Ken, unlike the rest of us, was not at ease with black people, and in the beginning I avoided working with him too much because of that. Not that I can recall Ken ever saying anything racist: it was just a difference in response, in empathy. Perhaps he was as uncomfortable with me and my open support for blacks in a country where identity was deeply, indelibly based on the colour of a man’s skin and how tight his hair curled. But Ken’s experiences as a photographer slowly changed his attitudes and had rid him of that native, unthinking racism.

While Ken was undergoing that process, Joao and he became close friends. The hours spent processing and printing pictures in each other’s company created a lot of time to learn about each other. They mostly just chatted or gossiped, but the claustrophobic processing cubbyholes at The Star were ideal for intimacies and sharing secrets. It was in Ken’s cubicle that he showed Joao the contents of a photo-paper box he treasured. Inside were pictures of a little girl: Tabitha, his daughter from a previous relationship. Ken’s wife, Monica, had forbidden him to see his daughter and had even made him promise in writing to not visit the child. For someone who worked so hard to keep things in hand, there were parts of Ken’s life that were definitely out of control. Monica’s jealousy was so intense that Ken would ask Joao and others at the newspaper to lie to her when he went to see Tabitha. Ken hid those pictures, fearing Monica would destroy them if she ever found them.

On Joao’s birthday in 1992, he was in his darkroom cubicle processing film when Ken came in to see how the job had gone. After some time, grinning broadly, Ken handed him a large brown envelope. Joao opened it, expecting a card, but instead it was a black-and-white photograph of a train smash and written on the bottom of the picture was ‘Happy birthday Joao!!’ Joao wondered why Ken had given him that picture. ‘That’s what happened the day you were born!’ Ken explained. He had gone to the newspaper archives to see what had been on the front page on 9 August 1966, unearthed the original negative and made an 8’ by 10’ print. ‘A lot of people die?’ Joao asked. ‘Lots,’ replied Ken, who had been born on Valentine’s Day. ‘On my birthday, they had some girl with flowers; on yours there has to be a disaster!’

By 1992, Ken had turned The Star’s photo department around. That year Joao won the national Press Photographer’s award, Ken was runner-up and The Star photographers dominated all the categories. It was through Joao that I got to know Ken better. There were individual friendships between the four of us, as well as a growing common bond. Our girlfriends and wives became friends, and we would get together for meals and to discuss and edit the pictures when one of us had done a big story.

When there was a lot of violence, we would team up for ‘dawn patrols’ - waking before dawn to be in the townships by first light. It was a ritual that we had each done singly at first and then later two or three of us would sometimes cruise together. The companionship meant I did not feel so alone when the alarm jerked me awake to face the next day of witnessing the violence. Sometimes when the days had been really bad I would wake seconds before the alarm and try to find excuses for staying in that warm bed, but the thought that the others were waiting somewhere would help me to get up.

From 1991 to 1993, South African political players were embroiled in protracted negotiations towards a transition to the ‘New South Africa’, and the ongoing violence was being used as a negotiating tool. It was impossible not to notice how the number of inexplicable massacres and attacks surged whenever the talks were at a critical stage. Even though we each in our own way were deeply motivated by the story, pictures and politics, cash also had its part in getting us up before the sun. The dawn was the transition between the chaos of the night and the occasional order of day - when the police would come in to collect the bodies.

I had become known as a conflict photographer. I could ask for assignments to almost any place, as long as people were killing each other. But it had taken me a while to learn how to make use of that reputation. When I had gone to New York in August of 1991 to collect the Pulitzer, I had asked if I had to wear a tux to the ceremony, not knowing that tuxes are not worn to lunchtime affairs. I also naïvely thought that the award would be a great opportunity to say something about what was happening back home. I spent days working on a speech and it was in my jacket pocket when my name was called and I walked up to the dias at Columbia University. But all the man did was shake my hand and give me a little crystal paperweight with Mr Pulitzer’s image engraved on it before ushering me away.

The other winners received their awards with equal haste and then there was a luncheon. It was the 75th anniversary of the prize and all living winners had been invited. It was an absurdly ideal place to establish contacts with many of the most important picture editors and the world’s greatest photographers. I made a wan effort to meet people, but I was in no frame of mind to do it effectively and left soon afterwards.

