Lunatock

Camera amid chaos

Alaska-bred photographer's images bring Chechnya war into grim focus

By DEBRA McKINNEY
Anchorage Daily News

Published: October 2, 2005
Last Modified: October 2, 2005 at 02:18 AM

Just as Heidi Bradner has made painful portraits of Chechen parents
whose sons have been "disappeared," she has photographed Russian
mothers searching battlegrounds for their missing boys. Just as she
has shown the agony of a Chechen man burned in an explosion, she has
captured the vacant stare of a wounded Russian soldier after an ambush
in which many of his comrades were killed.

Those who have seen her photographs of Chechnya are struck by her
ability to show compassion for both sides in this drawn-out war.

Bradner, 41, now living in London, is a graduate of Service High
School and the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her photographs have
been published in newspapers and magazines all over the world.

She talked about her work in Chechnya last week via e-mail and by
phone from a hotel room in Amsterdam, where she met with a book
publisher interested in the project. There's a chance to see some of
these photographs in the current issue of Alaska Quarterly Review,
which features a 10-year retrospective documenting what Bradner calls
"a violent struggle going nowhere."

Ron Spatz, founding editor of AQR, a critically acclaimed literary
journal published at the University of Alaska Anchorage, wasn't
looking for sanitized photos when he approached Bradner about
publishing her work. She didn't give him any. Even when photographing
bodies, she does so with "extraordinary dignity," he said.

"I was physically affected by looking through her portfolio.
Powerfully moved. There are a number of images in the children's
section that are very difficult to look at.

"She draws you into them. You can't slip away."

THE SUFFERING

Bradner's photographs are presented in three sections, beginning with
"The Lost Boys: Portraits of Russian Soldiers in Chechnya," which
stares into the eyes of teenagers drafted into the Russian Army who
seem poorly equipped, even awkward with their guns, as they shiver
against the cold.

"People Live Here" takes you into the devastated lives of the Chechens
as they mourn their dead, sift through the rubble of their homes and
flee for their lives over a mountain pass.

"The Children" documents a generation that has never known any way
other than war, kids whose parents walk out the door never to be seen
again, kids with limbs lost to rocket attacks and booby traps.

Of the 72 black-and-white images included in AQR, one of the most
haunting is of a handsome young Russian soldier, dead and abandoned in
the streets of Grozny, who struck Bradner as more a farm boy than a
warrior.

"I could not stop looking at him. ... He was just like the sons and
children of families I had stayed with across Russia the last couple
years. By the time I made this photograph, he had laid dead on the
streets for more than a day or two. ... He is looking upwards ... and
seemed like an angel or some truly innocent kid whose life should not
have ended on the streets of Grozny with his chest half-eaten by dogs."

Bradner has captured these images from both sides, giving depth to the
experience of this war, Spatz said.

"That context is extremely important. You can see they're all
suffering. At a certain point you'd hope the world could learn something."

This body of work has earned Bradner several international awards,
including the Leica Medal of Excellence and a grant from the Alexia
Foundation for World Peace. It was also chosen for exhibition this
year at the prestigious Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival in
southern France.

Jean-Francois Leroy, the festival's founder, calls Bradner "one of the
greatest photojournalists in the world.

"The way she makes us share the misery of the Chechen people is
absolutely unique," he said via e-mail from Paris. "There are some
pictures extremely graphic, violent. ... The picture of this civilian
woman, face to earth and the blood in the snow around her head. The
small, skinny cat with the dead woman. The burned soldier.

"So true, so disturbing, so necessary."

LINE OF FIRE

"Courageous" comes up a lot when Bradner's colleagues speak of her.
Sebastian Smith, a Moscow-based reporter for Agence France-Presse and
author of "Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya," thinks of her
that way, explaining why via e-mail.

"You really just have to look at the photos and think where they were
taken -- in what most agree has been the most violent small war
anywhere in decades and in a place where dozens of journalists have
died doing their work.

"She has always been one of the only, if not the only, woman
photographer in the generally male environment of war correspondents
in Chechnya. ... She is not a journalist who just parachutes in, gets
what's needed for a quick fix, then out. She's really gotten to know
the people there -- a good thing professionally because she can
literally trace the facts and the history of events through a whole
range of personal relationships. That's an approach that leads to
quality, not sensational, journalism."

In pursuit of other stories, Bradner has been caught sneaking onto a
plane headed to Afghanistan after being refused a ticket. She has
crept into a building under siege, been caught in angry mobs, dodged
gunfire, witnessed people being shot.

In Chechnya, she has been arrested several times by both sides. And as
the region has slid increasingly into lawlessness, she has had to hire
bodyguards for protection against kidnappers and bandits.

But she has had surprisingly few of what she considers close calls in
Chechnya. She described one:

"As I was leaving Grozny with a colleague, we drove past a few people
standing on a street corner. Just a minute later there was an
artillery attack, and we bolted out of the car to safety. We turned
around to head out of town and came upon the scene. The attack had
been exactly where they were standing. Now all these people were dead.

"Two men in the background had their legs blown off but were still
talking and conscious. In fact, one of them motioned to me for a
cigarette, which I had, as I always have some to help get past
checkpoints."

