AP photographer captures a bagpiper emerging from surreal green smoke during military exercises

Associated Press

21-02-2025

SMARDAN, Romania (AP) — Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vadim Ghirda has been working for The Associated Press since 1990. Based in Bucharest, Romania, he has covered the breakup of Yugoslavia, conflicts in Serbia and Bosnia, and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine among his many assignments.
Here's what he said about this extraordinary photo.
Why this photo?
I always look for a fresh view on assignments I've done many times. This time it was easy: The image is very different from what one would expect during live-fire military training. It was a striking moment, right after British troops stormed an 'enemy' trench, part of the exercise scenario.
The noise of machine gun fire and explosions, the smoke and fast movements of the servicemen transitioned abruptly to an absolute stillness of the landscape. The only sign of life was the eerie sound of the bagpipe carried by the bitter cold wind across the vast fields of the training range.
I couldn't tell where it was coming from, until Lance Corporal Jamie Killorn, of the 4SCOTS The Highlanders Company, emerged like a ghost from the green smoke walking slowly and playing his bag on the hypothetical battlefield.
How I made this photo
The photograph was taken with a Sony A1 camera on a Sony 400mm 2.8 lens. This gear is so effective that, as much as I'd like to, I can't claim much personal credit in this case. Having said that, I've been taking photos for AP for the past 35 years, so experience might have had a role.
Another underestimated technique for getting this photo is that I drove the 300 km (186 miles) east of my base in Bucharest, brought the equipment to the chilly Smardan range and paid close attention to what happened in front of me.
Why this photo works
This scene has a timeless element to it. If I squint, with the green smoke from the flares, it could be shot through plumes of poisonous gas during World War I. The British had bagpipers attached to the troops fighting in the Great War and WWII, meant to comfort soldiers or boost their morale before or during battles.
I wish viewers could also hear the sound in this photograph. There's no greater contrast than that between a man playing the famous 'March of the Cameron Men' while calmly walking away from a trench that would have been the stage of gruesome scenes and unimaginable terror, had this not been an exercise.
The extremes of human nature, seen in a quick succession.
Killing and art.
Understanding how beings capable of art still engage in mass killing of their peers, after millennia of evolution and so many well documented horrors of war, will forever elude me.