IT WAS the great Robert Capa, one of the finest war photographers of the 20th century, who once put it best. Asked what he would most like to be if he were not a war photographer, Capa gave the memorable reply: “An unemployed war photographer.”

Looking back across Capa’s vast and remarkable body of work we are probably all familiar with some of the images he made before being killed when he stepped on a landmine in Indochina in 1954.

Who hasn’t seen those grainy photographs he took amid the chaos of Omaha Beach on Day-Day or that famous "falling soldier" picture from the Spanish Civil War?

Capa, of course, made the ultimate sacrifice for the incredible photographic legacy he left behind and those within our profession as war reporters remain under no illusions as to the risks we run in seeking out images of conflict.

In the decades I’ve been photographing war, the death or wounding of colleagues and friends reminded me, time and again, of what can happen when you document far-off trouble spots.

People often ask whether I’ve grown weary of the war I’ve witnessed. Putting together the images for this exhibition due to open in Glasgow and looking back across decades of prints, slides and negatives I’m frankly amazed that I wasn’t more weary years ago.

The exhibition at the new Sogo Arts gallery in Glasgow is a look back over those decades but it remains a cameo retrospective given the huge archive I now have. That I have not grown weary of photographing war is perhaps because of one thing above all else. I’m talking now about the remarkable courage and fortitude of those ordinary people I have met along the way caught up in war through no fault of their own.

Their generosity and openness in allowing me into their lives often at dangerous and traumatic moments is what has kept me going these forty years and reaffirms my own faith in humankind’s capacity to endure and occasionally overcome.

It was a long time ago when I decided what the title of my forthcoming exhibition would be. For not only does it come from a book by my favourite writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but captures the very essence I believe of what is required to photograph war and what it inflicts on ordinary people.

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“Welcome to the lion’s den.” Vukovar, Former Yugoslavia 1991

It had become a Croatian Stalingrad, its siege and the determination of its defenders would also become legendary. “Welcome to the house of fun now I’ve come of age, welcome to the lion’s den,” a young Croat soldier sang in a drunken rendition of the song by Madness as we waited to dart across a street one morning.

It was after a lunch of soup, bread and beer that same afternoon when two young Croatian fighters asked me to take their photograph. It was a candid portrait of them taken in seconds, but somehow, looking at it afterwards, it seemed to catch a bond between them that had evolved over time. Their expressions always struck me as a mixture of determination and anger but also a resignation to the fate that would most likely befall them when Vukovar was finally overrun.

Surviving the Mano Blanca – Colomoncagua Camp, El-Salvador Honduras border 1985

It’s the best part of forty years ago now since I first arrived in Central America.

In the months and years that followed I would find myself too covering the humanitarian fallout from the civil wars raging in Nicaragua and neighbouring El Salvador.Housed in rows of tin-roofed wooden shelters in Colomoncagua Camp just inside the Honduras border, were more than 13,000 Salvadoran refugees. Cordoned off by harsh terrain and the Honduran Army, at night the refugees encamped there could look down across the Honduran-Salvadoran border to see what they have fled.

Those refugees I spoke with talked of the terrible atrocities they had witnessed. Some like one young mother clutching her malnourished daughter told me of the “death squads,” especially the “Mano Blanca,” whose calling card was to leave a white painted palm print on the outside of the house from which they would target their next victims.

“We fled after they left their mark,” the woman told me that day as I photographed her with her daughter. “It was the only way to survive.

A War of Brothers – Kabul, Afghanistan 1995

During the days of the Soviet occupation, it was known as the Russian Science and Cultural Centre. In the years that followed the Soviet withdrawal however it became little more than a frontline ruin, its walls pockmarked and punctured by the bullets and shells that ripped the district apart during the fighting between rival Afghan groups in the 1990s.

Until very recently my memories of this place have always been bad ones. On one occasion around the time this photograph was taken, I was injured here during rocket exchanges. A few years later in the same building I came across a homeless refugee family whose children had frozen to death while taking shelter from the bitter Afghan winter. Just a few months ago however I returned to the now rebuilt Russian Cultural Centre. There I met Nekrasov Viacheslav the new director and a veteran of the Soviet War sometimes referred to as “Russia’s Vietnam.”

“Today that war is behind us but not forgotten, and Afghanistan now faces other pressing and challenging times,” says Viacheslav. Challenging times indeed as yet another ‘war of brothers,’ grips the country while it struggles with the Taliban.

