Dialogue with Legends George Rodger

When Thomas Joshua Cooper and Paul Hill set out in 1974 to meet and interview the ‘movers and shakers’ of 20th century photography (see Dialogue with Legends, AP 1 April) they had no idea that the project would take four years and become a unique archive that is still in print.

- Paul Hill

Paul Hill describes the interview with British photojournalist George Rodger, followed by selected extracts from the recorded encounter

This year we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. It is also the 30th anniversary of the death of British photojournalist and Magnum founding member George Rodger. Whenever I am asked to describe his character, I always use the old-fashioned word 'gentleman'.

In 1945 Rodger made a life-changing decision that he recalled in the 1977 interview.

Traumatised by the experience of looking for 'nice compositions' of the corpses during the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, he vowed never to photograph another war. Instead, he embarked on a 28,000-mile journey all over Africa and the Middle East, focusing on animal life, rituals, and ways of life that exist in a close relationship with nature.

Earlier his pictures of the London blitz had brought him to the attention of Life magazine, and he became a war correspondent. He won 18 campaign medals and went on to document the war front in Eritrea, Abyssinia and the Western Desert. He also travelled to Iran, Burma, North Africa, Sicily and Salerno, Italy, where he met and befriended Robert Capa.