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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: A street in the Green Zone is seen through a U.S. military Humvee window March 8, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

I won’t be running in the Green Zone anymore, though it made perfect sense last week. I was stuck there (I had planned to be there for one day working for Newsweek) after the shrine in Samarra had been bombed and a 24-hour lock down had been enforced on Baghdad.

Without much else to do, I jogged every morning around the Green Zone, down its wide boulevards lined with trash, concrete blast walls and empty fields. Newsweek employs a South African security man, I asked him if running there was safe and he gave his reluctant approval.

“Just watch for mortars,” he said with a sigh. I nodded, we both knew that wasn’t possible.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

BAGHDAD, IRAQ: The Iraqi flag flies over an Iraqi government building in the Green Zone, on June 28, 2004 in Baghdad, Iraq.

The runs were tense. I’d stretch at the front gate at the Newsweek house, then head out onto the main streets. The Green Zone was the neighborhood that held Saddam’s palaces and housed his cornies; so the streets are broad, as wide as an interstate freeway, and yet are lined by only the occasional opulent house or tacky monument. There are no real sidewalks, so I ran on the side of the road, passed by dusty American Humvee convoys or pickup trucks bolted with ad hoc armor and filled with Iraqi “police,” brandishing weapons. Sometimes a convoy of some VIP or another would go by, a long string of anonymous, armored SUVs, brand new and clean.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

BAGHDAD, IRAQ: The Hands of Victory monument, erected by Saddam Hussein, is shown February 21, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

I ran by the famous monument of the crossed swords everyday. The third day, I noticed a familiar blast pattern scored into the sidewalk that wasn’t there the morning before. A mortar must have hit and exploded in the night. I wondered if it got anyone.

Finally, on Saturday, I was able to leave. I took off to be embedded with the military. When I arrived at the Army base, I checked my email and had one from a friend staying with Newsweek. A few hours after I’d left, a huge and unprecedented fusillade of daytime mortars had crashed around the Green Zone, and one had landed at the front gate of the Newsweek house. Everyone in the house was shaken but fine, though their generator had been destroyed and an Iraqi man who’d worked across the street was killed. “It’s pretty bad when you feel safer out on the streets of Baghdad than in the Green Zone,” she wrote me.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - JUNE 14: The streets just outside the Green Zone sit empty June 14, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

So that’s it for the Green Zone jogging for now. Good riddance. I’ve seen some grim places but the Green Zone has got to be one of the most strangely depressing four square miles on Earth.

Photo by Brent Stirton

I was in Kenya for World AIDS Day (2006), a place where the number of women infected by the disease outnumbers men up to 5 to 1 in certain communities. I was walking around Kenwa AIDS Clinic on the outskirts of Nairobi when I noticed a small sparse ward at the end of a cramped corridor. A tall, thin, sober looking man greeted me, explaining formally that he was the head nurse and could help me. I explained that I was in Kenya looking at HIV issues on behalf of the Global Business Coalition against AIDS, TB and Malaria. The man then invited me into a small testing room to show me how they were doing the tests.

Sitting in a chair besides a nurse in a brilliant white smock was a small man wearing a woolen hat with is hand bandaged. He looked at me with my cameras and tried to get up to introduce himself. Embarrased by this gesture I motioned to him to stay seated and asked if he would mind if I photographed him being tested.

He looked at the nurse, looked back at me and nodded. He knew he was sick, he wanted to know for sure what was wrong with him. He wanted access to medicine if he was HIV+. The first test indicated that he was, but in Kenya they currently do two tests where they have the kits available. The second test involved a litmus style strip with 2 bars across opposite sides, a drop of blood is placed on a sensitive panel, and if the other bar becomes illuminated then the person is HIV+ . The small man in the hat picked up the strip while the test was processing and watched silently as he saw the second bar come into being on the test strip. He looked at the bar, looked up at me and held out the strip for me to see. That’s when I shot this picture.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Getty Images CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan Klein recently sat down with Getty Images photographer Spencer Platt to discuss what it is like living a life behind the lens. This year Spencer received first place honors at the prestigious 2007 World Press Photo Award in Amsterdam for his image of a group of young Lebanese driving through a South Beirut neighborhood devastated by Israeli bombings. In his career at Getty Images, he has covered subjects such as 9/11, the Southeast Asia tsunami and the war in Iraq. His work has appeared in publications such as Time, Newsweek, Stern and the LA Times.

Click here to watch the first Getty Images Podcast

It’s easy to fly to Iraq. There are three flights a day from Amman, Jordan on the country’s national carrier, Royal Jordanian Airlines; it’s about a 90 minute trip, soaring over the saffron sands of Anbar province en route to Baghdad.

