Women Who Travel Podcast: Three Photojournalists on Revealing the Human Side of Conflict

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This week, Lale speaks with women who risk their lives to document conflict and catastrophe around the world—and who are all recipients of a Courage in Photojournalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. Listen to hear Cairo-based Nariman El-Mofty, who has been traveling through Yemen and Sudan, and Anastasia Taylor-Lind, whose work is focused on Ukraine, share stories of the human side of war, as well as a message from Samar Abu Elouf, a photojournalist from Gaza City.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi, there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this is another episode of Women Who Travel.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind: Only 15% of photojournalists are women, and the closer you get to the frontline geographically, the less women you find there.

LA: This week, we hear from women who risk their lives to document conflict and catastrophe around the world.

ATL: It's incredibly dangerous to be a photojournalist.

LA: They are recipients of a Courage in Photojournalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.

ATL: Fear is not your friend. Once you allow fear to overcome you, you can't think straight. So it's exceptionally dangerous to allow fear to overcome you. It's also a real challenge to allow it not to.

LA: The pictures that they're going to describe, which are often hard to look at and absorb, help us understand the impact of war and natural disasters, and perhaps also encourage some of us to take action.

ATL: The way I work isn't sort of like quick and snappy and at all aggressive actually. It's very slow.

Nariman El-Mofty:I really believe in having to take it all in to tell a story, and that's why I like staying longer and pushing, trying to be as present as I can.

LA: Photographs by honorees, Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Nariman El-Mofty have been published by some of the world's leading media outlets. But first, a statement from the winner, Samar Abu Elouf, who until recently was based in Gaza City. She continued to document what was happening to her community even after her home was destroyed and she was separated from her children. Samar has experienced trauma. She's lost friends and relatives. She's had to evacuate her home country and could not come to the US to accept her reward in person because of visa issues. This is what she wrote, especially for us at Women Who Travel. We hear Samar speaking in Arabic while Charlotte Fox from the International Women's Media Foundation reads the translation.

Samar Abu Elouf: [foreign language 00:02:39].

Charlotte Fox:I am Samar Abu Elouf, a photojournalist from Gaza City. Despite the difficult events, I am very happy to receive this award, which comes after the most difficult period of coverage I've endured as a journalist in 14 years and is due to the constant pressure and lack of safety, food and water, and communications technology. Despite all these difficult circumstances, I was, and I am determined to deliver courage in photojournalism.

LA: It's a privilege that Samar sent that to us. You can see her award-winning photos focusing on Palestinian mothers and children in The New York Times as part of her series, Gaza Under Attack. Sitting in front of me today is the British-Swedish photojournalist, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, who's come to New York to receive her honorary award. Her winning collection of work is called 5K from the Frontline.

You landed in New York yesterday?

ATL: Yeah, yesterday evening.

LA: Okay. So how are you feeling? I'm sorry the weather is so abominable.

ATL: The weather is making me feel very at home.

LA: I was going to say, "Welcome to England." You traveled across the Atlantic to just be back home.

ATL: I just realized as I got in the taxi to come down here that I had optimistically packed my sunglasses. What a mistake.

LA: How long are you here for?

ATL: Two days.

LA: Okay. Yeah, it's going to rain the whole time. I'm so sorry.

ATL: You don't need to apologize for that.

LA: So you're based in the UK. In London?

ATL: That's right. Yeah. Hackney.

LA: Okay. Well, I know Hackney very, very well, but I imagine you're not home that much.

ATL: I travel about half of the year.

LA: Okay.

ATL: Yeah.

LA: What did last year look like for you?

ATL: Well, since the full-scale Russian Invasion of Ukraine, I've only worked in Ukraine. And as fastidious and responsible as I am with the hostile environments training still today in Ukraine, anything can fall on your head at any moment. And that's just the reality of working in this space right now. And sometimes the reason why some people survive and others don't almost always is just a matter of luck.

So what do we expect to see in photographs of war? We expect to see men firing Kalashnikovs over brick walls. We expect to see women wailing beside coffins. We expect to see people standing in front of tanks. We expect to see families with children carrying their belongings and bags or piled onto their cars, moving down roads. These tropes of photojournalism exist because they're true. All cliché comes from truth, right? And at the same time, how can we do our best to challenge these pre-existing stereotypical roles? Because I think they sometimes hurt communities that we're trying to represent. Or can me, a professional photojournalist, photograph them in a way with love and tenderness and ordinariness and some of those beautiful qualities that we all know from family album photography without the distancing and the sort of editorialization of people in a war zone?

