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

by Addario, Lynsey

  I never realized how much work his flowers required, because they made him so happy. Even before a ten-hour day of cutting hair, he spent the wee hours of dawn in his greenhouse, tending to his plants as if each one were a small child. When I watched him, I tried to understand what about these plants captivated his attention. He would lead me through the labyrinth of gigantic pots and show me the mini mandarin tree that always bore succulent fruits, or the orchids that blossomed from seedlings he had ordered from Asia and South America. He grew them off slabs of bark, as they grew in their native rain forests.

  “This is a Strelitzia reginae, also known as a bird-of-paradise,” he’d say. “And this is a Gelsemium sempervirens, a Carolina jasmine, and a Paphiopedilum fairrieanum, a lady’s slipper orchid.”

  The names were long, an endless stream of vowels and consonants that I didn’t understand. But I was in awe of his knowledge of something so foreign, curious why this exhausting work brought him such mysterious joy.

  • • •

  ON SEPTEMBER 27,1982—when I was eight years old—my mother piled my three sisters and me into our station wagon, drove us to the parking lot of the hair salon, and turned off the engine. She must have chosen the parking lot of the salon because it was her second home, and neutral ground for her and my dad. “Your father went to New York with Bruce,” she said. “He is not coming back.”

  He was coming out.

  Bruce, a manager in the design department at Bloomingdale’s, was one of the many men who hung around our house when I was growing up. One afternoon my mother went to Bloomingdale’s in search of someone to design shades for my father’s greenhouse. Bruce went home with her in her two-seater Mercedes to see the greenhouse and walked in on a typical afternoon at the Addario house: several pots of food on the stove, and family and friends lounging about, talking and laughing loudly. He felt the warmth of our house immediately. “Oh, my God!” he cried. “What a beautiful house!”

  Bruce grew up in an icy family in Terre Haute, Indiana, and he was enthralled by the Italian-style camaraderie of ours. He was charismatic, talented, and very flamboyant, and he and my mother became fast friends. They ran around together, shopping and socializing, as if my father didn’t exist. My parents sent Bruce to hairdressing school to become a colorist and gave him a place to stay in our house when he didn’t want to commute back to his apartment in New York. For four years Bruce was part of the family.

  It wasn’t until 1978 that my father made a pass while he and Bruce were running an errand for my mother. The affair went on for a few years before my dad was able to admit to himself that he had fallen in love. My father had suppressed his homosexuality since his teenage years. His mother, Nina, had come to Ellis Island in 1921 along with thousands of other Italian immigrants. They brought their prejudices and conservative Catholic views with them. In the 1950s and 1960s homosexuality was considered a mental illness and was against the law. To this day my father thinks his mother would have committed him to an asylum had he come out back then. When he finally mustered the courage to tell her he was in love with Bruce, she said, “Can’t you just make believe you’re straight?”

  I was too young to fully understand why my father was leaving. It was something we deduced on our own or learned at school. “Phillip Coiffures … gay … their dad is gay” we heard kids whispering in the halls. I don’t remember the women in our family ever having a conversation about my father being homosexual. We only seemed to talk about everyone else’s lives.

  We visited Dad and Bruce on weekends in their new home at the end of a half-mile path by the beach in Connecticut. Lauren, the oldest of us girls, was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal. Two years later she finished high school and left to study abroad in England. Lisa, Lesley, and I bonded together. For the next fifteen years my father seemed to vanish from our everyday life. I reached most early milestones without him.

  My mother filled in the gaps: Between clients, she came to all my high school softball games, rewarded me with admiration when I brought home A’s from school, and counseled me on my first love. My mother was infinitely resilient—a trait she learned from her own mother, Nonnie, who’d raised five children on her own—and she tried to stay strong and positive about my father. She kept repeating the mantra they had always told us—“Do what makes you happy, and you will be successful in life”—as if to discourage any negative feelings about him, as if nothing had changed. Perhaps it was the way my mother portrayed their separation, or perhaps it was because I’d grown up my whole life witnessing the sorrow of outcasts, but I accepted that my father had found the happiness he’d longed for. I even found solace in the idea that my dad left my mother for a man rather than a woman.

