Chapter 5. Documenting War and Tragedy
Guard to one of the local clerics join a crowd of more than 15,000 pro-Taliban supporters as they listen to speeches given by religious leaders during an anti-American rally.
Any illusion that you are somehow protected or invulnerable because you have a camera and press credentials completely dissolves in a war zone.
I came close to death after photographing in a refugee camp in Pakistan in 2001. It was an organized trip coordinated by the Pakistani government. We rode for approximately three hours in a 13-car convoy, and we had to pass through 13 checkpoints before eventually arriving at a bevy of tents and refugees near Kandahar, Afghanistan. It might as well have been the middle of nowhere.
We were an incredibly disruptive force, media personnel from all over the world making photographs and trying to interview people with the aid of interpreters. The hard part was trying to find moments that looked somewhat authentic and genuine amid this gaggle of photographers and reporters.
In this image, two women are walking away from the press. The bright colors of their traditional garb clashed dramatically against the plainness of the sand. The way the monochromatic backdrop and sparse environment contrasted with their colorful clothing expressed the sense that they were facing a very empty future.
It was sad to see people leave all their belongings and end up in a situation where they didn’t have much more than tents and some water coming from the United Nations.
At some point, one of the guards became unhappy that I had photographed something. I noticed his irritation, but I just kept doing my job. As we returned to our vehicle, I could see that he was following us. We were in the last car in the convoy, and I could see him riding parallel to us, pointing an M60 machine gun in our direction.
We had made a big mistake being the last car in the convoy.
The gates that secured the camp closed, and we were separated from the rest of the convoy. We suddenly found ourselves surrounded by about 30 military men with AK-47s.
I pulled out my cell phone only to discover that I had no signal. And if I’d had a signal, George Bush wasn’t going to answer; and even if he did, the Delta forces would never come to save us.
Thirty guys with guns surrounded us. It’s at moments like these that you immediately lose the illusion of being invulnerable. The fact that you might see yourself as some unarmed idealist or objective observer doesn’t mean much of anything. These men with guns just don’t care.
I never felt more alone than at this moment in my life.
Thankfully, a female reporter from the Chicago Tribune started screaming at them in their dialect. She spoke Pashto!
They were not used to being screamed at by a woman, let alone a Westerner, and they certainly didn’t expect to hear her speaking in their own language. They were completely disarmed.
She convinced them that my fancy digital camera had already transmitted the photographs back to Washington, and that at this point they were only getting themselves in more trouble. We explained they should have let the armed man who had fixated on me get in trouble, because now all of them were putting themselves in deep water. After a very tense 25 minutes, they let us go.
It was the longest 25 minutes of my life.
Harsh Reality
As a photojournalist, you try to do your job with honor, and you try to stay as objective as you can. You come to the table with the purest of intentions. But ultimately, you’re on your own as a journalist; you’re no different than the people you’re covering, and not only can you become endangered as easily and as quickly as your subjects, but also you can in fact become a burden to others by becoming yet another victim, especially if you’re irresponsible.
There used to be this unspoken rule that journalists were off-limits. That has been chiseled away, as was painfully demonstrated with the untimely deaths of two great photojournalists, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, who were both killed in Libya in 2011. Prior to that, my friend Tyler Hicks and other journalists were captured and imprisoned by the Libyan government.
You have to be constantly aware that you’re walking around in a country or a community with cash and $5,000 to $20,000 worth of camera equipment on your body. You’re basically a walking ATM that represents the per capita yearly income of the entire town you’re walking into. And you’re completely unarmed.
Taking Risks
I nearly got myself killed again after making these images of two corpses in a hospital morgue.
Another journalist and I had heard that there had been some sort of uprising, and that the police had violently squashed it—by shooting a 12-year-old boy and an elderly man in the head. We confirmed that when we arrived at the morgue. It was clear to us that they had been executed, each with a bullet wound straight in the middle of their foreheads. I made my photographs, which, with the starkness of that room, spoke to the extreme severity of what had happened.
We were the first people to get that image. These were some of the first dead bodies we knew of. I’m sure there were others who had died before, but these were the first documented victims of the war in Pakistan.
Two bodies.
After that, we went and made the foolish mistake of trying to go back to the town where they had been shot. The smart thing we did was tell the other journalists where we were going, even though it meant giving up our story—our “exclusive.”
When the police met up with us, they were extremely angry with us for discovering what they had done. They tried to beat the crap out of us and at one point leveled AK-47s at our heads. In the midst of the chaos, we began to run.
Luckily, it was then that the other photographers—our friends—showed up and started to take pictures of the situation, which diffused it. Had those journalists not showed up, we could have easily been shot and buried with no one ever finding us. We would have simply disappeared without a trace.
Showing the Other Side
The reality of war is that it’s not always back-to-back fighting. It’s not nonstop confrontation. It includes a tremendous amount of calm, peace, and apparent normalcy, followed by intense chaos, and horror.
Even in the middle of war, men still have to get their hair cut and beards trimmed. This image tells the story of how life goes on in wartime.
It can be very weird when you know that while people are dying and big missions are being planned, life must go on. Here is a simple scene of the exterior of a barbershop. It speaks of the culture and the peacefulness of the people that are necessary to counterbalance the chaotic elements of war, such as the crazy guys burning effigies in the street.
