Pictures from... - Episode Guide

War photographer David Pratt takes a trip back to Iraq, the beautiful, traumatised land whose conflicts he has covered for over three decades.

This powerful, personal documentary unravels the complex recent history of Iraq using David's rich personal archive of photographs and video.

As the journey proceeds, the action flashes back to other times when David was present in Iraq: in 1991 before the Gulf War, the Iraq War in 2003 and then when he was embedded with American troops. For at least some of the time, David was there as an independent reporter, selling pictures and stories to many outlets.

David addresses the darkest period in Iraq's recent history: the rise and bloody reign of Isis. Using a series of carefully edited Isis propaganda videos, sourced from the BBC Monitoring Jihadist Unit, David describes the brutality of the Isis regime.

War photographer David Pratt takes a road trip through the Balkans, revisiting the conflict where he came closest to the edge: the Yugoslav wars of the 90s.

David begins his journey on the Danube River at Vukovar, Croatia. David came to Vukovar as a young photographer in 1991 to cover the opening battle of what turned out to be the brutal series of ethnically driven wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Scottish war photographer David Pratt has been visiting Afghanistan since the mid-1980s, when he was a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art. Working for various news organisations, he crossed the border into Afghanistan from Peshawar in Pakistan in disguise and travelled for long periods with a group of Mujahideen. He witnessed their intense guerrilla struggle against the occupying Soviet Red Army and learned the hard way how to survive in gruelling circumstances in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, as well as how to get his pictures out to the world.

During the so-called Civil War period in the 1990s, David witnessed intense fighting that reduced Kabul to rubble, the massive refugee crisis which resulted, and the rise of the hard-line religious force known as the Taliban. Then, after Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, David saw the fight from the other side. He was embedded with various British and American military units as they sought to subdue this difficult and damaged land, and to prop up the Afghan government they had installed.

Pictures from Afghanistan tells the story of David's relationship with the country using his unique personal archive of still images and video footage. It gives an independent reporter's personal perspective on a vast, complex and frequently harrowing set of conflicts that have frequently threatened to reduce Afghanistan to anarchy and its people to misery.

We travel back with David to Kabul, where he assesses the state of things as the Americans negotiate a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. He meets with former Soviet intelligence officer Vyacheslav Nekrasov, who now runs the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Kabul. He conducts an interview with a Taliban spokesman and picks up the trail of Sayed Anwari, the Mujahideen commander who took him under his wing in the early years. Anwari passed away in 2016, but we see friendship restored when David meets Anwari's sons, Mahdi and Abdullah.

David's work has always sought to capture the human dimension. The suffering of the Afghan people is always apparent, but so too is their warmth and loyalty, and the affection he has for them. The film is a moving portrait of a man who has dedicated himself to a career reporting on the worst of what humanity has to offer, and sometimes uncovering the best.

Veteran photojournalist David Pratt travels to Ukraine after war breaks out. His goal: to bear witness to the biggest unfolding crisis in Europe since World War Two.

In this episode, David returns to Ukraine in late summer. He crosses the border from Poland before taking the night train to Kyiv. He tells the story of what has happened since April, checking off key events such as the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv, the capture of Mariupol and the sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva. 

David describes the international situation and how Russia has attempted to use the energy supply to the west, the occupation of a Ukrainian nuclear plan 

and the control of grain shipments, to isolate Ukraine and blackmail the international community into backing down. He visits Borodyanka, a town to the north of Kyiv that contains areas which were devastated by Russian strikes, where he meets Natalya, a woman from the town who has lost her husband in the fighting. 

In the village of Moschun, David meets local man Vadym, who describes how the villagers assisted the Ukrainian army in their defence of the village by giving the positions of Russian troops by mobile phone and helping Ukrainian solders navigate the forests. 

David then travels to Bucha, where he meets three gravediggers who assisted with the recovery of bodies following the murder of hundreds of civilians by Russian troops. He also speaks to Alena Grom, a photographer from Donetsk who has turned from street art and portraiture to war photography. They talk about the impact of the war and how photographers cover conflict. 

Back in Kyiv, David comes across dozens of destroyed or captured Russian armoured vehicles that have been placed on the main street off Maidan Square. It is a dark satirical gesture of defiance by Zelenskiy, a parody of the victory parade which Putin expected to be holding. He then speaks to Valentyn, a volunteer Ukrainian soldier who fought in Donbas in 2014 and took up arms again in 2022. Valentyn describes how he is fighting for his family and future. 

David ends his journey where it began, in Kyiv, January 2023, as the war continues on.