It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario
Authors: Lynsey Addario
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worse.”
• • •
T HE U NITED S TATES BEGAN its aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan. None of the journalists in Peshawar tried to cross into Afghanistan at that point; as far as we knew, the Taliban still controlled the country. It would be suicide to go in until the Taliban fell. But we knew the fall of the Taliban was imminent.
The morning after the campaign started, I returned to the mosque where I had routinely visited and photographed Pakistan’s women fundamentalists. From the moment I entered, I felt uneasy. As a journalist, I assumed I would be viewed as a neutral observer, not as a propagator of American actions overseas. But in the doorway of the mosque one of the women I had photographed said, “Please. The bombing has started. The Americans are killing our Muslim brothers. You, American, are not welcome here anymore.”
I soon went off my long-sought-after assignment for the New York Times , claiming I needed a break, and flew almost nine thousand miles back to Mexico City. My roommate Michael greeted me at the door of our apartment with a confused look.
“What are you doing here? Isn’t the Taliban about to fall?”
“Uxval dumped me last week.”
“ So? You came home for that ?”
I wanted to board the next flight back to Pakistan. I felt like an idiot. “Yes. I need to see him face-to-face.”
I put my camera bag and luggage down in my room, put on my gym clothes, trudged over to my dismal, smelly gym, and got on the cheap stair-climber. I was so confused by what I had done. I was no longer heartbroken, no longer crying. For the first twenty-four hours after arriving in Mexico, I didn’t even call Uxval.
He heard through friends that I was back and showed up at my door as if nothing had ever happened and picked me up and carried me directly to the bedroom.
Uxval had no idea what I had sacrificed professionally to fly home to win him back. His life was exactly as I had left it: working during the day, riding bikes in the afternoon, drinking icy beers at night. I wanted to hate him, but I was deeply in love with him. Less than a month later, on the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, we watched the fall of Kabul on television in Mexico City, and I imagined all the journalists I had met in Peshawar scrambling over the border to get the story. I couldn’t have been farther from the action. I wasn’t sure whether I had made the right decision in flying back to Mexico—whether I wanted my personal life or my career to dictate the decisions I made, where I lived, and how I lived. But I knew that I felt unsettled, watching Kabul fall on the small TV we’d bought after the attacks of September 11. I was in the wrong place.
The Taliban’s only remaining Afghan stronghold was in the southern part of the country, in Kandahar. As they had in Peshawar, journalists were now camping out in Quetta, the Pakistani city closest to Kandahar, so they could rush in after the Americans attacked. I called Marcel in New York and let him know I wanted to go back. The New York Times Magazine put me on assignment. I promised Uxval I wouldn’t be gone long.
• • •
I N Q UETTA a whole new group of about a hundred journalists was holed up in the incongruously luxurious five-star Serena Hotel, one of several hotels in South Asia built by the Aga Khan, the billionaire leader of an Islamic sect. We indulged in long breakfasts, visited the horrific Afghan refugee camps, and waited for the border to open.
Quetta was even creepier than Peshawar; there were no shops or places to walk around, and two cinemas showing American movies were attacked after the bombing started. Alcohol was banned, so we drank a lot of tea, occasionally swigging some smuggled whiskey out of water bottles. World-renowned photojournalists—everyone from Gilles Peress to Alexandra Boulat to Jerome Delay—stayed in rooms just down the hall from mine. I walked around starstruck and giddy.
One morning I was having
• • •
T HE U NITED S TATES BEGAN its aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan. None of the journalists in Peshawar tried to cross into Afghanistan at that point; as far as we knew, the Taliban still controlled the country. It would be suicide to go in until the Taliban fell. But we knew the fall of the Taliban was imminent.
The morning after the campaign started, I returned to the mosque where I had routinely visited and photographed Pakistan’s women fundamentalists. From the moment I entered, I felt uneasy. As a journalist, I assumed I would be viewed as a neutral observer, not as a propagator of American actions overseas. But in the doorway of the mosque one of the women I had photographed said, “Please. The bombing has started. The Americans are killing our Muslim brothers. You, American, are not welcome here anymore.”
I soon went off my long-sought-after assignment for the New York Times , claiming I needed a break, and flew almost nine thousand miles back to Mexico City. My roommate Michael greeted me at the door of our apartment with a confused look.
“What are you doing here? Isn’t the Taliban about to fall?”
“Uxval dumped me last week.”
“ So? You came home for that ?”
I wanted to board the next flight back to Pakistan. I felt like an idiot. “Yes. I need to see him face-to-face.”
I put my camera bag and luggage down in my room, put on my gym clothes, trudged over to my dismal, smelly gym, and got on the cheap stair-climber. I was so confused by what I had done. I was no longer heartbroken, no longer crying. For the first twenty-four hours after arriving in Mexico, I didn’t even call Uxval.
He heard through friends that I was back and showed up at my door as if nothing had ever happened and picked me up and carried me directly to the bedroom.
Uxval had no idea what I had sacrificed professionally to fly home to win him back. His life was exactly as I had left it: working during the day, riding bikes in the afternoon, drinking icy beers at night. I wanted to hate him, but I was deeply in love with him. Less than a month later, on the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, we watched the fall of Kabul on television in Mexico City, and I imagined all the journalists I had met in Peshawar scrambling over the border to get the story. I couldn’t have been farther from the action. I wasn’t sure whether I had made the right decision in flying back to Mexico—whether I wanted my personal life or my career to dictate the decisions I made, where I lived, and how I lived. But I knew that I felt unsettled, watching Kabul fall on the small TV we’d bought after the attacks of September 11. I was in the wrong place.
The Taliban’s only remaining Afghan stronghold was in the southern part of the country, in Kandahar. As they had in Peshawar, journalists were now camping out in Quetta, the Pakistani city closest to Kandahar, so they could rush in after the Americans attacked. I called Marcel in New York and let him know I wanted to go back. The New York Times Magazine put me on assignment. I promised Uxval I wouldn’t be gone long.
• • •
I N Q UETTA a whole new group of about a hundred journalists was holed up in the incongruously luxurious five-star Serena Hotel, one of several hotels in South Asia built by the Aga Khan, the billionaire leader of an Islamic sect. We indulged in long breakfasts, visited the horrific Afghan refugee camps, and waited for the border to open.
Quetta was even creepier than Peshawar; there were no shops or places to walk around, and two cinemas showing American movies were attacked after the bombing started. Alcohol was banned, so we drank a lot of tea, occasionally swigging some smuggled whiskey out of water bottles. World-renowned photojournalists—everyone from Gilles Peress to Alexandra Boulat to Jerome Delay—stayed in rooms just down the hall from mine. I walked around starstruck and giddy.
One morning I was having
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