It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

by Addario, Lynsey

  As I ran forward to follow him, I heard the familiar whoosh of a bullet. I looked up at the rooftops: Qaddafi snipers were in the city. I assumed that everyone realized the gravity of the situation, but back near the car Anthony was drinking tea with a handful of men beside an ammunition truck, chatting happily in Arabic. He looked older than his forty-something years, with his gray beard and soft stomach. His eyes sparkled, warm and friendly, as he listened to the Libyans, calmly smoking his cigarette and throwing his hands around as he spoke, as if hanging out with friends by a pool.

  But Steve, who had been kidnapped twice—once in Iraq, once in Afghanistan—looked spooked. He stood by our car with Mohammed, as if this might inspire the others to finish their work. The locals around us were screaming, “Qanas! Qanas!” (Sniper! Sniper!)

  Mohammed was getting frantic. “We have to go to Benghazi,” he pleaded. His brother had been calling, warning that Qaddafi’s men had entered the city from the west. He called us all back to the car, and we took off for the eastern gate of town.

  On the road toward the exit Tyler asked Mohammed to stop the car one last time to check out a team of rebel fighters setting up rocket-propelled grenades. He reluctantly pulled off to the side of the road, and Tyler leapt out to shoot, buoyed by a rush of adrenaline I knew well—that feeling of satisfaction when doing reporting that few others would dare do. Mohammed immediately called his brother again to check in. I knew we were pushing the boundaries, lingering after we had been warned to leave, but my desire to pull back to safety felt like a terrible weakness. My colleagues would never have accused me of being wimpy or unprofessional; I was the one who was all too aware of being the only woman in the car.

  A car pulled up alongside us: “They’re in the city! They’re in the city!”

  “Tyler!” Mohammed shouted, his face wrecked with fear.

  “Let’s go!” Steve screamed. Tyler clambered into the car and we took off.

  The night before, my editor, David, and I agreed that I would call him at 9 a.m. in New York. I checked my watch and dialed his number. I couldn’t get a line out. I dialed again. Nothing. I kept redialing his extension, over and over and over, punching at the phone. When I looked up and squinted into the distance, I saw something I hadn’t seen in weeks: traffic.

  “I think it’s Qaddafi’s men,” I said.

  Tyler and Anthony shook their heads. “No way,” Tyler said.

  Within seconds, the fuzzy horizon distilled into little olive figurines. I had been right.

  Tyler realized it, too. “Don’t stop!” he screamed.

  You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint, and both are a gamble. The first option is to stop and identify yourselves as journalists and hope that you are respected as neutral professionals. The second option is to blow past them and hope they don’t open fire on you.

  “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Tyler was yelling.

  But Mohammed was slowing down, sticking his head out of the window.

  “Sahafi! Media!” he yelled to the soldiers. He opened the car door to get out, and Qaddafi’s soldiers swarmed around him. “Sahafi!”

  In one fluid movement the doors flew open and Tyler, Steve, and Anthony were ripped out of the car. I immediately locked my door and buried my head in my lap. Gunshots shattered the air. When I looked up, I was alone. I knew I had to get out of the car to run for cover, but I couldn’t move. I spoke to myself out loud, a tactic I used when my inner voice wasn’t convincing enough: “Get out of the car. Get out. Run.” I crawled across the backseat with my head down and out the open car door, scrambled to my feet, and immediately felt the hands of a soldier pulling at my arms and tugging at my two cameras. The harder he pulled, the harder I pulled back. Bullets whipped by us. Dirt kicked up all around my feet. The rebels were barraging the army’s checkpoint from behind us, from the place we had just fled. The soldier pulled at my camera with one hand and pointed his gun at me with the other.

  We stood like that for ten interminable seconds. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tyler running toward a one-story cement building up ahead. I trusted his instincts. We needed to get out of the line of fire before we could negotiate our fate with these soldiers.

