filter-less lenses

Stephanie Sinclair captures a side of Iraq the media often ignore

By William McKeen

The beautiful little girl smiles from her perch on the trunk of a small, parked sedan. She must be 5 and that girl behind her, the one sitting on the car’s roof, that must be her sister, looking all of 3. This could be anywhere, but the gun in the 5-year-old’s hand gives it away. This is Baghdad.

Here’s another image: Boys in their underwear romp in the fountains of a looted museum, oblivious to the post-war chaos. And another: A boy sits on a swing in the shadow of the barbed-wired wall of the prison he now calls home.

These are the images Stephanie Sinclair, JM 1998, sees in Baghdad, and she wants the world to see them – to learn what life is like in a war zone. Television broadcasts death and destruction and newspapers report political turmoil. But there’s more to Iraq. Sinclair wants to show that life goes on and that Iraqis are not faceless.

“For me,” she says, “it is about making a difference.”

Sinclair hasn’t turned her lens away from war’s frontlines. One of her dramatic photos – of a soldier stepping through the ruins of a bombed building – appeared among Time magazine’s “Pictures of the Year.” Her portfolio is drenched in artillery and desert camo. But she aims beyond combat reporting.

“I want to make pictures that cause people to think and to care about the people in them,” Sinclair says. “I pretty much want to be a voice for people who need to be heard. It is easy not to care about hardships of those less fortunate than ourselves.”

Sinclair is the sort of student John Freeman wishes he could clone. UF’s award-winning photojournalism associate professor points to Sinclair’s college track record when he extols the value of internships to today’s majors. She worked for the Miami Herald, Arizona Republic, Detroit Free Press, St. Petersburg Times and, upon graduation, Chicago Tribune. After five years with that newspaper, she joined the Corbis photo agency in New York and has been based in Iraq for two years.

Freeman uses Sinclair’s experience in his ritual harangue about internships in his introductory photo class. He tells students that two of her internships were unpaid and she delayed graduation a couple of times to gain more experience. The punchline: Her first job was at the newspaper that calls itself the “world’s greatest.”

“I launch into a little spiel to the class: ‘For those of you thinking about racing out of here and getting through classes as fast as you can, slow down. You’ve got to get the experience.’ ”

‘What motivates me’

It’s the photojournalist’s disease – having the will and the need to point the camera at something from which the rest of us turn away.

As if covering Iraq for Corbis wasn’t enough, Sinclair is working on projects in two other nations: Afghanistan and the Congo.

In Afghanistan, Sinclair turned her camera toward the Afghani women who self-immolate to protest their treatment by the government. Ninety-five percent of Afghani women are illiterate and denied basic human rights. Protesters want equal access to education for young women and an end to the practice of giving women or girls as compensation for crimes committed by one family against another.

One of Sinclair’s photographs – of a burned Afghani woman – appeared in Marie Claire in February and won first prize in the World Press Photo’s Contemporary Issues category of its annual photojournalism competition.

“World Press Photo is generally viewed as a worldwide version of the U.S. Pulitzers,” Freeman says.

It’s a chilling, horrific photograph, reminiscent of the pictures of the monk whose midday suicide on a Saigon street became one of the first crystallizing images from Vietnam to go worldwide. Sinclair’s photo is even more graphic.

Sinclair donated her World Press Photo prize money to Herat Hospital in Afghanistan to help build a burn ward.

Sinclair also is documenting systematic torture and abuse in the Congo, where one woman in three has been raped, she says. “It’s the leading war injury.”

Part of her Congo work focuses on Doctors Without Borders, which started a women’s clinic in the African nation. Those physicians work full-time helping the rape victims, earning, as Sinclair describes it, “what we spend for lunch.” Sinclair hopes this project will eventually appear in People magazine.

“This is what motivates me,” she says. “You see how amazing some people are – amazingly kind, amazingly good.”

