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

by Addario, Lynsey

  The man of the house gave me permission to join him and the other men in their meal, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to partake in an experience off-limits to Afghan women. As a foreign journalist I was exempt from all the norms and rules that applied to the women here. I was androgynous, a third, undefined sex. We spent the first twenty minutes of lunch in tangible discomfort. Clearly no man in the room had ever eaten with a foreign woman present, save for the occasional four-year-old girl or elderly aunt.

  I brought up the one subject everyone in Afghanistan could speak freely about: family.

  “How many children do you have?” I said.

  Most Afghan men prided themselves on having many children, and their faces gleamed as they rhapsodized about their eleven kids.

  “How many children do you have?” they asked me, perhaps assuming that at twenty-six years of age I’d be well on my way to the double digits.

  “None,” I answered.

  There was silence. I ate my meal quietly. The question of how many children I had would plague me throughout this trip—and for years to come. I was too shy to ask to take a photo.

  After lunch, Mohammed took me to a secret school for girls. The Taliban had banned girls’ schools, but some Afghans so desperately wanted to educate their daughters that they established makeshift pop-up classrooms in private basements. The father of the house greeted us at the door. Because there were young women inside, Mohammed was prohibited from entering, but the father led me through three rooms where young female teachers held classes in cavelike spaces for swarms of colorfully swaddled girls—in greens and purples and oranges—from the surrounding villages. One teacher, no more than twenty-five years old, held a baby in her arms as she conducted a lesson with one chalkboard and some handwritten posters. The children sat on a dirt floor. Only a handful had books.

  The children seemed surprised by the sight of a foreigner; the teachers, I suspected, were stunned that a foreigner would take the risks I was taking. I was still afraid, too. I managed to take out the camera concealed in my bag but could barely get off a decent shot. Half of my pictures were out of focus.

  Mohammed before prayer, 2000.

  We headed out again through the countryside, then up a narrow road carved into rock-spattered mountains until we reached a small plateau between two peaks. There was a pond of oddly still water and a silence that beckoned prayer. Mohammed and our driver had forgone prayer all morning and had twitched anxiously as we drove. Before Mohammed began to pray, I dredged up the courage to ask if I could photograph him. He agreed. I was happy to watch them in the open air going through the graceful motions of their devotion. Mohammed looked so serene as he stood against the backdrop of sharp mountains and a crisp sky and began his prayer, raising his thumbs to his ears. We were far from the Taliban’s grip here. From then on, I knew to search for moments like that—more intimate, more private, when Afghans were so enveloped in thought that they forgot to worry about whether the Taliban might be lingering nearby. We drove again, and I watched the sandy brown mountains fold like rumpled bedsheets into layers of vegetation, and clay houses fade into the land.

  On our fourth day we arrived at Mohammed’s home late in the afternoon, when the light was a velvety gold and the sun cast long shadows along the snaking road. I had been curious about his family. We entered his sparsely furnished home, and no one greeted me. The women lowered their eyes, and out of respect the men barely acknowledged my presence, except for the common polite greeting of placing the right hand on one’s chest with a slight bow forward. Mohammed walked me across the outdoor courtyard and up three stairs to my room, then disappeared. I knew it would have been improper for me to go out into his home and try to communicate with his family. Earlier he had made it clear that he didn’t feel comfortable with me photographing “his” women. It was as if he were scared to take me on a tour of the house, as if I would sneak photos anyway.

  Yet his nieces and nephews, sons and daughters, and eventually even his wife peered into my bedroom window from the courtyard and stared at me. I motioned to them to enter, thinking it was a futile effort; nothing could break a barrier constructed by years of humility and privacy. Finally a girl in her early teens with big-boned, dirty hands barged in to greet me and extended her hand. Without a shared language, the conversation ended with the handshake. I felt like a terminally ill patient, quarantined to a room where people just come and stare through the glass and pity me.

