It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (40 page)

A Somali doctor checks for a heartbeat as Abbas Nishe, one and a half, struggles to fight severe malnutrition in Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, August 25, 2011. The hospital is overflowing with people sleeping on the floors throughout most wards.

I entered the third room to the left off a long, window-lined hall. A woman named Rukayo and her sister Lu prayed over Rukayo’s son, Abbas Nishe, one and a half, who was dying from complications associated with severe malnutrition. His skeletal chest pumped up and down as he labored to breathe; his eyes rolled back into his head and then forward again as he focused on his mother. I kneeled down beside the two women, introduced myself as a journalist, and asked permission to photograph. They agreed. I began shooting as the two women put their hands on Abbas’s tiny frame and then onto his mouth. Each time his eyes rolled back into his head, the women thought he was dead. To my horror, they began closing his tiny mouth with their hands, a premature death ritual evidencing a loss of hope. They were covering his eyes and closing his mouth, and as I photographed I felt my own baby kicking and twisting about in my uterus, making me acutely aware of the life inside me. It was the most incongruous, most unfair juxtaposition of life and death I had felt since I began my journey as a photographer.

 • • • 

S
OMEWHERE BETWEEN FIVE
and six months, my stomach popped. I found out I was having a boy. Back in New York for an assignment, I started breaking the news to a few select people. Kathy Ryan, with whom I had worked for a decade at the
New York Times Magazine
, was one of the first. She immediately offered to throw me a baby shower. Did I really have to have a baby shower? There was no turning back. Kathy’s generosity to host a party at her place was overwhelming, but I hadn’t even told anyone else I was pregnant yet.

“Kathy,” I suggested, “maybe the shower invitation could be the way I tell my friends I am pregnant? Do I have to actually tell people before I invite them to my baby shower?”

That night I broke the news to Michele McNally and David Furst, my editors at the
Times
. The next morning my cell phone rang. It was David. I was hoping he had been too drunk to remember what I had told him the night before.

“Good morning,” David said, rather seriously.

“Morning. What’s up?” I asked.

“Listen: I want you to know something. I didn’t get into this last night because there was a lot going on, and we were all out and drinking. But I want to congratulate you again on the baby, and I wanted to tell you that I am really happy for you and Paul.”

“Um, thank you.” I said. “Sorry the news is a bit late . . . I just didn’t really feel comfortable telling anyone.”

“Listen, I want to be clear: I will give you work until the day you tell me you are ready to stop shooting, and I will start giving you work again after the baby is born, the day you tell me you are ready to go back to work. I am so happy for you. This is going to be great. Don’t worry about your career. It will be fine. I will personally give you as little or as much work as you want. I’m just really happy for you both.”

I was shocked by his reaction. I assumed I would be looked at differently as soon as they heard I was pregnant. My editor’s reaction gave me pause, made me think that perhaps the industry was changing a little. Was it possible I had finally proved myself enough?

Throughout my pregnancy, though, I remained terrified that my editors would write me off with childbirth and stop hiring me because the assignments were perceived as too rigorous or dangerous for a “mother.” These were decisions I wanted to make for myself; I didn’t want to surrender those choices as a woman and as a professional. Photojournalism, journalism as a whole, is brutally competitive. I knew that at the end of the day it didn’t matter that I had won a MacArthur fellowship or been part of the
New York Times
Pulitzer team or won numerous other accolades along the way. After all, I was a freelance photographer, with no professional security other than the reputation I had built over the years. I had no guarantee of future assignments and a future paycheck. And I was haunted by the maxim “You’re only as good as your last story.” Too often I had seen that it was true. It was still possible that motherhood could bring me down the professional ladder.

 • • • 

T
WO WEEKS LATER
Furst sent me to Gaza for a prisoner exchange between the Israelis and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The Israelis announced that they would trade 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier: Sergeant First Class Gilad Shalit, twenty-five, who had been abducted by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006. It seemed like a pretty straightforward assignment, even while pregnant, and I was to team up once again with my colleague Steve Farrell. I hadn’t seen him since our post-Libya visit to New York.