“Sometimes at the end of a day, I feel no good,” – Raqqa Syria 2018

Death is everywhere in Raqqa. Sometimes it lurks beneath the mountains of bomb-blasted rubble and pancaked buildings. Other times it peeks out from beneath the earth in the form of bones, hair and decomposing flesh the colour and texture of ancient dried parchment.

More than anyone else here, the men of Raqqa’s Civil Defence Unit know where death can be found. For going on six long months before I photographed them, they had sought out its many locations and collected its gruesome detritus along the way. On one afternoon I joined a small group of firemen who were busy uncovering a mass grave in one of Raqqa’s city centre parks.

“Such a waste of human life and the terrible destruction of the place in which we once lived, it makes me so angry,” said Mahmoud Jassm, the thirty-year-old leader of the team who like many of the men is also a volunteer with the unit.

“Look, it’s a young women, she can’t be more than twenty-five years old,” Jassm says, the sense of frustration evident in his voice.

“Sometimes at the end of a day, I feel no good,” he confesses shaking his head, giving the impression of a man on the edge of despair.

“I was carried like a bride at her wedding,” Mosul, Iraq 2017

As the bus carrying the new arrivals snaked its way down the dirt road towards

Chamakor Camp, I could just make out the faces peering from the windows.

As it drew closer the faces became clearer, and the exhaustion and apprehension of those on board was unmistakable. The siege of Mosul and their desperate escape from the beleaguered city had taken its toll.

As I photographed one boy disembarking, I couldn’t help notice that each and every family carried the meagre belongings that they had managed to grab before escaping. For most it amounted to no more than a few bags and blankets.

Carried from the bus by one of her grandsons, ninety-year-old Khatla Ali Abdallah was tenderly placed on the ground among her bags.

Khatla’s remarkable tale of fortitude and resourcefulness, involved being carried by her grandsons, under sniper and mortar fire, before making the town of Hammam Alil.

“I was carried like a bride at her wedding,” Khatla told those eager to hear her story. What will happen to you now? I asked, as she sat on top of her bags outside Chamakor Camp.

“When the fighting is finished, my grandsons will carry me back again,” she told me matter-of-factly.

Sun, Sea and ‘Somali flowers.’ Mogadishu, Somalia 2010

Sun, sandbags and submachine guns, as holiday advertising slogans go, it doesn’t have much going for it. Then again, Mogadishu as an annual relaxing getaway destination is some way off from being the new Mauritius.

Though well endowed with a stunning expanse of natural coastline beaches, Somalia’s capital still comes with the ominous reputation of being one of the world’s most dangerous places.

As if to make that very point, Bashir’s boys fanned out around me on the fine sand of Mogadishu’s Lido Beach.

Draped in bandoliers of bullets and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, this mean looking eight-man squad of bodyguards made the SAS look like Boy Scouts.

I’d dubbed them Bashir’s Boys after the name of the local hotel owner who provided them for my personal security.

“Ten minutes at the most,” insisted one of the ‘Boys’, sensing that I was looking to spend some time photographing the families frolicking in the sand and waves thundering onto the shoreline from the Indian Ocean. Mogadishu may not be Mauritius in the making, but for now its long suffering citizens I’m sure will settle for peace, stability and some sense at least of enjoying what life is really all about.

“We are happy here in the forest.” Colombia 2014

They call it the River of Butterflies. Occasionally I was to see a few of the insects, big, brash and beautiful, as our canoe made its way upstream through the khaki-coloured water of the Rio Andagueda towards the mining towns of Bagado and San Marino. Silent and fleeting, the butterflies' delicate presence hovered in marked contrast to the giant lumbering diggers that trundled to and fro on the banks of the river hewing out chunks of rainforest for illegal goldmining.

For time immemorial this same dense, humid rainforest has been the habitat of these butterflies and Colombia's indigenous Embera people who live in Choco Province.

Today, the Embera are one of the 34 Indigenous Peoples identified by the Colombian Constitutional Court as at risk of physical or cultural extinction. For the Embera a close connection with nature is an integral part of their culture. During my time among the Embera communities I made many photographic portraits, but this one perhaps pleases me most.

“We are happy here in the forest,” this proud defiant and dignified woman told me. “All the armed groups have taken our lives, and we have always been caught in the middle of the conflicts, but in our hearts here in the forest is still where we are most happy.”

Only With the Heart - War Photographs

Sogo Arts, 82-86 Saltmarket, Glasgow, G1 5LY

Opens Sunday 8 September 12 noon - 6pm then 10-am- 6pm daily except Monday