Nothing is as it seems. That’s what I realized with growing apprehension as the beautiful, sunny day turned suddenly into a nightmarish blizzard. We were on horseback 14,000 feet up in the mountains of Afghanistan, and I quickly tucked my camera away to protect it. I was now too cold to take pictures and balance myself on my horse, where one slip could have easily plunged me thousands of feet below. Along with two other journalists, I was on my way to cover a war that was about to engulf the region, stemming from the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon six weeks earlier. Our lives were at the mercy of fate and in the hands of Afghan guides we had met the night before. They were our only option to get us through this dangerous mountain pass and to our destination. We paid them $60 per horse.
I was a staff photographer for The Washington Post
, and this assignment was the first time I had ever worked with digital cameras. At that point, they produced mediocre images as far as I was concerned, but with a computer and a sat phone that transmitted at 14.4k baud rate, it was the only way to get photos back to my paper from this faraway place. I did bring a film camera, too, and had already shot a couple of rolls. But they would be my last: As the danger of my assignment increased, every photo counted, and I no longer had the luxury to shoot film.
Months later, after I returned to Washington, I excitedly processed the two rolls of film, only to discover, to my great disappointment, that one roll was ruined. During my trip, I had accidentally pulled out of my pocket one of those rolls of film after I had shot it, then put it back into my camera and reused it, creating double exposures. In today’s digital world, you can achieve the same effect in Photoshop by blending two images together. If you do it skillfully enough, you could even call it “art.” In my case there was no skill in combining these images. What I had done was the equivalent of an artist throwing paint against the wall — blindfolded. The double images were there purely by happenstance. I sleeved the roll of film, stuck it in a folder, and forgot about it.
Almost 20 years later, I came across that sleeve of photo negatives while quarantined during the pandemic. Today, though, as I re-examine this roll of film, I find the mistake intriguing. The accidental chaos of the images on top of each other reveals a different version of the complex story I had witnessed: the Afghan people being confronted by a dangerous war that came from well beyond their borders and guided by leaders they did not know. Now I saw these images in a new light brought on by the dangers all around us with the
coronavirus — coming from well beyond
our borders.
The element of chance in these images reminded me of my journey through Afghanistan, where any encounter could determine whether you lived or died. You took precautions, but you never knew what was around the corner. Maybe it was an encounter that could enrich your life, or snatch it away. You had to hope your guides were steering you on the right path. The Afghan people have been faced with similar choices since 2001, in a conflict that has resulted in more than 150,000 deaths. Back then, that war was supposed to be over within a year. Now we are hoping the same for the coronavirus pandemic. But we really don’t know if what’s around the corner will infect us or save us. We don’t know where our guides will lead us.