The safest, easiest way into Gaza was through Israel. A journalist flew into Tel Aviv, drove to Jerusalem, and went to the government press office for media accreditation. She then drove a short two hours to Erez Crossing, the high-tech, airportlike terminal that served as the official border gate between Gaza and Israel. The
New York Times
bureau in Jerusalem was an institution: well connected, with an excellent office manager and correspondents who immediately knew which officials to contact to facilitate any kind of story. As I headed to Erez, I called Shlomo, the Israeli press official who handled media relations at Erez, and he assured me the cross would be smooth.

I passed through immigration uneventfully. Erez was built to accommodate the thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Israel each day to work and back again, until fighting between the two states made Gaza an open-air prison: Few Gazans were allowed out through Erez, and no Israelis were allowed in. The border was traversed almost exclusively by journalists and aid workers, a stark reminder of the economic consequences of Gaza’s isolation.

I spent almost two weeks in Gaza, photographing relatives and bedrooms of prisoners due home after years away, and Hamas’s parade of weapons for the cameras in their ominous black attire and balaclavas. The prisoner exchange came at the end. As the buses full of prisoners streamed across the Egyptian border into Gaza, men, women, and children—relatives and friends—threw themselves at the prisoners as they exited the buses. Tasting their first steps of freedom in years, they looked half-shocked by the crush of loved ones. Momentarily forgetting I was pregnant, I jockeyed for a position close enough to capture the initial moments of euphoria with my cameras, throwing myself into the mix of hundreds of frenzied relatives. As the weight of men around me started to push me to and fro, pressing against my body in the natural hysteria of the moment, I recalled my fragile state. But my stomach and I were so deep in the crowd, I couldn’t extricate myself. What if someone pushed my stomach? What if I miscarried right then and there at the prisoner release? I panicked.

In the Muslim world, women and children were often put on a safety pedestal—and pregnant woman were slightly higher up on that pedestal. Naturally, no pregnant woman in Gaza would voluntarily be in that mix of madness, but it was too late to lament my stupidity. I had an idea: I threw my arms up in the air and screamed “Baby!” and pointed down at my very round stomach with my index fingers. “Baby!” I screamed again, pointing down.

All the men around me momentarily paused, and the man beside me looked at my face and down at my stomach and instinctively made a human gate around me, cocooning me from the crowd. It was as if the seas parted. And I continued shooting the madness, with my spontaneous bodyguards keeping watch over my unborn son.

Before heading back to Erez Crossing to make my way home, I called Shlomo in Israel and expressed a gnawing concern: I was twenty-seven weeks pregnant and concerned that the full-body scanners at Erez Crossing might harm my pregnancy. Shlomo reassured me that he would notify the soldiers in advance of my arrival. The crossing back into Israel from Gaza entailed an intensive security procedure in anticipation of suicide attacks. The entire border crossing is partitioned into cubes of bulletproof glass, with a series of heavy electronic doors that the Israelis open and close once the passerby’s identity has been confirmed. There is a traditional luggage belt for luggage, which is handled by a Palestinian. All Israeli soldiers monitoring the movement of people passing from Gaza into Israel are standing out of harm’s way, on a glassed-in balcony overlooking the entire security area. They communicate through an intercom system as they watch from above. You can see them, and they can see you, and you could potentially shout up to them in a raised voice, but the intercom stands in for any personal contact. Everyone must cross through the first metal detector and bulletproof gate and into an advanced full-body scanner; once a red light turns green, you eventually pass through a final gate and on to collect luggage off the belt, then through immigration on the other side of the security area. An American AP photographer based in Jerusalem had warned me of a tiny room off to the side where suspicious crossers were routed after the scan: It had a metal grate for a floor, so if one detonated himself, the body parts and the brunt of the explosion would fall down through the grates rather than outward. I had that image in the back of my mind as I pressed the first intercom button at the entrance of the security labyrinth.

