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

by Addario, Lynsey

  My mentor was an AP staff photographer named Bebeto, who worked as an editor on weekends. He called me almost every Saturday morning for three years: “You ready?” he would say in his slight Jamaican lilt. Bebeto was in his midforties and towered over me. He was intensely focused, but when he was unguarded, laughter would rush out of him like a lightly rumbling drum. He decided early on that he was going to take me under his wing and school me in photography. When I returned to the fifth floor of the AP offices with film canisters in hand, he stood over the rolls of negatives with a magnifying eyepiece called a loupe and went over each image with me, frame by frame, on multiple negative strips of thirty-six images per roll. He articulated what I had been trying to intuit. He taught me how to read light. He taught me the power of the sun at a low angle in the sky just after sunrise or before sunset to illuminate the world in that golden, magical way with long, dancing shadows. He talked of how a shaft of light fell onto a street corner in between buildings. He explained how to enter a room and look for the light by a window, or from a door slightly ajar. He taught me about composition. He showed me how to fill the frame of my viewfinder with the subject and important contextual information—something that lent the image a sense of place.

  More than anything, he taught me the art of patience. Cameras introduce tension. People are aware of the power of a camera, and this instinctively makes most subjects uncomfortable and stiff. But Bebeto taught me to linger in a place long enough, without photographing, so that people grew comfortable with me and the camera’s presence. A perfect photograph is almost impossible; a good one is hard enough. Sometimes the light is there, but the subject is in the wrong place, and the composition doesn’t work. Sometimes the light is perfect, but the subject is uncomfortable, and his awkwardness shows. I learned how difficult it is to put all the elements in place.

  While I was working, all my faculties were attuned to the scene in front of me. Everything else in the world, in my life, in my mind, fell away. He taught me to stand on a street corner or in a room for an hour—or two or three—waiting for that great epiphany of a moment, the wondrous combination of subject, light, and composition. And something else: the inexplicable magic that made the image dive right into your heart.

  As Bebeto reviewed my work, I learned. He looked over the negatives, image by image, drawing a giant red, waxy X over the frames he thought were below average. I worked to meet his standards.

  Seven days a week I ran around New York with a pager and a cell phone and waited for the photo desk to call with an assignment. In my downtime I worked at Craig Taylor, a high-end shirt company, running errands and stuffing envelopes. I had barely $75 in the bank on a good week, scraped by for rent, and scrounged to pay the bills for the phone and pager—my two most crucial possessions, aside from my cameras. Photography required thousands of dollars in initial investment to amass the proper equipment: two professional camera bodies, then $1,500 each (it was predigital); fast professional lenses with an aperture of 2.8, which ran from $300 to $2,500; a long zoom lens, about $2,000; a flash, $200; and a Domke camera bag, $100. I needed about $10,000 in total. I spent days walking around B&H and Adorama camera stores, dreaming of the gear I would purchase one day when I had money.

  Sometime around my twenty-fifth birthday, the last of my three sisters got married, and I had an epiphany. My father and Bruce had given each of my sisters $15,000 to spend toward their wedding costs. Miguel and I had broken up when we moved back to New York, and I knew I would never get married in my twenties; in fact, I wasn’t sure I would ever love anything as much as photography. So I made my father and Bruce a proposition: “If you advance me my wedding money now, I can use it to invest in my career, and I will one day have enough money to fund my own wedding.” They agreed. I bought new cameras and lenses and put the rest of the money in the bank.

  • • •

  AFTER LESS THAN A YEAR back in New York, I was desperate to travel and looked to Latin America once again. One country intrigued me most, perhaps because it was off-limits: Cuba. In 1997, Communist Cuba was embargoed, and Americans rarely visited. Being a foreign journalist in Cuba was also risky; the government monitored foreigners they suspected would publish negative stories about the ailing Communist system. I didn’t know anyone who had been there; at the time I didn’t know one foreign correspondent and knew few other journalists. But I was bursting with curiosity and the daring of youth. I was fascinated by the steady rise of capitalism in such a steadfastly Communist country.

  Cuban couple watching Fidel Castro on TV at home, 1997.

  I landed in Havana in May. As I rode the minivan from the airport into the city, I looked down at my nervous hands holding a sheet of paper with fading blue lines and the address of my destination and realized I was very alone. I read the address to the bus driver in rusty Argentine Spanish and felt an instant attachment to him. I wanted to spend the rest of my trip on the bus. Through the window I saw that Havana was decrepit. Some buildings had paint peeling away from their facades; others were just a heap of exposed, rotting wood. Rooftops had lost shingles; clothes were hanging up to dry in the pouring rain; boys nonchalantly rode their bikes through twelve-inch puddles. When I got out at my stop, two women and a man looked at me as if I carried a banner that said AMERICAN CAPITALISM. I was a stranger: My shoes were too new and well made for me to be Cuban. Even my hair clip would cost a month’s wages there.

  In a travel book I had found an agency that arranged home stays, and they placed me with a woman named Leo, whom I paid $22 a night for a small room. She greeted me as if I were an old friend. On my dresser she left two tiny bars of soap stolen from an American hotel in the mid-1970s. She left chocolates next to the soap. They were stolen from the same hotel.