In the family

Sinclair came by her wanderlust and artistic sense honestly. “My grandmother traveled the world as a young woman,” she says. “[Trudie Sinclair] was gung-ho, interested in seeing the world and experiencing life.”

Her mother, Paula Schulte, is an artist. “Growing up with her made me want to do something creative, or something that would make me want to go to work in the morning at the very least, because this is how she lived her life,” Sinclair says. “I met a friend in college who was a photographer and since I can’t even draw stick figures, it seemed like that might be a good way to be creative and maybe make a living too.

“Recently, my mom told me that she was very proud of me and would be doing the same things with her life if she were me. This meant a lot to me, as I often feel a bit guilty for spending my life traveling the world instead of spending quality time with my family.”

Sinclair arrived at the University of Florida in 1991, uncertain about career plans. A photojournalism course for non-majors piqued her interest. She sought out Freeman – who did not teach that course – to find out more about this photojournalism business.

“She was very serious and thinking long-term,” Freeman recalls. “She was asking, ‘What should I do?’ and, ‘Is this the sort of thing
I should be doing?’ ”

Freeman encouraged her to major in photojournalism and work at the Independent Florida Alligator. It was a picture in that student paper – not a class assignment – that made Freeman notice her talent.

“At some point, I see my students’ work in the Alligator and think, ‘Hey, they’ve got it.’ I remember one day, Stephanie had a picture of a woman carving an ice sculpture on the Reitz Union Colonnade and the woman was framed through the ice sculpture,” Freeman says. “It was striking and well-composed and I knew she’d caught on to what makes a good picture.”

Freeman is quick to tell his students that the best in the business always know they can be better. “She was so serious and thoughtful,” he says, “always coming to my office wanting to know more, wanting tougher critiques.”

Doing it her way

Sinclair moved to Iraq well before the start of the war. This gave her the advantage of coming to know the country as home to many people who became her friends. Then she saw the war descend and documented what it did to the Iraqis.

“They’re just people trying to send their kids to school,” she says.

In her online journal (at stephaniesinclair.com), she writes about being transformed into an Iraqi woman – complete with a billowing dark velour dishdasha and tons of makeup – by her translator’s family. After two months in the United States during the winter, she notes that the Iraq she returned to showed signs of Americanization: Froot Loops, Healthy Choice frozen dinners and Duracell batteries on the shelves of the once quaint Iraqi food market near her apartment. Some things change, some don’t. She was back in Baghdad for 15 minutes when she heard gunfire.

Staying safe in war-torn countries is simply a matter of having common sense,” Sinclair says.

Richard Sinclair knows his daughter takes no unnecessary risks, but he still struggles to get through the night. “I sleep with CNN on in the bedroom,” the Fort Pierce builder says. “She’s a courageous little kid.”

Being a woman in a war zone poses no greater dangers, she says. “As a woman, people feel less threatened by me. I can talk intimately with women without the presence of their husbands – unveiled both literally and figuratively. And, as a foreign woman, I’m often treated like an honorary man.”

Through it all, Sinclair tries to keep sight on her mission.

“I just spent some time with a woman who was abducted and raped at the age of 13,” she says. “As a result, her family set out to kill her because she was no longer considered ‘pure.’ Having nowhere to go, she spent several months in a juvenile detention center and finally ended up in a safe house run by the Communist Party.”

Being a freelancer associated with a picture agency gives Sinclair more freedom to suggest stories and avoid following editorial demands from New York or Chicago. “I pitch a lot of stories,” she says. “If you wait for assignments, you’re at the editor’s mercy. As a freelancer, I have more control and magazine editors all know where my heart is.”

It shows in her images: the boys playing at a looted museum, the child living in a prison because his family lost its home in post-war bedlam, the little girl with the gun.

“The little girl’s obliviousness to the violence around her as she unknowingly mimics that violence in play … that’s so very sad,” Sinclair says.

The world can choose to look, or not, but this is her life’s work.

“It’s tough on the soul,” she says, “but it’s really good for you.”