The Shattered Lens

by Jonathan Alpeyrie

  I continued making contacts in the world of photography and journalism. People became interested in making a film of my experience. I was alive, healthy, free.

  All the same, I’d get off my motorcycle as I went from appointment to appointment in Manhattan, park it in some illegal spot, taking off the license plate so the meter maids couldn’t track the bike to my name, slip off my helmet, and simply zone out as I went to where I needed to be. I’d find myself in the middle of some small talk at a social event and images of destruction would pop up in front of me as I spoke, truncating the conversation in midsentence. I listened to people explaining potential projects. I pitched a host of stories I was only half-interested in shooting. And all the while my mind was in some space between the captivity of the dark room in Syria, wondering if I’d get beaten or torn to pieces by a mortar, and that near-palpable glory beaming out of young soldiers’ eyes before the grind of war numbed them to the myths that had incited them to take up a weapon.

  “You need a plan B,” my father said.

  But most plan Bs looked very unappetizing—like a hot breakfast that’s been sitting on the table for hours. I couldn’t see myself in any kind of office situation where I had to show up every day and follow a protocol that was tantamount to being handcuffed to a bedpost by the window. It struck me that that was how most people lived—and wanted to live—chained to a comfortable bed with decent company, next to a window from which they could watch the drama of the world unfold. I still needed to break out and plunge into that drama. I’d been spoiled by the chance to make a living doing this work straight out of college, and now certain situations were hard to accept. Maybe if I found the right woman, settled down, had children. Many conflict reporters and photographers give up the edgier aspects of their trade with the arrival of kids. But I wasn’t there yet. That edge still beckoned. Something was still roiling inside me and I suspected it was connected to a wave of history poised to come crashing down. Whatever it was, it was keeping me from committing to anything that didn’t feed that sense of imminent peril I’d developed antennas for.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER WAS LESS DIPLOMATIC, more brutal with her advice. “You’re crazy if you want to go back. An idiot.” I didn’t even have to tell her. She could often sense what was churning inside me before even I was fully aware of it.

  She came to New York and stayed with me for about six weeks. She’d helped me find the one-bedroom apartment I was living in. But if I ever intended to settle into a bobo existence (French slang for “bourgeois-bohemian”), I’d need more space. I started thinking about selling the apartment and finding something bigger for the same price, farther uptown in Harlem, or even the Bronx.

  My mother had a knack for entering unknown territory and sussing the ins and outs immediately. She’d spent her youth on the road, traveling through Asia and the Americas. One time she had even cropped her hair short and traveled through Anatolian Turkey as a man.

  If from my father I inherited a pragmatic analytical side, my mother passed on to me an uncontainable passion for life and adventure. So it was a bit contradictory that she was telling me to stop chasing wars. If anyone understood the rush I felt, it was her.

  She liked to kid me about how lazy I was as a baby. I didn’t walk until I was about eighteen months. “You just reached up with your arms waiting for someone to pick you up . . . And just like now you wouldn’t listen to anyone. You were deaf then, and you still pretend to be deaf.”

  It was true. I was almost totally deaf as a child. The teachers in nursery school noticed I didn’t interact with the others. I just sat in the corner and drew pictures. They called in my mother to tell her, and she said, “Maybe he’s deaf?” Sure enough, my parents took me to the doctor and I was deaf. I had to have four operations over the course of the years. Now I can hear almost perfectly—although a few times when I was too close to an RPG going off, I had a ringing in my ears for weeks and my hearing got damaged.

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH MY MOTHER told me I was crazy to go back and my father tried to corral me with reason into a safer career, they both understood my compulsion. Each of my parents in his or her own way enjoyed the thrill of taking calculated risks that required a certain amount of skill and savvy. My mother traveled solo to places most women would avoid altogether, and she was fearless in confrontations with anyone that crossed her. My father, too, liked to push himself in certain areas. When he was younger he would often have to drive from Brussels to Paris, office to office, as fast as he could in his BMW. This was in the days before accurate photo controls for speeding, which are now ubiquitous on European highways. He and his friends would compete to see who was fastest. My father managed the two-hundred-mile trip in two hours and three minutes. Only his business partner managed a faster time with one hour and fifty-seven minutes.

  For sure there was a deep strain of risk-taking embedded in my DNA. But on a more superficial level, I can’t deny that was I still caught up in the mystique of the combat photographer, the romanticism. There’s an element of freedom that inevitably forces you to push your limits and confront your fears. You have to be both quick and cool, right in the middle of things and totally invisible. You move through a theater in which the laws of society are upended or annulled altogether, and you need to figure out what the code of behavior is in any given context and adapt your own code to it instantly.

  I grew up with images of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape fleeing from the Germans toward Switzerland and finishing with that classic-yet-futile motorcycle jump. The combat photographer has a lot in common with someone who rides a motorcycle. There’s a willingness to be exposed to danger, and the sense of freedom involved in reaching a destination—or just riding for the sake of it—often becomes an end in itself.

  Combining the two—riding a bike through the world’s no-go zones—seemed to me the ultimate adrenaline rush. I had images of Sean Flynn (the actor Errol Flynn’s son) and Dana Stone riding their motorbikes into Cambodia just before they vanished forever in 1970.

