It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

Iraqis watch a 3-D movie in Baghdad, 2010.

 

I sank into a depressed state. I had lived in India nine years before and was fine with all the noise and chaos then, but I had grown into a different person in my thirties. In an easy, home-base city like Istanbul, simple things felt like luxuries: that I could walk from one location to another without having to rely on taxis or drivers; that I could run out and meet my friends for a coffee in a hip neighborhood; that a flight to visit my family in the United States wasn’t sixteen hours long. After Istanbul, Delhi seemed isolating. The only nice gyms were inside five-star hotels. I couldn’t really walk anywhere; every excursion required a car. I worked almost three hundred days a year in difficult places, and I craved simplicity and ease at home. My little amenities were a fundamental part of my sanity.

 

Paul was also busier than usual. Our relationship usually worked well with consistent two-to three-week breaks after assignments, because we both felt that the distance kept our romance fresh. But his demanding new job kept him extrapreoccupied those first months. So I traveled incessantly. Rather than see the MacArthur as an opportunity to slow down, I saw it as encouragement to go even harder. From the end of 2009 until early 2011, I was traveling more than ever—from embeds in Afghanistan to stints in sub-Saharan Africa. With every return home, Paul argued that we didn’t know how long it would take to get pregnant and that, at age thirty-seven, I might be running out of time. I was terrified of losing my independence and refused to admit that he might be right.

 

Instead I always responded with the same argument: I had sturdy southern Italian genes, and each of my sisters had gotten pregnant the first time she tried and had healthy pregnancies. The Addario women were made to reproduce, I argued, knowing deep down that my case could be very different from theirs. I finally brokered a deal: I would stay on my birth control pill until January 2011, and then we would let biology and our libidos decide when we got pregnant. I didn’t want a child then, but I knew how important it was to Paul. And a small part of me did worry that I would run out of time.

 

January came and went. I stopped taking the pill, as we’d agreed, but planned back-to-back assignments that left me little time at home for conception: I hopped from South Sudan to Iraq to Afghanistan to Bahrain in less than two months. I was in Iraq for National Geographic in late January when David, my editor at the Times, called me in Baghdad and asked whether I wanted to go to Egypt, where there appeared to be a revolution under way. I was dying to go, but I couldn’t leave my National Geographic assignment half-completed. By the time I finished my work in Iraq, the Times was well staffed in Egypt, and David sent me to Afghanistan. But the more I watched the news—the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and apparently now Libya, too—the more I realized how historic this Arab Spring would be. All my colleagues from my Iraq and Afghanistan years had been reporting and photographing from Tahrir Square, and there I was, drinking tea in Kabul, watching a pirated DVD of Up in the Air.

 

I couldn’t take it anymore and got on a plane. I was headed to Libya.

 

 

 

 

 

PART FOUR

 

Life and Death

 

LIBYA, NEW YORK, INDIA, LONDON

 

 

 

 

 

Children play around a burning car in a residential neighborhood in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, as the uprising gathers momentum, February 28, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 11

 

 

You Will Die Tonight

 

 

LIBYA, MARCH 2011

 

Three weeks into the Libyan uprising—a revolution that quickly became a war—I was kidnapped. My colleagues—Tyler Hicks, Anthony Shadid, and Stephen Farrell—and I had been covering an antigovernment revolt started by ordinary Libyan men, and Qaddafi saw us journalists as the enemy. Along with Mohammed, the quiet, twenty-two-year-old engineering student we had hired to be our driver, we had run directly into a military checkpoint. Now we were at the mercy of Qaddafi’s soldiers, our hands and feet bound, and blindfolded.