Incredibly, up until a few months ago you didn’t even need to secure an Iraqi visa first: it was possible, if you knew what you were doing, to simply show up and get an “emergency visa” in a small office in Baghdad airport, filling out a form while surrounded by dozens of diminutive Sri Lankan manual laborers flown in by Halliburton and other US government contractors. I’d been doing that for a few years; but for my latest trip the government of Iraq (such as it is) has started to crack down, necessitating a trip to an Iraqi embassy in another country first to pick up a visa before arriving. There’s an Iraqi embassy in Amman, so I spent an extra day there to get the visa.

The nightstand in my hotel in Amman - it points the the way to Mecca.

I walked down from my hotel to the embassy Sunday morning to get it (Sunday, of course, being a regular workday in a Muslim country).

The embassy, a single floor building with several rooms and offices, was packed. Mostly it seemed to be Iraqis getting various paperwork related to their stays in Jordan. Though it’s hard to say; Jordanians and Iraqis don’t look or act much different, at least from a foreigner’s perspective. It wasn’t that long ago that they were all one land, of course: both part of the Ottoman Empire. Only in the 1920s, picking through the remains of the once-mighty caliphate that dissolved after WWI, did the British famously (and arbitrarily) draw borders and create all these new countries. Iraq was specifically formed to encompass the northern and southern petroleum fields; in a way, Iraq has been about oil from the very beginning.

Several attractive Iraqi women in Western dress were working behind the glass in the visa section of the embassy, set up almost like tellers in a bank. One, a dyed blonde with features like the actress Cameron Diaz, told me that they normally stop handing out visas at 11 am; I was half an hour late.

“Please?” I asked, waving my passport around. “I have to fly out tomorrow morning.”

“Well, leave it here, and we’ll see what we can do. Come back in an hour.”

I went across the street, found a coffee kiosk and ordered a strong Turkish coffee, boiled by hand in a small steel decanter by a Jordanian teenager with a hip haircut and skinny jeans. An hour later, back at the embassy, Cameron Diaz smilingly handed over my passport, the ink still drying on the visa. I thanked her and headed out.

The view of Amman from the back of a cab.

I tried to hail a cab but they were all full, so I walked up the hill, back to my hotel, not terribly far away.

As I walked, I thought about how easy it is for a society to come unglued. Amman and Baghdad, very similar cities, in a lot of ways, populated by the same kind of people. And there I was, casually doing things in Amman that would get me killed in an instant in today’s Baghdad - walking the streets alone, speaking in English, waving an American passport around. Twenty years ago, Baghdad was the cosmopolitan capital where you went to get a whiskey and do business; Amman was the backwater. Four years of a power vacuum has utterly transformed Baghdad, once one of the Middle East’s safest cities, into a nightmare of blast walls, bombings, organized crime and deadly insurgent checkpoints.

It was quite possibly the last time that all of these pioneers of British photojournalism would be in the same room together. On the 50th anniversary of Picture Post’s last publication, the reunion was a fitting tribute to a number of photographers, journalists and staff of the magazine who helped to both capture the period and shape the course of photojournalism in the UK.

It was extraordinary that we were sitting there celebrating the impact this publication had on the way we digest imagery in the media today. I can’t think of any other magazine that has had such an influence over such a long period of time.

Matthew Butson, VP, Getty Images Hulton Archive

I spent the better part of last week documenting the few hundred Katrina refugees who have recently been allowed to return to the B.W. Cooper housing project in New Orleans. B.W. Cooper, or Calliope as it is popularly known, originally housed over 1,000 families yet now remains more than 80 percent empty. Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, some 10,000 former residents of the New Orleans housing projects have not been able to return home. Many of the projects have not been repaired following the storm, while others that appear to be habitable are sealed. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plans to tear down four of the major New Orleans housing projects and replace them with mixed income developments.

Affordable housing has become difficult to find in New Orleans as rents are significantly higher than before the hurricane struck. The projects were notoriously ruthless places plagued by gang warfare and drug abuse. Yet they were also a place that families called home for generations. Residents say the projects were a viable place to live for low income residents in the center of a great American city. Activists and many residents believe the HUD plan is simply a way to prevent poor urban African-Americans from returning to the city. Yet there is no doubt that the projects need improving, one way or another.

The place is usually teeming with some kind of activity, especially among the children and teenagers. There is no playground, so the kids often make do with makeshift games like practicing flips on mattresses or shooting hoops on the two beat up basketball courts. Many of the apartments remain closed, so you’ll see a boarded up apartment on the first floor with a family living in the apartment above. Some apartments remain unsealed with broken windows or ravaged by fire.

The lovely people in Calliope, while initially skeptical of my motives, have become increasingly welcoming and friendly. While their situations are far from ideal, many are delighted to be back in the place they call home among family and friends they’ve known all their lives. I feel privileged to be able to explore a side of New Orleans most people never get to see.