It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (7 page)

“I’m a photographer.”

“And these are your friends?”

“Yes, I guess.”

The kiss ended there.

 • • • 

W
HEN IN THE BEGINNING OF 2000
I got an invitation to go to India with a family friend—a business professor who was taking his students abroad for a field study that had virtually nothing to do with any of the subjects I was interested in photographing—I considered it an opportunity to leave New York for good. I asked the Associated Press if they thought I might be able to get work in South Asia, and they responded encouragingly. At the time, I had no idea if I would really stay. But at that point in my life I didn’t think that far in advance; I didn’t wring my hands over seemingly enormous decisions. I just saw the door and went through it. That was the case with moving to India. It would turn out to be the last time I lived in the United States.

Indian men bathing on the streets of Calcutta at dawn, 2000. 

CHAPTER 2

How Many Children Do You Have?

My first night in New Delhi I stayed with two foreign correspondents: Marion, a reporter for the
Boston Globe
, and her boyfriend, John, a staff photographer at the AP. I could tell when I arrived late one evening that they were used to the constant traffic of guests. John answered the door sleepily, unfazed, showed me to my room, and went back to bed. I lay there, staring into the dark, suddenly overwhelmed by loneliness.

But the next morning, as I drank the coffee Marion cursorily plopped down on the counter for me, I saw the life I dreamed of right there in her kitchen. “We haven’t stopped working in years,” Marion said pointedly. She was trim and attractive and had no time for bullshit. “From India and Pakistan’s nuclear testing to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines jet to Kashmir . . . we are exhausted.” I watched her face turn serious and focused, my stomach flipping with admiration and anxiousness. Marion and John, who were roughly my age and from the United States, were covering major international news events, working hard, and establishing their careers while maintaining a comfortable home overseas. Instead of wondering whether I had made a mistake moving to India, I felt as if I had squandered my life in New York.

Everything that made India the rawest place on earth made it the most wonderful to photograph. The streets hummed with constant movement, a low-grade chaos where almost every aspect of the human condition was in public view. The vast disparity between India’s wealthiest and poorest made for an incredible juxtaposition of people and street life. Few subjects or scenes were off-limits in India. The country was a photographer’s ideal laboratory. The morning and evening light illuminated a rainbow of brilliant, saturated hues: I followed women draped in magentas and yellows and blues as they disappeared into dusty crowds. I spent ten days along the Ganges River in Varanasi, photographing Hindu devotion from the predawn hours until long after sunset; eight days in Calcutta, shooting men bathing on the street and children caked in dirt and begging for food. When the stimulation got overwhelming, I hid inside my viewfinder, outside of my body. Images were everywhere, and my eyes got tired. But I could endure anything for the prospect of beautiful negatives. I spent all my money on film.

I found a room in the dark, slightly depressing apartment of an easygoing thirty-something named Ed Lane. He was the bureau chief of the financial news company Dow Jones and loved his whiskey. The AP helped me get press credentials and an Indian residential visa. Ed took me to the run-down Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where international journalists gathered every week to gossip about their lives as expats, like something out of a Hemingway novel. They were a worldly but friendly bunch, used to meeting new people and welcoming them to their homes. Hearing their stories made the world appear smaller and more manageable—as if going to difficult or dangerous places were just a matter of knowledge and logistics, part of the job and the life.

When I wasn’t photographing, I watched Bollywood films in Hindi or went swimming at the American Club, an elite club run by the U.S. Embassy, with Marion. Life was difficult in India, but it was also cheap. Personal space did not exist, but a little money could buy luxury. I paid rent with one assignment and paid for a maid with another.

Back home my college and high school friends embarked on a year of endless engagement parties and weddings. I was often invited to be a guest photographer. Everyone’s life was moving forward while I was chasing good light and village women in India. I envisioned a nomadic life of adventure for myself, but I worried sometimes whether I was condemning myself to a spinster’s future: forever single, having affairs with random men, my cameras dangling all over me.

It could have been worse.

Within months I had gotten myself into a rhythm of steady work, pairing up with Marion for the
Boston Globe
and the
Houston Chronicle
and shooting the occasional story for the
Christian Science Monitor
and the AP. I wrote to the photo desk of the
New York Times
several times, offering myself up as a stringer, and each time my e-mail went unanswered. I wrote directly to the
New York Times
correspondents based in India and asked if I could shoot anything for them. They told me they took their own pictures while on assignment. I would keep trying. I felt that if I could only shoot for the
New York Times
—to me, the newspaper that most influenced American foreign policy and that employed the world’s best journalists—I would reach the pinnacle of my career.

 • • • 

A
ROUND MID-
A
PRIL 2000
Ed returned from a reporting trip to Afghanistan. He came home with fifteen Afghan carpets and some advice: “You should go to Afghanistan to photograph women living under the Taliban.”

“What do you mean?” I honestly didn’t know much about Afghanistan, aside from the
Times
articles I had read while on the elliptical machine in New York.

