Dwight Lunkley
I can't remember now the precise reason Dwight decided to do the he-man pose for me,but it all seemed to make a strange kind of sense at the time. The picture was taken at 7.30 in the morning, not because Dwight is an early riser (though you get the feeling he is) but because he hadn't gone to bed the night before. Beer, and lots of it, was involved. He apologised for not wearing his cowboy hat.

Dwight, a self-described hillbilly from eastern California, was burned when a 4x4 buggy he was riding shotgun in overturned and exploded. He was burned down to the bone in many places, and lost both his hands as well as most of his face. "The surgeon told me", he says with some relish, "the first job was to going to be making me look human again".

Dwight's life hung in the balance, but it was the thought of his children (who he was bringing up on his own) that pulled him through. He was offered advanced prosthetics but chose instead the arms you see, which are powered by nothing more than bicycle brake cables and springs. "I figured they were simple enough that I could mend them myself if they broke", he grins. His dexterity with them is truly extraordinary: not only can he write, but his handwriting has remained the same as it was before the accident.

Even harder to believe is the fact that when he left the hospital, Dwight returned to his profession as a professional 4x4 racer, and now competes with his own team in 500 mile off-road races across some of North America's toughest terrain, sharing the driving chores with a buddy.

It's been a long road, he says, but through it all there was a quotation he had heard somewhere that kept him going. "Let me get it right", he says. "'Anything vividly imagined and ardently desired will surely come to pass'. And it's true," he adds, "only they conveniently left out the part about how much work it takes".