John Moore/Getty Images

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN - DECEMBER 27: Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto addresses thousands of supporters at a campaign rally minutes before she was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The opposition leader died from wounds to the neck and head after speaking at an election rally in the northern city where an estimated 15 people were left dead by the explosion.

In the latest Getty Images photographer podcast, Getty Images CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan Klein recently talked with staff photographer John Moore to discuss what it is like working behind the lens in the middle of a conflict and living life as an award-winning photojournalist in Pakistan.

Throughout his career, John has traveled and lived in several parts of the world including Nicaragua, India, South Africa, Egypt and for the past three years, Islamabad, Pakistan. Since joining Getty Images in 2005, John has extensively covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, photographing the US and British military in some of the world’s most dangerous combat zones.

Last year, John spent much of his time covering Pakistan’s slide into instability. In December 2007, he was the only American photojournalist to capture the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the chaotic moments thereafter.

John earned two first-place World Press Photo awards for his coverage of the Bhutto assassination and was awarded this year’s “Magazine Photographer of the Year” from Pictures of the Year International (POYi) and was awarded “Photojournalist of the Year” from the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA).

To learn more about John, don’t miss his previous Getty Images blog posts:

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery

I’ve probably been to the Ground Zero site 60 or so times since 9/11/01 and visiting each new time is like watching an old photograph age and fade away. Of course I’ll never forget those first horrific days, but returning to the site now leaves very little context of what went on that Tuesday morning. There is still a giant hole in the ground but it is now just a construction site.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Greenwich Street, which I sprinted down trying to outrun the tornado of dust and debris as the South Tower fell, now is just like any other Manhattan avenue, with shops, taxis, parking garages and Wall Street types hustling past on the sidewalk. I shot a ceremony outside a firehouse this morning where the firefighters observed moments of silence at the times the planes struck the towers.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

The paradox of the cleanup and recovery is that there are very few symbols remaining of what happened that day. I spent last week down at the site shooting for a multimedia piece on what Ground Zero looks and feels like now. I recall as a kid being taken to a Civil War battlefield by my father one day and complaining to him that there was nothing to see. I’m pretty sure most visitors to Ground Zero now feel like I did that day at Antietam.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

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.

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

John Moore/Getty Images

After spending much of the last six years covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I felt like I needed to visit Arlington National Cemetery this Memorial Day weekend. I felt like I owed it some time.

I went with my family - my pregnant wife and my young daughter. Separately and together, my wife and I have covered a lot of heart-wrenching stories around the world, but Section 60 was unlike any place we had been.

The beauty and serenity of Virginia’s rolling hills and awe inspiring views of Washington D.C. clash with today’s reality of national loss, where grief is raw and in your face. You step over grass sods still taking root over freshly dug graves. You watch a mother kiss her son’s tombstone. Two soldiers put flowers and a cold beer next to the grave of a fallen buddy. A young son left a hand-written note for his dad. “I hope you like Heven, hope you liked Virginia very much hope you like the Holidays. I also see you every Sunday. Please write back!”

Section 60 is not about a troop surge or a war spending bill or whether we should be fighting these wars at all. It is about ordinary people trying to get through something so hard that most of us can’t ever imagine it. Everyone I met that afternoon had a gut-wrenching story to tell.

Mary McHugh is one of those people. She sat in front of the grave of her fiance James “Jimmy” Regan, talking to the stone. She spoke in broken sentences between sobs, gesturing with her hands, sometimes pausing as if she was trying to explain, with so much left needed to say.

Later on, after she spoke with a fellow mourner from a neighboring grave, I went over and introduced myself and told her I was photographing for Getty Images and had brought my family on our own pilgrimage to the site. I told her we had been living in Pakistan for the last few years, how we had come back to the States for a few months for the birth of our second child.

Mary told me about her slain fiance Jimmy Regan. Clearly, she had not only loved him but truly admired him. When he graduated from Duke, he decided to enlist in the Army to serve his country. He chose not to be an officer, though he could have been, because he didn’t want to risk a desk job. Instead, he became an Army Ranger and was sent twice to Aghanistan and Iraq - an incredible four deployments in just three years. He was killed in Iraq this February by a roadside bomb.

