War photographer Marcus Bleasdale shoots the fashion week shows

The photographer Marcus Bleasdale made his name documenting conflicts from Kashmir to Congo. An assignment to shoot the fashion shows in New York, Milan and Paris took him out of his discomfort zone .

Published: 7:00AM BST 12 Sep 2009

Backstage at Dolce & Gabbana, Milan.

Spending a month at the international catwalk shows was a shock. I had never taken photographs of fashion before. It is not something that I know anything about. Before I started this assignment I had heard of Armani and Yves Saint Laurent – all the big names – but that was about the end to my fashion knowledge. I am a guy who wears jeans and a T-shirt for a living. I spent eight months last year covering conflict.

I had been to Somalia, Sudan, Congo and Kashmir, and the images that arrest you from places such as those are powerful. In a way I suppose I wanted to clear my head by trying something new, a contrast to what I had done before. New York magazine wanted someone who had no preconceptions of the fashion world, someone who was completely lost. They found the right person.

I flew to New York fashion week in February straight from Congo. I spent the first two days wandering around in a daze, thinking I had made a mistake. I find it difficult enough readjusting to my home life in Oslo when I come back from a place like Congo; going out to eat in a restaurant feels like an obnoxious thing to do. But this experience was something else entirely. I was transported into a world filled with models, hair and make-up artists, and burly bouncers telling me where I was and wasn’t allowed to go.

In January I had been working on a documentary with Human Rights Watch, surrounding the trial of Thomas Lubanga at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Lubanga is charged with forcibly recruiting child soldiers and using them to commit atrocities in eastern Congo between 2002 and 2003. We centred the documentary on people who had been child soldiers or had been directly affected by Lubanga. These are people scrambling around for what they could eat, worried about whether they would survive the next day.

Initially, I felt lost in New York and quite resentful of the fashion industry. I was shocked at the vast amounts of money being spent on the shows and the attention to detail paid to individuals.

But by the end I was getting the hang of it. I started to understand the magic of it all. The amount of work that goes into the production of a show is incredible. People may think that catwalk shows are glamorous, but there is plenty going on behind the scenes that is not glamorous at all. I couldn’t believe how much the models get prodded and pressed; how many things are applied, then taken off, then reapplied. How frustrating must that be.

There is a pecking order among fashion photo­graphers. Some of them have been shooting the shows for years and they tend to look out for each other. When you are photographing the show front of house, there is a specific area for photographers and cameramen called the riser. I had never heard this word before and I remember at one show being handed a piece of paper that said riser access only. I asked a PR girl where the riser was and she looked at me like I was stupid and pointed to a group of about 700 photographers. I later found out that these photographers would have all arrived there much earlier and placed a little cross on the floor with tape to denote their spot. Standing in someone else’s spot is not a good idea.

By the time I arrived in Paris for the final week of the project I was really enjoying myself. Every day was like going to a circus or the theatre, and I tried to capture how poetic that felt. I was surrounded by beauty. When I am in Congo I spend days, sometimes weeks, getting to know people and understanding their story. This was a much quicker way of working. What I had learnt to do was not worry about where the models’ parents were from or if they felt suicidal, but concentrate on making beautiful images. Sometimes you would have only a second or two before being pushed along or told to stop.

It felt bizarre speaking to a contact in Congo during Paris fashion week, trying to work out how we could buy and ship six cows from Uganda to supply the orphanage that I helped set up in eastern Congo, and how we would get the grass for these cows to eat. That kind of contrast was constant. But by the end I found that I applied the same artistic process to photographing both worlds.

In a place of conflict I am trying to make people understand the horror of what is going on. If people are shown a very straight image of Congo they might shut down and not engage because the reality is so horrific. So what I try to do is show the truth but with a little bit more poetry. I applied the same process to the fashion world.

Backstage at Zac Posen.

Placing the seating cards at Chloe, Paris.

Backstage at Chanel, Paris.

The model board at Dries Van Norten, Paris.

Backstage at Isaac Mizrahi, New York.

Backstage at Lanvin autumn/winter 2009 show, Paris. By Marcus Bleasdale

The Telegraph Magazine 12 September 2009