“Hi, we are with the
New York Times
. I called Shlomo this morning and explained that I am twenty-seven weeks pregnant and wondered if you could do a manual body check rather than have me pass through the scanner? I am worried about my baby and the radiation.”

A snarky voice wafted from the intercom on the door: “Well. You can strip down to your underwear and we do a strip search, or you can just pass through the scanner.”

I turned to Steve, who was married to a Palestinian Christian and had been living in Jerusalem for several years.

“Steve, what should I do? I’m worried about passing through the scanner.”

“Well, I think if you opt out of the scanner, they’re going to keep you here
all day
. You might as well pass through once. It probably won’t harm the baby to pass through once.”

I pressed the intercom button again, looking up at the gaggle of Israeli soldiers at a distance above, and let them know that I opted for the scanner.

I was still worried about the radiation. I heard a loud metallic click, and the gate opened to a machine that looked like a time capsule. I stepped in, placing my feet on the stenciled footprints that marked where they should go, and raised my hands in a triangle above my head, as I’ve done so many times before in this country, unpregnant. I waited as the scanner moved around my body, and held my breath. The machine stopped, the light switched from red to green, and the magical gate opened, passing me through to another prisonlike cubicle. The light in the second cubicle turned from red to green, and as I started forward, the light turned back to red. I paused, confused. The same arrogant voice came over the intercom: “Could you please go back to the scanner? There was a problem.”

“What?” I asked, feeling my blood pressure rise. “You want me to go through the scanner again?”

“Yes. Go back.”

I went back to the scanner and raised my arms above my head. I held my breath as the scanner moved again around my body, careful not to move. The light turned from red to green, and I moved forward into the next cubicle, where I waited for that light to also turn green to pass me through after two full-body scans. But the light turned red again. It must have been a mistake. I looked up to the glassed-in balcony, now with a handful of soldiers looking down on me in my little glass prison. They were laughing and smiling as they debated whether to continue radiating me and my stomach.

“Whoops”—the arrogant voice returned— “you moved. Can you please pass back to the scanner?”

Are you kidding me?
I asked myself. It took every inch of self-restraint to not lose my mind. “I did not move. I have been through these scanners before. I know I did not move.”

“Go back to the scanner.”

“I am sure my baby will be born with three heads after this,” I offered.

“Go back,” he said. The other soldiers were still laughing.

After the third time in the full-body scanner, they finally passed me through to the next cubicle. But instead of directing me straight toward the exit and the luggage belt, they had me go to a cavernous room with a metal-grated floor off to the right: the suicide-bomber room. A light flicked on across from me, and a female Israeli soldier who was perched behind thick bulletproof glass leaned forward and said, “Take off your pants.”

“What?”

“Take off your pants, and lift up your shirt. I need to see your body.”

“Is your scanner not working? The one you just made me pass through three times?”

“Please take off your clothes.”

I took off my pants and lifted up my shirt to reveal my perfectly shaped basketball of a stomach and the red lacy underwear I don’t know what possessed me to wear that day.

“Are all the men in the glass box watching this from above?” I asked.

“No, they are not.”

I wondered if the woman staring at my pregnant, naked body was at all ashamed of their behavior.

“OK, you can get dressed again.”

I was confused, appalled, and angry until I suddenly had a moment of clarity: If the Israeli soldiers were doing this to me, a
New York Times
journalist accredited by the Israeli government itself, who had called the press officer in advance to graciously ask to be manually searched, how on earth did they treat a poor, Palestinian pregnant woman? Or a nonpregnant Palestinian woman? Or a Palestinian man? The thought terrified me.

I left Erez and filed a formal complaint to the International Press Center in Jerusalem and the Israeli government through the
Times
bureau in Jerusalem. More than a month after we filed the initial complaint, the Israeli Ministry of Defense issued a statement regarding the events at Erez, and in an unprecedented step for the ministry, they issued a public apology for my treatment.