  The weekend parties came to an end. My father stayed in business with my mother for moral and financial support for years after he left to be with Bruce, but the strain of remaining in business together was difficult for everyone. Six years after my father left, he and Bruce opened a new salon; most of my mother’s stylists and clients followed them. She struggled to keep the shop going. Managing money was never my mother’s strength, and without my father she could no longer maintain our expensive lifestyle. The first casualty was the two-seater Mercedes. She was unable to pay the bills on our house and our cars. Almost every month either the electricity or the water was cut off, or the repo man came in the middle of the night to take our car away. In middle school I often looked out the window at daybreak to see if our car was still in the driveway.

  We moved out of the house with so many memories on North Ridge Road and moved into a smaller house a few miles away. There was no swimming pool and no big backyard. My three sisters had all moved on to start their lives, and my mom and I were alone.

  It was around that time, when I was thirteen, on one of my rare weekend visits to his house, that my father gave me my first camera. It was a Nikon FG, which had been given to him by a client. The gift happened by chance: I saw it, I asked about it, and he casually handed it over. I was fascinated by the science of the camera, the way light and the shutter could freeze a moment in time. I taught myself the basics from an old “how to photograph in black-and-white” manual with an Ansel Adams picture of Yosemite National Park on the cover. With rolls of black-and-white film, long exposures, and no tripod, I sat on the roof and tried to shoot the moon. I was too shy to turn my camera on people, so I photographed flowers, cemeteries, peopleless landscapes. One day a friend of my mother’s, a professional photographer, invited me to her darkroom and taught me how to develop and print film. I watched with wonder as the still lifes of tulips and tombstones twinkled onto the page. It was like magic.

  Bruce and Phillip.

  I photographed obsessively, continuing when I went off to the University of Wisconsin−Madison, where I majored in international relations. Still, I never dreamed of making photography a career. I thought photographers were flaky, trust-fund kids without ambition, and I didn’t want to be one of those people.

  Then I spent a year abroad, studying economics and political science at the University of Bologna. Free from the academic and social demands of Wisconsin, I embraced street photography. Between lectures I photographed Bologna’s arches and ancient nooks with my Nikon. During holiday breaks, I teamed up with new, instantly intimate friends, the kind who typified a college year abroad, and went backpacking around Europe, photographing the ruddy cheeks of Prague and the nude thermal baths of Budapest, the coast of Spain and the crowded streets of Sicily. I soaked up the architecture and the art I had read about my entire life, went to museums and photo exhibitions. I saw a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, from when he first began photographing until his death, and for hours I sat and studied his composition and use of light. I was inspired to photograph more.

  The more I traveled, the more I craved a life of travel. I could wake up on any given morning and go to almost any destination; the countries of Europe were accessible by train and inaccessible only because of my o
wn inhibitions or fear. This was such an unfamiliar luxury to me, an American who grew up on an isolated continent. I imagined a life overseas—as a diplomat, maybe, or a translator.

  But one day as I was leaving the darkroom with a stack of prints, an Italian man approached and asked to see them. After flipping through them for a few minutes, he offered to turn them into a line of postcards. I was so excited that I happily handed them over without signing a thing. They were sold in Rimini, an Italian resort near Bologna, but I never saw a dime. It was the first time I realized photos could be published and seen by hundreds of people, maybe more.

  When I graduated from college, I moved to New York City for the summer and waited tables at night at Poppolini’s restaurant in Greenwich Village. During the day I got an internship assisting a fashion photographer who shot for catalogues. I hated it. It was too predictable. So once I’d made about $4,000 from waitressing, I moved to Buenos Aires to learn Spanish and to travel around South America, as I had in Europe. Taking pictures became a way for me to travel with a purpose.

