Darfur—unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, which were wars instigated by an invading foreign military—exposed me to the kind of war where people killed their own people, on their own land. It was a war that perhaps started as a genocide but eventually devolved into a civil war, where every side was responsible for murder, for rape, and for pillage, and all the players were guilty.
Over the years I forced myself to be creative in how I covered the same scenes over and over. I started shooting refugee camps out of focus, sometimes in abstract ways, to try to reach an audience beyond the typical New York Times readership—an audience geared more toward the visual arts. As ugly as the conflict was, the protagonists were beautiful, wearing brilliantly colored fabrics and, despite the persistent hardships, wide, toothy smiles. The Sudanese were lovely, friendly, resilient people, and I wanted to show that in my work. It seemed paradoxical to try to create beautiful images out of conflict, but I found that my more abstract images of Darfur provoked an unusual response from readers. Suddenly I was getting requests to sell fine-art prints of rebels in a sandstorm or of blurred refugees walking through the desert for several thousand dollars.
I was conflicted about making money from images of people who were so desperate, but I thought of all the years I had struggled to make ends meet to be a photographer, and I knew that any money I made from these photos would be invested right back into my work. Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions.
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BETWEEN THESE VISITS to Darfur, beginning in 2006, I made frequent trips to another civil war, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been displaced from their villages in the east and were living in overcrowded camps across North and South Kivu provinces. Attacks from both government and rebel soldiers left millions dead and a countless number of Congolese women sexually assaulted. The soldiers raped women to mark their territory, to destroy family bonds (rape victims were often ostracized from their families), and to intimidate civilians as a way of establishing power. They forced the families of the victims to watch the rapes. And they gang-raped women and often used their weapons to tear them apart, causing fistulas, or tears between the vagina and anus from which feces and urine leak. The stories were unbearable. As a photojournalist, I felt there was very little I could do for the women in the DRC but record their stories. I hoped awareness of their suffering might somehow save them. I returned the following year.
In 2008 I was given a grant by Columbia College Chicago’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media to document gender-based violence, and rape as a weapon of war. The roving exhibition, “Congo/Women,” consisted of work from the DRC by photographers James Nachtwey, Ron Haviv, Marcus Bleasdale, and me, which traveled to more than fifteen venues across the United States and Europe and raised funds to help women in the DRC get surgery for fistula repair. It was my first grant—the Getty grant for Darfur came a few months later—and the first time I was able to go to a place and focus solely on one project, without the responsibility of deadlines and covering breaking news.
I spent two weeks traversing North and South Kivu, interviewing and photographing women who were victims of sexual assault, surprised by how many women agreed to speak openly about their experiences. Some spoke about how they became infected with HIV, or how their husbands left them upon learning they’d been raped; some spoke about how they were abducted and kept as sex slaves for up to several years, forced to bear the children of their rapists. It amazed me that all the women had the maturity and strength to love their children regardless of the circumstances out of which they were born.
Bibiane, twenty-eight, South Kivu.
Vumila, thirty-eight, Kaniola.
Mapendo, twenty-two, Burhale.
So many women were casualties of their birthplace. They had nothing when they were born and would have nothing when they died; they survived off the land and through their dedication to their families, their children. I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they plowed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred toward women I was witnessing.