By Tracy McVeigh
For female photojournalists the past six weeks have been a particularly brutal reminder of the dangers they face. Two photographers have recently been killed while making a record of the suffering on humanity’s most extreme edges, documenting the otherwise hidden effects of war on people left to endure tremendous hardship and pain.
German photographer Anja Niedringhaus was shot dead at a checkpoint in Afghanistan on April 4 by a man in police uniform, and just four weeks later, a young French photographer, Camille Lepage, died of gunshot wounds in the Central African Republic.
“This is a profession of the brave and the passionate, those committed to the mission of bringing to the world information that is fair, accurate and important,” said Gary Pruitt, President of the Associated Press, after Niedringhaus’s death. “Anja Niedringhaus met that definition in every way.”
Alice Gabriner is a picture editor formerly at Time magazine and now at National Geographic, where about 12 of the 60 freelance photographers are women. The National Geographic Society has chosen to celebrate its 125th anniversary year by showing the work of 11 female photographers in an exhibition entitled Women of Vision (the exhibition runs all year in various venues across the US) because, says its vice-curator Kathryn Keane: “For the last decade some of our most powerful stories have been produced by a new generation of photojournalists who are women.”
Gabriner has worked closely with the world’s leading female photojournalists, from Lynsey Addario to Kitra Cahana and the responsibility that comes with commissioning people to travel to conflict zones is huge. “We do send these people into danger and of course I think about the risks,” says Gabriner.
“I’m always astonished by the bravery of these women. I’m getting calls all the time from people who just want a job, desperately want to go here or there and are willing to take the risks and so I’m happy to be able to get them doing a story they want to do. It’s in retrospect, even years afterwards, you think about the risks. Photo editors are in a difficult position. Photography is a tough business and the turnover is so great, and people want to get into places that nobody else gets.”
Gabriner adds that the worst scenario would be commissioning a photographer she barely knew, so that if anything happened to them on the ground, she wouldn’t even know their next of kin.
“I like to try and meet people, to try and get a sense of a person before a commission. Make sure that they understand the risk. I’ve stopped working with people in the past who I thought were too immature. The truth is that photographers take great risks, but nobody wants to die.”
Women in war photography are a relatively new development. But they have played a vital role in the development of photography generally, from the Scot Clementina Maude’s pioneering portraiture of Victorian ladies in the 1860s to Londoner Christina Broom — the UK’s first female press photographer — and her startlingly atmospheric pictures of first world war soldiers leaving for the front, and the American Dorothea Lange’s famous, harrowing images of migrants during the great depression, which helped to change the public perception of poverty in the US in the 1930s.
One of the first women widely known to have taken her camera on to a battlefield, certainly from the western world, was New Yorker Margaret Bourke-White, who was allowed to travel with American troops during the Second World War and later photographed the Korean war and India’s civil rights struggles under Mahatma Gandhi.
But women still remain a minority in the craft and especially in war photography. Yet, said Gabriner, women often bring something unique to their picture. “Access can sometimes be in women’s favour, especially in Middle Eastern cultures, where they can get inside a home much more easily than a man.
Female photojournalists are often telling the stories that are hidden from male eyes, and would otherwise never be covered. Only by getting inside homes in Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban could anyone find out how women were living their lives, while access to other culturally sensitive issues like child marriage and female genital mutilation, while difficult for a western female, are a non-starter for a man.
Gabriner adds: “But equally I think there are situations where it is just not possible for women to work. There was a point in Baghdad for example, when things were very violent and male photographers were having to attempt to blend in with locals – it was never going to be possible for a woman and I had to pull out a woman from the base we had there. But I’d say in most cases I wouldn’t consider the gender of a photographer.”
Gabriner has worked with many of the women featured here. She says: “They’ve all worked very hard to get where they are. Stephanie Sinclair is a fantastically dogged reporter, she just never gives up. Lynsey Addario is the same. She combines an enormous human empathy and personal patience in her pictures. But it is tough, you have to stay ahead of the game and keep proving yourself. I’ve seen a lot of good people fall away. In the past if you had a name, you were fine but now, if your style doesn’t evolve, if you don’t keep marketing yourself, chances are you will be forgotten very quickly.
“A great photograph is something you feel, in its compassion, its light and colour, its aesthetic. A photographer recently said to me ‘I don’t take pictures with my eyes, I take pictures with my body’”.
In an interview with the photographic blog PetaPixel last October, Camille Lepage talked about her work in South Sudan, where she had gone to live and cover the under-reported conflict in the Central African Republic. She said: “Since I was very little, I’ve always wanted to go and live in a place where no one else wants to go, and cover in-depth conflict-related stories… I can’t accept that people’s tragedies are silenced simply because no one can make money out of them.”The Guardian
Maggie Steber
The documentary photographer Maggie Steber was born in 1949 in Texas. She has worked in 64 countries and her work in Haiti – she was sent there to cover riots in 1986, became gripped by the country and has returned every year since – was made into the book Dancing on Fire. Steber won critical praise for Rites of Passage, her documentary of her mother’s descent into dementia. She has been awarded the Leica medal of excellence and has worked for the Guardian, Newsweek, Life and National Geographic. She lives in Miami.