LA: I'm curious, and I imagine listeners will be too, as to... You're based in London. How do you get from London to Ukraine, and how do you get into Ukraine?

ATL: That's a really good question. It used to be really easy. I would fly from Heathrow to Kiev on a British Airways flight. There were several flights a day. Since the full-scale invasion, airspace over Ukraine is closed. And so from London, I fly to Poland where I take an overnight train from Shimshal, a town on the Polish border to Kiev.

Mostly I'm working in Donbas, the eastern region of Ukraine. And most train stations along the front line have been attacked by the Russians, and so are not operational. So in order to reach Donbas, I would then go travel by road from Kiev. So three days, three days door-to-door from London to, let's say, Kramatorsk.

Ukrzaliznytsia, Ukrainian Railways is just the most pleasant experience. They have these beautiful sleeper trains and they have good coffee, they have fresh cookies.

LA: You're describing the opposite of British Rail-

ATL: Oh my God.

LA: ... and Amtrak in the US.

ATL: I'm familiar with both, and this is exactly the opposite of it. My heart is in Ukraine, and since I've been photographing the war for 10 years now, since the war started in Ukraine.

LA: Which I feel like people who aren't impacted by that war often forget. And when we talk about the Ukraine-Russia war, we talk about the last two years. But you said it's 10 years, right? How much were you there and spending time there photographing Ukraine pre-the invasion?

ATL: So I reported on the Revolution of Dignity, which deposed a then President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Within a week, Russia had invaded, occupied, and illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula. I was photographing and reporting a lot in Ukraine in 2014, 2015, and then what you can call the in-between years. And as you can imagine, the longer this conflict dragged on, the harder it was as a journalist to find editorial support for stories about-

LA: People move on, right?

ATL: Right. But of course, all that changed at the beginning of 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.

LA: What sort of stories were you looking to tell and how's that changed?

ATL: So I've been working with Alisa Sopova, who's a Ukrainian journalist, a writer, and also an anthropologist from Donetsk City, which has been occupied since 2014. Together, we've worked on a series of projects, but the unifying sort of theme is to look for ways that ordinary people resist war in small daily acts of, let's say, normal life. For example, I've followed the Grinik family for the last six years and watched their two kids, Kirill and Miroslava, grow up. Both kids were born after the war started in 2014, and neither have known peace.

The first summer I met them in 2018, the family took Alisa and I to a popular picnic spot in a horse and cart. They have the only horse in town, and have a picnic. And we also foraged for mushrooms in the woods. They weren't able to go to the forest next to their house any more because of landmine contamination. So they took us to another spot. Every summer we meet the Griniks. We now have a ritual of going picnicking. And the last time I saw them, the summer of 2023, the family were living in the Poltava region where they'd fled after the full-scale Russian invasion. They'd just discovered that their home had been completely destroyed. And Nikolai, the father, was absent because he'd been conscripted into the Ukrainian army where he's serving in the army now. So I met up with Olga, his wife, and the two kids, and we went to a new picnicking spot.

LA: Is there a photograph that you've taken during this project that you are particularly proud of? And could you tell me the story about it?

ATL: You know, it's honestly hard to think of pictures I'm proud of. An image that stayed with me, I photographed Elena over many years together with her husband, Rodion. They lived in a small village called Opytne between Avdiivka and Donetsk City. Opitne eventually was occupied by Russian forces at the end of 2022. And just before it fell, Elena was in her backyard. She was weeding the watermelon patch when she heard an incoming shell. This is one of the things, for example, that we are taught on hostile environment trainings, the sound of an incoming shell versus the sound of an out coming one.

And of course, Elena didn't have to go on any hostile environments training to know that. People who live along the contact line know very well the sound of an incoming shell. It whistles. And as she turned to run into the house, because she knew it was close, it landed in her backyard and two pieces of shrapnel hit her in her left buttock and at the top of her spine. And it took several hours till she could be evacuated and taken to hospital in Pokrovsk. And we went to hospital with her. She was having the dressings on her wounds changed. I made a picture of her lying on the hospital gurney in a room with a soft blue wall and this also soft summer light coming in the window, and she had to lie on her stomach while her bandages were changed.

My relationship with Ukraine is tied up in the deep friendships that I have with people there. I had no idea when I first visited Ukraine in 2010 that I would end up having this long reporting relationship with the political events that were taking place there. My mum gave me a Ukrainian name for no other reason than she liked it. So I like to think in some small way that it was fate I would end up working in Ukraine where everybody knows my name. Anastasia or Nastia for short.

