Starting over: Photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale

Documenting the horrors of war for the likes of National Geographic couldn’t seem further from the photojournalist’s previous life as a banker. He discusses the moment he hit breaking point, and why his two careers have more in common than you might think

Making a career change is rarely an easy decision. For most people, there tends to be a fair bit of agonising over the inevitable money vs fulfilment debate before they finally take the plunge. For Marcus Bleasdale however, ditching his job as an investment banker for the life of a photojournalist was slightly less planned out.

“I knew I wasn’t going to stay forever, but that moment where you walk out of the door is a difficult one,” says Bleasdale, who was working as a derivatives trader at Bank of America in the late 90s. “There was one particular day where my colleagues and I were talking about the war in Kosovo, and one person asked me what impact the conflict was going to have on the price of the currency. [He had] taken this human catastrophe and distilled it into into a financial tool that he could profit from.”