  It had been a mere four days since I’d arrived, and I wondered what the world had been doing since I’d left it. Afghanistan hid in a time capsule of war. Many Afghans had no idea how the rest of the world had advanced technologically. There were no foreign newspapers; there was no television news, and very little electricity, for that matter. I felt claustrophobic. Anxious. I hadn’t bathed once, and the stench of my sweat—a layer of filth—seeped through my clothes. I missed my dawn runs through Lodhi Gardens in New Delhi, passing the rotund Indians fixed in yoga poses. I missed my swims at the American Club and a frothy, cold beer at the end of the day at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I missed all the things I hadn’t realized I had grown to love. The things I hadn’t even been aware of before. Like my freedom.

  But as I stretched out on the thin mattress, I also considered the benefits of being a female guest in Afghanistan. I would always have my own room—this one was a big, carpeted, empty space with a huge bay window—separate from the men. I did not think about my appearance, or looking sexy, or male-female attraction. In America I expended an incredible amount of energy on things that in Afghanistan seemed vain if not pointless, and it was refreshing to submerge myself in an unfamiliar perspective and ideology, to assimilate in both mind and dress.

  In fact, during the last few days, as I walked through the streets and into people’s homes, I had started to welcome the cover and anonymity of the thick cloth I wore draped over my head and around my shoulders. I understood the urgency of wanting to be covered at all times. As I awoke the next morning and prepared for my day, I realized that I had even grown to appreciate the constant presence of my mahram, the unfamiliar peace I found when I surrendered control to Mohammed, to our driver, to a man.

  • • •

  KABUL WAS GRAY and lonely in June 2000. Its monolithic, graceless buildings, as well as its aura of paranoia, betrayed Afghanistan’s heavy Soviet influence. Parts of the city looked as if they’d been half-buried beneath a giant dust storm: Hills of dirt faded into rusting cars, which faded into the broken clay buildings. The mood starkly contrasted with the lively, sun-dappled countryside villages that had been relatively free from the Taliban’s watch. In Kabul everyone was cautious of where he stepped and with whom he spoke. The United Nations workers—typically Afghans, Pakistanis, or people from other Muslim countries—were welcoming inside the UN compound, but I rarely saw them outside on the streets of Kabul. Locals avoided conversation with foreigners entirely in public.

  I finally had to face the Taliban at the Foreign Ministry, where foreign journalists were required to check in upon entering the country. This was the Afghanistan I had been warned about. Everything I wanted to do had to be approved with a letter handwritten in Dari, stamped by the government ministry responsible for the issue I was covering, and signed by a man named Mr. Faiz.

  In the ministry compound prepubescent boys with layered turbans stacked on their heads sashayed in and out of the high-ceilinged building. I waited for two hours, drinking sugary tea and improving my chances of developing diabetes. Once nervous about the prospect of meeting a Talib, I now knew the rules. By the time Mr. Faiz called me in, my nervousness had disappeared.

  He was a burly press minister no more than twenty-eight years old, wearing the customary turban and beard. He welcomed me to his country. Our words ricocheted off the twenty-foot-high ceiling. Intricate patterns danced on the tattered carpet beneath our feet. I thought of the men and women who were shot and stoned to death for adultery and murder in th
e soccer stadiums across Afghanistan on Fridays.

  “Thank you,” I said, eyes lowered. “It is an honor to have the opportunity to come here. To see Afghanistan with my own eyes. I am doing a story on the effect of twenty years of war on Afghanistan.”

  I did not mention that I had already spent almost a week in the provinces of Ghazni, Logar, and Wardak and that I had spent several nights in the homes of warm, generous Afghans who all reinforced my belief that Afghanistan was much more than a terrorist state governed by unruly, women-hating Taliban, as much of the media portrayed it.

  “Your country is beautiful, Mr. Faiz. I am grateful you approved my visa.”

  Through an interpreter, Mr. Faiz and I discussed what I was interested in seeing in Kabul. He showered me with questions about my background and intentions, each one eliciting a purposeful response from me. I thought I had won him over.

