Photography: The Myth of the Airborne Warrior, By Stuart Griffiths

(Stuart Griffiths)

Stuart Griffiths is now a formally trained and prize-winning photographer, but the pictures in this book predate that training, and were taken on a compact Canon secreted in his webbing while he was serving as a paratrooper with the British Army in Northern Ireland in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

These evocative, raw – ugly – personal snapshots of young soldiers looking shattered and bored in their barracks, or highly visible – and scared – against bleak Belfast street scenes, are accompanied by disturbing fragments of recollection: "These were the sorts of people I wanted to become and they were badly broken...we all felt like blowing our brains out..."