Photographs by Joao Silva are on exhibit at the Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France. Mr. Silva spoke at the Bronx Documentary Center on Aug. 2, during his first visit to New York since he was injured in Afghanistan. The following week, he went into surgery. He is doing well.

Mr. Silva’s speech, which appears below, has been edited and condensed.

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‘A Rough Time For the Industry’

It’s been an amazing experience. One would not choose to go through it, but I’ve gone through it. It happened. My time came, I guess. From the very moment that I stood on that land mine, that morning on Oct. 23, 2010, I was pretty pragmatic about the whole thing. So many people had been killed around me — friends dying at my feet, no exaggeration — that when it happened to me, I was like: “O.K. My number came up. It’s time to move on.”

And here I am, nine months later. I’m standing upright, seeing a lot of wonderful faces looking at me, and it’s an absolute pleasure.

It’s been a rough time for the industry. This April in particular was pretty bad. We lost three friends, Tim, Chris and Anton. As it turned out, Libya was a pretty harsh mistress — not only for the foreign expat journalists working there, but for local journalists, too.

Being in Walter Reed as a patient, every day is an awakening. Every day you see miraculous things happen before your eyes. There are days where I don’t really want to get out of bed. But I always get to see how lucky I am. There’s always somebody worse off than you. There’s young, 20-year-old kids, triple amputees, genitals gone. And they have to start life anew. It’s not easy. But it is an inspiration, because it teaches you that no matter how bad you have it, somebody else has always got it worse than you.

That Morning

It was a morning like any other morning when you’re with the military. There was nothing ominous about it. We hadn’t been shot at. It was just mundane border patrol. Troops stomping ground don’t make the pages of The New York Times — or most papers, for that matter. It was that kind of morning.

I was the third man in line. The guy up front was a dog handler. There was a guy following , providing security, and there was me. The dog didn’t find it. Then these guys stood on it; didn’t find it. And I found it.

I heard the mechanic click. I knew: this is not good. And I found myself lying face-down on the ground, engulfed in a cloud of dust, with the very clear knowledge that this has just happened and this is not good. I could see my legs were gone, and everybody around me was dazed. I was like, “Guys, I need help here.” And they turned around and saw me on the ground. They immediately sprang into action. I got dragged out of the kill zone, for safety reasons, to a patch of ground a few yards away.

Immediately, there were medics working on me. I picked up a camera, shot a few frames. The frames weren’t very good, quite frankly, but I was trying to record. I knew it wasn’t good, but I felt alive. Adrenaline kicked in. I was compos mentis; I was on top of things. So, I made some pictures. I dropped the camera, then I moved to Plan B, which was to pick up the satellite phone. I called my wife, Vivian, and told her, “My legs are gone, but I think I’m going to live.” Incidentally, I’m a father of two. I passed the telephone on to the correspondent so she could continue the conversation and keep Vivian calm.

Then I proceeded to lie back and smoke a cigarette. This is while the medics are frantically working around me, applying tourniquets, injecting me straight into the chest, and doing all sorts of really wonderful things. Those guys are amazing. They’re the ones who saved my life right there and then. The helicopter landed to take me to safety. I was completely conscious and totally awake, up until the moment that I got into the helicopter. That’s when I finally blacked out. I woke up in Germany, and then again at Walter Reed.

I had incredible bad luck that day, but also incredible good luck. The land mine was daisy-chained to a vat containing about 30 pounds of homemade explosives, and for whatever reason, that did not go off. Had that second explosion gone off, there wouldn’t be enough of me to put in a matchbox. It’s just amazing how life works out, you know? Call it the hand of God, call it luck, call it whatever — I’m grateful for it. I guess you guys are going to have to read about it in my next book.

It’s been an amazing voyage of learning — learning about myself, learning about the resilience of the human body and the resilience of the human spirit. Because you just don’t know how strong you truly are until you get pushed to that point where if you go any further you’re not going to come back.

What’s happened to me is nothing new. Journalists have been dying and being injured for time immemorial. Ever since a camera was first taken onto the battlefield, journalists have been killed and hurt. I’ve had the misfortune of falling into that category.

It’s been nine months. It’s going to be probably another year before I’m fully functional, where I’ll get to the point where I’ll be able to run. Ultimately, the goal will be to get back to work. Without a doubt, life is strange. Everything has changed. But I hope to pick up from where I left off, to a certain extent. In the meantime, I just take a little more courage and a little more perseverance — and quite frankly, take as many drugs as I can.

