Stories behind the images that bring a photographer alive

He is regarded as one of the world's foremost conflict photographers, has won numerous awards, and his and his fellow South African photographers' exploits were chronicled in a book and a film - "all that Bang Bang bullshit", as he calls it.

Yet Joao Silva has never had a solo show of his work in South Africa until now.

As we stand in Museum Africa in Newtown while the exhibition is prepared for its opening, Silva's eyes dart around, looking over the selection of photographs from the three countries that have most shaped his life - South Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, where he lost both his legs four years ago after stepping on a landmine on patrol with US forces.

"I don't have any regrets. Obviously if I could get a do-over I'd choose not to step on that mine - but you don't get do-overs in life, so here I am," he tells me.

It's almost a year since we last spoke. Then he had returned from the Visa Pour l'Image festival in France where he'd been honoured by the photo-journalist community for his work.

Now the images that were part of the retrospective shown in France are here on home soil and it's when he starts telling the stories of the moments captured in these photos that Silva really comes alive - talking fast, jumping from decade to decade, place to place, colleague to colleague.

"I remember absolutely every moment.

"You relive them when you're looking at the work, trying to make selections - and that's why when editing the South African work, I was in a deep, deep funk for two months. Ultimately you're not going for anything except what has meaning to you.

"A lot of these photos have no photographic value whatsoever, except the historical moment," he says, pointing at a slightly burnt-out press conference photo taken in the back yard of Nelson Mandela's house in the early '90s, included here because it was the first time Silva saw the man.

These personal stories, the motivation behind the selection of images, are not indicated in the captions that accompany the work.

If you want to know more, you have to watch Silva walking through his photos and telling you their stories.

The beehive that drove him and a group of photographers out of the shed they were taking cover in during cluster-bombing in Afghanistan, the piece of debris that hit his friend and longtime collaborator Greg Marinovich in the face, putting an end to his war-zone days, the suicide bomber's head collected along with the pieces of his victims in a bowl on the floor of a Baghdad mosque after he blew himself up during Friday prayers.

All of these incidents add to the images, but Silva has always been driven not by a search for the adrenaline of war zones but by the end objective.

"To show the world, to educate. That's always the point."

In the four years since his accident Silva has undergone numerous operations (he stopped counting at 47, but estimates that he's had more than 70 surgeries) and is now coming to terms with the physical limitations imposed by the use of prosthetic limbs.

He says before his accident he wasn't planning to stop doing what he was doing.

"This happened to me and I got yanked out of it.

"It's not as if I suddenly came to some sort of realisation that I'd experienced death once too often or been shot at once too often and must put down my cameras and find a different focus - but shit happens, of course."

These days he travels less and spends more time with his wife and two children.

While he's grateful for what he has and the fact that he's still alive, there's a far-off look in his eyes when he admits: "In your darkest moments alone in the hospital room with the pain, and the morphine not working, you sometimes think..."