  “I want you to move from where you are staying at the Associated Press house,” he said, “to the Intercontinental Hotel.”

  • • •

  THE INFAMOUS INTERCONTINENTAL was where most foreign correspondents met their dreaded fate: isolation and scrutiny by loitering and watchful Talibs who gathered in front of the hotel. High on a hill overlooking the city, the Intercontinental was the one hotel still functioning in the city, and the Foreign Ministry racked up large sums of money from the few foreigners, many of them journalists, who passed through Kabul and were sent there.

  The lights flickered and the lobby remained dark most of the time. The elevator did not run during the day. A chipped enamel plaque announced the directions to the pool and the spa—a harsh joke for those who remembered a time when visitors could actually wear bathing suits. Stores sat eternally locked in the lobby, their interiors lined with dust. Half the hotel had been destroyed by repeated rocket attacks during fighting between mujahideen factions, leaving one side partially collapsed, though no one paid attention to the rubble. Only the bookstore and a restaurant stayed open to serve the few guests. There wasn’t a single other guest while I was there.

  I browsed the bookstore and found a tattered 1970s edition of Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, George Orwell’s Penguin Classics, inaccurate histories of Afghanistan, and glowing chronicles of the Taliban movement. There were a couple of discarded books from departing guests in German, French, Italian, and Russian, along with a few English-Urdu and “Learn Dari in a Day” handbooks for ambitious journalists who thought they might actually get that much access to local Afghans without a guide. Later the same bookseller grew confident with me and offered up an entire selection of books banned by the Taliban—his secret stash.

  I returned to my room, disheartened by the prospect of reading as my sole option to pass the time until I fell sleep. Everything was silent. I took off my clothes and stood naked on the balcony of my lonely room, under the stars. A woman. Naked. Outside. Under the Taliban. Definitely grounds for a public execution at the soccer stadium on a Friday. But I couldn’t resist. The air was chilly. We were hours deep into the public curfew across the city, and people were at home, asleep, dreaming of or dreading sunrise.

  I crawled into bed and stared at my meager collection of books.

  • • •

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK I managed to visit a women’s hospital and a neighborhood bombed out by the Soviets and widows begging for money on the street. I shot fully clothed women in labor hitched up on rusting old-fashioned gynecological chairs, and Afghans traipsing through the postwar rubble. When I stopped the car where begging widows crouched all day, they got up and swarmed the window, thinking I had money. Dirt and poverty had faded their brilliant blue burqas into a sad powdery gray.

  Afghan women shield their faces at the women’s hospital in Kabul, May 2000.

  On one of my last days there, I visited with a Sudanese woman named Anisa, who ran the main UNHCR office in Kabul and had been living in Afghanistan for several years. I was relieved to see her, sitting behind a grand desk in a bare-bones office. I had been craving the presence of a female with whom I shared at least a few cultural references.

  Anisa took me to a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Kabul. Four women greeted us at the door. The front of their blue burqas had been slung back over their heads, revealing angular features, fair skin, and striking blue eyes. They all wore floral skirts. Their white patent-leather pumps were lined up at the door. It still surprised me to see an actual living being under the tomblike burqa. They smiled warmly and excitedly ushered us inside their modest clay home, wicker baskets and pink-and-green-embroidered sheets hanging on the walls, lacy curtains fluttering by windows covered in wax paper.

  The UN had secretly hired the women to teach vocational skills—knitting, sewing, weaving—to widows and poor mothers in their neighborhood. They sat on the floor and, over the requisite tea and biscuits, began to talk. They were nothing like the women of the countryside; they were educated and had held jobs in government ministries before the Taliban came into power. They were frustrated with the restrictions on their freedoms, which, among other things, prohibited them from working outside the home.

  “Before, our capital was destroyed,” one of the women explained. “The Taliban has rebuilt our capital. In each house in Afghanistan, though, the women are the poorest of the family. The only thing they think of is how to feed their children. Now the men are also facing problems like the women. They are beaten in the streets if their beards are not long enough, thrown in prison for not praying. It is not only the women who suffer,” she said.