‘Life Is Far From Over’

I’ve seen a lot of injuries over the years, and I could see that my legs were shredded. My foot was missing. I didn’t realize the extent of my injuries. It just felt, instinctively, that I was going to be O.K.

What I didn’t know about was that my urethra had been blown up. I had several internal injuries. My anal passage had been blown up and my system was completely infected at that point. That’s what almost killed me. It was the fight against the bacteria, not so much the legs.

With the amputation, it’s usually a 10-week turnaround time, and you’re up on prosthetics. With me it was closer to five months, and that’s because the infections just kept raging through my body. They had to rebuild my anal passage. They had to rebuild a urethra. For seven months, I urinated through a tube, into a bag. Thankfully, that’s all gone. I still have a colostomy bag, and the final surgery in a week’s time will be to reverse that.

I guess I’ve reached the point where I’m whole again. I mean, my legs are gone. They’re never going to grow back. But you know, that’s O.K. That is actually O.K. I’m alive; I’m here. Life is far from over.

‘Historian With a Camera’

I think people think you have some sort of fascination with death. Let’s put it out there. It’s exciting. You’re doing what you love doing. But ultimately, I’ve always seen my role as being a messenger. Documenting history. Trying to bring the reality of war to those who are fortunate enough not to live in a war zone.

I’m a historian with a camera, and hopefully my pictures use the medium to capture history, or to tell a story, or to highlight somebody else’s suffering. That’s ultimately why I continue doing it, and why I want to continue doing it.

As I said right in the beginning, it is fun. There’s a camaraderie with your friends, your colleagues. It’s a bond; it’s a brotherhood. You have to be there to understand it, but it’s real. There’s the excitement of the unknown; every day is new. You never know what might be waiting around the next corner, not only in terms of the sense of danger but also photographically. Every day can be a voyage of discovery, and you grow as a human being.

The Human Being Behind the Camera

The camera buys you access to people’s most intimate moments. It’s very interesting that people for the most part will not allow a stranger into their lives.

Sometimes you’re going into a conflict that flares up somewhere and lasts a couple of weeks, and you might never speak to people again. I can’t speak on behalf of anybody else, but it’s not as if I make lifelong friendships wherever I go. That would be a lie, if I did tell you that. I’m a human being. I’m out there to do a job.

But there are bonds. You do make friendships and you do stay in touch with people. It’s inevitable. You spend a lot of time with people. You hire a driver, a translator — you might spend months on end with the same person. You’re two guys who are just human beings. You talk about family, you talk about whatever. You talk about life.

People often ask me, “How can you stand there and watch people hack each other and take pictures?” You have to have clarity as to what your role is. If you want to help people, then you should not become a photographer. Having said that, we do help people. We help people all the time. Sometimes you help people with just the smallest of things. I’ve put people in the back of my vehicle and rushed them to the hospital.

But unfortunately, the images are so stark sometimes that people tend to think that there’s a machine behind the camera, and that’s not the case. We are all human beings. The things that we see go through the eye straight into the brain. Some of those scenes never go away.

A very good friend of mine, Kevin Carter, eventually took his own life. He made the famous picture in Sudan. There’s this child lying face down in the dirt and there’s a vulture stalking the child. He was highly criticized for that picture. People who had no place in criticizing him — people who had no understanding of the dynamics that it took to make that picture — criticized him to the point that he got all conflicted. He took his life a month after winning the Pulitzer.

People always assume that this heartless photographer just walked past and shot the image of the child, and that wasn’t the case. For one, the child was a few hundred yards from a feeding center. That child was not abandoned. But that’s the power of photography. You isolate something, you transmit your image through that isolation, and it was the most powerful image. Ultimately that image was such a strong message of famine. Suddenly there was this influx of money that came out of nowhere. He saved more lives by taking that picture than he would have by not taking the picture.

At the other side of the camera, there is a human being, and that human being is trying to stay alive, trying to capture, trying to get the message out to the world, and trying to stay safe.

Not a ‘War Photographer’

I kind of stumbled upon photography. I was never a young kid at school in photo clubs. A friend of mine was studying graphic design and one of his subjects was photography. One of the projects that he had to do was on speed, motion. He came to the racetrack with us to photograph the race cars going around in circles, and I kind of thought: “O.K., I can see myself in this role. This thing is right for me.”

