My name is Damien Drake. This is my story. Not the headlines in the newspapers. Not a 30-second spot in a 24-hour news cycle. Not a stylize portrayal of my life in an experimental film. This is how it is, how it was and how it will be.

You’ve seen my artwork. The photographs. The award-winning images of the Iraqi and Afghanistan conflicts. The horrors of war and the beauty of death. We are drawn to death and violence like moths to a flame. To be caressed by the warmth of the light and to be consumed by the fire when we get too close to the secrets within.

They say a picture can tell a thousand words. I have taken thousand of pictures. Sometimes a picture is not enough. A picture doesn’t always tell you the entire story. Pictures can’t tell you the why or the how. An image captures a moment of life or perhaps it is but a moment of death. That moment is forever, never changing, never corrupted by the ravages of time. Always timeless, always beautiful. No matter what the subject, with my camera; I can make it beautiful forever.

In the coming days and weeks, I will attempt to tell you, not how it should have been, not how THEY all wanted it to be; but how it was.