It was in Peshawar that I got my big break: freelancing, or being put on rotation, for the New York Times on a huge news story.
It was my proximity to the action that got me the job. When a big story broke, the Times would parachute in their top staff correspondents and photographers to report, but photographers were also often hired on a freelance basis. If there wasn’t already a staff photographer on the ground, the photo editor would have to scramble, and so those initial hours of a breaking news story were crucial for a freelance photographer. You had to be in the right place, and available by phone or e-mail at that moment. You had to say yes.
I knew I had one chance with the Times to prove myself a strong choice to cover the mood in Pakistan before the war. Not only did I have to make compelling images, but I also had to coordinate them with the Times staff reporters. New York Times journalists were always on deadline, always overwhelmed, always stressed out. No matter how much they pretended they didn’t care about landing a story on the front page, all Times correspondents fought hard to “front.” They were competitive with journalists from other newspapers, even more brutal with one another. And almost no one had time to be bothered by a photographer. Instead I often had to intuit the story of the day on my own. I got up before dawn; I went to bed at midnight. I worked every waking hour so that I could be at the right place at the right time.
I also made sure I used every advantage I had. I knew from my time in Afghanistan that I had a unique kind of access. I used my gender to get inside the women’s madrassas (religious schools) to interview and photograph the most devout Pakistani women. Before I shot a single image, I spoke with them at length about their political and religious beliefs. It was the first time I witnessed open hatred toward the United States, toward my government and its policies governing international affairs. The women were proud of the September 11 attacks and voiced no remorse for the innocent lives lost. They were sympathetic to the Taliban and their beliefs. They also rooted almost all their animosity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; to them, the attacks of September 11 were justified after years of American support for Israel and discriminatory policies against the Palestinians. Through these women I began to understand the depth of hatred this bias fostered across the Muslim world, and I wanted to explain this to readers still trying to make sense out of 9/11.
I also wanted to give readers a sense of Pakistani women’s lives beyond religion. I knew that if the only image people saw in American publications was of women in head scarves and long black robes reading the Koran, it might be easier to dismiss their beliefs as something completely foreign and bizarre and specifically “Islamic.” But if readers could get a sense of who these women really were—if they could see them in their homes, with their children, as they cooked meals—it might offer a more complete picture.
I became fascinated by the notion of dispelling stereotypes or misconceptions through photographs, of presenting the counterintuitive. In Pakistan I learned quickly to tuck away my own political beliefs while I worked and to act as a messenger and conduit of ideas for the people I photographed. This proved instructive for the future: While these women were the first to openly express hating my country, they were definitely not the last.
Women of Jihad series for the New York Times Magazine, November 2001.
I was getting photographic material and access I wasn’t seeing in other publications and decided to pitch my first story to the New York Times Magazine—which was entirely separate from the newspaper, with a different set of editors. They accepted. It was another milestone for me: my first publication in a magazine, and one of the publications most renowned for powerful documentary spreads.
The period after September 11 gave young photographers who hustled—and who were willing to go to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and eventually Iraq—an unparalleled opportunity to make a name for themselves. Those weeks in September launched an entire generation of journalists who would come of age during the War on Terror.
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