War photographer Jack Picone has been to military action epicenters in many countries, including Nagorno-Karabakh. Exactly the Karabakh war was his first real war experience.

In his notes published in Al Jazeera Magazine, the photographer says that many people sometimes think that photographers take up such a job only for adrenaline, but that was not the case for him. One of the reasons he started that job was the repetitive and unchallenging work in daily Australian newspaper.

His first destination was Iraq, but the photojournalist was soon arrested deported from the country for the photographs of Iraqi troops crossing the border into Kuwait.

“I arrived in [Karabakh] in 1992, aged around 30 and ready to answer the question I'd carried around with me for years: could I keep my head, literally and metaphorically, as I documented an exchange of gunfire between warring soldiers?

I was making my way towards Armenian soldiers positioned in trenches by the side of a mountain when I got my answer. The mountain suddenly reverberated with the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells. Ink-blot black clouds snaked their way eerily towards the sky. A shallow hole – a perfect ready-made grave – provided my only cover from the incoming bullets and cluster bombs. I remember thinking as I lay there, that while this was too picturesque a place to be the scene of war, it was certainly a beautiful place to die.

Then I looked up and saw an Armenian soldier signal for me to run to him. His trench was only about 80m away, but that short run seemed to go on forever. I took some shrapnel in the lower back and head but I was alive. My heart pounded, adrenaline surged through my body and I felt that kind of affirming, edifying euphoria that comes with escaping death,” the photographer writes.