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War and peace through a lens

Witness to history: Martine Perret in Western Sahara.

In December, Margaret River-based photographer Martine Perret received a call from the United Nations asking her to head to West Africa.

Her assignment? To spend three months documenting the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea that would kill more than 11,000 people.

She would witness death, disease and humanity at its most fragile, and its best.

“We immediately tried to capture as many images as we could of the various activities, so everyone could see what was going on,” she toldM&M this week.

“The images are sent back to New York immediately, put in a photo library and they’re made available to the world.”

Ms Perret has spent more than a decade as a UN photographer — a job that has taken her to some of the most war-torn and dangerous places on the planet.

It has been her job to provide a visual record of the UN’s missions on the ground in Burundi in 2004, elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 and peacekeeping missions in Timor-Leste (East Timor).

“The ideal of the UN, the ideal of bringing peace and security to the world, is a beautiful ideal,” she said.

“I think when you work for such an organisation there is always positive and negative but you try to focus on whatever you can bring to the positive.”

Ms Perret began her career as a freelance photographer in Sydney in 1999, including time at the Australian Financial Review. Her love of photojournalism first took her to Timor-Leste in 2003, where she saw the birth of that country’s independence.

“I took two suitcases, I thought I’d stay seven weeks. I ended up staying there,” she said.

Ms Perret met some UN photographers in Timor, which “planted a seed”.

To her surprise, in 2004 she got a call sending her to the African republic of Burundi to photograph elections and the demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration of ex-combatants.

The assignments soon brought her into contact with extraordinary people in extraordinary situations.

One such person Ms Perret recalls was a Congolese woman she met in a Doctors Without Borders hospital in 2006, who had stepped on a landmine and lost both her legs.

“She was pregnant and lost her baby and then on top of that, her husband left her,” Ms Perret said.

Unable to forget the woman, some months later Ms Perret tracked her down with the help of UN peacekeepers. She was living in a mud hut, sitting on the ground, unable to move and unable to care for herself or her son.

“I looked at my friend who was also working for Mine Action and I said, ‘What is the likelihood of us helping her to get prosthetic legs’,” she said.

Using her contacts, and with a bit of fundraising, prosthetic legs were arranged.

“All of a sudden she had legs and could walk and take care of her 10-year-old child,” Ms Perret said. “That bought me a bit of joy that you could make a difference in someone’s life.”

Helping, however, is not always possible.

In 2003, Ms Perret travelled to Bogoro in the Congo as part of a team collecting information on a massacre by the Lendu militia. One of the witnesses showed her a skull and told her “this is my sister”.

“I didn’t expect that,” she said. “I asked him if he didn’t mind and I took his picture. I think he didn’t really want me to photograph his face so that’s why I took the picture without his face.

“I think it gives a bit more emphasis to the skull and the effects of that militia attack.”

Ms Perret said she “never slept well” during her time in the Congo but it was after a 2013 mission to South Sudan — where there is an ongoing civil war — that she decided it was time for a bit of “peace and quiet”.

After a decade living in, and photographing, some of the world’s most troubled places, she moved to Margaret River with her husband, fellow photographer David Dare Parker.

“I published an aerial photographic book, which I think was my way to seek beauty and cleanse myself of the darkness I had witnessed,” she said.

But as the phone call beckoning her to Ebola-riddled West Africa shows, her experience means she is still in demand.

“You have to be efficient, quick and flexible,” Ms Perret said.

“You also have to understand a bit better how to deal with people. Years of field experience have taught me a little bit about how to behave in the field, to be respectful in a way where you can still manage your work.

“When you go to Africa or East Timor and you turn up in a village I know you have to go to the elders or the chief of the village first, you can’t just point your camera straight away.

“You have to assess the situation before you do anything.”