• • •
MEXICO CITY was about to empty out for a holiday weekend. El Distrito Federal, or el D.F., as Mexicans called the capital city, was a sprawling mass of concrete blocks, intricately designed bronze statues, and colonial-era buildings, some bereft of character, others lovely Latin American haciendas. A thick haze of pollution formed a perpetual milky umbrella over the city; cars, especially lime-green Volkswagen Bug taxis, choked the wide avenues. The DF’s sprawl and chaos was intimidating, uninviting.
Marion already had a new boyfriend, a professional mountain biker who led tours through the countryside for semiprofessional mountain bikers. On Easter weekend, they were going to the nearby state of Veracruz, and I suggested that Marion and I go along with them. I was a tomboy growing up and didn’t think it could be that hard to ride a bike. From the town of Papantla de Olarte, a dozen of us set off through countryside lush with the yellow flowers of vanilla plants. The first time I hit the front brakes at top speed, I flew over the handlebars.
I decided to spend the rest of my weekend riding in the support van. A young Mexican man with a thick mess of brown hair named Uxval was one of the guides. He spoke Spanish, English, Italian, and just enough of every other language to be able to charm women around the world. He was engaged to be married, but there was an uncomfortable chemistry between us immediately. Like most mama’s boys, he was strategically in touch with his feminine side. Everything about his personality was deliberate. When we said good-bye, I wished him well with his marriage.
Two days later he called and asked if he could come by the apartment I shared with two American roommates. I gave him my address, and he arrived within a few hours. He walked in the door and pulled me close and kissed me. We stood there embracing for what seemed like hours, and when we stopped, he turned around to leave.
“I just had to do that before I did anything else,” he said and walked out the door.
Uxval broke off his engagement with his fiancée that night. I was apprehensive about getting involved with someone who would break an engagement over a gut attraction to a relative stranger, but I was attracted to his decisiveness. A few years earlier my grandmother Nina sat me down at her kitchen table in Hamden, Connecticut, to talk about love. I had just broken up with Miguel, who was reserved and passive, and I was at that tender age when decisions about love and life seemed somehow intertwined, when the questions of whom to love and what profession to choose seemed essentially the same question: How do you want to live? “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said coyly, as if she were going to tell me that she and my grandfather French-kissed before they were married. What she told me would stay with me for life.
“I used to go with this fellow, Sal,” she said. “Years ago Sal would pick me up from work and walk me home to my doorstep. We used to sit on the concrete steps for hours on Sherman Avenue. We would walk from Sherman to Chapel Street to pass the time and see the shows, the Paramount, you know. He was funny and spontaneous, and back then there was nothing to do but walk and go to the theater for twenty-five cents. He made me laugh, and he would grab me and kiss me all the time. But he didn’t have a pot to piss in. He had no money. He was a hard worker. He worked long, long hours and helped his mother out taking care of his brothers and sisters. But he never had any money. No future.
Nina and Poppy having coffee at home, May 2005.
“We went our separate ways, and soon enough my friend Eleanor fell for him. She was crazy for him, and he liked her, too. He treated her real nice, and she was mad about him. She cooked for him all the time and tended to his every need. He was a hard worker. He always made sure that she was all right. I was already with Ernie.
“Don’t get me wrong, your grandfather was a good provider. He was a good provider, and he trusted me with everything. I never had to show him the receipts from the grocery store. My sisters still do this with their husbands. Your grandfather gave me my freedom. He let me play cards on Quinnipiac Avenue and never told me I had to be back at a certain time. When his brothers came over, Ernie would sit at the table and watch us play. He didn’t like to play, but he would sit and watch and talk with us.
“Eleanor and Sal were doing well. They stayed married right up until the end. I have no regrets. Your grandfather can be a little distant, but he is a good man. I hear Eleanor has Alzheimer’s disease, and it gets progressively worse. I say, ‘You know, Ernie, I think I will call Sal to tell him I am sorry about his wife—invite him by for coffee.’ ‘Sure,’ Ernie says, not listening. So one day when your grandfather is at work, the doorbell rings. It is Sal. Eleanor is by now in a home, and he comes in. We talk, reminiscing of when we were sixteen years old, walking down the main boulevard in Hamden. I tell him I’m sorry about his wife, and we finish our coffee. He’s on the way to the hospital. I walk him to the front door, and in the foyer before we reach the door Sal grabs me. He grabs me and kisses me like I haven’t been kissed since those golden days when he would walk me home from work down the main boulevard. ‘I have been waiting over fifty years to do that, Antoinette,’ he says. ‘I know,’ I said, and I walked him out.
“His wife died three days later, and I didn’t call him. I felt funny. Before a kiss I could reach out without the slightest bit of tension. It all ended with a kiss. Even a phone call was too much.
