It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (3 page)

We stood like that for ten interminable seconds. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tyler running toward a one-story cement building up ahead. I trusted his instincts. We needed to get out of the line of fire before we could negotiate our fate with these soldiers.

I surrendered my waist pack and one camera and clutched the other, pulling the memory cards out as I ran after my colleagues, who, in the chaos of bullets, had also escaped their captors. My legs felt slow as my eyes stayed trained on Anthony ahead of me. “Anthony! . . . Anthony, help me!”

But Anthony had tripped and fallen to his knees. When he looked up, his normally peaceful face was wrenched with panic, oblivious to my screams. His face looked so unnatural that it terrified me more than anything else. We had to reach Tyler, who had sprinted ahead and seemed likeliest to escape.

Somehow the four of us reunited at the cinder-block building set back from the road, sheltered from the gun battle that continued to rage behind us. A Libyan woman holding an infant stood nearby, crying, while a soldier tried to console them. He didn’t bother with us, because he knew we had nowhere to go.

“I’m thinking about making a run for it,” Tyler said.

We looked into the distance. The open desert stretched out in every direction.

Within seconds, five government soldiers were upon us, pointing their guns and yelling in Arabic, their voices full of hate and adrenaline, their faces contorted into masks of rage. They ordered us facedown into the dirt, motioning to us with their hands. We all paused, assuming this was the moment of our execution. And then we slowly crouched down and begged for our lives.

I pressed my face into the soil, sucking in a mouthful of fine dirt as a soldier pulled my hands behind my back and kicked open my legs. The soldiers were all screaming at us, at one another, pointing their weapons at our heads as the four of us sank into silent submission, waiting to be shot.

I looked over at Anthony, Steve, and Tyler to make sure we were all still there, together and alive, and then quickly looked back down at the sand.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Please, God. Save us.”

I raised my eyes from the ground and looked up into a gun barrel and directly into the soldier’s eyes. The only thing I could think to do was beg, but my mouth was so dry, as if my saliva had been replaced with dirt. I could barely utter a word.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”

I waited for the crack of the gun, for the end of my life. I thought of Paul, my parents, my sisters, and my two grandmothers, well into their nineties. Each second felt like its own space in the universe. The soldiers continued barking at one another, with their guns leveled at our heads.

“Jawaz!” one of them suddenly yelled. They wanted our passports, and we surrendered them. The soldier leaned down and started searching my body for my belongings, pulling things out of my jacket pockets: my BlackBerry, my memory cards, some loose bills. His hands moved quickly, skipping over my second passport, which was secretly tucked into a money belt inside my jeans, until they reached my breasts. He stopped. And then he squeezed them, like a child honking a rubber horn.

“Please, God. I just don’t want to be raped.” I curled as tightly as I could into a fetal position.

But the soldier was preoccupied with something else. He removed my gray Nikes with fluorescent yellow soles, and I heard the whipping sound of the laces being pulled out. I felt air on my feet. He tied my ankles together. With a piece of fabric he pulled my wrists behind my back and tied them together so tightly they went numb. Then he pushed my face down into the filthy earth.

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?

The soldiers picked me up by my hands and feet and carried me away.

 • • • 

T
HAT DAY IN
L
IBYA
I asked myself the questions that still haunt me: Why do you do this work? Why do you risk your life for a photograph? After ten years as a war correspondent, it remains a difficult question to answer. The truth is that few of us are born into this work. It is something we discover accidentally, something that happens gradually. We get a glimpse of this unusual life and this extraordinary profession, and we want to keep doing it, no matter how exhausting, stressful, or dangerous it becomes. It is the way we make a living, but it feels more like a responsibility, or a calling. It makes us happy, because it gives us a sense of purpose. We bear witness to history, and influence policy. And yet we also pay a steep price for this commitment. When a journalist gets killed in a firefight, or steps on a land mine and loses his legs, or tears his friends and family apart by getting kidnapped, I ask myself why I chose this life.

The location where we were taken, photographed about one month later by Bryan Denton for the
New York Times
. Following photograph: My shoe without laces where we were tied up.