I told her how I had spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan, photographing American troops in combat. I told her that earlier this year I was a month in Ramadi and then a few more weeks in a tough spot called Helmand. I told her how I am going back to Iraq sometime this summer and that I was very sorry to see her this Memorial Day in the national cemetery, visiting a grave.

Mary said that they had planned to get married after Jimmy’s four years of service were up next year. “We loved each other so much,” she said. “We thought we had all of the time in the world.”

After a few moments more, my beautiful wife, Gretchen, now almost 9 months pregnant, walked over with our two-year-old Isabella. Our daughter started climbing over me, saying “daddy” in my ear and pulling on my arm to come walk with her. I felt awkward and guilty about the contrast, but if Mary felt it too, she was nothing but gracious and friendly. I told her that I would forward her some photos of her from that day if she would like and she gave me her email address. We said our goodbyes and I moved on with my family through the sea of graves.

Later on, I passed by and she was lying in the grass sobbing, speaking softly to the stone, this time her face close to the cold marble, as if whispering into Jimmy’s ear.

Some people feel the photo I took at the moment was too intimate, too personal. Like many who have seen the picture, I felt overwhelmed by her grief, and moved by the love she felt for her fallen sweetheart.

After so much time covering these wars, I have some difficult memories and have seen some of the worst a person can see - so much hatred and rage, so much despair and sadness. All that destruction, so much killing. And now, one beautiful and terribly sad spring afternoon amongst the rows and rows of marble stones - a young woman’s lost love.

I felt I owed the Arlington National Cemetery a little time - and I think I still do. Maybe we all do.

Here I am in action.

Growing up I was fascinated by the Life Magazine photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Larry Burrows. My passion for photojournalism started with a romantic notion of traveling the world and quickly evolved into a desire to witness and report. I am very much influenced by literature and great reportage of the late Ryszard Kapuscinski. I still try to read as much as possible as I feel that literature helps you see and feel the world in a much more intimate way. As a photojournalist, I am simply writing with a camera, using empathy and experience to connect with my subjects.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

My subjects in this image are young people driving in a red Mini through the devastation in Beirut.

I took this image after a long morning walk through rubble while documenting people returning to what was left of their homes. Let me be very clear about this, because there has been some misunderstanding about the matter - the image did not win an award because it was a portrayal of rich or poor Lebanese; it did not win because it showed people sightseeing. The jury in Amsterdam spoke about its contradictions and how it is an image that tells a story about war, an image one can keep looking at.

Long before anyone met these people in the car, I stated in an interview that it is not right to judge these individuals. As far as I knew, they had lost their home, or loved ones, in the war that summer as many thousands of Lebanese had. It does not matter if you were from New York or in the neighborhood where I made the image; we were all struck by the total destruction and carnage. They were just viewing the scene with a lot more panache than the rest of us.

They are not flattered by the image; I did not take it for them. What is important is it is reality, not staged or manipulated in any way. Moments like these can tell us volumes about cultures, individuals and the ability of people to persevere in war. Some have tried to alter the reality that this image celebrates, and that disturbs me greatly. In the end, I have a strong bond with and deep respect for the Lebanese people. This picture could not have been made on any other patch of land in the world. It is a picture about Beirut…lovely, sad, surreal Beirut.

We often think we know what war looks like, but it is not until we get to war when we realize it looks like us. I am not a war junkie. I do not consider myself particularly brave. It is a job I got into out of a passion for travel and reporting. I now consider it a duty to venture to parts of the world too often ignored. I always take precautions and follow advice from locals. While there are some very intense moments, mostly you wait and look and wait some more.

Hear more of what Spencer has to say on NPR. Spencer’s interview airs in most markets the weekend of May 5-8. You can find local times and broadcast frequencies by clicking “local listings” at the top of our website.