“But you know,” Nina said to me, “I had forgotten the passion of a kiss like that. When a man grabs you and kisses you like he means it. It felt good. Don’t get me wrong, your grandfather is a hard worker, and a good provider, but it was nice. What would it have been like? All those years with passion? I cook, and Ernie doesn’t eat. I say, ‘Ern, let’s have coffee,’ and he drinks it, but he’ll never ask. We drive home from the doctor’s, and I say, ‘Ern, let’s stop and get a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts.’ He says we can drink it at home.”
I never forgot that story. And I never wanted to regret the kisses I missed.
• • •
THERE WAS A LIGHTNESS and spontaneity and romance to my relationship with Uxval, something I’d never felt before. When I wasn’t on assignment outside Mexico City, we slept in late until we couldn’t possibly stay in bed any longer, or went for long walks, or loaded our mountain bikes onto his car and rode them up the steep, treacherous hill to La Virgen, a giant statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I loved him painfully and did anything to please him, even if it meant learning to ride a mountain bike fifteen miles uphill twice a week.
The only thing I could not give him was my photography. I was publishing pictures on the front pages of newspapers, but I had so much more I wanted to accomplish: to immerse myself in longer assignments, to work for magazines, to start shooting regularly for the New York Times. I wanted people to recognize my photographs, to be affected by my work—just as I had felt looking at Salgado’s work in Argentina. This was just the beginning. I hadn’t even set foot in Africa! The more I worked, the more I achieved, the more I wanted.
Photography drew me away from Uxval like a lover, and this was a simmering source of tension between us. Each time the phone rang he pulled away, protecting himself from my inevitable departure. He knew he couldn’t ask me to forgo my work. There was no way to do my job without traveling, without physically being away from home. I never said no to an assignment—not ever.
One morning in September, as Uxval and I lingered in bed, my roommate Michael banged on my bedroom door. I knew something was amiss—none of us would ever deliberately wake the others in the morning, and rarely did anything in Mexico City require urgency. We didn’t have a television with cable, so we darted up the stairs to Marion’s apartment. I sat down in front of her television and saw the Twin Towers on fire. Half-asleep, I didn’t realize the planes had smashed into them on purpose.
People were jumping. My mind flashed to the women in wedding gowns I had once photographed on the roof of the World Trade Center for the annual wedding marathons on Valentine’s Day, where young couples, radiant with love, steeled themselves in
the wind tunnel on top of the world, the brides clinging to their veils. I started crying.
Michael broke the silence. “You know what this means?”
I didn’t.
“We are at war.”
We spent the entire day glued to Marion’s television. The words “Afghanistan,” “training camps,” “terrorists,” and “Taliban” started getting thrown around by news anchors, analysts, and politicians. I felt the familiar knot of excitement and dread in my stomach: I would have to leave again for South Asia. I would have to leave Uxval. The story was taking root in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, and they were countries I knew.
Michael was a journalist, too, and understood what September 11 meant for me. “So when are you flying to Pakistan?” he asked.
I needed to call SABA, my photo agency, and offer to go to Pakistan. I had watched the most historic event of my lifetime on a borrowed television set in Mexico City, and I wasn’t about to miss the second half of the story.
“I have to leave,” Uxval said flatly, and with an uncharacteristic peck on the cheek, he left Marion’s apartment, left me sitting in front of the TV, left me transfixed, as I had been since the early morning.
I hated myself for being so driven. I wanted to plead with him to stay, but I needed to concentrate. I had calls to make. All flights into New York City were canceled, and I had to figure out how to get to New York and to Pakistan. Though I was young and terribly inexperienced, few photographers had worked in Afghanistan under the Taliban as I had. I wasn’t considering that I might be going to war but was instead worrying about what would happen to the civilians, to the women I had photographed sequestered in their homes in Kabul, Ghazni, and Logar.
This was the first time I had to decide between my personal and professional lives. Some part of me knew, or hoped, that real love should complement my work, not take away from it.
PART TWO
The 9/11 Years
PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ
Women and girls study and recite the Koran in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2001.
CHAPTER 4
You, American, Are Not Welcome Here Anymore
I landed in New York on September 14 and went directly to Ground Zero. There was nothing left of the towers but mangled steel and ash, lines of solemn people clutching their palms to their mouths as they gasped in horror, and countless posters in search of the missing. I was devastated; New York was home. I chastised myself for not being there to cover one of the defining moments of my lifetime. The geopolitics of my generation changed with September 11; in the media Latin America was forgotten.
I raced up to Union Square to SABA, my photo agency. Marcel, my agent, offered to split the cost of the flight to Pakistan with me, and we booked my ticket to Islamabad. He then handed me a giant Canon digital camera, the first digital camera I had ever seen, along with the manual.
“You shoot Nikon, right?” Marcel asked.
“Yes. All my life,” I said.
“Great. Well, Canon has the best digital camera on the market, and you will need digital to file to newspapers and magazines from Pakistan. Here is the manual and one wide-angle lens for the Canon. Learn how to use the camera during the flight.”
My adrenaline surged. Uxval, Mexico, the mountain bikes, the kisses, the long lunches during the week—they were all tucked away in what was becoming the giant filing cabinet in my mind.
