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

by Addario, Lynsey

  He was a brother I miss dearly.

  MAJ Kearney

  How could Tim have survived more than a year in the Korengal Valley, arguably the most dangerous place on earth, only to be killed in Libya? I did not want to believe the e-mail. As usual, I needed to say the words out loud to believe them. Tears rolled down my cheeks.

  “Tim Hetherington was just killed in Libya.”

  Everyone gasped.

  I scrolled down over more e-mails, trying to get some sort of explanation as to how this could have happened. Another e-mail had this heading:

  Chris Hondros killed in Libya.

  It couldn’t be possible. Suddenly all the anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and sadness I had escaped after being released from Libya washed over me, flooding me with emotion. I fell apart in the austere conference room. The three people I was meeting with at Aperture excused themselves, telling me to stay in the room as long as I needed to.

  It was not as though I hadn’t experienced the loss of friends or colleagues before: Marla Ruzicka was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad in 2005; Solid Khalid was gunned down on his way to the New York Times bureau in Baghdad in 2007; Times photographer and mentor João Silva stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan in October 2010, losing both his legs and suffering debilitating internal injuries; Raza had died shortly after we lay on adjacent concrete slabs in a roadside clinic in Pakistan after our car accident; and of course Mohammed, our young driver, had died in Libya, too. But given all the death we had witnessed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Lebanon, Israel, and during the Arab Spring, death and injury had rarely come to the foreign journalist community—until now. Something in me snapped.

  Tim and Chris were friends of mine. They weren’t close friends in the typical sense of the word, but nothing in any of our lives was typical. We shared friendships born of long, intimate talks in lonely, morbid places and epic, intoxicated dinners back in the real world. Their sudden deaths hit me profoundly, in a way that my own experience in Libya failed to affect me. For the first time I felt the weight of the years of accumulated trauma. Perhaps it was because I realized how precarious life was and how arbitrary death was. Those e-mails could have easily been about me, Tyler, Anthony, or Steve. There were scores of inexperienced young photographers running around the front lines of Libya, but it was Tim and Chris, two of the most experienced photojournalists in the world, who met their fate in Misurata, in a mortar attack. It didn’t make sense. Did our lives depend on statistical probability? Was it that the longer we covered war, the more close calls we sustained, increasing the chances that something would go wrong? Our lives were a game of odds. I sat paralyzed in the Aperture conference room. I needed to collect myself and walk home, but I couldn’t do it. I messaged Paul and asked him to meet me. I needed him to come pick me up at Aperture. I couldn’t find my way home alone.

  • • •

  THE WEEK OF April 20, 2011, was a reckoning. Dozens of photographers, journalists, and editors came together in a way I had never witnessed before, flying in from all corners of the globe to grieve collectively. But before I could confront the overhwhelming sadness, I needed strength. I boarded an Amtrak train for Washington, DC, and took a taxi to Walter Reade Army Medical Center, where I found my friend the photographer João Silva among dozens of other wounded and maimed veterans of war. I hadn’t had a chance to visit him since a land mine severed his legs from his body and forced him into months of serial surgeries, but I knew that I craved his inner strength. Even after his injury, after one of his closest colleagues and friends had taken his own life and after another had been killed beside him, João remained resolved to cover war. His unfaltering belief in what we dedicated our lives to and his sage generosity of spirit and experience—despite the fact that he had lost half his body to war—rivaled the fortitude of anyone I knew. I simply needed to be with him to face reality head-on, to sit beside him in the very place that epitomized the devastation of war. I needed to hear how he kept going.

  • • •

  THAT SAME EVENING, I took the train to New York and reunited with Elizabeth and many other colleagues from throughout my travels. Groups of us met up, night after night, and traded stories about Tim and Chris, often clenched in long embraces, expressing years of pent-up sorrow from, for many of us, exactly a decade of covering war. Along with our editors, who functioned as adopted parents, we had formed an iron bond, inexplicable to those outside our circle. The colleagues I had spent the decade with—sharing meals of stewed lamb with mounds of rice woven with sweet raisins and grated carrots in Afghanistan, or stale bread in cities overrun by insurgents—had become an essential part of who I was; they were family, and the only people with whom I found consolation at such a desperate emotional time.