When pressed, Bradner attributes her bold spirit to her parents, both
of whom arrived in Alaska before statehood. Born in Fairbanks, she's
the daughter of Janet Kruse Bradner, a core member of the Fairbanks
theater scene, and Mike Bradner of Anchorage, a former speaker of the
Alaska House of Representatives and publisher of the Alaska
Legislative Digest and the Alaska Economic Report.

Bradner took her first photography class in high school from Nelson
Gingerich at what is now the King Career Center in Anchorage, using an
old Nikkormat her father used when he worked as a reporter for the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in the 1960s. At the time, she was into
shooting ice and trees.

She spent two years as a summer intern for the Juneau Empire, taking
pictures of parades, salmon derbies, cruise-ship passengers and
orphaned bear cubs.

At the time, the Empire tended to go for interns from more prestigious
journalism schools Outside, Bradner said. But Empire photographer
Brian Wallace was adamant she be given a chance.

Another mentor at the paper was Mark Kelley, who encouraged her to
apply for an Eddie Adams Workshop in New York, a program she hadn't
even heard of.

Adams, who died last year, photographed 13 wars, including Vietnam. He
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for the iconic photograph of a South
Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of
Saigon after the man had just murdered eight people. Bradner was
accepted to the workshop, which got her thinking of working overseas.

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, she made the leap,
moving first to Prague in 1990, then to Moscow to document the demise
of the Soviet Union.

Those early days weren't always what she had in mind.

"I remember standing night shift outside the East German embassy,
waiting for a glimpse of Eric Honecker coming out in a moving car or
whatever. Horrible. And $30 a picture. That felt like paparazzi work
and not photography."

She hooked up with group of young freelancers, dubbed "The
Mercenaries," who were covering Eastern Europe and forever battling
editors and news agencies for decent pay and copyright protection.

On the Mercenary Photos Web site, Alan Pierre Hovasse, Agence France
Presse photo chef in Moscow at the time, tells a story from 1991, when
civil war broke out in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and all
the photographers were sending in picture after picture of "guys with
guns."

"All fine, but you can only run so many of these, and I was getting,
well, many. But Heidi sent me a wonderful photograph of an old woman
in a Georgian costume standing on a balcony, weeping, and the photo
played and played all over the world."

Bradner, who taught herself Russian, had covered several conflicts in
the former Soviet Union when the Kremlin turned its sights on
Chechnya, a mostly Muslim republic about the size of Connecticut
making a bid for independence. On New Year's Eve in 1994, the Russian
Army invaded the capital city of Grozny.

Grozny was once a modern city of about a half-million people, with
universities, oil refineries, tree-lined avenues, orchards and
gardens, Bradner said. It has been reduced to shrapnel- and
bullet-ridden rubble comparable to the World War II destruction of
Warsaw and Dresden.

Bradner arrived a day after the invasion and stayed among survivors in
the cold and dark. What she witnessed became a turning point of her
life and work.

This is a story she has covered since the beginning and has stuck with
long after most journalists moved on to other tragedies, other wars,
other headlines. She has returned again and again over the past 10 years.

"I found myself ignoring what people told me was or was not important
...," she said. "I stopped caring if I got into this week's magazine
or next week's. It felt like one of the most important things I could
be doing, instead of running from this war to that war.

"I think photography is one of those fields where it takes a long time
to find your voice or your way of seeing."

Natalie Nougayrede, former Moscow bureau chief for the French daily Le
Monde, has known Bradner since her Prague days.

"Heidi is one of the very rare journalists to not give in to Russian
government censorship of this war," she said via e-mail. "She does not
accept the restriction rules put on journalists and travels to
Chechnya in a clandestine manner. She knows that the silence and media
blackout on Chechnya are only leading to more and more killing.

"Her work is about relating to people, anywhere, even in some kind of
hell like Chechnya. It's about showing what these people are going
through when everyone else is looking elsewhere."

As the war has dragged on, the story of Chechnya has become even more
important to Bradner but no easier to stomach, particularly since the
second Russian invasion in 1999, when Chechnya "sank into a black hole
-- inaccessible to the media, closed to international organization,
where human-rights abuses went unseen, unpunished and unknown to the
outside world," Bradner wrote in commentary accompanying her
photographs in Alaska Quarterly Review.

"At the outbreak of war, everybody trusted each other and helped each
other. They were unified. Now there has been so many years of society
breaking down, lack of jobs, education, betrayals, torture and arrests
and disappearances and dirty politics and economics that ... people
are unable to trust each other.

"The horror of Chechnya's second war produced extremism that was not
part of the Chechen resistance 10 years ago when I first went there,"
she said. "Mass hostage taking in Beslan's school and in a Moscow
theater and the simultaneous downing of two passenger planes by women
suicide bombers are examples of this new expansion of the war."

Still, she goes.

"What sustains her is this search for the truth," Spatz said. "She
will risk her life to bring back whatever she can of that truth.
That's what keeps her going."

Daily News reporter Debra McKinney can be reached at
dmckinney@adn.com. Alaska Quarterly Review is available in local
bookstores.