It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
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Our actual wedding day began with a massive hangover from the pink-champagne party the night before. Paul and I had planned on respecting the tradition that bride and groom shouldn’t see each other the day of the wedding, but we were so hungover, we didn’t wake up until around 11 a.m., just hours before we were due at the church. During the Catholic ceremony Paul almost gave the elderly priest a heart attack when he said, “I, Paul de Bendern, take you, Lisa, to be my wife.” Lisa was my sister.
My family, meanwhile, had reunited happily. Paul and I loved spending time with Bruce and my father, who were still together. They had made up with my mom; we even all went on vacation together sometimes. It was a testament to my mother’s warm and forgiving nature and to my father and Bruce’s effort to bring us all together again. At my wedding dinner my mother stood up on a chair, her arms around Bruce, and said how excited she was that her daughter was marrying into royalty—“but I thought I’d introduce you all to a real queen!” And with that she thrust the flamboyant Bruce forward. The party roared with laughter. Nothing made me happier than watching my mother and Bruce, the original best friends, stand on a chair side by side and make a toast together as my father looked on. I wrapped my arms around her ankles and gazed up at her with admiration.
That day I looked around at all the guests—the collection of friends and family who had gathered from as far away as Peru, New York, Hong Kong, and California—then back at Paul, who was beside me, holding my hand. After all the years of hard work, unsuccessfully searching for love, the kidnapping in Fallujah, the ambush in the Korengal Valley, the car accident in Pakistan, I was so grateful to be sitting in the middle of the rolling hills of France with my family and closest friends, happy, drinking, and celebrating life.
• • •
AFTER THE WEDDING, I was finally able to go back to work. I was in a transitional phase in my photography, trying to edge out of daily news stories and focus almost entirely on more time-consuming magazine features and projects. In mid-September, three months after the wedding, I sat at my desk having an unsettling conversation with an editor from National Geographic. Sometimes the long lead times between the start and finish of a story for National Geographic made me question the impact of the work I was doing for them. Eighteen months passed between when I began a story and when I saw it in print. After years of photographing for the Times, I had grown used to the immediate gratification of working on stories and seeing them published within days or, at most, weeks. I had to convince myself that the stories I was photographing could have as much relevance published long after I shot the photos as those published the day after I shot them.
The editor and I had been talking about an assignment I had just begun shooting.
“Don’t shoot this story like a New York Times story,” he advised, in a slightly patronizing way. “Take your time with this story, get into it. Use the time you have to explore.”
He was right: I had spent so many years working on stories on deadline that I had to retrain myself to shoot with time and patience. I understood where the editor was coming from but was annoyed with the conversation, which left me feeling that he didn’t have faith in my vision as a photographer.
Minutes after I hung up the phone, it rang again. The number showed a Chicago area code and I thought it might be the fraud department of my credit card, telling me for the millionth time they had blocked my card because it showed usage overseas.
I picked up the phone, exasperated.
A man’s voice: “May I speak with Lynsey Addario, please?”
“This is she.”
“This is Robert Gallucci, the president of the MacArthur Foundation.”
“Hi.”
“This is the first of such phone calls I have to make in my new job as president of the foundation, so I will just go ahead and begin: I would like to tell you that you have been selected as a MacArthur Fellow.”
I was silent. Every year I combed through the announcement of the year’s MacArthur “genius awards,” people from all professions who got the famous “phone call out of the blue” telling them they had won $500,000 “with no strings attached.”
“Hello? Are you there? Do you know what a MacArthur fellowship is?”
“I think so,” I said, wanting to be told again.
“We will give you half a million dollars, with no strings attached, over the course of the next five years, in quarterly deposits of $25,000. This is not based on work you have done in the past but to help further your work in the future.”
“Are you sure you have the right person?”
“Your name is Lynsey Addario, and you were born November 13, 1973, in Norwalk, Connecticut, correct?”
“Yes, that is me.” I felt my chest tighten with emotion.
Mr. Galucci offered a brief explanation of how the next few weeks would unfold in relation to the announcement, passed on the name and contact details of the head of the fellows program, and congratulated me once again. He then asked me what I thought of the situation in Afghanistan, and I was so overwhelmed, I used some lame word like “quandary” and then wondered if he was going to take the money back, thinking, “She isn’t really a genius.”
Our phone call ended, and I put my BlackBerry down and stared at the phone. I was sure “Robert Gallucci” must be Ivan playing a practical joke on me. I looked at the caller ID and entered the number into Google: MacArthur Foundation. It was true.
I sat down on our couch, alone in our happy, sunlit apartment, and wept with joy. I wouldn’t have to worry about money for the next five years. After years of traveling from country to country with no home, of trying to bring attention to injustice, of witnessing war, funerals, and hunger—the MacArthur Foundation had recognized how devoted I was to this work. All that time, sacrifice, and commitment had been worth it.
I had promised Mr. Gallucci that I wouldn’t tell anyone other than my husband. I walked to the metro stop in Taksim Square, where I knew Paul would eventually surface from among the throngs of commuters, and hovered over the subway exit for almost an hour before he came out. When he saw me, he was confused by what could possibly have brought me to meet him at the subway for the first time since we had met.