  One night that week a group of us close friends got together for dinner on New York’s Lower East Side: the photographer Samantha Appleton; Marion Durand, a photo editor at Newsweek and the wife of the Magnum photographer Chris Anderson, who’d stopped covering war after the birth of their son; the brilliant photo editor Jamie Wellford; Tyler and his girlfriend, Nicki; and me. Samantha, Marion, and I arrived first and ordered a bottle of wine. Tyler, Nicki, and Jamie showed up shortly thereafter, their faces blotchy and swollen. No one seemed to be able to stop crying.

  I was shocked by Tyler’s appearance. I saw in his face the same devastation I was experiencing: These deaths broke him in a way that Libya hadn’t. Hondros was one of Tyler’s oldest friends. He had ushered Tyler into the world of photojournalism when they were young men fresh out of college, living in Ohio and working for the Troy Daily News. Their careers developed in tandem as they covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Libya. They’d amassed accolades together, grew into accomplished men together. We all sat and looked at one another and cried openly, a display of emotion that was uncharacteristic of our profession. The bravado was gone.

  Two days later we went to Chris’s funeral in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, at the church where he was supposed to have married that summer. Instead of walking down the aisle with his beautiful Christina, he was carried down the aisle in a casket, his mother and his bride-to-be walking a few steps behind. Bach, Beethoven, and Mahler echoed off the cathedral walls. The simple image of one of us in a wooden box, after leading such a full life, was too much to bear. The finality was inescapable. Friends, colleagues, relatives, and people who never personally knew Hondros squeezed inside and spilled out onto the sidewalk. During the eulogies I stood with Michael Robinson Chavez, a photographer I had met in Iraq and who had become a dear friend over the years, and David Guttenfelder, another photographer and friend. We were wrecked.

  Paul stayed with me in New York that week. His bosses at Reuters allowed him to take time off to console me after Libya. And I finally felt that it was the right moment to step back from all the drama and death of the past decade and make love, without worrying about the consequences.

  CHAPTER 13

  I Would Advise You Not to Travel

  Three weeks later, in New Delhi, the little blue line appeared in the window—making a positive out of the negative sign. Already? April was the first month Paul and I had physically spent time together since I went off the pill. I counted backward, calculating that conception must have happened the week Tim and Chris were killed in Libya—the week I had let my ever-present guard down. I cursed the genetics of my reproductively inclined Italian family and crawled back in bed with Paul, placing the plastic stick with our future on the pillow next to his head. I hated him at that moment. He had been pushing and prodding me to get pregnant since the day we got married. He even announced his intentions during a live interview with CNN anchor Ali Velshi while I was missing in Libya. On the third day of our captivity, Paul told Velshi that the New York Times had speculated that we might have been abducted by Qaddafi’s soldiers, but no one really knew if we were alive or dead. Velshi asked what Paul would say to me when we had the opportunity to speak again and Paul replied, “I�
�m going to say, you know, you gotta come back here because, you know, we gotta have kids.” Paul knew I would have been mortified at the thought of my husband announcing on live TV that he wanted to get me pregnant, but it was an emotional moment. Usually he made no secret of his desire to start a family. He even contrived with my oldest friend, Tara, to decipher my ovulation chart in the weeks after Libya and put the dates as a reminder in his BlackBerry. He did all this with his characteristic sense of humor and never flagged in his support for my work. But he knew he had to push me.

  When Paul finally woke up, I showed him the pregnancy test, and we took another just to be sure: positive again. “You got your wish,” I said. “I can’t believe it happened so fast. I think my life is over.”

