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From Finance to Photojournalist As an investment banker, Marcus Bleasdale was paid 500,000 pounds a year to sit in front of 10 computers and 25 phones. 'My job was to produce for the bank,' he remembers, 'almost like being a battery chicken, sitting there laying eggs.' There were perks, of course, and before the age of 30 Bleasdale was the owner of two houses and a 1968 Porsche 911, and he spent weekends skiing in the Alps. Bleasdale is now a photojournalist, and the change in his life could hardly have been more dramatic. He owns a flat, but no car, and at the age of 40 earns 60,000 pounds a year, if he is lucky. But the most profound change has been in his habitat. He no longer operates from the safe, routine life of an office; instead he is at short notice sent to document conflicts in Africa, Central America and the Balkans. He has photographed the bodies, and interviewed the survivors and those who have raped or tried to kill them. He has reported on child abductions in Uganda, air pollution in China, civil war in Somalia; he has escaped from rioters, checkpoint thugs, snipers and, most recently, a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Adre, Chad (he sheltered in the back room of the Medecins Sans Frontieres compound). Bleasdale, for his part, couldn't be happier. 'I like life being raw,' he says. 
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