He spoke first. “Are you pregnant?”
It may not have been the good news he wanted, but Paul was overjoyed. My success was his as well. Paul, who understood the limitations of fast-paced breaking-news journalism, had always encouraged me to work on longer-term projects, which, he argued, would allow for more artistic freedom as well as a chance to go deeper into a story. Larger independent projects also often become exhibitions, which are a way of connecting with a world outside the news and media. Only something like the MacArthur fellowship would allow me that kind of time for my work, without worrying about where my next assignment would come from. And yet I decided to continue working with the New York Times, Time, and National Geographic because I believed in those publications, and their readership reached a wide audience. Part of me recognized that there was little point in doing this work if no one saw it. So while the MacArthur changed certain aspects of my professional life, it didn’t change everything.
• • •
TWO MONTHS LATER our lovely existence in Constantinople ended. Paul and I moved to New Delhi, where he took a job as the new India bureau chief for Reuters. I hadn’t realized how attached I had grown to my life in Istanbul over seven years—having Ivan as a neighbor, colleague, and best friend; enjoying Mediterranean salads topped by grilled halloumi cheese with Suzy, Maddy, and Ansel; spending summers drifting around the Aegean on a sailboat with my dad and Bruce. I was a married woman, and for the first time in my adult life, decisions about where I would live and how long I would stay were no longer determined by which war I was covering or which correspondent I wanted to work with. These decisions were going to be determined in large part by the fact that Paul had a staff job at a large company, and Reuters had needs.
An Afghan woman, Noor Nisa, s
tands in labor on the side of the mountain in Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan, November 2009.
The death of a U.S. Marine in southern Afghanistan, 2010.
Maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, 2010.
Iraqis watch a 3-D movie in Baghdad, 2010.
I sank into a depressed state. I had lived in India nine years before and was fine with all the noise and chaos then, but I had grown into a different person in my thirties. In an easy, home-base city like Istanbul, simple things felt like luxuries: that I could walk from one location to another without having to rely on taxis or drivers; that I could run out and meet my friends for a coffee in a hip neighborhood; that a flight to visit my family in the United States wasn’t sixteen hours long. After Istanbul, Delhi seemed isolating. The only nice gyms were inside five-star hotels. I couldn’t really walk anywhere; every excursion required a car. I worked almost three hundred days a year in difficult places, and I craved simplicity and ease at home. My little amenities were a fundamental part of my sanity.
Paul was also busier than usual. Our relationship usually worked well with consistent two-to three-week breaks after assignments, because we both felt that the distance kept our romance fresh. But his demanding new job kept him extrapreoccupied those first months. So I traveled incessantly. Rather than see the MacArthur as an opportunity to slow down, I saw it as encouragement to go even harder. From the end of 2009 until early 2011, I was traveling more than ever—from embeds in Afghanistan to stints in sub-Saharan Africa. With every return home, Paul argued that we didn’t know how long it would take to get pregnant and that, at age thirty-seven, I might be running out of time. I was terrified of losing my independence and refused to admit that he might be right.
Instead I always responded with the same argument: I had sturdy southern Italian genes, and each of my sisters had gotten pregnant the first time she tried and had healthy pregnancies. The Addario women were made to reproduce, I argued, knowing deep down that my case could be very different from theirs. I finally brokered a deal: I would stay on my birth control pill until January 2011, and then we would let biology and our libidos decide when we got pregnant. I didn’t want a child then, but I knew how important it was to Paul. And a small part of me did worry that I would run out of time.
January came and went. I stopped taking the pill, as we’d agreed, but planned back-to-back assignments that left me little time at home for conception: I hopped from South Sudan to Iraq to Afghanistan to Bahrain in less than two months. I was in Iraq for National Geographic in late January when David, my editor at the Times, called me in Baghdad and asked whether I wanted to go to Egypt, where there appeared to be a revolution under way. I was dying to go, but I couldn’t leave my National Geographic assignment half-completed. By the time I finished my work in Iraq, the Times was well staffed in Egypt, and David sent me to Afghanistan. But the more I watched the news—the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and apparently now Libya, too—the more I realized how historic this Arab Spring would be. All my colleagues from my Iraq and Afghanistan years had been reporting and photographing from Tahrir Square, and there I was, drinking tea in Kabul, watching a pirated DVD of Up in the Air.
I couldn’t take it anymore and got on a plane. I was headed to Libya.
PART FOUR
Life and Death
LIBYA, NEW YORK, INDIA, LONDON
Children play around a burning car in a residential neighborhood in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, as the uprising gathers momentum, February 28, 2011.
CHAPTER 11
You Will Die Tonight
LIBYA, MARCH 2011
Three weeks into the Libyan uprising—a revolution that quickly became a war—I was kidnapped. My colleagues—Tyler Hicks, Anthony Shadid, and Stephen Farrell—and I had been covering an antigovernment revolt started by ordinary Libyan men, and Qaddafi saw us journalists as the enemy. Along with Mohammed, the quiet, twenty-two-year-old engineering student we had hired to be our driver, we had run directly into a military checkpoint. Now we were at the mercy of Qaddafi’s soldiers, our hands and feet bound, and blindfolded.