  I rented a room from an arrogant Argentinean man in his late twenties who spent a good portion of his time looking in the mirror, getting ready to go out partying, or sleeping off his hangover. To support myself, I taught English at Andersen Consulting for $18 an hour. It afforded me free afternoons, when I could wander through the alleys of the city, photographing tango dancers on narrow streets or ancient men in smoke-filled cafés. I often ended up at the Plaza de Mayo, where every Thursday Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Argentinean mothers, marched in protest of their children’s disappearances during Argentina’s Dirty War.

  When I started photographing the mothers, I didn’t know what ingredients produced a powerful photograph. No one had taught me about composition, or how to read light. I knew that the mothers’ expressions spoke to me, but I wasn’t sure how to capture the scene I was experiencing. Each Thursday I went back to the plaza, unsatisfied with the images I had composed the week before. I sensed I was too removed from the women, so I got a little closer to them as they circled the plaza. I tried to frame their pain and unresolved sadness in my viewfinder. Sometimes their expressions were shielded by dark shadows on their faces, because they were in the wrong place in relation to the sunlight. Sometimes I was simply too tentative and insecure to get close enough to them. Sometimes I missed a perfect moment, unsure of my instincts. I was untrained, but I began to teach myself, studying photography in books and newspapers, to see how powerful scenes could make a tired old story new again. I kept going back to try.

  A month after I arrived in Argentina, my boyfriend, Miguel, a writer ten years my senior, joined me in Buenos Aires. Miguel and I rented a room for $500 a month, and for little, we received little. The bathroom was across a cement courtyard. When a cold rain descended on the city in the winter, we had to run from the nest of our bedroom into the brisk evening air, down a set of wet stairs, and around the corner to the tiny toilet. I all but stopped drinking water during the day.

  Every few weeks I traveled around Latin America to photograph. I went from seaside villages in Uruguay to Pablo Neruda’s houses along the Chilean coast to Machu Picchu in Peru; I photographed volcanoes, mountains, lakes, plush green fields, towns propped on hillsides, craft fairs, fish markets; I took long bus journeys around hairpin turns marked by crosses where others had fallen and died, and searched for beautiful light at dawn and dusk. My quest was simple: to travel and photograph everything I could with what little I had.

  Miguel had recently completed a master’s degree in journalism. We were both curious and cared deeply about what was happening in the world; it was our bond. But Miguel was a very private man. In me he recognized an extrovert, someone who loved to meet people and ask questions. He suggested I go to the local English daily newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald, to see if I could freelance for them as a photojournalist. I had no experience in newspaper photography, but I was convinced they should offer me work because of my determination. The first time I approached the two editors in the photo department—two middle-aged men who smoked cigarettes all day while pulling pictures off the AP wire—they told me to come back after learning to speak the language. I thought I was already fluent, so I went away, brushed up on my Spanish, and went back to the paper a few weeks later.

  Annoyed by my persistence, they finally gave me work—assignments I was convinced were fabricated just to keep me out of their hair. They’d write down the address of some location outside Buenos Aires, and I would have to find my way there, take a photo, and return and show them. None of these ever got published.

  One day they told me that Madonna was filming the movie Evita that night at the Casa Rosada, the president’s house in the city’s main square. I already knew that, because I’d read in the paper that she was staying in a hotel suite for $2,500 a night and had set up her own gym in the room. I’d thought about her personal gym all morning as I went for a jog in tired shoes and sidestepped piles of dog shit.

  The photo editors made me a proposal: If I could sneak onto the set of Evita and get a photo of Madonna filming, they would offer me a job.

  That evening I pleaded with the security guards at the perimeter of the Casa Rosada for access, explaining that my entire career and future as a photojournalist depended on their allowing me onto the set. “I will be famous someday,” I told them, “if you just let me in.”