I had no idea that I would become a conflict photographer. I wanted to travel, to learn about the world beyond the United States. I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people’s most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

It was in Argentina, at age twenty-two, that I discovered I could make a living—at first, $10 a photograph—from this hobby that I loved. Once I began to work, a career in photojournalism didn’t seem like such a distant dream. The question was how to move forward in such a competitive industry. I got a job as a stringer for the Associated Press in New York, and once I had experience, I took a risk and began to travel, first to Cuba, then India, Afghanistan, Mexico City. I became comfortable in places most people found frightening, and as I saw more of the world, my courage and curiosity grew.

I was just finding my way as a reporter when the September 11 attacks changed the world. Along with hundreds of other journalists, I was there to witness the invasion of Afghanistan; it would be the first time many of us would participate in a story that involved our own troops and our own bombs. The War on Terror created a new generation of war journalists, and as the wars became more unjust, our commitment deepened. We had an obligation to show the world the truth, and our sense of mission consumed our lives. On the front lines we became a family. We’ve seen one another through affairs, through marriages, divorces, and deaths. Now that combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly ceased, we meet most often at weddings and funerals.

When I was first starting out, I raced to cover the biggest stories, but over time my choices have become more personal. I see images in newspapers, magazines, on the Internet—refugee camps in Darfur, women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, wounded veterans—and my heart leaps. I am suddenly overcome with this quiet angst—a restlessness that means I know I will go. The work takes on a rhythm all its own. I may spend two weeks photographing women dying of breast cancer in Uganda, and on the plane home I am already sketching out my next assignment, on the Maoist rebels in the jungles of India. When I return home to London—to my husband, Paul, and my son, Lukas—I’ll edit some eight thousand Uganda photos, break to take Lukas to the park, and perhaps discuss with an editor a future assignment in southern Turkey. When people ask me why I go to these places, they are asking the wrong question. For me, the conundrum is never whether or not to go to Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan; the problem is that I can’t be in two of those places at once.

With my subjects—the thousands of people I have photographed—I have shared the joy of survival, the courage to resist oppression, the anguish of loss, the resilience of the oppressed, the brutality of the worst of men and the tenderness of the best. I maintain relationships with drivers and fixers, the trusted locals I relied on for setting up meetings, translating interviews, and navigating a foreign culture, for years. An interpreter I worked with thirteen years ago in Afghanistan can unexpectedly pop up in a meeting at a United Nations office today. They are as much a part of my circle of humanity as anyone else, and when a new tragedy is visited upon their country, I feel a sense of responsibility to see how it is affecting them. Often they write to me, “Are you coming, Miss Lynsey?”

Of course, there are dangers, and I have been lucky. I have been kidnapped twice. I have gotten in one serious car accident. Two of my drivers have died while working for me—two tragedies that I will always feel responsible for. I have missed the births of my sisters’ children, the weddings of friends, the funerals of loved ones. I have disappeared on countless boyfriends and had just as many disappear on me. I put off, for years, marriage and children. Somehow, though, I am healthy. I have maintained warm and wonderful relationships; I even found a husband who puts up with it all. Like many women, once I started a family, I had to make tough choices. I struggle to find the imperfect balance between my role as a mother and my role as a photojournalist. But I have faith, as I’ve always had, that if I work hard enough, care enough, and love enough in all areas of my life, I can create and enjoy a full life. Photography has shaped the way I look at the world; it has taught me to look beyond myself and capture the world outside. It’s also taught me to cherish the life I return to when I put the camera down. My work makes me better able to love my family and laugh with my friends.

Journalists can sound grandiose when they talk about their profession. Some of us are adrenaline junkies; some of us are escapists; some of us do wreck our personal lives and hurt those who love us most. This work can destroy people. I have seen so many friends and colleagues become unrecognizable from trauma: short-tempered, sleepless, and alienated from friends. But after years of witnessing so much suffering in the world, we find it hard to acknowledge that lucky, free, prosperous people like us might be suffering, too. We feel more comfortable in the darkest places than we do back home, where life seems too simple and too easy. We don’t listen to that inner voice that says it is time to take a break from documenting other people’s lives and start building our own.

Under it all, however, are the things that sustain us and bring us together: the privilege of witnessing things that others do not; an idealistic belief that a photograph might affect people’s souls; the thrill of creating art and contributing to the world’s database of knowledge. When I return home and rationally consider the risks, the choices are difficult. But when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine.

PART ONE

Discovering the World

C
ONNECTICUT,
N
EW
Y
ORK,
A
RGENTINA,
C
UBA,
I
NDIA,
A
FGHANISTAN