  I surrendered my waist pack and one camera and clutched the other, pulling the memory cards out as I ran after my colleagues, who, in the chaos of bullets, had also escaped their captors. My legs felt slow as my eyes stayed trained on Anthony ahead of me. “Anthony! … Anthony, help me!”

  But Anthony had tripped and fallen to his knees. When he looked up, his normally peaceful face was wrenched with panic, oblivious to my screams. His face looked so unnatural that it terrified me more than anything else. We had to reach Tyler, who had sprinted ahead and seemed likeliest to escape.

  Somehow the four of us reunited at the cinder-block building set back from the road, sheltered from the gun battle that continued to rage behind us. A Libyan woman holding an infant stood nearby, crying, while a soldier tried to console them. He didn’t bother with us, because he knew we had nowhere to go.

  “I’m thinking about making a run for it,” Tyler said.

  We looked into the distance. The open desert stretched out in every direction.

  Within seconds, five government soldiers were upon us, pointing their guns and yelling in Arabic, their voices full of hate and adrenaline, their faces contorted into masks of rage. They ordered us facedown into the dirt, motioning to us with their hands. We all paused, assuming this was the moment of our execution. And then we slowly crouched down and begged for our lives.

  I pressed my face into the soil, sucking in a mouthful of fine dirt as a soldier pulled my hands behind my back and kicked open my legs. The soldiers were all screaming at us, at one another, pointing their weapons at our heads as the four of us sank into silent submission, waiting to be shot.

  I looked over at Anthony, Steve, and Tyler to make sure we were all still there, together and alive, and then quickly looked back down at the sand.

  “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Please, God. Save us.”

  I raised my eyes from the ground and looked up into a gun barrel and directly into the soldier’s eyes. The only thing I could think to do was beg, but my mouth was so dry, as if my saliva had been replaced with dirt. I could barely utter a word.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Please.”

  I waited for the crack of the gun, for the end of my life. I thought of Paul, my parents, my sisters, and my two grandmothers, well into their nineties. Each second felt like its own space in the universe. The soldiers continued barking at one another, with their guns leveled at our heads.

  “Jawaz!” one of them suddenly yelled. They wanted our passports, and we surrendered them. The soldier leaned down and started searching my body for my belongings, pulling things out of my jacket pockets: my BlackBerry, my memory cards, some loose bills. His hands moved quickly, skipping over my second passport, which was secretly tucked into a money belt inside my jeans, until they reached my breasts. He stopped. And then he squeezed them, like a child honking a rubber horn.

  “Please, God. I just don’t want to be raped.” I curled as tightly as I could into a fetal position.

  But the soldier was preoccupied with something else. He removed my gray Nikes with fluorescent yellow soles, and I heard the whipping sound of the laces being pulled out. I felt air on my feet. He tied my ankles together. With a piece of fabric he pulled my wrists behind my back and tied them together so tightly they went numb. Then he pushed my face down into the filthy earth.

  Will I see my parents again? Will I see Paul again? How could I do this to them? Will I get my cameras back? How did I get to this place?

  The soldiers picked me up by my hands and feet and carried me away.

  • • •

  THAT DAY IN LIBYA I asked myself the questions that still haunt me: Why do you do this work? Why do you risk your life for a photograph? After ten years as a war correspondent, it remains a difficult question to ans
wer. The truth is that few of us are born into this work. It is something we discover accidentally, something that happens gradually. We get a glimpse of this unusual life and this extraordinary profession, and we want to keep doing it, no matter how exhausting, stressful, or dangerous it becomes. It is the way we make a living, but it feels more like a responsibility, or a calling. It makes us happy, because it gives us a sense of purpose. We bear witness to history, and influence policy. And yet we also pay a steep price for this commitment. When a journalist gets killed in a firefight, or steps on a land mine and loses his legs, or tears his friends and family apart by getting kidnapped, I ask myself why I chose this life.

  The location where we were taken, photographed about one month later by Bryan Denton for the New York Times. Following photograph: My shoe without laces where we were tied up.

