that tomorrow.....