  I must have looked sufficiently pathetic, because the guard smiled and cracked open the gate just enough to let me sneak through. I walked over to the press riser, about three hundred yards from the balcony where Madonna was due to appear, climbed up the stairs, raised my tiny little Nikon FG with a 50mm lens that my father had given me years before, and peered through the viewfinder. The balcony was nothing more than a microscopic speck.

  I lowered my camera and just stood there, looking out at the balcony in the distance, convinced my career was over before it had even begun. And then I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Hey, kid. Give me your camera body.”

  I had no idea what this stranger was talking about. I stared at him blankly.

  “Take your lens off your camera,” he said, “and give me your camera.”

  I did as instructed. He latched my minuscule camera onto a heavy 500mm lens—I hadn’t even known that all Nikon bodies could be used with all Nikon lenses—and said, “OK, now look.”

  I squealed. Madonna was right there, huge in my frame. Everyone on the riser paused to look at me and rolled their eyes.

  My image of Madonna at the Casa Rosada made the front page of the newspaper that morning, and I got a job at the paper, where I was paid $10 a picture.

  While I was working for the Herald, I went to see an exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s work: enormous images of impoverished workers around the world who toiled under harrowing conditions. The photos were an enigma to me: How had he captured his subjects’ dignity?

  Until I saw Salgado’s exhibition, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a street photographer or a news photographer or whether I could make it as a photographer at all. But when I entered the exhibition space, I was so overcome by his images—the passion, the details, the texture—that I decided to devote myself to photojournalism and documentary photography. Something I had perceived until that moment as a simple means of capturing pretty scenes became something altogether different: It was a way to tell a story. It was the marriage of travel and foreign cultures and curiosity and photography. It was photojournalism.

  Until that exhibit I hadn’t quite known what that was or could be. I hadn’t thought of photography as both art and a kind of journalism. I hadn’t known that my hobby could be my life. I knew then that I wanted to tell people’s stories through photos; to do justice to their humanity, as Salgado had done; to provoke the kind of empathy for the subjects that I was feeling in that moment. I doubted I would ever be able to capture such pain and beauty in a single frame, but I was impassioned. I walked through the exhibition and cr
ied.

  I never felt the uncertainty that typically plagues people in their twenties. I was lucky enough to discover something that made me happy and ambitious at an age when I couldn’t conceive of fear or failure, when I had very little to lose. But when I began working for the Herald, Miguel gave me possibly the best advice I ever got in my career.

  “Stay in Latin America, learn photography, and make all your professional mistakes in Argentina,” he said, “because if you make one mistake in New York, no one will give you a second chance.”

  • • •

  WHEN WE FINALLY RETURNED to the States, in 1996, I was ready. I carried my mediocre clips from the Buenos Aires Herald around to the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and the Associated Press (AP), marching into photo editors’ offices with groundless confidence that they should hire me. I was an overzealous twenty-two-year-old, dressed in stylish jeans, a crisp button-down shirt, and black rubber-soled platform shoes. (At five foot one, I hated flat shoes.) The newspapers put me on their “stringers” list, which they consulted when they needed to call a photographer for an assignment. No photographer on that list would ever say no to an assignment, even if it meant ditching a romantic dinner, or waking up at 5 a.m. to stand outside a courthouse on a freezing New York morning for a perp walk, or taking lame photographs of a kid playing in a leaking fire hydrant on a hot summer’s day. In the early days the assignments were grim, but I took them—happily.

  The AP gave me steady work almost immediately. During my years there I covered protests, press conferences, city hall, accidents. I shot Monica Lewinsky making one of her first public appearances, on the Today show. I photographed people watching the big screens in Times Square as the Dow Jones soared past 10,000. I covered the Yankees’ ticker tape parade, which seemed like an annual event, because the Yankees always won the World Series. I never came back empty-handed or without a compelling image. Wire services, like the AP or Reuters, supplied news articles and photographs to newspapers, magazines, and television. They had freelance photographers in every country around the world and didn’t accept excuses.