  So even though there are always nobler reasons for living the life of the combat photographer—like showing the world ignored pockets of injustice or chronicling history for posterity—you can’t deny the simple fact that it’s cool. Never have I felt so alive and free and grateful and in touch with the cosmic forces jostling for power as when I’ve been photographing soldiers fighting for their lives and those of their compatriots. And I know most of my colleagues feel the same.

  * * *

  SO AS I READJUSTED to my previous life in New York, I kept one eye glued to the news. While I was being held captive in Syria, Egypt’s democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, led by Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown by popular protests that led to a military coup. Now a new general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was playing pharaoh—and he was determined to root out any opposition. Two years of turmoil since the Egyptian revolution had been enough.

  Obviously the Muslim Brotherhood was not happy about its brief and incompetent rule getting cut short, so they tried to protest. They set up camps in squares all over the country, hoping to ignite another uprising like Tahrir Square. The biggest one was in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. But Sisi would have none of it. On August 14, 2013, after halfhearted negotiations failed, Sisi sent the military into the camps, where an estimated six hundred to a thousand protesters were killed in what’s come to be known as the Rabaa Massacre.

  In November of the same year, protests started in Ukraine after their corrupt president backed out of an association agreement with the European Union. Tens of thousands of people gathered in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan.

  Something was brewing. Something’s always brewing somewhere in the world: oppression, discontent, revolt, basic bloodlust.

  As I’ve noted before, my mother named me after Jonathan Harker, the character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who travels to Transylvania and meets the fearsome count determined to wreak havoc througho
ut England. Harker has no pretensions of being a hero, but in the end he is instrumental in killing the vampire who is the embodiment in human form of all that is evil.

  Today’s real vampires, in my limited experience, are fat warlords and clerics commanding God-addled kids who wield Kalashnikovs and RPGs, convincing them to don explosive vests with promises of heaven. The warlords feed off these boys’ blood and the light beaming from their eyes as they all get drunk on mere motes of Allah’s omnipotence.

  Usually there’s no visible Dracula out there to zero in on. At most some camouflaged movement behind buildings or trees, or a human form imagined as the source of a whistling mortar, a helicopter rotor’s high-speed throb in the distance, a plane shrieking by to blast out your little rabbit warren. Still, we all need to personify evil and exalt our devils. And the real personification starts inside each of us—in the first nervous twitch, in the frustration that comes of self-righteous indignation left unrectified.

  In our struggle with evil we deal less with vampire fangs than with absence—a vast free-floating void, which our nature abhors even as we are secretly sucked into it. You really feel it when things are calm in a war situation. You see it in the soldiers’ various tics, their commanders’ anxious laughter. It hums beneath the calm as pure potentiality. A compulsion to act, defend—in short, to kill—that is almost palpable.

  By most ethical standards that compulsion to act is evil. But it’s a very attractive evil. There’s also a more banal evil born of absence—when nobody acts, nobody says this is not right, not good. This type of evil is often confused with ignorance or stupidity—and too often justified as tolerance.

  I keep wondering how long I can sit back and observe so much human folly without acting. My worst times in captivity were when I felt powerless. Now that I was free, the prospect of inaction, like nothing else, carried me back to that sense of impotence.

  THE SIREN CALL OF VIOLENCE

  YOU FOLLOW THE NEWS. You know something is happening in some far-flung place, an event or upheaval that could alter the tide of history—or at least your blindered vision of it—and you wish you were there. You come from a society in which the only thing people still hold sacred is the right to have fun, to be entertained. Our only value is to have the means—usually money or fame—required to obtain the consumer goods and services that will enable such fun. All other rights are negotiable, contingent on the freedom to amuse ourselves.

  Those who would destroy our society hold an angry idol sacred. And as things stand now, they will defeat us because they are willing to die for their idol. We won’t die for fun—only of it.

  * * *

  FOR SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER I was released, I watched videos of combat from Syria almost every day. I’d watch the rebels open fire with their AK-47s and RPGs, screaming “Allahu Akbar,” and I could practically smell the gunpowder wafting through my well-lit uptown apartment. I kept following the rapid rise of Daesh, or ISIS as it’s called in the Anglo world (I don’t like calling them by the name of a goddess). I knew something like that would happen. Even the rebels who had kidnapped me, who were ostensibly moderate, were becoming more radicalized by the day. Before the uprising many of them were clean-shaven and drank alcohol, veterans of Bashar’s army or police force, or simple students looking to get a foothold in an increasingly globalized world. By the time this war is over, many of those still alive will probably make Osama bin Laden look like a libertine.

  A few of my closest friends kept asking if I was okay, if I needed help. I was zoning out a lot, losing the train of conversations as my thoughts kept wandering back to the images I’d been watching on my computer, which brought me back to the images I’d been trying to capture for years.

  But I needed to watch those videos. I needed the adrenaline I’d had there when everything I did was a matter of life and death, from the way I cut a tomato to how I took a shower and shit.

