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

by Addario, Lynsey

  One morning, five days into my stay in Thailand and five days into the chaos of my mind, wondering whether Matthew would come back to me or stay in his comfortable relationship back home, Seoul spoke:

  “Madam?” he asked.

  “Yes, Seoul?” I answered, turning my eyes briefly to him and then engaging the horizon again.

  “Why no husband?” Seoul asked.

  I turned back to Seoul and smiled. “I am busy, Seoul. No time for husband.”

  One year later, after months of vacillating between his two prospects, Matthew married his first love. He returned to familiarity, to security, and to a life with a woman he adored. The reality was that I could offer little to a man other than passionate affairs and a few days a month between assignments. Romantic feelings in a war zone were exaggerated by the intensity of every day; one month in Iraq alongside someone was equivalent to six months in the normal world. Our love never would have flourished anywhere but in Iraq.

  • • •

  BEFORE I LEFT Iraq for good, I made a push to widen the scope of my coverage. I was in Istanbul when Life magazine had called with an assignment to photograph injured American soldiers. The father and grandfather of the reporter, Johnny Dwyer, were both doctors in the military. We would have five days in the field hospital at Balad Air Base, where hundreds of soldiers would be coming directly out of battle, en route to the U.S. hospital at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany. As far as I remembered, the military had never given journalists that type of access to photograph injured soldiers. The human costs of the war had been carefully concealed.

  The military rules of coverage stipulated that we did not attempt to photograph or interview anyone who didn’t agree beforehand. I had to get a signed release from every soldier I photographed, and if a soldier was unconscious, I was allowed to shoot but could not publish the image until he regained consciousness and signed the release. Almost every soldier I photographed signed the release. In fact, they were so thrilled with the idea that their contribution to defending America was being recorded in Life magazine that many begged me to take their picture. The censorship was coming from above, not from the soldiers themselves.

  I was finally photographing the wounded Americans I’d been prevented from photographing. I was sure that the series of images would enlighten Americans to the reality of the war in Iraq. They would see the images and protest our presence there. These were things they hadn’t seen before.

  The story was slated to run in mid-November, but it was held by Life magazine for weeks, and eventually months, through Bush’s inaugural speech in January. In February 2005 I received an e-mail from my photo editor at Life. She explained regretfully that Life would not publish the essay of injured soldiers coming out of Fallujah, because the images were just too “real” for the American public.

  I was a freelance photographer. I walked a fine line between being assertive about my work and not so high-maintenance that no editor wanted to work with me again. But on a story like this, where as far as I knew no other still photographer had had access to the injured soldiers at Balad—where the soldiers themselves were eager to have their stories told—I was devastated that the images wouldn’t be seen.

  Almost five months after I shot the story, they finally did run in the New York Times Magazine, but something in me had changed after those months in Iraq. I was now a photojournalist willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people. I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq so they could decide whether they supported our presence there. When I risked my life to ultimately be censored by someone sitting in a cushy office in New York, who was deciding on behalf of regular Americans what was too harsh for their eyes, depriving them of their right to see where their own children were fighting, I was furious. Every time I photographed a story like the injured soldiers coming out of Fallujah, I ended up in tears and emotionally fragile. Every time I returned home, I felt more strongly about the need to continue going back.

  PART THREE

  A Kind of Balance

  SUDAN, CONGO, ISTANBUL, AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, FRANCE, LIBYA

  CHAPTER 7

  Women Are Casualties of Their Birthplace

  Even before the experience with Life magazine, at thirty years old, I had started stepping away from America’s War on Terror. That summer of 2004 I had covered the transfer of power into Iraqi hands and had known it was the moment to make the transition to other types of coverage. I needed to branch out beyond the daily demands of breaking-news photography. I had learned how to work quickly and effectively, but it would always be difficult to experiment and grow as a photographer when working under the violent, restrictive conditions of Iraq. I wanted to see what else I could do, and for that I needed to try a different region. It was time to move on, from Iraq and from the destructive love affairs of my youth. I was single for the first time in many years, and ready to be.

  My attention turned to Africa. For years I had imagined it a continent where I could lose myself in the people, the stories, the light, the colors, the heat, smell, dust, grime—and my photos. But I had been so wrapped up in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it had remained a distant dream until New York Times correspondent Somini Sengupta emailed me with an idea: Darfur. The war in Darfur began in 2003 when rebel militias made up of ethnic black Africans began attacking the Sudanese government—composed primarily of Arabs—to protest institutional racism and injustices against their tribes. The Sudanese government retaliated without mercy. They bombed and attacked their own people across Darfur with air strikes carried out by antiquated Russian aircraft called Antonovs and then sent in armed militias on horseback, known as the janjaweed, to rape and murder villagers and pillage their homes. The conflict was ethnic but also over access to land and water. Wars often had as much to do with resources as tribal, religious, or national hatreds. Darfurians from the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes organized themselves into two main rebel militias, called the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), to fight the Arab government’s attacks. By 2004 the rebels were completely entrenched in fighting the Sudanese government, trying to help civilians flee into neighboring Chad, and strategically working with journalists who sneaked across the border into Sudan’s Darfur region to help them document the charred countryside littered with bodies.