  I had no idea that I would become a conflict photographer. I wanted to travel, to learn about the world beyond the United States. I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people’s most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

  It was in Argentina, at age twenty-two, that I discovered I could make a living—at first, $10 a photograph—from this hobby that I loved. Once I began to work, a career in photojournalism didn’t seem like such a distant dream. The question was how to move forward in such a competitive industry. I got a job as a stringer for the Associated Press in New York, and once I had experience, I took a risk and began to travel, first to Cuba, then India, Afghanistan, Mexico City. I became comfortable in places most people found frightening, and as I saw more of the world, my courage and curiosity grew.

  I was just finding my way as a reporter when the September 11 attacks changed the world. Along with hundreds of other journalists, I was there to witness the invasion of Afghanistan; it would be the first time many of us would participate in a story that involved our own troops and our own bombs. The War on Terror created a new generation of war journalists, and as the wars became more unjust, our commitment deepened. We had an obligation to show the world the truth, and our sense of mission consumed our lives. On the front lines we became a family. We’ve seen one another through affairs, through marriages, divorces, and deaths. Now that combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly ceased, we meet most often at weddings and funerals.

  When I was first starting out, I raced to cover the biggest stories, but over time my choices have become more personal. I see images in newspapers, magazines, on the Internet—refugee camps in Darfur, women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, wounded veterans—and my heart leaps. I am suddenly overcome with this quiet angst—a restlessness that means I know I will go. The work takes on a rhythm all its own. I may spend two weeks photographing women dying of breast cancer in Uganda, and on the plane home I am already sketching out my next assignment, on the Maoist rebels in the jungles of India. When I return home to London—to my husband, Paul, and my son, Lukas—I’ll edit some eight thousand Uganda photos, break to take Lukas to the park, and perhaps discuss with an editor a future assignment in southern Turkey. When people ask me why I go to these places, they are asking the wrong question. For me, the conundrum is never whether or not to go to Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan; the problem is that I can’t be in two of those places at once.

  With my subjects—the thousands of people I have photographed—I have shared the joy of survival, the courage to resist oppression, the anguish of loss, the resilience of the oppressed, the brutality of the worst of men and the tenderness of the best. I maintain relationships with drivers and fixers, the trusted locals I relied on for setting up meetings, translating interviews, and navigating a foreign culture, for years. An interpreter I worked with thirteen years ago in Afghanistan can unexpectedly pop up in a meeting at a United Nations office today. They are as much a part of my circle of humanity as anyone else, and when a new tragedy is visited upon their country, I feel a sense of responsibility to see how it is affecting them. Often they write to me, “Are you coming, Miss Lynsey?”

  Of course, there are dangers, and I have been lucky. I have been kidnapped twice. I have gotten in one serious car accident. Two of my drivers have died while working for me—two tragedies that I will always feel responsible for. I have missed the births of my sisters’ children, the weddings of friends, the funerals of loved ones. I have disappeared on countless boyfriends and had just as many disappear on me. I put off, for years, marriage and children. Somehow, though, I am healthy. I have maintained warm and wonderful relationships; I even found a husband who puts up with it all. Like many women, once I started a family, I had to make tough choices. I struggle to find the imperfect balance between my role as a mother and my role as a photojournalist. But I have faith, as I’ve always had, that if I work hard enough, care enough, and love enough in all areas of my life, I can create and enjoy a full life. Photography has shaped the way I look at the world; it has taught me to look beyond myself and capture the world outside. It’s also taught me to cherish the life I return to when I put the camera down. My work makes me better able to love my family and laugh with my friends.