“You’re a woman, and you’re interested in photographing women’s issues,” Ed said. “There are few female journalists doing these stories there now. You should go.”

I had never been to a hostile country. Afghanistan had been destroyed by war, first when the Soviets occupied the country in the 1980s and later when Afghan factions fought each other for power. By 2000 one of these groups, the Taliban, had taken over about 90 percent of the country, promising to end the violence, thievery, and rape. It installed Sharia, Islamic law requiring strict obedience to the Koran; forced the entire female population to wear the burqa; and outlawed television, music, kite flying—any form of entertainment. Men had their hands cut off for robbery, and women were stoned to death for adultery. But everything I had read was from an outsider’s perspective, from articles usually written by Westerners and non-Muslims. Were Westerners imposing their own set of values on a Muslim country? Were Afghan women miserable living under a burqa and under the Taliban? Or did we just assume they were miserable because our lives are so different?

I didn’t know how I’d pull off such a trip. The only governing body was the Taliban, and almost all foreign embassies and diplomats had pulled out. I was an unmarried American woman who would want to photograph civilians. In Afghanistan women were not allowed to move around outside the home without a male guardian. Photography of any living being was illegal. According to one famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad said: “Every image-maker will be in the Fire, and for every image that he made a soul will be created for him, which will be punished in the Fire.”

But aside from a brief moment when I wondered whether I would be able to carry out my work, I wasn’t scared. I believed that if my intentions were for a good cause, nothing bad would happen to me. And Ed was not a daredevil journalist. I didn’t think he would recommend a trip that might end in my death.

On Ed’s recommendation I immediately sent a bunch of e-mails to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and to several local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), introducing myself as a freelance photographer interested in photographing the lives of women under the Taliban. Almost immediately I began to receive responses. I was shocked: I didn’t have backing from a major publication—to them I was a nobody—but they still took the time to answer my e-mails and offer logistical support. Few journalists were covering Afghanistan under the Taliban, and they were grateful for my interest. I arranged to arrive in two weeks.

The week before I was scheduled to go, I checked my bank balance. The remnants of my wedding money had dwindled to nothing, and most of my freelancing payments hadn’t come through. I couldn’t possibly cancel this trip because of money. In most war zones credit cards were not accepted: The only accepted currency was a wad of dollars. And I didn’t have dollars. Or rupees, for that matter. My mother couldn’t lend me money; I refused to ask my father and Bruce for anything beyond the wedding money, because they had repeatedly expressed their belief that I needed to make it on my own. I called my sister Lisa and her husband, Joe, and without hesitation—and without asking why I was traveling to Afghanistan or whether that might be a bad idea—they wired a few thousand dollars into my bank account that very day.

 • • • 

I
T WAS
M
AY 2000
when I arrived in Pakistan, in transit to Afghanistan for the first time, with my Nikons, one panoramic camera, one suitcase, and four worries: I was from America (a country that had recently sanctioned Afghanistan because of sheltering the Islamic fundamentalist leader Osama bin Laden); I was a photographer (and photographing any living thing was strictly prohibited under the Taliban); I was a single woman (and according to the Taliban should be kept in my father’s house or travel at all times with a
mahram
, a husband or male relative who functioned as a guardian); and I was arriving at a time of extreme censorship by the Taliban.

Pakistan was the country closest to India that had a working Afghan Embassy, where I could apply for a visa. Several colleagues at the Associated Press in New Delhi recommended that I contact the AP correspondent in Pakistan, Kathy Gannon, to help facilitate the visa process and brief me on the logistics of operating as a woman in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Kathy, like very few other journalists in the world, had been working there for more than a decade. Over a drink at the UN club in Islamabad, she casually navigated me through the process of working under the Taliban, offered me a place to stay at the AP house in Kabul, and put me in touch with Amir Shah, the AP’s local stringer. Her enthusiasm eased some of my fear.

The next morning I wondered what to wear to the Embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. I forgot to ask Kathy that most basic question. But I knew that modesty was essential. Afghan women wore burqas, but Western women in Pakistan did not. I settled on a
salwar kameez
(the traditional baggy pants and long shirt worn in the region) and a wide, draping head scarf, referred to as either a chador or
hijab
, depending on what part of the Muslim world one was traveling through. I opted for a large head scarf rather than the type of all-encompassing fabric that wrapped around both the head and the body. I prepared my papers, passport photos—ones I had shot with me wearing a heavy black head scarf—and made my way with all my paperwork to the embassy. For journalists, no matter who they are, there are few experiences filled with more terror than the infuriating, bureaucratic, often arbitrary, but necessary process of getting a visa.

Ed’s advice rang in my ear: “Do not look any Afghan male directly in the eye. Keep your head, your face, and your body covered. Don’t laugh or joke under any circumstance. And most important, sit each day in the visa office and drink tea with the visa clerk, Mohammed, to ensure that your application will actually get sent to Kabul and processed.”