  Paul knew better than to answer. He had his coffee, got dressed, and went down to the bookstore at Khan Market, near our house in New Delhi, and bought What to Expect When You’re Expecting. He came home and presented me with this encyclopedic book of gestation. I took one look at it, with its grinning, baby-bump-flaunting woman on the cover, and was terrified. I was not at all ready to give up my life, my body, my travels. I stared at the glowing woman with a watermelon-sized stomach. Was that really going to be me in nine months? That huge? And she was so happy. Wasn’t that woman conflicted about her career? How was I going to keep shooting? My thoughts shifted to my colleagues—mostly men. What was everyone going to think? Kidnapped in Libya, husband made an announcement on CNN that he wanted to start a family while wife was still missing, and less than two months later she’s already knocked up! Surely it was the most predictable outcome of my entire life. I tried to imagine my life as a mother—struggled to envision a female role model in conflict photography—and I couldn’t think of a single female war photographer who even had a stable relationship. There were journalists who had taken time out to have children, like Elizabeth, who had a baby and managed to keep writing; photographers were different. What would the MacArthur Foundation say? They honor me with an incredible fellowship to foster my career as an international photojournalist, and I get pregnant.

  A few days later I sat in the OB/GYN waiting room at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi. The ground floor was swarming with Afghans who traveled to India for medical tourism—men with long gray beards looking disoriented and out of place in such a modern hospital, trailed by women in full hijab. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t handle sitting in a room full of Afghan beards and head scarves as I waited for my first official visit to the doctor as a pregnant woman. Bollywood videos played on a flat screen mounted on a pink wall festooned with stencils of pastel-colored mushrooms, flowers, caterpillars, and ladybugs. Screaming Indian and Afghan children tore across the waiting room floor. Their parents sat idly by, smiling proudly and exercising zero discipline, as I waited for Dr. Sohani Verma’s secretary to call my name. I prayed that the two pregnancy tests were wrong as I clenched the results of blood tests she had requested in my hands. The secretary called out my name. The doctor was a stern, old-fashioned Indian woman in a sari. She looked over my chart and introduced herself.

  “I’m Dr. Verma,” she announced, with no enthusiasm. “Everything looks fine.”

  “Am I really pregnant?” I asked.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you have any questions?” she asked.

  I had dutifully read a few chapters of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and had perused the Internet for the obvious dos and don’ts of pregnancy: what not to eat, when the nausea would kick in, etc. “Can I still go to the gym?” I asked, half-knowing I would continue to go with or without her consent.

  “Yes, light exercise. Don’t let your body overheat too much, don’t sweat too much. Keep your heart rate moderate.” I was relieved I would be able to hold on to one of my rituals.

  “I am on my way to Senegal next week.”

  She looked at me askance. “I would advise you not to travel. Flights have radiation that is not good for the embryo at this stage. It could be harmful.”

  The words were like daggers in my heart. No travel? Impossible. “Really?” I asked skeptically. “I have never heard of that before. For how long is there a risk period involved with flying?” I was convinced it must have been an Indian folktale.

  “The first three months are the most sensitive. And for the duration of your pregnancy, I would limit all long-haul flights—flights over six hours—to a minimum.” I tried to contain my shock. No one had ever told me to limit my travel before. “And there is malaria in Senegal. Do you have to go to Senegal now?”

  Claustrophobia set in. “Yes.” The words flew out of my mouth. It was a knee-jerk reaction. “I cannot cancel now.” As I said the words, I realized that to someone outside my profession, to whom journalism was just a job, I probably sounded insane, being willing to possibly jeopardize my pregnancy for a ten-day Times assignment.

  “There is a risk you can lose the pregnancy if you get malaria in Senegal. And I would advise you not to take antimalaria tablets while pregnant.”

  With every sentence I felt a part of myself dying. My life was being taken over by a microscopic union of Paul and me growing inside my uterus, and I had yet to feel that overwhelming joy all these women talked about when they talked about pregnancy.

  “I can use bug spray,” I started, and before I finished the sentence I realized that bug spray, too, might be harmful to an unborn child.

  “You can use citronella,” Dr. Verma said.

  I left the hospital in a cloud of defeat.

