It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (21 page)

I went directly up to the roof, one of the few places where I found solace in Iraq, in search of the stars and the open sky. My hands were too nervous to dial; my throat was dry and cracking. I couldn’t remember phone numbers emblazoned in my memory since childhood. I scrolled through the cell phone in search of “Mom” and dialed her first. I got her voice mail and started crying at the sound of her voice.

I then scrolled to “Dad.” He never answered his phone. What day was it? Wednesday. He was working. I called his salon, my memory returning. The squeaky voice of their receptionist answered at the hair salon on the other end, and nothing came out of my mouth.

“Is my dad there?”
They knew who my dad was, right?
“Is Phillip there?”

“Yes, yes, honey, yes.” Her voice was urgent, and I knew she knew. I was immediately flooded with guilt for the pain I had caused my parents.

My dad picked up the phone, and he couldn’t speak. I could only hear him whimpering on the other end, struggling, like me, to form a sentence. It was one of the first times in my life I elicited a trace of emotion from him; I felt his love for me in the absence of his words.

“Dad? Daddy? It’s OK. I am fine.” I was crying so hard I could barely get the words out, but I wanted to sound strong for him.

“Oh, baby. Please come home. Please come home.”

I looked up into the black sky, sobbing. “OK. I will come home soon.”

I promised I would go back, but when the paper asked me if I wanted to pull out of Iraq, I didn’t. I knew that trauma accompanied the work of a conflict photographer—we had all heard about the drinking, drugs, and suicides of the previous generation of war correspondents—and I wanted to take control of my own response. I was in touch with my feelings enough to process what they meant; I did not want my response to kidnapping to be escape. Matthew and I discussed options, and we decided we would give it a week or two more and then leave. I was shaken but not deterred by what I knew had become my mission in life. I accepted fear as a by-product of the path I had chosen.

I did, however, create a will. The kidnapping in Iraq was the first time I really thought I was going to die, and though I didn’t own anything other than my pictures, I had finally recognized my own mortality. After the kidnapping, back in the United States, I made an appointment with a lawyer I met through a mutual friend in New York to declare that I would leave my money to my mother and the income generated from resales in my archive to my sister’s children. It was all laid out, but I needed to sign the final documents. I arranged for two of my editors at Corbis to stand as my witnesses.

That day Corbis had just received a new shipment of body armor for its photographers to take to Iraq. I was trying on a flak jacket and helmet. It seemed only appropriate to sign my death papers while wearing my protective gear—a good omen, I told myself.

So I signed my first will in a flak jacket, holding my helmet in my left hand.

 • • • 

M
ATTHEW AND
I
HAD
endured so much together, but the question of us, our future as a team beyond Iraq, loomed large. I had dealt with relationships at home and had dealt with relationships in the field but had never tried to combine those two very distinct worlds. I also couldn’t fathom how he or I would be capable of returning to an old lover after all we had been through.

We spent one final weekend at the Four Seasons Hotel in Jordan, where so many journalists shacked up in luxurious rooms and rolled around in thousand-thread-count sheets, wrapping up their illicit affairs before heading back to their real lives. The brunch room was a who’s who of infidelity. Matthew went home to the United States, and I went off to Thailand by myself to decompress, to wade and swim in the still, blue sea.

Each morning on a minuscule island off the coast of Koh Samui, Seoul, my narrow-framed boatman with leathery skin and sunken cheeks and dressed in a colorfully decorated sarong, met me on the shore in front of my beach hut to take me to a nearby desolate island, where a long white stretch of pristine sand was surrounded by clear, calm turquoise waters. Seoul didn’t speak much English, and I was thrilled I didn’t have to make small talk with him every day. I was coming down off the wire of anxiety, stress, and near-death experiences, and I felt a cavernous emptiness. The adrenaline that had soared through my veins for months suddenly dissipated, and I was aimless, like a wayward dog, reading book after book to try to fill my mind with other people’s experiences to replace my own. My heart ached. Seoul picked me up each morning, dumped me on the lonely stretch of beach where I read and swam each day, and returned around 3 p.m. to take me back to my hut. I paid him the equivalent of about $5 for this specialized service.

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.

 • • • 

B
EFORE
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

S
UDAN,
C
ONGO,
I
STANBUL,
A
FGHANISTAN,
P
AKISTAN,
F
RANCE,
L
IBYA

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 e-mailed 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.