  It was a perfect opportunity to start working in Africa and to focus on a story with a strong humanitarian angle. I was getting steady work with the New York Times and Time, and I had managed to save a little money during my long stints in Iraq, when all my expenses were paid for by the paper. It was the first time in my adult life I wasn’t consumed with anxiety over the next assignment and the next dime, and I could afford to take a risk.

  I had no way of knowing then how important Sudan would become to me. I would return for five consecutive years and would establish a deep connection to the country and its people. My work in Africa would change my career, and my life.

  • • •

  SOMINI AND I MET up in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, and flew to Abéché, a Chadian town close to the Sudanese border. Our French military aircraft was manned by two extremely good-looking French pilots, who invited us to sit in the cockpit and watch the stretches of desert beyond the panorama of the windshield. I had never seen endless swaths of unpopulated, virgin land. The pilots showed off for us, tilting their aircraft to the left and right, and I ended up puking into a bag for the entire second half of the flight. So much for being a freshly single, veteran photographer and impressing the good-looking soldiers.

  In Abéché we spent the night at a UN guesthouse before traveling by four-wheel drive to the remote village of Bahai, where refugees were arriving in droves from across the border in Darfur. In late 2004, there was little infrastructure at the refugee camps: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the international aid groups were so overw
helmed by the sudden influx of tens of thousands of refugees that most had not received shelter or food and were accessing water through emergency water bladders set up in the desert by the NGOs.

  As we traveled to Bahai I realized what a punishing journey it would be for refugees, with nothing but sand from horizon to horizon. I saw makeshift tents populated by malnourished civilians with fresh terror in their eyes. Skeletal villagers who had arrived seconds ago nestled under spindly trees with tattered fabric hung in the branches as sunshade. They were hungry, thirsty, and too listless to beg or move. I instantly reverted to the reserves of my memory for similar images: James Nachtwey’s images from the famine in Somalia, Tom Stoddart’s images from South Sudan, Sebastião Salgado’s workers from around the world, Don McCullin’s images of the Biafra famine. Darfur was not a famine, but it was the first time I had seen people who simply didn’t have food and were so weakened by their escape that they could barely walk.

  I moved around the desert camp self-consciously, a white, well-fed woman trudging through their misery. The people understood that I was an international journalist, but I was still trying to figure out how to take pictures of them without compromising their dignity. As much as it would be natural to compare this misery to that in Iraq, it was impossible. Iraq and Darfur were two different worlds, yet my role was always the same: Tread lightly, be respectful, get into the story as deeply as I could without making the subject feel uncomfortable or objectified. I always approached them gingerly, smiling, using their traditional greeting. The Sudanese spoke Arabic in addition to their local languages, so it was familiar to me. “Salaam aleikum,” I would say, and then, “Kef halic? Ana sahafiya.” (How are you? I am a journalist.) “Sura mashi? Mish mushkila?” (Photo OK? No problem?)

  And they would nod, or smile back. They never refused.

  The crisis in Darfur was a fast-developing story, and the international community had begun throwing around the word “genocide.” Few photographers had shot the refugees at that point. By then I had seen how our devastating photos from Iraq had forced policy makers and citizens to be cognizant of the failures of the invasion. I hoped that heartrending images from Sudan—especially on the front page of the New York Times—might motivate the United Nations and NGOs to respond more urgently to this crisis. As the Sudanese government continued to deny wrongdoing in Darfur, photojournalists could create a historical document of truth.

  • • •

  THE SUDANESE GOVERNMENT wasn’t issuing journalist visas for Darfur, so the only way for a journalist to cover the situation at the time was to sneak in illegally from Chad. The SLA had almost no financial support and its logistics were minimal, but journalists sometimes crossed the border with them. The SLA’s leaders were wise enough to understand that media coverage might help their cause, so they used their every last resource to accommodate trips into Darfur.

  Like most rebels, the SLA used tattered Kalashnikovs. Often a dozen fighters shared one dilapidated truck. For my visit to Darfur, the SLA grouped four foreign journalists together—me, Somini, freelance photographer Jehad Nga, and Jahi Chikwendiu of the Washington Post—oblivious of the competition between teams of journalists vying for exclusive stories. It was a hodgepodge of a group. Jahi was a charismatic and talented African American photographer who had traveled extensively around Africa and called all the rebels “my brother,” grinning widely. Jehad stood over six feet tall, weighed about as much as me, and rarely uttered a word.

  The plan was to drive to the edge of Chad, then walk a couple miles through the no-man’s-land between Chad and Sudan and meet the rebels in Darfur. We knew we would have to carry everything on our backs while in Darfur, so we minimized our kit, leaving behind lenses, batteries, clothes, shoes, and, not so intelligently, several bottles of water. We set forth on our five-day journey across the Sahel, the southern edge of the Sahara.

