My next guest is one of the world's best known photographers whose portraits have defined the pages of time. Rolling Stone, The New Yorker. He goes simply by one name Platten. And for more than two decades, he's been up close and personal with the most influential figures of our era, from Muhammad Ali to Vladimir Putin. His new book, The Defenders, is about giving a voice to real people, fighting back and standing up for human rights. And that is the subject of my letter from London this week. Plus on. Welcome to the program. Good to be here. Your latest book is called Defenders. What do you mean by that title? Well, it's a it's a superhero title, but the people who are defenders of human rights do they are ordinary people, but they do extraordinary things. And we often think of human rights defenders and activists. We always talk about them in a certain way. Many of them have been victimized by history and by society and faced horrendous hardships. But they've with all those challenges. They do extraordinary things. So I thought we should change start to change the narrative and see them as a new set of cultural heroes. You like very much your image of Muhammad Ali, who is by no means an ordinary person. But he captured the imagination of ordinary people all over the world. So explain to me this picture. How did this come about? He was very frail when I took this. I believe it's one of his last maybe even the last big photo shoot he did. And he had lost control of his once most powerful arms and fists because of the Parkinson's. But when he felt me drape the American flag over his shoulders, you can just see a bit of it here. He was compelled to hold up his hands in that defiant pose. And it was really moving. His his wife actually started to cry a little bit. And he was trembling, trying to keep his hands in that position. So I said to him, Muhammad, you are the greatest. Please teach me to be great. How can my generation be as great as your generation had to be during the civil rights era in America? So I had to get close to him. And he whispered in my ear and he said, I have a confession to make. So I said, What is it? And he said, I wasn't as great as I said I was. Oh, my goodness. I freaked out. That's the biggest confession I ever heard in my life. And I said, the whole world knows you as only the greatest. But then he said, You misunderstand me. I'll tell you what was great and it wasn't me. It was that people saw themselves in my struggle and my story. Let's go now to the pictures of world leaders. So this was for the Time magazine cover person of the year of 2008. You know, it is an extraordinary picture of him. You have two pictures. One is just a face on. I chose this one. Everything you want to know about Putin is summed up in that picture as far as I'm concerned. I mean, he's performing power. Exactly. I it's is a whole process of intimidation when you come into contact with power. You know, I was told that it should be in the halls of the Kremlin. And I was picked up, driven to the gates by a former KGB BMW. And then you get to the gates and the chaos turns goes out of Moscow into a dark, bleak, gothic forest. It's really intimidating. You have no idea what's going on. And I got to the most scary building I've ever seen. It was his private residence, his dacha in the middle of the forest, a two story high security wall, snipers everywhere. I'm led into the building at gunpoint and literally. Yeah, and and then the entourage comes in, and he he has two translators who whisper into his ear whole team of advisors and a gang of bodyguards. And I nervously said, Mr. President, before we capture a moment of history, I have a question to ask you. I said, I was brought up by my mom and dad listening to the Beatles, and I would like to know if you ever listened to The Beatles. And in Russian, he orders the two translators and all his advisers out of the room. Immediately, the bodyguards stay. And then Putin turns to me, and in perfect English, he says, I love the Beatles. So I said, I didn't know you spoke English. He said, I speak perfect English. So I said, Who's your favorite Beatle? He said, Paul. I said, Interesting. What's your favorite song? And I said, Is it back in the USSR? And then he said, No. My favorite song is yesterday. That is before. I think he made his big speech, you know, warning the West that he wouldn't tolerate any expansion before he invaded, annexed Crimea. Before, obviously, the second full scale invasion. And before he became a pariah. And in those intervening years, you also took pictures of the opposition, notably Pussy Riot. So let's talk about this. Everyone probably knows then like this, you know, a hardcore feminist punk rock group who speak truth to power against Putin's excessive nationalism. But what happens if you remove those aggressive masks? You see something different. And this is Nadia and Masha. After they were released from prison, they paid a heavy price for the support of women's rights. And LGBTQ rights in their country. There are leaders sometimes who will define history for better or worse. Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin. Plus on his photographs, all three. In fact, he's photographed more than 40 world leaders, including three US presidents. But it was Trump who surprised him the most. This is a man who's been president who wants to be president again, Donald Trump, who's under criminal trial as we speak. What was that up? What were you saying in his way at the back of the frame? This is, I've been told, one of his favorite rooms. It's the boardroom in Trump Tower. Where everyone would get fired in his TV show. This is where he exercised power. As a rehearsal, I think for the presidency. I remember saying to him, Donald, let's just be human. When was this? This is before he was president, before even the election campaign started properly. And I said, let's be human together. I said, we've all followed your career. No one can doubt it's an extraordinary career path you've had. But there's always something about you. There's always an air of tension and controversy about things you say and do in public. And I'm sure it's intentional on your part, but it feels to me as if you're in the middle of an emotional storm. And I said, I can't live with that anxiety. All the time. As a fellow human being, I would like to know how you weather the storm. He calmly looked at me and he said, I am the storm. Even then, I had those words ringing out in my brain through the election campaign, through his presidency, through his post-presidency. And now we're in another cycle again. And I keep thinking to myself, there's only one person who can navigate perfectly through the storm, and that's the creator of the storm. So these people are very powerful, formidable, and they're much smarter than we make them out to be. And they are not to be underestimated. And I think we always seem to do that. He's smart. One of the big issues that he brought to the fore, others have, but he really made it a campaign issue is immigration. Here's a picture of a mother carrying a picture of a boy. And this is about immigration across the southern border. Tell me what this is. Well, this is a difficult story. Her name is Fermina. She's from Guatemala, country ravaged by conflict, abject poverty, corruption, gang violence, Her parents were killed. Grandparents were killed. She had trouble feeding her son, even who was, I think, eight years old at the time. His name was Omar. So she made the most difficult decision her mother could make, which is to leave your son behind with family members cross over borders into the dangerous, deadly, sovereign and desert. Because we also have a big picture of of the mortgage in Tucson. Yeah. This is actually a story. This is the morgue. Yes. And it was actually her son. She found this out the day I was to photograph so I did what my heart told me to do. I put down my camera and I gave her a hug. Christiane, I still remember the feeling of her pain going through my body like vibrations. And eventually, after a few seconds, she pushes me away She was making the sound of a wounded animal. And she grabs the picture of her son that's framed. And she says, take my picture now. I want the world to see my pain. So I took this picture. And, of course, the picture these pictures do tell a thousand words. And you can watch a longer conversation on my weekday show next week. And as always, you can find all of my interviews online at amanpour.com.