  Three rocking chairs awaited on the glassed-in terrace with a ninth-story view, and Leo and her mother, Graciela, took their places and motioned me to sit. We began exchanging the usual questions, small talk, one-word inferences, and waited for intonations that quickly became familiar. We rocked in our chairs, and everything I had read about the situation in Cuba—the failures of communism, the poverty, the hardships, the lines for food, the struggle for basic amenities, the disparity between those who paid in dollars and those who paid in meager pesos—was confirmed by Leo and Graciela in the span of hours. Our conversation carried on from early evening into the night, and we lingered comfortably with the Cuban breezes blowing in and out of the patio windows. I had expected Cuba to be this ominous, scary dungeon, but the people were so warm, so candid—just like anyone else.

  Several days after I arrived, I finally went to Publicitur, the organization that represented Cuba’s International Press Center and provided minders for foreign journalists. Minders were government-appointed guides who accompanied journalists around, wrote up reports detailing every person the journalists interviewed and every place they visited, and then passed this information on to the government. I introduced myself to the secretary at the front desk. They recognized me as “the American journalist”; they were expecting me. The secretary led me to a room where two young women who prided themselves on their textbook English and secondhand knowledge of the outside world were seated at a table. The directors of Publicitur who oversaw the minders were eager to answer a list of questions I had prepared about Cuba and its mechanisms and to arrange my requests to photograph in certain places. I could tell instinctively I would never get the information I wanted from them. They claimed they would arrange shoots for me inside government buildings and hospitals, but I knew that in a country like Cuba they would not. It was my first experience in a country that provided government minders to journalists and blatantly restricted my movements.

  While all who worked at Publicitur and the International Press Center were eager to show me Cuba’s touristy sights—Varadero Beach, the Tropicana, the recently restored Old Havana area—they were equally eager to keep me away from the run-down neighborhoods.

  It was the rainy season,
and the streets were hard to photograph. I walked the city from end to end, for hours and hours each day, in search of images, drenched from the humidity, exhausted from the heat, and sick of hearing the flirtatious “ssssst” from men surprised to see a foreigner. I walked so much and spent so much time looking for the right light or the right angle of a shiny old American car in front of a decaying building that even my minders got bored with me and decided I wasn’t worth following around. For a few days, there wasn’t enough water for bathing, and soon I smelled from my long days of walking. I thought I might collapse from the heat. But as I roamed around the Cuban villages alone, camera in hand, I also felt satiated, at peace. I felt at home.

  As soon as I returned to New York after a month in Cuba, I thought only about getting back on a plane. I didn’t want to lose the momentum of travel and discovery or sink into the trap of a comfortable life. But I trudged through two more years of paying my dues in New York, visiting Cuba again in 1998 and 1999 to satisfy my wanderlust.

  In 1999 Bebeto came to me with an idea. In the past year there had been a series of murders in the transgender-prostitute community in New York. Rather than order an investigation into the crimes, the AP had heard that Mayor Giuliani had decided the community wasn’t worth the city’s resources. An AP reporter wanted to explore the idea that transgender prostitutes were society’s throwaways. It was my first long-term assignment, my first opportunity for a real photo-essay.

  Transgender prostitutes in the Meatpacking District in New York, 1999.

  In the beginning, the reporter and I ventured out together in the Meatpacking District to make inroads into the seemingly impenetrable world of transgender prostitutes. We traveled with a local organization that distributed condoms and information on sexually transmitted diseases on the neighborhood’s busiest weekend nights. I never took out my camera. Once we made some initial contacts as a team, I decided to venture out on my own, and for weeks I went out almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night—often without my cameras—and hung around the Meatpacking District like a groupie, trying to gain the women’s trust. I was the only white girl among a tribe of Latinas, blacks, and Asians, and they were skeptical of my intentions. Finally a woman named Kima, who walked the then desolate streets in front of what is now the fashionable Pastis restaurant, invited me to her apartment in the Bronx projects. “Be there around midnight. You can hang out with us and then come downtown to work with us.” I asked if I could bring my cameras. She agreed.

  I showed up at Kima’s with chocolate-chip cookies and milk. I’m not sure what I was thinking, bringing chocolate-chip cookies and milk to an apartment full of transgender prostitutes who lived on drugs, alcohol, and fast food—but I didn’t want to arrive empty-handed, and I didn’t think it was ethical to bring booze. (I later learned otherwise.) A handful of women were there, injecting themselves with black-market hormones, drinking, dancing, getting made up. They let me shoot whatever I wanted. For five months I spent almost every weekend with Kima, Lala, Angel, and Josie. As I gained their trust, my photographs became more intimate; time allowed me to see things I hadn’t before, like when a tough guy who looked as though he had strutted out of a Snoop Dogg video would gently comb his transgender girlfriend’s hair in the dim light of a street lamp while she waited for her early morning clients.

  One night I went on my first date in months, with a musician who played the saxophone in a Cuban band. Around 1 a.m. he walked me home along Christopher Street to the corner of West Tenth Street. We looked down at our feet and kicked our heels around in circles as we made meaningless conversation. Finally he kissed me.