Despite my ineptitude in handling the business side of photography and in marketing myself, by late September of 1991 I had convinced the AP to assign me to cover the war in Croatia, and within days I was in the front-line village of Nustar. It was autumn, cold and wet, and the roads had been churned into muddy trails by the tanks. It was my first time in a ‘real war’ with tanks, artillery and machine-guns. I had no clue of what was reasonably safe and what was insane, yet somehow I survived those first weeks without getting myself or anyone else killed. I found that I liked war. There was a peculiar, liberating excitement in taking cover from an artillery barrage in a woodshed that offered no protection at all. Two other journalists shared that particular woodshed with me: one was a young British photographer called Paul Jenks, who huddled in a steel wheelbarrow because it made him feel safer as the massive detonation of nearby shells mingled with the scream of others passing overhead. He would be killed months later by a Croat sniper’s bullet: Paul had come too close to discovering the cause of the death of another journalist who had been strangled by a member of a motley unit of international volunteers to the Croat army. My other companion was Heidi Rinke, an Austrian journalist with long black hair, beautiful green eyes and a wicked sense of humour. I lent her my flak jacket as she did not have one and so began a romance that would keep us warm through the long winter months of covering the Serbo-Croat war.

Because of my Croat parentage, I spoke a passable pidgin Serbo-Croat and this sometimes gained me good access. So, in December of 1991, Heidi and I were the only journalists accompanying a troop of Croatian soldiers as they took village after village in the Papuk mountains. The Croats met only token resistance from geriatric villagers firing old hunting rifles at them, since the Yugoslav army and the Serb militia had already retreated, having seemingly decided that the area was bound to be lost sooner or later. It was eerie to see house after house burst into flames as we advanced on foot. In addition to putting Serb homes to the torch, many of the Croat soldiers were looting everything they could find, especially the local plum moonshine, slivovic. They also murdered many of the old folk who had been left behind. Deeper in the mountains, a soldier and I helped an old lady to the safety of her neighbour’s farmhouse after her house had been torched. The Croat commander, a decent enough man in charge of a bunch of murderous drunks, promised that the women would be safe. A few hours later, I stopped by to check on them, but the barn and house had been burnt out. My heart was in my mouth as I searched for the two women. I found only one and she was lying dead in the frozen mud.

In another hamlet, on another day, a conscience-stricken Croat soldier whispered to me that there was an old man still alive in one of the partially burnt farmhouses. Heidi and I tried to be nonchalant as we walked up the drive where blood spilled on the mud gave urgency to our search. We found nothing in the house, not even a corpse. I came back down to the road and surreptitiously asked the soldier where the wounded man was; he was terrified that his comrades would see him talking to me and whispered, ‘In the barn.’ I went back up past the blood and to the wooden barn, but saw only piles of hay. I started pulling at it, prepared for the worst; but I still got a fright when confronted by the grey, bloodless and unshaven face of an old man at the bottom of the pile. He was alive, but in a bad way. He had been shot and left under the hay to die. I tried to tell him to be calm, that we would get help. While Heidi was staunching the old peasant’s bleeding leg, I bent closer to hear what he was saying. I had my ear next to his mouth before I understood what it was that he kept repeating: ‘Don’t let the pigs eat my feet, don’t let the pigs eat my feet!’ It was not a crazy fear - pigs will eat anything, and on a few occasions I had seen pigs feeding off human corpses.

It was a strange war. One day I discovered a white-haired Serb lying dead in a ditch with his ears cut off. An unshaven, grinning Croat soldier with rotten teeth came up to me as I was taking pictures and he gleefully told me that he had killed and mutilated the old villager. His commander had a standing offer that anyone who brought him a pair of Serb ears could go home for four days. My Croatian surname allowed me to witness one side of the intimate brutalities of the civil war, but it precluded me from seeing the even greater toll of Serb atrocities up close.