  The heat was brutal. Even the small amount of weight we each carried seemed too much under the desert sun. Soon after setting out, we came across some nomads with a string of camels who kindly offered to strap our water, tents, and anything else we could manage to the humps of their herd to lessen our load. We formed a little convoy of man and animal, trudging through the sand. Not a single nomad drank even a sip of water over the three-hour walk. I plowed through the first of two bottles I carried. We should have carried more water.

  The Sahel was laced with wadis, gullies that filled up during and after the rainy season with fresh streams of muddy water. They flowed like arteries through the desert landscape. We were tempted to drink from the wadis, but they were brown and viscous, sure to induce an immediate case of diarrhea. When we arrived at the edge of the first mini river, chest high and muddy, our improvised guides formed a human chain and passed our things from one side to the other. I stripped off my shoes, sunk my toes into the clay-colored muck, and made my way, holding my passport and cameras high above my head.

  Once we reached the other side, a few miles into Sudan’s rebel territory, we met the SLA rebels—a collection of lithe, sinewy young men, most wearing brightly colored turbans and old American basketball jerseys and T-shirts they could have picked up from a Goodwill in Minnesota. The “vehicle” we were promised in Chad turned out to be a pickup stripped of almost everything but the wheels and the frame and sagging with the weight of seventeen rebel fighters. Their clothes, sleeping gear, pots and pans, giant jugs of water, gasoline, and Kalashnikovs formed a mini mountain five feet high above the bed of the truck, and it was all held together by crisscrossing ropes tethered to the sides. They motioned for us to climb on. I wondered how long we could endure the ride, clinging for our dear lives to the shoddy ropes as we plowed through the sand toward emptiness.

  I used the pidgin Arabic I’d learned in Iraq to talk with the Sudanese rebels, and Somini tried her French, but we mostly communicated through incoherent attempts at sign language. At night we slept wherever the rebels slept, hoping to find refuge under a beautiful, beefy African tree—rare in the landscape we were traversing. Somini was generous enough to let me share her tent with her; in Chad insects had spit acid on my skin, leaving long, watery blisters up and down my arms by morning. Jahi had brought a single-man tent and set up alongside us. Poor Jehad slept upright in the passenger seat of the truck and was devoured by the mosquitoes.

  On our second day we were low on water, and there was no well in sight. We had assumed there would be someplace to buy bottled water in Darfur. We were stupid. There were no proper stores in the villages we passed, and the air was hot and dry like a blow-dryer on our faces and throats. Somini, Jehad, Jahi, and I shared a “food bag,” in which we pooled what we had brought from Chad: pasta, cans of tuna, protein bars, biscuits, and sugary pineapple-and orange-flavored drink mixes. It wasn’t enough food, and we were always hungry and always thirsty. I was convinced we would dehydrate and meet our fate in the middle of the desert, trying to ascertain whether Darfur was a genocide or a civil war.

  Every couple of miles the truck would sink into the sand, its wheels spinning, digging deeper into the abyss. Or the truck would simply break down, because it was old and overworked. We then sat for hours as one or two guys fiddled with the motor with a screwdriver or a tool from 1965 while the others splayed out, happy in the sand. They ate out of communal bowls full of asida, a grain-based dish that looked like a ball of plain oatmeal. Some would hunt for gazelles—a gourmet lunch—while the others would nap. Miraculously the truck always restarted, but it took us almost three days to travel just twenty miles into northwestern Darfur.

  At every water source the rebels would stop and fill their bottles with brown mud mixed with water, but we knew that this would make a khawaja, foreign white person, deathly ill. We rationed the few bottles of water we had brought and wondered what we could do as the signs of dehydration—exhaustion, lethargy, headaches—plagued us. I became obsessed with finding water. I had never been in a situation where there were no taps, no wells, no clean streams—no
sources at all, really. The sun seared our light skin, and liquid evaporated from our bodies faster than we could sweat. The rebels were so busy drinking pure mud from streams, they barely noticed our desperation for anything remotely resembling water. They just kept pilfering our empty water bottles as we tore through them. In Darfur plastic was like gold, and money was almost worthless.

  Finally, on the third day, we arrived at a rebel base in Shigekaro, a tiny village of more sand and emptiness, interrupted by a few thatched huts and one tiny shop that sold flavored drink mix, salt and sugar, pasta, and little else. A dried-out wadi rimmed the village, its trees providing fundamental cover for what had become a natural toilet. No water.

  The SLA had a mini training camp in Shigekaro, and we camped out and photographed the soldiers in formation doing training at dawn and dusk. Our fighters regrouped and rested. I walked around the village in search of water as a vampire hunts for blood; I might have pounced on a child if she had water. Then I saw words I never thought I would be so happy to see in Darfur: SAVE THE CHILDREN.

  It was a well! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I leaned over the edge to see if there was actually water in the well, and indeed the rust-colored, stagnant water looked leaps and bounds cleaner than the muddy stream. Save the Children, an aid group headquartered in my little hometown of Westport, Connecticut, would save us from dehydration.