Of course, there are dangers, and I have been lucky. I have been kidnapped twice. I have gotten in one serious car accident. Two of my drivers have died while working for me—two tragedies that I will always feel responsible for. I have missed the births of my sisters’ children, the weddings of friends, the funerals of loved ones. I have disappeared on countless boyfriends and had just as many disappear on me. I put off, for years, marriage and children. Somehow, though, I am healthy. I have maintained warm and wonderful relationships; I even found a husband who puts up with it all. Like many women, once I started a family, I had to make tough choices. I struggle to find the imperfect balance between my role as a mother and my role as a photojournalist. But I have faith, as I’ve always had, that if I work hard enough, care enough, and love enough in all areas of my life, I can create and enjoy a full life. Photography has shaped the way I look at the world; it has taught me to look beyond myself and capture the world outside. It’s also taught me to cherish the life I return to when I put the camera down. My work makes me better able to love my family and laugh with my friends.
Journalists can sound grandiose when they talk about their profession. Some of us are adrenaline junkies; some of us are escapists; some of us do wreck our personal lives and hurt those who love us most. This work can destroy people. I have seen so many friends and colleagues become unrecognizable from trauma: short-tempered, sleepless, and alienated from friends. But after years of witnessing so much suffering in the world, we find it hard to acknowledge that lucky, free, prosperous people like us might be suffering, too. We feel more comfortable in the darkest places than we do back home, where life seems too simple and too easy. We don’t listen to that inner voice that says it is time to take a break from documenting other people’s lives and start building our own.
Under it all, however, are the things that sustain us and bring us together: the privilege of witnessing things that others do not; an idealistic belief that a photograph might affect people’s souls; the thrill of creating art and contributing to the world’s database of knowledge. When I return home and rationally consider the risks, the choices are difficult. But when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine.
PART ONE
Discovering the World
CONNECTICUT, NEW YORK, ARGENTINA, CUBA, INDIA, AFGHANISTAN
CHAPTER 1
No Second Chances in New York
My oldest sister, Lauren, likes to tell a story about me. One summer day our entire family was in our backyard pool. I was only a year and a half old and couldn’t swim, so I was standing on my father’s shoulders. My three older sisters and my mother splashed around us. Suddenly, without a word, I bent my knees and jumped into the water. My sisters were stunned. My father said he let me go because he knew I would be fine. When I emerged from the water, I was smiling.
The Addario house in Westport, Connecticut, was a kaleidoscope of transvestites and Village People look-alikes, a haven for people who weren’t accepted elsewhere. My parents, Phillip and Camille, both hairdressers, ran a successful salon called Phillip Coiffures, and they often brought home their employees and clients and friends. Crazy Rose, a manic-depressive former employee, spent most days chain-smoking, spewing non sequiturs. Veto, an openly gay Mexican—rare in the late seventies—solicited show-tune requests from my sisters and banged them out on the living room piano. When my sisters and I came home from school, we were frequently greeted by Frank, known to us as Auntie Dax, dressed as a woman and wearing a feather boa. In the summer my parents brought in two DJs from Long Island to spin Donna Summer and the Bee Gees records. Hors d’oeuvres, Bloody Marys, and bottles of wine were passed around poolside, as were quaaludes, marijuana, and cocaine. Uncle Phil, a scowl on his face, sometimes appeared in a wedding gown for a mock ceremony on the lawn. No one ever seemed to leave. It never occurred to me that any of this was strange, because that was just how our house was.
Family portrait, circa 1976.
We were four sisters—Lauren, Lisa, Lesley, and I—and only two to three years apart in age. I was the youngest and relied on Daphne, our beloved Jamaican nanny, to rescue me when Lisa and Lesley beat me up or stuck puffy stickers up my nose. Our house was rambling and lawless. On a typical day ten to fifteen teenage girls were running around the yard, raiding the never-ending supply of junk food in the kitchen cupboards, skinny-dipping in the pool, and leaving wet towels and underwear along the deck and in the grass. All down the street you could hear us squealing as we pulled our bathing suits up high, rubbed Johnson’s baby oil on our butts, and shot down the big blue slide.
Phillip and Camille at one of the pool parties.
My mother and father were a sun-kissed and smiling team. I never heard them raise their voices, especially at each other. My father, towering over her at six foot one, called my mother “doll.” She was always befriending someone, taking someone under her wing. On Westport’s Main Street we couldn’t walk five feet without one of their clients stopping us, looking me in the eye as if I had a clue who they were. “You’ve gotten so big. I’ve known you since you were this high,” they’d say, gesturing to their knees. All of Westport watched me grow up through my mother’s stories. Every day someone told me what a wooooonderful mother I had.