Men getting haircuts in Pakistan.
Aerial photograph of the devastation caused by the high winds and heavy flooding in the greater New Orleans area following Hurricane Katrina.
ISO 800 f/6.3 1/2000 200m
Dangers at Home
Similarly, the setting of Hurricane Katrina back at home was absolutely as dangerous as a war zone. A primary reason for this was the complacency of journalists, and that there was absolutely no support for us.
I initially took on a different role in Katrina. Because I was one of the first people to arrive there, I became a kind of a logistics person, to a certain degree. And sometimes logistics involved very simple thinking.
When my friend and seasoned war photographer Tyler Hicks informed me that he was coming down to photograph in New Orleans, I asked him an important question: “Does your satellite phone work?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll fix it when I get there.”
“What do you mean ‘I’ll fix it when I get in there’? Who are you going call and how?”
There were no working phones. There was no cell service, and if your satellite phone didn’t work, you’d be stuck in the water.
It was the little logistical things like those that could kill you. And in New Orleans after Katrina had hit, the only working phones were actually the old phone booths, and you couldn’t call collect.
I made sure reporters and photographers had a few rolls of quarters, a ton of water, extra fuel, medical supplies, and, of course, food and clothing. To charge everything from their cameras and computers, they used the power from a car battery.
I also made sure everyone had a paper map so they could get around, because most of the streets were under water, and GPS units had become useless.
A lot of the journalists had been working in Iraq and Pakistan and received marching orders to come back to Katrina, but if they didn’t prepare, they were not only putting their own lives at risk but also they were going to be a burden to rescuers.
The infrastructure that we normally would have depended on had been literally washed away. So we had to figure out the logistics from scratch, and they were pretty massive in terms of documenting the impact of Hurricane Katrina.
Getting Access
After a few days of driving back and forth between New Orleans—or what was left of it—and Baton Rouge, we realized that having a helicopter would give me the advantage of showing a bit more of the scale of what was going on.
But what would have been easy to acquire in New York City was a difficult if not impossible thing to get during the aftermath of Katrina.
We had to make over 100 phone calls over two days to get a helicopter, because all of them were being used by rescue teams and the oil rig companies. Luckily, I was able to connect with two gentlemen from Kentucky who had come down to help rescue people. They were able to fly me around for a week. We’ve become very good friends.
They flew down from Louisville, Kentucky, just to help. It was a very small Robinson R44 helicopter, but it gave me the opportunity to reveal the scale of the submerged city and water damage from the air, a completely different perspective than what could be captured on the ground. It also gave me access to locations that were impossible to reach by boat or by car, or by any means of transportation other than a helicopter.
It allowed me to capture heart-breaking images including one of a woman being raised in a basket into a rescue helicopter. It’s a pretty powerful image to me in that it reflects a sense of the scale of the disaster.
I’ve always thought about how it must have felt for that woman to be hoisted up in a basket in her T-shirt and jeans, leaving everything she owned and knew beneath her.
Our helicopter provided us the perfect view from which to witness the scale of the devastation. I remember turning to one of the men in our helicopter, whose face had turned as white as a sheet. We were all left speechless.
Helicopter rescue following Hurricane Katrina.
ISO 800 f/6.3 1/2000 300mm
ISO 100 f/1.2 1/8000 85mm
Putting a Face on Tragedy
This is a photograph of a man who had stuck through the entire hurricane at a neighbor’s house to watch it for them, and who a year later was still digging and cleaning out his own home and that of his neighbors.
He was one of the guiding lights for the community of New Orleans. He demonstrated the resilience of its people, as well as how much they love their fellow residents and their culture—their music, food, and heritage. It’s absolutely insane that this man was still cleaning out his own home one year after the hurricane hit. You know, of course, he’d been helping other people out, but it gives you an idea of how massively destructive this thing was.
As a photographer, sometimes you have to document the devastation with an aerial image. But the risk is that when someone sees the immensity of such devastation, it can be too easy for them to just remove themselves and say, “This is too much.” Everything is gone. Everything is destroyed.
The reality is that these were people’s homes, their dreams, their lives, and that there were people like this man who were coming back and wanting to rebuild.
You absolutely need to put a face on tragedies, and on the story of that struggle and that kind of perseverance.
It’s not just about making factual images. It’s about documenting who, to me, are the real heroes—people who don’t just give up and move away. It’s much easier to leave your home if you have the means and go live somewhere else, or build a new one. It takes a lot more courage to try to dig out and rebuild a community that’s been wiped off the map either by war or natural disaster. I admire those people so much.
It’s moments like these that can easily and quickly lead to frustration and nervousness and fear. When you swell up with so much emotion, those very feelings will lead you to make a lot of bad photographs.
It’s always important for me to remember that I’m not just making photographs for myself, to satisfy the desire of my own ego, but to be there to help tell someone else’s story. It can be a big event like Katrina or Pakistan, but it could also be the everyday life of normal people. Those photos of the commonplace are important too, because they document our lives as we are today, in a very real manner. That’s the beauty of photography: over time, those images can and do become incredibly valuable.
Aerial view of the cleanup of flattened vehicles, buses, and refrigerators in a dump adjacent to the Lower 9th Ward.
ISO 500 f/4 1/1250 500mm
