A Bit About Sam Faulkner- London Photographer & Director 

A few days after my last exam I threw a battered old Canon and a few rolls of Tri-X into a backpack and took a long route to Afghanistan.

It was 1994 and the feuding mujahideen were slaughtering each other while the world ignored. I didn't really know where I was going. I didn't really know what I was doing. I hadn't worked out how I was going to get into the country, let alone how I was going to get out again. I wanted an adventure and to have a go at being a photographer.

I slept under the stars, next to teenage killers who'd never met a foreigner before. At night we shared greasy mutton soup as we watched tracer rounds and rockets silently rain on distant Kabul. By day we toured the front lines south of the capital, dashing crouched behind low mud walls as bullets whistled over head.

At times I wondered whether my hosts, a band of fighters, loyal to the murderous warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would let me go. I was utterly dependent upon them in a hostile, alien country. One dawn, they just drove me back to the Pakistan border. My Afghan holiday was over. I had shot 4 rolls of film. But it was the start. The images won the Sunday Times Ian Parry Scholarship and then real adventure began.

While my background is reportage photography, I now direct TV commercials and am repped by Great Guns.

Unseen Waterloo was my first monograph published to coincide with my exhibition at Somerset House, London and the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo.

I live in London with my wife and our two children.