Despite the horrors and my ancestral links to the country, the war did not have the same emotional impact on me as the events I had witnessed in South Africa - it was not my country and not my struggle. I was definitely there as a foreign journalist. In February of 1992, I returned to South Africa with Heidi. We lived together in the house I’d bought shortly after winning the Pulitzer. I had taken out a mortgage in order to buy it, as for the first time in my life I felt financially secure, after years of living hand-to-mouth. I was perpetually amazed by the turnaround in my circumstances - just one year previously I had been on the run from the police, but I now reckoned that there would be an outcry if they arrested South Africa’s only Pulitzer Prize-winner. I began to use my real name as a by-line. But in reality, the environment was changing, and ‘crimes’ such as mine were being ignored, as were draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors - whereas they had previously been hunted to ensure there was no ‘moral rot’ among whites. But even the Pulitzer could not change the effect that witnessing such searing events had had on me; on my return I found that I was almost immediately emotionally and politically ensnared by the events in South Africa. Unlike in the former Yugoslavia, I could not keep a distance from this story, nor from the people I photographed.

I remember a Sunday morning just weeks after coming back. In the street outside my house I was cleaning my car. Several neighbours also had hosepipes and buckets out as they cleaned and polished their cars - a Sunday ritual in my working-class neighbourhood. We greeted each other - they recognized me from interviews on television and in the papers. What they did not know was that I was not getting the car spruced up for the weekend, but that I was grimly trying to wash someone’s brains out of the cloth upholstery of my back seat. The previous afternoon, while most of South Africa was grilling meat on the braai or watching sport on television, I had been racing through the streets of Soweto trying to get to the hospital before the rasping, noisy breathing of the young man lying on my back seat ceased. The comrade’s girlfriend cradled his head in her lap and Heidi, sitting alongside, was telling me not to bother speeding, that it would make no difference. Brain-matter and fluid bubbled freely out of a gunshot wound in his head and he was not going to make it. At the hospital they pronounced him dead.

So, despite the cheery greetings from my neighbours, I resented them cleaning simple street dirt off their cars. This was something that I could not explain to them, nor to anyone else. It was as if they were occupying a different planet to me. It was precisely this that helped draw Joao, Ken, Kevin and me close to each other. When we tried to discuss those little telling details from incidents in the townships with people who had never experienced them, the usual response was either disgust or uncomprehending stares. We could only really talk about these matters to each other. Kevin had once written about his feelings on photography and covering conflict in an article which expressed thoughts that we had all, on occasion, shared: ‘I suffer depression from what I see and experience nightmares. I feel alienated from “normal” people, including my family. I find myself unable to relate to or engage in frivolous conversation. The shutters come down and I recede into a dark place with dark images of blood and death in godforsaken dusty places.’

It was from this sense of being outsiders from the society we had grown up in, and of being insiders to an arcane world, that we developed into a circle of friends prompting a local lifestyle magazine, Living, to dub some of us ‘the Bang-Bang Paparazzi’ in a 1992 article. Joao and I were so offended by the word ‘paparazzi’ that we persuaded the editor of the magazine-a friend called Chris Marais - to change it to ‘the Bang-Bang Club’ when he wrote a follow-up piece that was about the four of us. We were a little embarrassed by the name and its implications, but we did appreciate being acknowledged for what we were doing. No matter what they called us, we liked the credit.

Articles like the Bang-Bang Club piece made us minor celebrities in media circles. As a result, several young South African photographers were motivated to try their hand at documenting the violence. One of these was a young man called Gary Bernard, who had always wanted to be a professional news-photographer. He kept seeing our pictures in the papers and he eventually signed up at a non-profit photographic workshop, where he attended classes in the evening while working as a printer during the day. Gary’s decision to be a news-photographer coincided with Ken’s becoming The Star’s chief photographer. From being a notoriously self-absorbed egotist who cared only for his career and awards, Ken had become a champion of aspiring photojournalists. Gary was one of a group of interns Ken had taken on at The Star in a programme to recruit talented young photographers from the workshop into the newspaper. Gary would go out with us to learn the ropes and he became a friend. He wanted to be a bang-bang photographer. Despite his desire to cover conflict, Gary was far too sensitive to deal with the violence, but he kept his feelings to himself. On the surface he seemed to handle the emotional aspect of the violence OK. We had no idea about his dysfunctional family past and how he blamed himself for not having been around when his father committed suicide. Sometimes I would catch myself looking at Gary and wondering what was going on in his mind, but I was too preoccupied to follow up on any of the small signs that might have indicated a real problem. It was only later that we understood the full effect that the accumulated trauma was having on him.