How do you deal with the risk inherent in your work?
When you’re young you don’t think about it at all. You’re fearless, you take more risks. And of course a lot of people cover wars to kickstart their careers, to get noticed, and sometimes very sad things can happen. But I do think that if you are going to do it, to have this kind of career, then you do it earlier rather than later, when you are fearless.
I think as we get older we do think more about death, although for myself I’m certainly glad that life doesn’t last for ever – that would be exhausting. I’ve had a very rich life and a magical life. If I died tomorrow I’d die happy. I’m a little nobody from Texas and look where I’ve been – 64 countries, all that breaking news, joy and sorrow, and what I have seen. Who knew?
When have you felt most at risk in the field?
I was almost beheaded once by guys with machetes in Haiti, but interestingly enough it wasn’t in the obvious places that I’ve felt at risk. The most scared I’ve been was of an African guide who pulled a knife and tried to drag me into a cave when I was doing a story about the history of the slave trade in Senegal. That was in a nice place, a pretty island, not at war. And I’ve had more embarrassing sexual assaults on the New York City subway than anywhere.
Stephanie Sinclair
Born in 1973, Stephanie Sinclair is a New Yorker who studied journalism at the University of Florida before beginning her career at the Chicago Tribune, which sent her to cover the Iraq war. She moved to the Middle East, working as a freelance for six years and beginning what has become a decade-long interest in documenting underage marriage. She has worked in Yemen, Afghanistan, Tanzania and Ethiopia. She was part of a Tribune team that won a Pulitzer prize for its investigation of the airline industry in 2000 and has also won three World Press Photo awards. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Why did documenting child marriage become such a focus for your work?
I started in 2003 when I was asked to cover the issue of self-immolation by young women in Afghanistan for a women’s magazine. I ran into multiple girls who had been married underage. While it wasn’t the reason girls were setting themselves on fire, it was a common factor in a lot of the cases.
I really believe in this project and as I’ve been working on it for more than a decade I have seen a lot of changes. It’s enormously satisfying when you finally get your images out there and I believe they can communicate and be a catalyst for change. There’s a global campaign now against underage marriage and I like to think I’m a spoke in that wheel. I think a photograph can have an incredible amount of power.
Does your gender have an impact on your work, and have other women paved the way for you in photojournalism?
I definitely think there’s an advantage to being a woman. You have to play to your strengths in any art form and you bring who you are into your work so I bring being a woman. With child marriage, a man couldn’t do the same work in that kind of area at all. I have access as a woman to stories that my male counterparts don’t.
There are several women photographers who have inspired me. Lynsey Addario was doing great work in Afghanistan when I was still a newspaper photographer in Chicago and I was very inspired by her work. Jodi Cobb, the first female photographer to work for National Geographic [and one of the first to cross China when it reopened to the west] is someone I look up to very much. And Donna Ferrato’s work on domestic violence in the US had a real influence on me. A lot of work has come before me that women have done that’s both inspired me and made me feel I could be part of it as well.
Alixandra Fazzina
Alixandra Fazzina was born in east London in 1974 and has worked as in eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, focusing on conflict and its humanitarian consequences. Her work has been published in the Observer and Guardian as well as in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and Stern. She has won several awards covering the plight of Somali refugees in east Africa and in 2010 won the UNHCR Nansen Refugee award — the first journalist to win the humanitarian prize. She is based in Pakistan but has recently returned to the UK.
In the past five weeks two female photographers have been killed. How have those tragedies affected you?
It’s something I have thought about in the last days since I left Pakistan three weeks ago. Anja Niedringhaus was in a car with reporter Kathy Gannon – who I know well – when she was killed, and Kathy was hurt, and they’re both very experienced. So that’s very close to home for me. I’ve been thinking about Camille Lepage. She was 26. People seem very shocked by that, but at that age we feel indestructible. Immune. We all know there is a risk and we try hard to minimise it. But there’s a lot of pressure on people to come back with the goods, to get the picture and people are really laying their lives on the line. Somewhere like Syria where staff correspondents and photographers are being pulled out because of the dangers, it’s left to freelancers to cover without the support or the experience, its very worrying.
I have a baby now so that makes me think twice and I wouldn’t go to Syria – it’s too complicated a story and I don’t know it well enough. But people run risks crossing the road in London,. There are a lot of irrational fears in day-to-day life, even if you never go anywhere near a war zone. If you want to tell people’s stories and you’re listening to things that are very powerful, it’s hard to see yourself as anything but a mouthpiece.
How do you deal with risk and trauma?
Post-traumatic stress goes with the territory. I’ve been shot at on numerous occasions and had more than a few kidnap attempts. I’ve had a few run-ins with the Taliban, who have specifically targeted me. There’s a lot of times in my career I have been really, really scared. It can really get to you and still now, if I’m here in London and I see someone walking down the street and I can’t see their hands I start to worry they’ve got a gun. I get anxious sitting in a cafe with my back to the door, that kind of thing. I don’t get depressed in the field, the camera can act as a bit of a barrier, but when you’re back and are maybe going through your image sheets and you suddenly remember that person, it can really hit home.