Will I see my parents again? Will I see Paul again? How could I do this to them? Will I get my cameras back? How did I get to this place?
Someone placed me in the backseat of a car. My mouth was cottony with fear, my hands were numb from the tight cloth around my wrists, and my watch was digging into my skin. A soldier opened the door and slid into the car beside me. He looked at me for a few seconds, and though I felt the weight of his gaze on me, I was too scared to look up and make eye contact. For a moment I thought perhaps he had arrived to offer me water. But instead he lifted his fist and punched me hard on the side of the face, bringing tears to my eyes. It wasn’t the pain that made me weep; it was the disrespect, the fear of what was to come, and the knowledge that a grown Arab man could have so little self-respect that he could punch a completely bound and defenseless woman in the face. I had worked in the Muslim world for eleven years and had always been treated with unparalleled hospitality and kindness. People had gone out of their way to feed me, to provide me with shelter in their homes, and to protect me from danger. Now I feared what this man might do to me. For one of the first times in my life, I feared rape.
Steve was placed in the car next to me, and I was relieved. Soldiers surrounded the car, looking at us and laughing, as if we were monkeys in a cage. They said things in Arabic—things I thankfully didn’t understand. Outside I saw Tyler and Anthony in another car about twenty feet away. Tyler and I had attended high school together. We’d known each other since I was thirteen years old. There was something comforting about his brave, calm, familiar presence.
I had lost all sense of time. I found the courage to look at our own car, the one Mohammed had been driving. One, or maybe it was two, of the doors of the gold four-door sedan were open, and a soldier was emptying our belongings onto the sidewalk. On the ground beside the driver’s door lay a young man, facedown and motionless, wearing a striped shirt, one arm outstretched. He appeared dead. I was positive it was Mohammed, and I was sick with guilt. No matter how he finally met his fate—either in a cross fire or executed by one of Qaddafi’s men—we had killed him with our relentless pursuit of the story. I began to cry, trying desperately to hold it together, and at that moment one of the soldiers put a cell phone to my ear.
“Speak in English,” he said.
“Salaam aleikum,” I stammered. (Peace be unto you.)
A woman’s voice spoke back to me in English. “You are a dog. You are a donkey. Long live Muammar.”
I was confused.
“Speak to my wife!” the soldier ordered me.
“Salaam aleikum,” I repeated.
She paused, perhaps wondering why an infidel would greet her with the traditional Muslim greeting. “You are a dog. You are a donkey.”
“I am a journalist,” I said. “New York Times. Ana sahafiya. I am a journalist.”
The soldier pulled the phone away from my ear and laughed into it, speaking softly and joyfully to his wife, proud of what he had accomplished that day.
We sat in those cars for hours—incoming artillery smashing and crackling and raining all around us—tied up and defenseless. The sky above us darkened. At dusk, the rebel attacks increased in intensity, bullets spraying the area around our car. Tyler managed to wriggle himself out of the electrical cord around his wrists, and a sympathetic soldier untied mine. We dived out of our car and onto the ground beside the door in search of cover. Steve and Anthony soon followed, and we huddled together on the ground like sardines.
“That’s outgoing tank fire,” Tyler explained after a long series of piercing explosions. “And that’s incoming machine-gun fire.” We recoiled every time we heard the crash of incoming explosions, certain we would get hit by shrapnel or a bullet. Soldiers surrounded us, and we pleaded with them to allow us to remain prostrate on the ground. In a rare moment of kindness a few of them came with thin mattresses, wh
ich they lined up behind the cover of a truck. They ordered us to lie down there, in the middle of the road. We curled together under a dirty blanket.
It was impossible to get a sense of who was in charge. All we had been told was that we would be delivered to “the doctor.” Some soldiers later referred to him as Dr. Mutassim, one of the more vicious of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Each son had his own militia, which seemed to operate on its own, with its own rules.
At 4 a.m. they woke us up. Nearby we could hear the troops speaking. Anthony, who was half Lebanese and the only one among us who spoke Arabic, closed his eyes to concentrate on what they were saying. “The rebels are amassing nearby,” he said. “The troops are saying they want to move us to a safer place.”
“That’s a promising sign,” I said.
Several soldiers approached us, and one by one they tied blindfolds around our eyes and refastened our arms behind our backs. A large, muscular soldier lifted me like a pillow into his arms and loaded me into the back of the armored personnel carrier—a vehicle resembling a giant tin beetle. I tried to remain as still as possible, to draw as little attention to myself as I could, when I felt a soldier climb into the vehicle and position himself with his front pressing tightly against my back. There was a lot of movement, and soon I heard Steve’s voice: “Is everybody here?”
One by one we all answered yes.
The vehicle began to move, and within seconds the soldier spooning my back started tracing his fingers across my body. I prayed he wouldn’t find my money belt with my passport. I squirmed and pleaded, “Please, don’t. Please. I have a husband.” He covered my mouth with his salty fingers and ordered me not to speak as he continued groping me. I could taste the salt and mud from his skin on my lips as he continued grabbing at my breasts and butt, clumsily tracing my genitals over my jeans.