  Journalists can sound grandiose when they talk about their profession. Some of us are adrenaline junkies; some of us are escapists; some of us do wreck our personal lives and hurt those who love us most. This work can destroy people. I have seen so many friends and colleagues become unrecognizable from trauma: short-tempered, sleepless, and alienated from friends. But after years of witnessing so much suffering in the world, we find it hard to acknowledge that lucky, free, prosperous people like us might be suffering, too. We feel more comfortable in the darkest places than we do back home, where life seems too simple and too easy. We don’t listen to that inner voice that says it is time to take a break from documenting other people’s lives and start building our own.

  Under it all, however, are the things that sustain us and bring us together: the privilege of witnessing things that others do not; an idealistic belief that a photograph might affect people’s souls; the thrill of creating art and contributing to the world’s database of knowledge. When I return home and rationally consider the risks, the choices are difficult. But when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine.

  PART ONE

  Discovering the World

  CONNECTICUT, NEW YORK, ARGENTINA, CUBA, INDIA, AFGHANISTAN

  CHAPTER 1

  No Second Chances in New York

  My oldest sister, Lauren, likes to tell a story about me. One summer day our entire family was in our backyard pool. I was only a year and a half old and couldn’t swim, so I was standing on my father’s shoulders. My three older sisters and my mother splashed around us. Suddenly, without a word, I bent my knees and jumped into the water. My sisters were stunned. My father said he let me go because he knew I would be fine. When I emerged from the water, I was smiling.

  The Addario house in Westport, Connecticut, was a kaleidoscope of transvestites and Village People look-alikes, a haven for people who weren’t accepted elsewhere. My parents, Phillip and Camille, both hairdressers, ran a successful salon called Phillip Coiffures, and they often brought home their employees and clients and friends. Crazy Rose, a manic-depressive former employee, spent most days chain-smoking, spewing non sequiturs. Veto, an openly gay Mexican—rare in the late seventies—solicited show-tune requests from my sisters and banged them out on the living room piano. When my sisters and I came home from school, we were frequently greeted by Frank, known to us as Auntie Dax, dressed as a woman and wearing a feather boa. In the summer my parents brought in two DJs from Long Island to spin Donna Summer and the Bee Gees records. Hors d’oeuvres, Bloody Marys, and bottles of wine were passed around poolside, as were quaaludes, marijuana, and cocaine. Uncle Phil, a
scowl on his face, sometimes appeared in a wedding gown for a mock ceremony on the lawn. No one ever seemed to leave. It never occurred to me that any of this was strange, because that was just how our house was.

  Family portrait, circa 1976.

  We were four sisters—Lauren, Lisa, Lesley, and I—and only two to three years apart in age. I was the youngest and relied on Daphne, our beloved Jamaican nanny, to rescue me when Lisa and Lesley beat me up or stuck puffy stickers up my nose. Our house was rambling and lawless. On a typical day ten to fifteen teenage girls were running around the yard, raiding the never-ending supply of junk food in the kitchen cupboards, skinny-dipping in the pool, and leaving wet towels and underwear along the deck and in the grass. All down the street you could hear us squealing as we pulled our bathing suits up high, rubbed Johnson’s baby oil on our butts, and shot down the big blue slide.

  Phillip and Camille at one of the pool parties.

  My mother and father were a sun-kissed and smiling team. I never heard them raise their voices, especially at each other. My father, towering over her at six foot one, called my mother “doll.” She was always befriending someone, taking someone under her wing. On Westport’s Main Street we couldn’t walk five feet without one of their clients stopping us, looking me in the eye as if I had a clue who they were. “You’ve gotten so big. I’ve known you since you were this high,” they’d say, gesturing to their knees. All of Westport watched me grow up through my mother’s stories. Every day someone told me what a wooooonderful mother I had.

  My father was quieter, an introvert who would speak to one person for hours—if he was forced to speak to anyone at all. He spent most of his time out in his rose garden—one hundred bushes of more than twenty-five species of roses—or in his two-story greenhouse, full of ferns, birds-of-paradise, jasmine, camellias, gardenias, and orchids. When I wanted to find him, I followed the long garden hose to the puddles of water that collected around the drains on the greenhouse’s redbrick floor.