Getty Images Reportage photographer Giles Clarke offered a rare and unflinching account of the psychological toll and ethical weight of crisis photojournalism during one of the most compelling sessions at the Xposure International Photography Festival (Xposure 2026).

In conversation with bestselling author and photojournalist Rick Smolan, Clarke traced two decades of frontline work that has taken him from special prison regimes in El Salvador to malnutrition in Yemen, from Haiti’s most violent neighbourhoods to the aftermath of Sudan’s conflict in 2025. The discussion moved beyond the images themselves to examine the split-second decisions, personal risk and lasting emotional cost of bearing witness to humanitarian catastrophe.

Clarke’s path into crisis reporting began far from conflict zones. In the mid-1990s, he worked as a black-and-white printer in New York, including a period in Richard Avedon’s darkroom, refining technical discipline before turning to documentary work. That grounding, he said, shaped his approach to photographing challenging environments.

One of his early defining assignments came in El Salvador in 2010, when he embedded with anti-crime officers and uncovered unofficial holding sites behind a police station, where dozens of hostages were confined. Forbidden from photographing the site, Clarke used a small point-and-shoot camera, capturing the images before fleeing to the airport minutes ahead of authorities arriving to investigate his presence. The resulting photographs later received World Press Photo recognition.

Since 2017, Clarke has made multiple trips to Yemen, documenting one of the world's most humanitarian catastrophes. Working closely with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), he gained extraordinary access to regions affected.

For 15 years, Clarke also documented the ongoing effects of the 1984 Union Carbide gas tragedy in Bhopal, India, one of the world's worst industrial disasters where several thousands died in a single night when a toxic gas cloud engulfed the slum areas surrounding a pesticide factory. "The aftermath was that because it was a pesticide factory and all the pesticide was left there - it all sank into the aquifer,” Clarke explained. “For years, even multigenerational now, the effects of this toxicity continue.” Clarke's images documented third-generation children born with severe disabilities from the contaminated water, most of whom have died, he noted quietly.

Clarke’s most recent work has focused on Sudan’s conflict. In April 2025, he gained access to Khartoum. “I really wanted to get in before the cleanup. I wanted to see the damage and document the reality while everything was very raw and still smoking,” he said.

The psychological toll of documenting crises

How does Clarke maintain his humanity after witnessing a lot of challenging events in so many countries? “I work with people on the front line who see a lot worse than me, much more of the year,” he noted. “I’m really just going in with a job… I know I'm getting out. It's the frontline responders and humanitarian workers and doctors - they're doing it 24/7”.

“The hardest thing is when you go back home and you’re editing at night. Editing is really tough because that's when you go back into the situation. You’ve got the time, you sit there, and you remember. It would mess me up."