• • •
BY THE TIME I arrived in the hostile Pakistani city of Peshawar, dozens of journalists had already checked into its few hotels. It was September 21. Peshawar was a dusty, ominous border city—teeming with suspicious-looking, bearded men, CIA agents, and Pakistani intelligence—thirty-five miles from the border with Afghanistan. Every place in public view was conspicuously bereft of women; only the occasional white, black, or sky-blue burqa skated ghostlike through the narrow allies. It was the type of place where everyone constantly looked over his shoulder. We all knew that the United States was going to retaliate for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and we wanted to position ourselves close enough to Afghanistan so that when the borders collapsed, as they inevitably do in the chaos of an invasion, we could all rush in to report on the ground. So much of the buildup to the war in Afghanistan was a mystery to me, but it was familiar territory to my more seasoned colleagues. Were we about to have another Vietnam, with a ground war and American troops dug into trenches? Or would it be all fighter jets dropping bombs from on high? I had no idea. But I loved being close to the center.
Anti-American demonstration in Peshawar, October 2001.
I shared a room at the run-down, medium-sized Green’s Hotel with Alyssa Banta, a Filipina-Mexican-American photographer in her midthirties from Fort Worth, Texas. Older journalists with bigger expense accounts stayed at the posh Pearl Continental Hotel. Faces I had seen only on TV darted through the lobby, striding with purpose, trailed by their enormous production crews, through the atrium courtyard. Famous writers hovered over computers in a makeshift newsroom. Alyssa and I were undoubtedly two of the least experienced “war” photographers there, but the opportunities to shoot were diverse. America had become obsessed with Islam overnight. Anything that shed light on the religion that allegedly fueled the attacks against America made the front page. Editors suddenly found news value in the Taliban, in the plight of Pakistani women, in Afghan refugees living in Pakistan—all stories I had done while living in India.
It was in Peshawar that I got my big break: freelancing, or being put on rotation, for the New York Times on a huge news story.
It was my proximity to the action that got me the job. When a big story broke, the Times would parachute in their top staff correspondents and photographers to report, but photographers were also often hired on a freelance basis. If there wasn’t already a staff photographer on the ground, the photo editor would have to scramble, and so those initial hours of a breaking news story were crucial for a freelance photographer. You had to be in the right place, and available by phone or e-mail at that moment. You had to say yes.
I knew I had one chance with the Times to prove myself a strong choice to cover the mood in Pakistan before the war. Not only did I have to make compelling images, but I also had to coordinate them with the Times staff reporters. New York Times journalists were always on deadline, always overwhelmed, always stressed out. No matter how much they pretended they didn’t care about landing a story on the front page, all Times correspondents fought hard to “front.” They were competitive with journalists from other newspapers, even more brutal with one another. And almost no one had time to be bothered by a photographer. Instead I often had to intuit the story of the day on my own. I got up before dawn; I went to bed at midnight. I worked every waking hour so that I could be at the right place at the right time.
I also made sure I used every advantage I had. I knew from my time in Afghanistan that I had a unique kind of access. I used my gender to get inside the women’s madrassas (religious schools) to interview and photograph the most devout Pakistani women. Before I shot a single image, I spoke with them at length about their political and religious beliefs. It was the first time I witnessed open hatred toward the United States, toward my government and its policies governing international affairs. The women were proud of the September 11 attacks and voiced no remorse for the innocent lives lost. They were sympathetic to the Taliban and their beliefs. They also rooted almost all their animosity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; to them, the attacks of September 11 were justified after years of American support for Israel and discriminatory policies against the Palestinians. Through these women I began to understand the depth of hatred this bias fostered across the Muslim world, and I wanted to explain this to readers still trying to make sense out of 9/11.
I also wanted to give readers a sense of Pakistani women’s lives beyond religion. I knew that if the only image people saw in American publications was of women in head scarves and long black robes reading t
he Koran, it might be easier to dismiss their beliefs as something completely foreign and bizarre and specifically “Islamic.” But if readers could get a sense of who these women really were—if they could see them in their homes, with their children, as they cooked meals—it might offer a more complete picture.
I became fascinated by the notion of dispelling stereotypes or misconceptions through photographs, of presenting the counterintuitive. In Pakistan I learned quickly to tuck away my own political beliefs while I worked and to act as a messenger and conduit of ideas for the people I photographed. This proved instructive for the future: While these women were the first to openly express hating my country, they were definitely not the last.
Women of Jihad series for the New York Times Magazine, November 2001.
I was getting photographic material and access I wasn’t seeing in other publications and decided to pitch my first story to the New York Times Magazine—which was entirely separate from the newspaper, with a different set of editors. They accepted. It was another milestone for me: my first publication in a magazine, and one of the publications most renowned for powerful documentary spreads.
The period after September 11 gave young photographers who hustled—and who were willing to go to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and eventually Iraq—an unparalleled opportunity to make a name for themselves. Those weeks in September launched an entire generation of journalists who would come of age during the War on Terror.
• • •
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Page 7