  I went to Senegal in mid-May, enveloped by the exhaustion and nausea of my first trimester. I left a certain amount of the risk of malaria, of the radiation of flying, and of whether I could handle a physically challenging assignment in the hands of fate. After all, it was the philosophy that had governed much of my life. I thought often about Elizabeth and of how she had traipsed through the Korengal Valley laden with body armor for her entire second trimester, and I suddenly understood why she had forced herself to keep working throughout her pregnancy: because in a sense, our work was our life. It defined who we were, it wasn’t just a job we did for a living, and I needed to hold on to that for as long as I could.

  With the exception of military embeds, I took on all my regular assignments, hiding my burgeoning belly beneath loose-fitting shirts, cargo pants, and sometimes, fortunately, the necessary hijab. I convinced myself that if I didn’t tell anyone, I wouldn’t have to compromise my life. I was adamant that my editors and colleagues were not to know until I could no longer hide it—I feared editors would deny me work on account of my pregnancy. I had fought hard to reach a place where I had a consistent stream of assignments, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t written off with the girth of my belly.

  I went from Senegal to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, and at four months Paul and I broke the news to my parents while on vacation in Rhode Island. No one could believe that Paul had actually managed to persuade me to pause long enough to have a baby when I barely stopped moving long enough to do my laundry. At four and a half months Doctors Without Borders sent me to photograph its medical outreach for victims of the drought consuming the Horn of Africa and Kenya—from the Turkana region to the Somali refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya. Halfway through the assignment, working in remote African villages, I could no longer button my pants. I was almost five months pregnant. The nausea and exhaustion were gone, my energy level had returned, and I was eating normally, though I was careful to avoid harmful bacteria, which in remote Africa meant eating bread, rice, bananas, and protein bars I carried from home.

  As I was finishing up my two-week assignment, I sensed that I had just been skimming around the edges with my coverage of the drought. All the refugees I was photographing in Dadaab were fleeing the drought in Somalia; I needed to go to Somalia in order to photograph the real story, what had been causing them to seek refuge. It was a fundamental missing piece among the images I had photographed. While my assi
gnment with Doctors Without Borders was finished, the story would also be syndicated through my photo agency for other publications around the world. I would have felt like an irresponsible or misleading journalist had I only half-completed my coverage of the story of the drought—that is, if I didn’t go to Somalia and expose the heart of the crisis. For me, it was because few journalists went to Somalia that I felt it was important to go. But that meant traveling at five months pregnant, less than six months after being very publicly kidnapped in Libya, to Mogadishu, the kidnapping capital of the world.

  In many ways Somalia was a failed state: anarchic, violent, impoverished, its land overrun by the Shabaab, a fundamentalist militia group that terrorized civilians and kidnapped people for exorbitant ransoms. The only reason they didn’t enter Mogadishu was the presence of African Union peacekeepers. Somalia was one of the few places on earth that I was actually scared to visit, as I repeatedly imagined a fate like that of the American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu’s streets in 1993. And I knew that if anything ever happened to me in Somalia so soon after Libya, I would surely be written off by my editors and peers as a crazy, irresponsible photographer, making it impossible to justify myself. But journalistically Somalia was a fundamental part of the story, and I didn’t want to start compromising my professional instincts before I had a baby.

  I started sending e-mails to colleagues who had recently been in Mogadishu: Tyler, who had been one of the first to cover the story powerfully for the New York Times, and John Moore, a photographer with Getty Images whom Tyler and I had traveled with in Libya. They both passed along contacts for Mohammed, the main fixer in Mogadishu. For $1,000 per day, Mohammed could arrange a room in his guesthouse, an interpreter, a driver, and a militia of anywhere from four to eight gunmen to accompany me each time I wanted to travel out of the guesthouse. Tyler and John both spoke very highly of Mohammed; they explained that he went to great lengths to prepare each shooting excursion outside the sanctuary of the guesthouse and took no task lightly. They said what I knew already: that Mogadishu was unpredictable, that it looked scarier from the outside, and that the chances were that the trip would go fine—unless it didn’t.