Julie Jacobson, Afghanistan, August 2009:

We were hiding from Taliban gunfire, when there was this explosion. Afterwards, I saw [Lance Corporal Joshua M] Bernard – one of his legs was blown off and the other was barely there. He’d suffered a direct hit from an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. The media ground rule was that you couldn’t photograph a military casualty in a way that they could be identified, but I could see Bernard’s hand reach out to his weapon, his face turned to me. So I shot nine frames over two and a half minutes.

Making that decision was a public act. I got a lot of flak. Bernard later died, and people said that I didn’t give him dignity, that I should have helped him. But I couldn’t help him. For me to turn my back, that’s disrespectful.

From “The Shot That Nearly Killed Me: War Photographers - A Special Report” in The Guardian (June 17, 2011).