  Oddly enough, even though I’d just been as close to hell as most humans ever get, I missed it. I’d sit at my desk in the evenings after having spent the day Skyping with others involved in some hostage situation and I’d surf back and forth from combat videos to the news. Arab Spring gone awry. Democracy in Iraq a bloody farce. Waves of migrants capsizing in the Mediterranean, washing up on Europe’s shores. I’d play with a pen as I watched the images and doodle shapes that reminded me of the maps I’d chip out from the peeling paint in the Light House, conquering the world in my mind while I was cuffed to the bed. Everywhere I went I’d see those shapes: half-torn posters in the subway, the last bits of guacamole in a bowl at a taco joint, even in a piece of skin scraped off from a spill on my motorbike. That’s what happens: you start to miss some of your captors. They even have a name for it, a “syndrome,” the Stockholm syndrome. Those guys were in my life almost every minute, 24/7 for eighty-one days. I missed Mej, Fares and Noor. Crazy as it sounds, I even missed Abu Talal, even though I hated him. You spend so much time with them in a state of heightened awareness, and suddenly they’re not there anymore. You even start to miss your very captivity.

  EGYPT IN THE ARAB WINTER

  DURING THE TIME I was a hostage I made a lot of promises, vows: Oh, if I ever get out I’ll never be a war photographer again, I’ll become a sort of peacenik, a better person, more patient, less judgmental, more forgiving, patch things up with that cousin I fell out with, help the infirm and crippled cross the street . . . These vows took on religious overtones. Vows that might help me get out alive, be reborn.

  I actually fulfilled many of the vows. But as for changing jobs, it wasn’t that easy.

  My first forays back into journalism came in collaboration with a writer, Dorothée Moisan, who had interviewed me for a book she was writing on political abductions for ransom. She was very smart and hardworking. When I went to Minneapolis, she came along and we did an article about the Somali community there and how terrorist elements find fertile ground for recruitment in various Muslim diasporas.

  Later, toward the end of January 2014, Dorothée and I went to Egypt for Paris Match to cover the third anniversary of the revolution, which fell on the twenty-fifth; we also hoped to do a human interest story about children living in the streets. Egypt was a good place for me to get back in the saddle. It wasn’t a war zone like Syria, but it was very volatile and could blow up from one minute to the next. Despite Sisi’s crackdown and arrests, the Muslim Brotherhood still had strong popular support, and those with any connection to the thousands arrested were even more supportive. It was a complex place domestically and a crucial piece in the Middle East geopolitical puzzle.

  We first explored the Coptic Christian community in Old Cairo. There were very few Westerners in that part of the city, and we were already drawing attention to ourselves. After three years of turmoil, Western powers, especially the United States, were blamed for everything by all sides. The secularists blamed Obama for throwing their longtime president and ally, Hosni Mubarak, under the bus during the protests and for supporting the Morsi government when it was elected; the Islamists blamed America for undermining their legitimacy by blackmailing Morsi into continued support for peace with Israel. It was typical of the whole Arab world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The knee-jerk reaction to anything that didn’t work was to blame it on outsiders: Western colonialism, Zionists, communists, capitalists. The only ones who actually seemed to be addressing the real problem of radical jihadis were the dictators, who preferred to crush opposition quietly rather than advertise a growing problem and thereby exacerbate it.

  The day before the anniversary of the revolution was a Friday, the day of the week when Muslims gather at their mosques and the imams give sermons intended to rouse the faithful to action. We were woken up by a powerful explosion. Our hotel room was on the fifteenth floor. We went out onto the balcony and saw a plume of black smoke about five hundred yards away as the crow flies. I grabbed my camera and started shooting.

  We jumped into a taxi immediately and went to
the site of the explosion: the headquarters of the Cairo police. There was a corpse at our feet, wounded scattered around, ambulances, firemen, soldiers. Normally I wouldn’t have hesitated to pull out my camera and start taking pictures, but right away I sensed the atmosphere was electric and the Egyptians were already giving us wary looks.

  Dorothée didn’t dare film anything except for a few brief videos with her smartphone, as did many of the onlookers. Interviewing the Egyptians on-site was impossible. I managed to steal a few images without being noticed but couldn’t get to the crater. They wouldn’t let journalists anywhere near the explosion, so we pretended to move around like a couple of tourists who had wound up there by accident. At one point, a woman a few feet away from us started shouting. Dorothée was fluent enough in Arabic to understand that the woman was accusing Americans of every evil imaginable.

  We decided it was time to slip away. A few minutes later, three German journalists working for ARD television were attacked by the crowd. Two of them were stabbed and wound up with serious injuries. If it hadn’t been for an undercover police officer who fired his weapon into the air, they might have gotten torn apart by the crowd.

  Three other explosions rocked Cairo shortly after that one. They were claimed by a jihadist group based in the Sinai, which would later declare allegiance to Daesh.

  Rather than try to get to the explosion sites and be kept away, we went to the Mohandessin neighborhood, near a bridge where every Friday the Muslim Brotherhood had been clashing with police. Tanks, rifles, tear gas launchers, and a lot of heavy weapons all came out in preparation for the worst. Everyone was extremely nervous.