LA: You make me cry. That's so lovely.

ATL: Thank you so much.

LA: Coming up, the other honoree of the Courage and Photojournalism Award, NE, who describes some of her winning images.

Samar Abu Elouf:

[foreign language 00:13:44].

LA: And now to Pulitzer Prize winning Nariman El-Mofty, who's based in Cairo. Her images are from Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and Yemen.

Your work has been praised for being so immersive the way that you tell your stories. Could you describe one photograph that you feel particularly proud of? I feel like that probably changes, but right now.

NE: Right now, I would say it's a Yemeni mother when she lifted her veil to show me her collarbones from the hunger. That was really something. I only have two frames of that, and that was it. And it's a really dear picture to my heart because this photograph, you won't see it in a place like Yemen, like a woman showing a part of her body to share to the world to see. She covered her face so her identity isn't shown, but she was really brave to show that to me. And it was a really powerful moment.

LA: How do you avoid taking a photo that's been taken before?

NE: I avoid taking it. No, because I see it. I've seen how it's been done, and I try to just stop it. I'm conscious of trying to take a step back. So I try to have like a clean slate.

LA: And resist those temptations when you see that.

NE: Exactly. And try my best to resist that.

LA: We're talking about some sort of unthinkably, horrific circumstances that you're photographing in, but your photographs often can be incredibly beautiful as well in terms of the colors and the composition. How much, when you are entering into these places and communities or war zones, when you're taking a photograph in that moment, how much are you actually thinking about the composition? How much are you thinking about framing that image?

NE: I do see frames, and I do see the stories, and I do see the expressions of people and the way they're talking and what they're talking about, the way they're saying it. So I think what we do as photographers, I mean, we stop time. Right? Everyone does. Now, everyone does literally. And that's actually a really profound idea to think about and it's very powerful. So I think there needs to be, or at least for me, the respect and giving it that time.

LA:

When you say respect, is it giving respect to the place that you are in and the people that you're photographing?

NE: Exactly. Respect to the environment, to the landscape, to everything around you, to the people of course. Like, everything in that environment, not just dipping your toe in and leaving.

LA: What sorts of stories do you like telling or do you feel drawn to? Are there examples of stories you've told recently that really show the sorts of things that you are pulled towards?

NE: Yeah. I mean, the most recent one was just published on The New York Times, and it was these wounded children from Gaza who were being evacuated from Egypt to Italy. And I followed their journey from Egypt to Italy. Being with them every single day for hours on end and seeing their new lives in Italy in general, I do love these really character-driven stories.

LA: Could you talk me through that journey a little bit? I mean, you said it was a relatively short one, eight, nine days, but a lot must have happened within that journey, going from Egypt to Italy with these children.

NE: I mean, each family had different journeys from inside Gaza to Egypt. But then when they met in Egypt, one of the biggest things for me was that no one really knew anything about Italy. But it's basically they were finding things out as they went. Like, even in terms of their injuries and so on. There's this one five-year-old girl who had her leg amputated in Gaza, but it was amputated really badly. One of the doctors said it was like a butcher did it because of the circumstances, and there was no alcohol so they couldn't clean it. So her leg had this fungus from the bottom and they had to do another amputation. It was really, really tough for sure.

LA: Do you think photographs telling this sort of story can help shift perspectives?

NE: I don't really believe in changing the world, but I think in a story like this, from the comments I got, it kind of humanized it in a way to the suffering of these children and women who are civilians.

LA: Clearly you do see your storytelling as being able to contribute to some sort of incremental change.

NE: Yeah, yeah. Incremental is a very good way of saying it, I think. And I'm also documenting my generation's history too, You know? So it's not... Like, a story like that is not obviously about me or personal, but it's our generation. Right?

LA: You've mentioned a few times about gaining the trust of your subjects. How do you do that?

NE: When there's a news story and it's really fast, people are really overwhelmed and you're there. And sometimes people will love that you're there because they want to let it out, and some people will hate it that you're there. It depends on who you are and the situation and what's happening. So that's different. But in terms of gaining trust, I never have my camera on me right in someone's face when I first meet them. You know? I take it slow, talk to them, let them know who I am, be transparent about everything, and see how it goes. You know? And get a feel of also what they want to do. And more recently, I'm kind of letting go more and more in terms of not trying to sit and convince you.

LA: And also I imagine takes a lot of more experience and confidence to get to that point, but you want to photograph someone feels comfortable with you being photographed, and if they're not, then I suppose you have to ask yourself, who is this photo for?

