British Photographer Shows Wars Are Closer Than We Think

BusinessBritish Photographer Shows Wars Are Closer Than We ThinkByKatya Soldak,Forbes Staff. Katya is the editorial director of Forbes international editions.Follow AuthorMay 27, 2026, 06:00am EDTNew York, May 2026. “Distortion / Memory / Resilience,” the exhibition by British photographer and humanitarian Giles Duley.Tanya NikolaenkoBritish photographer Giles Dudley brought an immersive pop-up exhibition, Distortion / Memory / Resilience, to the U.S., showing that wars are closer to us than we might think.“War is not far from us, both generationally and geographically,” said Duley, a British photographer and humanitarian, about his new project Distortion / Memory / Resilience — an immersive exhibition he brought to New York in May. He said, "Many of us in this city have a grandparent who probably fought in World War II or fought in some conflict. It’s connected to our story.”Set high above New York, overlooking Manhattan and the East River, in a massive penthouse inside Sutton Tower, the exhibition is about war but almost doesn’t show combat directly. It is less a photography show than an immersive meditation on memory and trauma that highlights how conflict repeats across generations.“The whole project really is very autobiographical,” said Duley, who lost both legs and his left arm after stepping on an landmine in Afghanistan in 2011. For more than two decades, Duley has documented conflicts, often focusing on communities overlooked by mainstream coverage. “I always said I’m not a photojournalist,” he says. “I’m an angry man with a camera.”Duley says his earlier work was driven by the need to draw attention to conflicts that received little international focus. He recalls first traveling to Ukraine in 2010 and returning in 2014, when fighting in eastern Ukraine remained largely absent from broader European political discourse.“Even in 2014, when I first went to Ukraine to cover the war, nobody in Europe was really talking about the fact that there was a war...