The stress from what we were seeing and the at times callous act of taking pictures was making an impact on all of us. Ken was waking up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming about things he had seen. Joao had become quiet and withdrawn, and I sank into a deep depression that I only clawed my way out of years later. Kevin was the most outwardly affected and that meant that life as his friend could be demanding. He seemed to have no borders, no emotional boundaries - everything that happened to him would penetrate his very being and he let all that was inside him just pour on out. The highs of boundless energy and infectious joy would inevitably crash and then we would get the despondent midnight calls. Joao, Ken and I all had our turns at spending hours talking to a weeping Kevin until he had been soothed or grown exhausted enough to sleep. But through it all, Kevin had a way about him, an openness to pain, a generosity with his time and affection which meant it was easy to overlook those lapses and become even closer friends.

Maybe it was because his emotions were always right up front that Kevin was the most candid of us all about the effect that covering the violence was having on him. He was having a beer at a pub opposite The Star one Saturday afternoon when Joao came in after covering an uneventful political funeral. They listened to a radio report that three people had died in clashes following the burial. Joao wanted to go back to the township, but Kevin said it was getting dark and talked him out of the idea. After several more beers, Kevin recounted a recurrent nightmare that was plaguing his sleep. In the dream, he was near death, lying on the ground, crucified to a wooden beam, unable to move. A television camera with a massive lens zoomed closer and closer in on his face, until Kevin would wake up screaming. Kevin thought that the dream meant it might be time to leave photography.

When Kevin told me about the same nightmare some time later, he described the feelings of helplessness, the anger, the fear he lived though in that dream. It was all that he imagined our subjects must feel towards us in their last moments as we documented their deaths. The dream had variations: sometimes Kevin was the photographer, not the victim, and in that version, the ‘dead’ man would roll over and grab him by the ankle, holding him captive with bloody hands.

Some weeks previously, in a lawless Sowetan shanty town called Chicken Farm, Kevin and I had been following armed policemen as they ran through the shacks, plunging downhill along rough tracks muddy with raw sewage. At a clearing near a stream, we saw a woman in rural Zulu dress wailing in grief, her hands clutching her head. In front of her, a middle-aged man was lying on his back, his arms stretched out on either side of him along a thick wooden beam. It looked as if he had been crucified. His earlobes, pierced and enlarged in the traditional Zulu fashion, were filled with blood from several head wounds. There is no question that a professional thrill ran through me: it was a scene that could be an icon of the civil war. Kevin and I descended on the corpse, but once we started to photograph, I found myself struggling and failing to capture this image of the crucifixion properly. I was unnerved, jittery, my hands were shaking involuntarily. Perhaps it was because of the woman wailing or memories of childhood religion, of Christ on the cross. I looked at Kevin; he looked stunned. Suddenly the corpse groaned and rolled on to its side. We leaped back in terror - we had been so certain he was dead. I will never forget that moment of horror, but unlike Kevin, I had no nightmares; at least none that I could recall in my waking hours.

An American consultant hired in November of 1992 to revamp the look of The Star was convinced that Joao was suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome, similar to what he’d seen among photographers in Vietnam. Management agreed and, despite protests from both Ken and Joao, he was told to stop going to the townships. South Africa’s isolation from the world during the apartheid years meant that any foreigner was automatically granted expert status and respect, often beyond their due. Joao was assigned to cover the effect of pollution on a pond in a wealthy white suburb of Johannesburg. While walking disconsolately around the sad pond, he noticed a duck waddling unsteadily towards him. The duck collapsed and died at his feet. Back at the newspaper, he printed the series as a montage with the mischievous caption ‘Going, going, gone’ and presented it to the photo desk. The consultant was appalled and urged the newspaper to get Joao psychological help.