That was the first time I ever took pictures. The bug bit. I knew exactly what I wanted to do from that moment onward. It coincided with the end of apartheid and the releasing of Nelson Mandela. There was a lot of political violence that engulfed the whole country. Brutal, up-close. Fifteen thousand, closer to 20,000 people, died in a period of four years in a situation where there were no tanks, no artillery. It was happening in my own country, right there at my footstep, and I felt this need to be there, to record this, to show the world people were dying.

I really started branching into Africa and experienced other conflicts. But having said that, conflict is not everything I’ve ever done. There’s been a lot of other social ills that I’ve pointed my camera toward to try and help the reader make sense of it. I don’t really use the term “war photographer” in describing myself. It has been my focus, my passion. But as a photojournalist, you have a lot more responsibilities than just being at war.

Working With the Mahdi Army

That period in Iraq was unique. It was right at the beginning of the rise of the Mahdi Army. They were still open for media. Quite a few Westerners were in there and chose to document it from that side, and then others with the U.S. military. I’ve spent a lot of time with the U.S. military, make no mistake. But the opportunity presented itself.

It’s important to show readers of The New York Times that there’s another side to this war. It’s just not our boys getting shot dead. Who’s the enemy? As photojournalists, if you are able to show the enemy, it’s very important.

For the Taliban, people have managed to go over to the other side. But it’s all stage-managed. They don’t get to see actual combat with the Taliban. It’s usually guys with rifles walking up and down mountains. They don’t trust us. They’ve got their own media machine. They’ve got their own public affairs offices, as it were. Back then, it was just that one window that presented itself. And a handful of us, we were out there crossing American lines to get inside Najaf.

Being on the other side of American firepower is scary and it’s endless. Back then it was very much a young movement. What I can tell you about these guys, they’re courageous. These guys are wearing sandals, and they’re firing machine guns toward American tanks, which has absolutely zero effect. I feel fortunate that I managed to witness that, as a journalist.

People ask me about the embed process. I’m one of those who believe that the process, though flawed, is very important. It’s something that we cannot do without. If you want to cover the conflict, if you want to cover specifically the combat, in many of these countries, you have to be with U.S. forces. You simply cannot walk into a battlefield, because both sides will kill you anyway.

What Would You Say to People Who Idolize You?

I find it amazing that people do idolize me. Since this has happened to me, a lot of people have drawn strength from my strength. That in itself I find pretty amazing — the fact there are people out there who think I’m a big deal. Sometimes it’s quite embarrassing, really.

I don’t know if I have any words of wisdom. I went down doing what I have a passion for doing. The friends that I’ve lost, and there’s been more than one, they died doing what they had a passion for. It’s pretty difficult to argue with that. You haven’t died in an old-age home somewhere, rotting away — not that there’s anything wrong with that. But at least those guys died doing what they love doing. And I got injured doing what I love doing. I fully understood the consequences of what I was doing, and I was always prepared to accept them. And I have. I totally accept them.

Advice for Young Photojournalists

I’m old school. I’ll always shoot stills. I don’t do video. I’ve tried to play around with it, but I’m not very good. It just completely screws up with my photography. But I think if you’re a young kid, you have a better chance of being employed and of succeeding if you are able to embrace all the mediums that are available.

I started many, many years ago. It was difficult. We used to actually turn the hotel bathroom into a darkroom. We’d print, we’d take the pictures, we’d roll them into a drum and we’d transmit the pictures like that. It would take about 20 minutes a picture or something crazy like that.

But I like the new technology. I embrace digital photography. I haven’t shot film, to be honest, since 2001. It took me a long time to go there. I first started freelancing for The New York Times 15 years ago. We shot black and white, and it was printed in black and white. When the paper went to color, I was like: “Oh no! This can’t be happening.” But the pictures look great. It’s like anything else; the industry changes with time as technology changes, as the need for information has changed.

I guess the only other piece of advice I could give to young photojournalists is perseverance. It’s not an easy industry. It’s highly competitive. Every year there’s literally thousands of young kids coming on the stage, a lot of them so talented.  For freelancers, it’s a juggle every day. There’s only so much money going around. There’s only so many publications that will employ people. Even though demand for knowledge and content has grown, the market has shrunk. It’s really sad, but it’s a reality.

Walter Reed

I felt no real urge to photograph while I’ve been in Walter Reed. My state of mind has been one of recovery.

