Brennan Linsley, an Associated Press photographer, has gone 12 times to the high-security detention facility in Guantanamo Bay where the Bush administration said some of the most dangerous terrorists are held indefinitely. At a time when the Obama administration has committed itself to closing down the facility, we talked to Linsley about his work there. How he gained access to the base? What could he photograph once there? And what impact the prison has had on the US both at home and abroad?

Brennan Linsley in front of his exhibition at the 2009 Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival.

BJP: How did you get access to the prison? And what are you allowed to see once there?
Brennan Linsley: You constantly have to lobby to go to Guantanamo Bay. There is a lot of red tape. Whenever I get the green-light from the public affairs office at Guantanamo, AP sends me. The US military is the only limiting factor in these assignments. But, there is a new unit every few months. So you often have to start over the negotiations. But I've seen that the more you go, the easier it is to get in.

They have an itinerary prepared for the press. It's usually broken down in 15-minute parts. You have to work a lot to get out of this itinerary. Most of what they have for you has nothing to do with the detainees. They will show you the beach, the lighthouse. The time you have inside the “wire” in the detention facility, as they called it, is very limited. They try to move you along the whole time.

Now, I send a wish list every time. I tell them that I don't want to go to the clinic or the lighthouse. I tell them to skip this or that. “Just put me in a corner and I'll be fine.” Sometimes the public affairs people will help you. A couple of times, they took me inside the central guard tower at 4am and allowed me to photograph the morning prayer.

Every photo you see is a victory. It's amazing how simple some of the photographs look.

When you get the photograph of a detainee, it's the result of hours of pushing. You're not allowed to communicate with the detainees. There are 15 pages of ground rules. You try to humanise these guys, but it's difficult with these restrictions.

My first trip was at the instigation of the government. They saw that we kept on using the same and unique pictures we had of Guantanamo Bay, when it was first opened. They were saying: “these are out of date, wait until you see how it looks like now.”

My goal is to come back from each trip with a couple of shots that will allow me to paint more of a picture of this place. Some trips, I came back with nothing at all. Some journalists and photographers get frustrated when they don't get what they wanted. They spend a lot of time and money on this, and when you come away with very little, it is frustrating. And it doesn't serve the government's purposes. They should allow selected interviews of detainees. In terms of public relations, it would go a long way.

BJP: Talking about the detainees, is it difficult to frame a story if you can't get access to them?
Brennan Linsley: One of the problems you face is that you don't know who you are photographing. Are they, as Bush and Cheney say, the worst of the worst? Some are high-ranking terrorists, some are Talibans or foot-soldiers, but others are truly innocent. We know that a certain number of detainees were captured on bounties paid by the government. They used to drop leaflets in the tribal areas saying that $5000 would be awarded per terrorist caught. A lot of innocent people were rounded up as a result. In the fog of war, a lot of stuff happens.

So when you're working there and make eye-contact with a detainee, you never really know who it is you looking at.

Something that should be looked at in the indoctrination process at Guatanamo. What is the effect of confinement on the detainees. There is now a new military commander that has a pretty sophisticated view of what needs to be done to win the hearts and minds, and how counter-productive the stringent rules have been to achieve this goal.

This war is very political. The Talibans are also fighting for the hearts and minds of the population. I was very surprised about how successful the republicans were at turning this into political football. They shaped the message by saying that only the worst of terrorists were there. And they have used that perception against Obama.

Obama's view is that Guantanamo Bay is not only a human rights aberration, but also a strategic blunder that hurts America. It has become a symbol of US oppression. It's killing US troops and so it's strategic to get rid of it. But the Republicans are so good at setting the narrative. I remain hopeful, if anyone can close Guantanamo, Obama can. But it is going to need on ongoing dialogue with the public. It has to be a campaign, so that Cheney cannot say that it is endangering America. It has to be more than a couple of speeches.

BJP:: How is the base? Can you gain access to other areas?
Brennan Linsley:: It's surreal. It's Cuba, but it's not. Ten to 15,000 people live there. They have McDonald's, Starbucks, the Navy version of Wal-Mart. They have everything.

There are two ways to cover this story. You can go on the standard media tour, or you can be commissioned for the pre-trial hearings. For the latter, you get to go into the base – Camp Justice. The bubble is tighter there. You are in a eight-people tent. You can't photography anything outside, not even a little bit of razor wire. You can only photograph the lawyers and the tent.

In late May, in Camp Iguana, there was a Chinese detainee, one of the guys that no one would take. He heard that there were journalists coming that day, and so wrote down on a pad the words “Let there be justice” and “We need to freedom.” The public affairs people didn't know what hit them. You can't communicate with the detainees, but there was nothing in the rules that dealt with detainees showing placards. Our work was held in limbo for 24 hours, while the Obama administration was informed and that they wouldn't be taken by surprise by the images' release.

Not all photographs make it out of the base. 'The operational security people go through all the photographs, videos and sounds recorded by journalists and photographers and they delete anything that they perceived breaks the ground rules. It's agonizing. The best pictures from Guantanamo Bay are all gone. It's hard to humanise someone when you can't even show their face.'

BJP: Has it been difficult to operate in the current economic climate, with people saying that photojournalism is dead?
Brennan Linsley: There's less money in photojournalism, that's a fact. It's hard for people to make a living. In terms of impact on the public, this hasn't changed. If you asked people if they remember a photograph from the last 12 months, the answer would be yes.

A lot of photojournalists are dying financially. It becomes an art that is only sustainable if you have a life outside of photojournalism. More and more you need to self-fund the process. You need to be able to work for nine months, set aside a few thousand dollars and then you can spend that money on a project for three months. But the challenge is to find a venue to show this work. Photojournalism suffers from that lack of venue, which is paradoxical in a world where we have 800 television channels, thousands of magazines and the online world.

The industry is suffering, but the impact of photography hasn't changed. It's a powerful medium. A powerful photograph makes people think, it makes them want to know more. And I don't see anything that would change that.

The Golden Age of photography has been over for a long time. It died somewhere between the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Before, magazines such as Time would send three photographers unilaterally without restrictions. They were able to send their pictures whenever they wanted. Now, we have three deadlines a day. It's annoying sometimes, because you want to be able to disappear into a story.

BJP: In projects such as this one [exhibited at this year's Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival] do you retain control of your images?
Brennan Linsley: Absolutely not. AP is the owner. AP has a resale division where they resell the pictures. Photographers don't see much of that money. But, at the same time, it contributes to the health of the company, which allows us to go on such projects.