  “Wearing a burqa is not a problem,” another said. “It is not being able to work that is the problem.”

  Everything they said surprised me. It had been naïve of me to think that, given all the repression women in Afghanistan were facing—their inability to work or get an education—wearing a burqa would be high on their list of complaints. To them, the burqa was a superficial barrier, a physical means of cloaking the body, not the mind.

  The women also put my life of privilege, opportunity, independence, and freedom into perspective. As an American woman, I was spoiled: to work, to make decisions, to be independent, to have relationships with men, to feel sexy, to fall in love, to fall out of love, to travel. I was only twenty-six, and I had already enjoyed a lifetime of new experiences.

  • • •

  THE DAY BEFORE I left Kabul, I returned to the Foreign Ministry to get my exit visa from Mr. Faiz.

  “Welcome,” Mr. Faiz said, gesturing for me to sit. “How was your trip? What are your impressions of our country?”

  I thought of Mohammed from the visa office, the working city women stuck at home, the widows in the countryside, the maternity hospital with its ghastly conditions. Mr. Faiz, in his grand office at the Foreign Ministry in Kabul, represented everything millions of women across the world have fought. In Afghanistan the Taliban granted me license to see and to do things no Afghan woman had permission to do since they took control: partake in meals and in conversations with men outside of their families, go without a burqa, work. But perhaps there were many women in Afghanistan happy with how they lived: their days spent baking bread in the countryside and caring for their families in the crisp, clean Afghan air. My own life choices must have been equally as confounding to people like Mr. Faiz.

  “Mr. Faiz,” I said, “I love your country. I only wish Taliban rules permitted foreigners like myself to openly engage in conversation with the locals. It is very difficult for me, and for journalists, to visit Afghanistan and have anything positive to write about, given such restrictions on our interaction with the Afghans.” Mr. Faiz, of course, didn’t know I had broken their rules by meeting with some Afghans on my own. “It is a culture renowned for its hospitality and warmth.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  I looked down at the last sip of room-temperature green tea in my china cup and felt oddly comfortable. I didn’t want the moment to end.

  “It is not time yet. When we ar
e ready to have you meet with our women and our people, we will definitely invite you in.”

  I smiled, and as our eyes met Mr. Faiz did not look away. I finished the last cup of tea, and as I left I pulled my chador tightly around my head and neck, making sure it wouldn’t slip from my hairline in the wind.

  I returned to Afghanistan twice in the next year. Between trips I found a photo agency willing to distribute my work. But for a long time no newspaper or magazine bought them. In the year 2000 no one in New York was interested in Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER 3

  We Are at War

  I returned to New Delhi and kept shooting, traveling throughout India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal, focusing on human rights and women’s issues. Marion and I fueled each other with story ideas and motivated each other when we were tired or frustrated or in a rut. It was also easier for us to get assignments as a team, so when Marion decided to move to Mexico in 2001—because she had always wanted to live in Latin America, and she and John had broken up—I did, too. It was on to the next adventure.

  I never considered going back to live in New York and didn’t even stop home to see my family. By the time I finished college, my family had scattered across the country. My sister Lauren moved to New Mexico to paint when I was still in high school. Lesley moved to Los Angeles to work for Walt Disney when I was in college, and Lisa followed a few years later to write movies with her partner. Christmas became our time to gather as a family, a reunion we all looked forward to.

  We remained close despite the geographical distance, but life abroad had its costs. While I was in India, my sister Lauren’s first husband was diagnosed with lung cancer and died thirty days later. I never got to say good-bye to him or comfort her. That same year my mother was in a car accident that left her unconscious for three days; my family chose not to tell me, because I was far away and there was nothing I could do. I often lived with an aching emptiness inside me. I learned early on that living a world away meant I would have to work harder to stay close to the people I loved.