Late that same night, a ‘press alert’ came across on the pager. An entire family had been in slain in Sebokeng, a sprawling black township south of Johannesburg that was plagued by mysterious killings and massacres and drive-by shootings. Kevin and Joao exchanged calls with Heidi and me, and despite the heavy rain and our anxiety about the fact that it was well after dark, we decided to go. The common wisdom among journalists was to never enter conflict zones after dark: things were different at night; people behaved without restraint. And we would have to use our flashes to get pictures - risky as the bright light going off spooked people and could attract gunfire.

The rain was bucketing down as we raced south in Kevin’s little pick-up. Heidi and I huddled against the cold in the fibreglass canopy on the back, bracing against each other as the car aquaplaned unpredictably every time it hit a patch of standing water on the road. We were uncertain about the wisdom of the foray: rumours of white agents provocateurs taking part in killings in the black townships meant that whites were increasingly treated with hostility. Sebokeng was probably the most dangerous township for journalists to work in, but we were determined to try to expose what was going on. When we got there, the dark streets were deserted. We had no way of finding the house as there were few street signs and residents had taken to painting over their house numbers for fear of being targeted for attack. The killings were so indiscriminate that people had devised convoluted theories as to who might be the next target-a situation which made wandering strangers seem to be a potential threat.

Usually we could ask people for directions or follow our noses to the right place, but the rain and the fear of being out at night meant that there was no one around to help. We started to regret our decision: to the armed self-defence unit members that kept watch, we must have looked like killers ourselves, cruising around looking for victims. We crept fearfully along the main streets, hoping to stumble on to the right house, until we saw a police armoured vehicle lumbering along, the deep growl of its engine breaking the silence. They were surprised to see whites there, but agreed to let us follow them to the house. While we waited for the detectives to finish their investigation, we found shelter from the wet with the survivors in a back room. The rain drummed on the tin roof, leaking through holes. Under the dim glow of a naked light-bulb, 21-year-old Jeremiah Zwane related how two men had burst through the front door and thrown a tear-gas canister into the room, then gone from room to room shooting everyone they found. His father and his brother had been gunned down in one bedroom. Jeremiah’s sister, Aubrey, just seven years old, had tried in vain to hide in her parent’ bedroom closet. She lay on her back in a pool of blood alongside her dead mother. Shot in the face and chest, her little body was a deeply shocking sight even after the many gruesome images we had photographed over the previous two years. A visiting teenage cousin had been shot dead in the lounge. Another teenage sister had died on the way to hospital, but her two-day-old baby had somehow survived the attack unhurt. The house looked like a scene in a horror movie, but this was real. The smell of blood was heavy in the damp air.

The four of us were the only journalists out in Sebokeng that night, despite the fact that every news organization and most journalists had received the message of the killing on their pagers as we had. We were convinced that the only way to stop such killing was to show what those deaths looked like, what those daily body counts actually meant.

The Star, which had suggested Joao lay off covering township violence, ran the story he had reported and two pictures, one on the front page. I transmitted pictures to the AP and The New York Times. Without our pictures, the only source of information on the massacre would have been spokesmen for the police and the political parties. Editors from most domestic and foreign media organizations still took police reports as factual even though the police were clearly a part of the problem. I remember many infuriating discussions with Renfrew, who was then still the AP bureau chief, about police and military involvement in the killings - he would patronizingly accuse me of being politically biased and naïve, but the AP and almost every other news organization chose to believe the government’s propaganda. The public would have been given information about yet another massacre from the people who were actually involved in many of the killings, as would be proved years later. It seemed that the international and domestic public were all too ready to believe that people who sometimes dressed in skins and could not speak English properly must be barbaric, while the white politicians and officials who spoke so logically and kept the trains running on time could not possibly be implicated in the murders. And yet despite our attempts to tell the truth, through our reporting and in our captions, our pictures played an unwitting part in the deception - our images from Sebokeng that night showed horribly dead black people and white policemen in uniform taking the bodies away, investigating their deaths. The impression was of the police helping the victims. Our pictures could not show that they had arrived hours after the emergency calls for help: they could not show the absolute certainty of the survivors that security forces had been involved in the attack.