  Minutes had gone by when I sensed a group of people too close to us. I opened my eyes and saw shadows dancing around our feet.

  “IT’S THE PHOTO LADY!”

  It was Kima and Lala and Charisse and Angel—an entire posse of the trannies. They screamed and laughed, and they got closer and closer to me and the poor musician. “Woohoo, you go, girl!”

  The musician was confused: “What did you say you did for a living again?”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “And these are your friends?”

  “Yes, I guess.”

  The kiss ended there.

  • • •

  WHEN IN THE BEGINNING OF 2000 I got an invitation to go to India with a family friend—a business professor who was taking his students abroad for a field study that had virtually nothing to do with any of the subjects I was interested in photographing—I considered it an opportunity to leave New York for good. I asked the Associated Press if they thought I might be able to get work in South Asia, and they responded encouragingly. At the time, I had no idea if I would really stay. But at that point in my life I didn’t think that far in advance; I didn’t wring my hands over seemingly enormous decisions. I just saw the door and went through it. That was the case with moving to India. It would turn out to be the last time I lived in the United States.

  Indian men bathing on the streets of Calcutta at dawn, 2000.

  CHAPTER 2

  How Many Children Do You Have?

  My first night in New Delhi I stayed with two foreign correspondents: Marion, a reporter for the Boston Globe, and her boyfriend, John, a staff photographer at the AP. I could tell when I arrived late one evening that they were used to the constant traffic of guests. John answered the door sleepily, unfazed, showed me to my room, and went back to bed. I lay there, staring into the dark, suddenly overwhelmed by loneliness.

  But the next morning, as I drank the coffee Marion cursorily plopped down on the counter for me, I saw the life I dreamed of right there in her kitchen. “We haven’t stopped working in years,” Marion said pointedly. She was trim and attractive and had no time for bullshit. “From India and Pakistan’s nuclear testing to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines jet to Kashmir … we are exhausted.” I watched her face turn serious and focused, my stomach flipping with admiration and anxiousness. Marion and John, who were roughly my age and from the United States, were covering major international news events, working hard, and establishing their careers while maintaining a comfortable home overseas. Instead of wondering whether I had made a mistake moving to India, I felt as if I had squandered my life in New York.

  Everything that made India the rawest place on earth made it the most wonderful to photograph. The streets hummed with constant movement, a low-grade chaos where almost every aspect of the human condition was in public view. The vast disparity between India’s wealthiest and poorest made for an incredible juxtaposition of people and street life. Few subjects or scenes were off-limits in India. The country was a photographer’s ideal laboratory. The morning and evening light illuminated a rainbow of brilliant, saturated hues: I followed women draped in magentas and yellows and blues as they disappeared into dusty crowds. I spent ten days along the Ganges River in Varanasi, photographing Hindu devotion from the predawn hours until long after sunset; eight days in Calcutta, shooting men bathing on the street and children caked in dirt and begging for food. When the stimulation got overwhelming, I hid inside my viewfinder, outside of my body. Images were everywhere, and my eyes got tired. But I could endure anything for the prospect of beautiful negatives. I spent all my money on film.

  I found a room in the dark, slightly depressing apartment of an easygoing thirty-something named Ed Lane. He was the bureau chief of the financial news company Dow Jones and loved his whiskey. The AP helped me get press credentials and an Indian residential visa. Ed took me to the run-down Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where international journalists gathered every week to gossip about their lives as expats, like something out of a Hemingway novel. They were a worldly but friendly bunch, used to meeting new people and welcoming them to their homes. Hearing their stories made the world appear smaller and more manageable—as if going to difficult or dangerous places were just a matter of knowledge and logistics, part of the job and the life.

  When I wasn’t photographing, I watched
Bollywood films in Hindi or went swimming at the American Club, an elite club run by the U.S. Embassy, with Marion. Life was difficult in India, but it was also cheap. Personal space did not exist, but a little money could buy luxury. I paid rent with one assignment and paid for a maid with another.

  Back home my college and high school friends embarked on a year of endless engagement parties and weddings. I was often invited to be a guest photographer. Everyone’s life was moving forward while I was chasing good light and village women in India. I envisioned a nomadic life of adventure for myself, but I worried sometimes whether I was condemning myself to a spinster’s future: forever single, having affairs with random men, my cameras dangling all over me.

  It could have been worse.

  Within months I had gotten myself into a rhythm of steady work, pairing up with Marion for the Boston Globe and the Houston Chronicle and shooting the occasional story for the Christian Science Monitor and the AP. I wrote to the photo desk of the New York Times several times, offering myself up as a stringer, and each time my e-mail went unanswered. I wrote directly to the New York Times correspondents based in India and asked if I could shoot anything for them. They told me they took their own pictures while on assignment. I would keep trying. I felt that if I could only shoot for the New York Times—to me, the newspaper that most influenced American foreign policy and that employed the world’s best journalists—I would reach the pinnacle of my career.

  • • •

  AROUND MID-APRIL 2000 Ed returned from a reporting trip to Afghanistan. He came home with fifteen Afghan carpets and some advice: “You should go to Afghanistan to photograph women living under the Taliban.”