The New York Times fought really hard to keep me in the military system. It’s not the norm. There have been other journalists through Walter Reed. None currently; I’m the only one. And I’m grateful for it, because I got the best care in the world. Walter Reed has become really good at dealing with this, especially the reconstructive work. It was a process; it wasn’t easy. But they did get me in, and I’m totally grateful for that.

Walter Reed is closing. Basically they’ve created this new facility at Bethesda, the naval hospital. They’re closing the whole campus down because it’s been there for over 100 years. The building has aged, you know? It’s just a matter of that. Right now we’re seeing a lot more wounded warriors. The numbers aren’t decreasing. They’re increasing.

I’m 45 years old this year. I have the wife, I have the kids, I have the house, I have the car, I have the motorcycle. I mean, my life is set. My career is set. So it makes it a lot easier to just kind of move on. But imagine being 19, 20 years old. You have lost two, three limbs. A lot of these kids are losing their genitals. Imagine that. It’s a stark reality. There’s a lot of depressed young kids there who are having a hard time dealing with this.

Goals of Recovery

For the first five weeks I was in the I.C.U. I was so drugged up that whole period was just a complete blur. I was going in and out of surgery every second day. I guess it was seven and a half months before I finally stood up. In that period I would go down to the Military Advanced Training Center, which is where all the amputees, Marines, soldiers go to do their rehab. Initially I would go down in a bed and I’d have to be lifted onto one of the mats, where we’d do all the actual exercises. Eventually I progressed to a fully automatic wheelchair.

While you’re in bed in recovery, people create goals for you. The doctors all tell you, “Well, you’ve got to get to this stage.” Or your physical therapist will say, “Next month we’re going to do a weight-bearing test, and you’re going to walk.” And you’d be like: “Oh, wow. O.K. So there’s something. I can focus on that.”

Now I’m an outpatient. I live on campus, where wounded warriors and their families stay. But I have to go back. They have to cut me through the core in order to do my stomach muscles, in order to reverse the colostomy, to relink the intestines to the colon.

This rehab process is going to take probably another year. I have to get to the point where I’m not using a cane to walk. I have to get to the stage where I learn how to run. And when I say run, I don’t mean with the blades. I didn’t jump before; I’m not going to start jumping now. I need to run with this leg so when I go back to work, I’m capable of small dashes. It’s not elegant running, but it’s running.

But I think I’m way past elegance now anyway.

I’m going to go back to photography, without a doubt. I’ll continue working for The New York Times. It’s just a matter of time. If I can go back to combat, I will. If I can go back to war zones to cover what I like doing, I most certainly will. There’s no doubt in my mind. Mentally, I’ve always been strong. Like I said, I was pragmatic from the get-go. I got injured, I’ve seen it happen to people around me, so it is O.K. My number came up. Bad numbers come up, so now we move on, you know? I’m hopeful.

What Have You Learned About Life?

I think death is one thing none of us can avoid. So I’ve never really bothered with trying to think too much about it. I have learned that life is precious. I have learned that it’s good to be alive. Every day from that day on in Kandahar is a gift. (As I say that I’m smoking, but that’s O.K. I used to smoke before, too. Eventually, death is going to happen to all of us. None of us are going to run away. Anybody got a light?)

Let’s put it this way: my legs are gone, but I’m still going to be able to walk my daughter down the aisle one day, and I’m still going to see my son grow up, and probably get into trouble.

‘A lot of what I do, I do for them’

Vivian and I have been together for 24 years. She’s traveled this path with me. The close friends that I’ve lost, she was friends with them, too. She always knew that there was a possibility that something bad could happen. She certainly wasn’t naïve. She was extremely upset. But she’s brilliant; she’s a really strong woman. That’s why the first person I called, lying on the ground, bleeding, was my wife.

It has been tough on them. But it’s also brought us closer. I mean, we’ve always been incredibly close. And the kids are just too young. “Daddy’s got no legs — but he’s got robot legs, so that’s cool.” You know, “Daddy’s a Transformer.” We’ve kept nothing away from them; we’ve always been pretty open, and very adult about explaining exactly what was going on.

I do this for myself, but as I mentioned earlier, there’s honor in what I do. And a lot of what I do, I do for them, too. I know that as cheesy as that sounds, I want to make them proud. I want to make sure they have a certain standard of living. I want to make sure that there’s food on the table. So this is what I do. This is all that I know. And I’m afraid that’s just going to have to do. Because that’s probably not going to change.

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