'If I get killed, I kind of think, so what? People die all the time. I watch people die. I'd rather it not be me. I want to do more stories."
That is just one small aperture into the mind of Rita Leistner, a Canadian photojournalist, one week shy of 40 years old, who was in Toronto recently before returning to Iraq for the fourth time since the war on terrorism began.
There are more, each one a flash, brief, as if she has been caught, unwillingly, in the act of thinking about what motivates her to put herself in danger. The images she allows of her interior landscape are often startling, unexpected as her photographs.
Leistner embedded herself in the U.S. military without the sponsorship or financial support of any media outlet. She is the only journalist to do so. After a harrowing and illegal entry into Iraq from Turkey, she set out to find stories. One of them was about the months she spent with the men of the 3rd squadron of the 7th United States Cavalry, who liked to refer to their unit as Crazy Horse. The portraits of the men, so young and innocent, put a human face on the business of killing.
Leistner's work in Iraq has been in The Daily Mail of London, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Canada's Walrus magazine, Newsweek and Maclean's. Recently, she was nominated for a Courage in Journalism Award from the U.S.-based International Women's Media Foundation.
"I own nothing but cameras," she explains at one point over lunch in downtown Toronto. "And hardly any of those, because they were stolen three weeks ago in Iraq. Photography is the only thing in my life. And people," she quickly adds. "Photography and people."
Born in Toronto, she now lives in New York, where she rents a 3,500-square-foot loft with four other (male) photojournalists. She shares a bedroom with one, although they are rarely in town at the same time. There is no boyfriend. ("Since 1998, I've dated photojournalists or journalists. But they're all a bunch of lying and cheating dogs, so it just hasn't worked out," she says, laughing.) She has never wanted children of her own. "I think the desire to have children is an orientation, like sexuality. It's sort of like religion, in that the feeling [for it]never came to me.
"It might be that being conventional scares me more than going to war," she concedes.
Does she feel contempt for convention? "Yeah, I guess," she says. "I've always been very interested in the strange and the fantastic and the extreme and uncommon."
Not that she doesn't want to get married. A soldier from Crazy Horse proposed to her a few weeks ago. They had been friends in Iraq, and when they returned to Georgia, where the regiment is based, his marriage, which had been in difficulty, fell apart. "It was an incredibly kind offer," Leistner says. "He is younger by 10 years, and he said to me, 'You need a base somewhere. I could build that foundation for you.' " She turned him down.
There were other offers in the field. An African-American soldier asked her if she had ever had sex with a black man. When she said yes, he replied, "Well, if you ever want some more. . . ." But otherwise, she says, her sexuality was a "non-issue." She slept in the same rooms as the men, never removing all the layers of her clothing. "There's a code of honour. And the leadership in that unit was very strong."
Rita's Big Adventure started out normal as corn flakes. She is the youngest of two daughters born to a German father, Henry, who owned a tool-making business and a mother, Donna, who worked as a gym teacher. They divorced when Leistner was a teenager. She loved to read National Geographic magazines as a child. And then, when she was a little older, she became obsessed with war-journalist films, watching The Killing Fields at least 15 times and The Year of Living Dangerously just as many.
After attending the private Toronto French School, she studied French, English and American history at the University of Toronto, then stayed on to do a masters in comparative literature. She had tried to get into journalism schools, Toronto's Ryerson University and Ottawa's Carleton University, but was turned down, not for marks -- she was an A student -- but because she hadn't worked on a school newspaper (there wasn't one at the Toronto French School).
To earn money to go to school, she spent her summers tree-planting in northern Canada. (In 1997, she won a gold Canadian National Magazine Award for a photographic feature on tree-planting.) And here, in the calm recitation of her story, there's another aperture.
"Competition drives me a lot," she offers. "And a lot of that comes from facing chauvinism in the seventies and eighties. I wanted jobs that weren't stereotypically female. There was always this bravado around tree-planting.
"You know, like tree-planting is so tough, it's like war without the killing," she says. "Well, now I can, like, turn around and say, 'Fuck you! Now I've been to war! And where are you guys?' They're all probably married with three kids living in Thunder Bay."
She laughs at the vehemence of her explanation, then says, "I don't know if that kind of competitiveness is healthy, but I know it's part of my character."
Still, her success at living her dream -- "I feel I have been preparing my whole life for this," she says of her freelance life as a photojournalist -- took more than a few years to come to fruition. After her masters, she planned on accepting a scholarship to the University of Alberta for a PhD in English literature. But during a year off, in which she travelled 90,000 miles in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, shooting rolls of black-and-white film, she realized "that to be a great photographer I had to commit full-time."
She turned down her scholarship and went to work in the film industry for seven years, a good place to learn about lighting, she figured. But even though she continued to take photographs and had some exhibits of her work, she felt she had lost sight of her desire to be a photojournalist. Within the matter of a month, she was living in the strife of Cambodia, teaching English for most of the day and then hopping on her motorbike to chase down stories in Phnom Penh. She encountered her hero, Al Rockoff, the eccentric photojournalist played by John Malkovitch in The Killing Fields. He didn't consider her as competition, she explains, so he befriended her and often guided her to where the news was happening. She stayed for two years until 1999, a year after the death of Pol Pot, the brutal leader of the Khmer Rouge. "It was everything I dreamed it would be. Just like a movie," she says.
Upon her return, she moved to New York and, with her savings from her years working in film, enrolled in a year-long, full-time course in photojournalism at the prestigious International Center for Photography. Her next goal was to find a war, which the United States promptly supplied. She took courses in security, learned how to operate a satellite phone, bought bullet-proof gear and had laser eye surgery. "I always thought that the only thing someone had to do was take my glasses and I'd be completely disabled." When she had her vision corrected, "my confidence level rose 100 per cent."
The only task remaining was to find a way into Iraq. Ineligible to enter the country as a journalist embedded with the U.S. military because of her freelance and non-American status, Leistner only had risky options. She travelled to Turkey, but soon after, the border was closed. Friends in Jordan were saying it was just as difficult to enter from there. She could go back to New York, defeated, or she could pay a smuggler to take her through the mountains. She chose the latter at a cost of $1,200 (U.S.).
"Your life is in their hands," she says simply. "If they left you there in those mountains, you would die." For 2½ days, she and one other journalist, a man, walked through the night with their guides and slept during the day in caves to avoid border guards. Halfway through the journey, she fell and hurt her knee. With a stick as support, she hobbled through the mountains. Not for a moment does she regret the danger, she says. The thrill of being in a foreign conflict zone is a heightened awareness hard to find elsewhere. "You have to force yourself to acclimatize," Leistner says.
"It's like going into cold water, and staying there, until it feels normal." But don't the images shock her? She saw dead men up close for the first time. "Your camera is a kind of mask. It separates you and helps you keep a distance."
But surely it has affected her in some way? "Sometimes, it makes me scared of what people are capable of, and of the helplessness," Leistner explains. "I think there's a quality in photojournalism -- and journalism in general -- to be able to see redemption within the horror," she says. A beat. A look of plain honesty. "That's something I haven't quite found yet."
Leistner describes herself as someone who always seems to confound expectations of her. She resists being pigeonholed, even as a hard-boiled, never-say-die, war-zone photojournalist. Think she's tough as a man? Listen to her admit that the stress of her job sometimes makes her cry for no reason at all when she's home.
And watch her get up to exit the restaurant. Yeah, that's her, the small, lithe woman in the long, ankle-length skirt and layered top, hoisting her weathered Mountain Co-op knapsack over her shoulder.