NE: Yeah. But sometimes there's something so profound in front of you and you've traveled for hours and you have a budget and there's so much on the line, and then letting it go is really, really tough. It's really humbling. Let's just say that it'll humble you to your knees to the ground.

LA: Is there a time that particularly humbled you?

NE: Yeah. There's one in my past when I was much younger. And you know what FGM is? Female genital-

LA: Yes. Female genital mutilation.

NE: Yeah. There was a story about this 13-year-old girl who died from the procedure, and it was done at the clinic.

LA: Where was this?

NE: At a town in Egypt.

LA: Okay.

NE: And so the town is like, what, five hours away from Cairo and our offices in Cairo. And we wanted to speak to the grandmother and see what happened and so on. Anyway, we went and saw the grandmother and she opened the door for us to go in. She saw a camera, and then she started crying and crying, crying, crying. I told my colleague, "Stop," and I hugged her. I told her, "Don't worry, we were here to tell your granddaughter's story." She's like, "I can't take, I can't believe she's gone." She was grieving. And maybe she had agreed, but when she saw us, she's like, "No, I just can't do this. I'm grieving. I'm tired. I don't want this."

I just told my colleague, "Let's just leave it. Let's go." And that was really unorthodox. And being really young in AP, it wasn't the correct thing to do, let's just say that. But I-

LA: Correct in terms of what? The AP expected of you?

NE: In terms of... Yes, yes. It was not correct. You know? You have a job to go... You need to at least sit and convince her and do these things, but I really couldn't. Obviously, I apologized to my manager because when you come back with nothing... I mean, but now it's different for me. Now it's just... You know? I make that choice. I try to see where this goes with me and the person in front of me.

LA: Coming up, the award that honors Samar, Nariman, and Anastasia was established after the death of a photojournalist from Germany. She was killed in Afghanistan 10 years ago. We go to the awards ceremony in New York where friends and family have flown in to celebrate her life and her work.

Anja Niedringhaus worked for the Associated Press. She died while covering the Afghan elections when an Afghan policeman opened fire on her car. Nariman worked with her at the AP.

NE: When I came in AP, Anja was one of these women that I really did look up to. And I was an editor, by the way, before being a photographer. I was on the desk in Cairo for the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan. So actually when she was in Afghanistan, I was dealing with her work. And we would talk a lot and I would tell her, "I want to do this." And I've never met her in person actually, but we talked a lot. And she was incredibly supportive and really, really tough. I mean, this woman really paved the way. What I did experience was the grief when she passed away. From all her colleagues who were my managers at the time, seeing these really grown, respectable men, grieve like that. And that's when I understood her legacy, the way they spoke about her. She's done all her work. It was really incredible.

LA: How did it shift it exactly?

NE: It basically made me understand the power of giving yourself time and people really getting to know you and your work throughout all these years. You're very humanized for people. Right? I see people who maybe haven't even met her, but have stories about when she covered Bosnia and their families were in her photographs and they were children at the time and how they remember. You know what I mean? That's really profound. Let's just say that it matured me when I was in my early 20s.

LA: A day later, we went along to the awards at the Bronx Documentary Center. There was an exhibition of Anja's black and white photographs of military and civilians in Afghanistan. 160 people crowded into the center to see more work from Anja on a big screen and to hear her colleagues talk about her courage and her humor.

Thank you to Anastasia and Nariman.

ATL: Freelancers, like everybody, are required to have hostile environment training in order to get war zone insurance. Hostile environments training is super expensive, but there are loads of amazing organizations, including the International Women's Media Foundation who fund this training. It's my heart that leads my photography. I'm a freelance. It's not really like saying, "Oh, could you go here? Or Could you go there to photograph these people or this issue?" I get to choose at this stage in my career thankfully.

NE: You're completely in it and alive in it, and that's how you thrive. Also, with these maybe internal wounds or injuries or whatever you want to call it, you do get hurt by it because it's a relationship. The camera does, of course, act as a sort of a shield. But I do get hurt by it.

LA: And we are so grateful to Samar for writing to us.

Samar Abu Elouf: [foreign language 00:27:21].

Charlotte Fox: Despite all these difficult circumstances I was and I am determined to deliver courage in photojournalism.

LA: That's it for today.

Next week, traveling cook Yasmin Fahr tells us why a month ago she sold all her possessions in America and arrived in Menorca off the coast of Spain, a beautiful tiny island, which is now her home.

I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram, @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, Nick Pitman, and James Yost. The show's mixed by Amar Lal, Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast, head of Global Audio. See you next week.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler