Radiolab - Sight Unseen

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

As the attacks were unfolding on the Capitol, a steady stream of images poured onto our screens. Photo editor Kainaz Amaria tells us what she was looking for--and seeing--that afternoon. And she runs into a dilemma we've talked about before. In December of 2009, photojournalist Lynsey Addario, in was embedded with a medevac team in Afghanistan. After days of waiting, one night they got the call - a marine was gravely wounded. What happened next happens all the time. But this time it was captured, picture by picture, in excruciating detail. Horrible, difficult, and at times strikingly beautiful, those photos raise some questions: Who should see them, who gets to decide who should see them, and what can pictures like that do, to those of us far away from the horrors of war and those of us who are all too close to it? Episode Notes: To hear Kainaz Amaria talk more about the filter, check out:  this post on ethical questions to consider around the sharing of images of police brutality and her interview on On The Media about the double-standard in many U.S. newsrooms when it comes to posting graphic images.  Special thanks to Chris Hughes and Helium Records for the use of Shift Part IV from the album Shift Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.    

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radio Lab. And today we're gonna start with... I've just recording your furious typing. A very busy photo editor. My name is Kina's Amaria and I am the visual editor at vox.com. Are you exhausted? Were you up late?

Yeah, I gotta say I'm not very lucid. So I got her in this kind of leery moment because the afternoon before January 6th, she had been sitting in her DC apartment doing her visuals editor thing TV on we're covering the vote count watching the live feed of the Senate floor and We knew that the protest was happening. Keeping an eye on the photos coming in through Twitter. Crowds getting closer and closer to the Capitol building through the wires. Barriers being torn down.

And at some point when she was looking at the TV. The live feeds shut off. There was just a title slide, Congress's temporarily out of session. As we now know, this was the moment that the people outside the Capitol got in. Right. And suddenly Kainaz is staring down this vortex of photos coming in. Thousands of images. Damn, and is it really?

It's like thousands? Yeah. Photos of broken glass, smoke, angry faces. And her job is to start picking the very small fraction of them that will make it to our eyes. And actually, the first image that really stopped me in my tracks was an approach from supporter with a flag standing on the staircase inside the

capital and it's from a really low angle and there's a look in his face. I'm not sure if he's cross-eyed or there was a flash but there is a feeling in that photograph of we are here now. I mean, you know, good images show you what's happening. Great images have metaphor and make you feel what's happening and put you in that moment as if you're there. And that was the first photograph I saw

that made me feel worried for the people in the building. So she decided to run that one because she thought it gave audiences a clear sense of what was really going on. But you know, picture editing is very subjective, you know, there is this element of my own filter. That filter is something Kaina's talks about a lot in her work. She writes and speaks beautifully about how if you want to see deeper into a photo, you need to think about that filter. Ask yourself, who put this photo in front of me? What do they want me to see?

How am I implicated in what I'm seeing? And she says that that day, her admittedly subjective filter was trying to show the rest of us an accurate range of what was going on and also what it feels like to be there. So she said no to tons of photos that were too blurry, too busy. You know, your eyes just have any place to land. And yes, to this very small handful that she thought captured the feeling. Men scaling the walls, congressional members taking cover, people looting the capital but feeling completely okay with having their picture taken and smiling in a sense of like there was no fear

of consequences for them. And then this one image came to her attention. I did have one slight hesitation of the police drawing guns so close to a protesters face. Is this the one that it's the three policemen? Two of them seem to be pointing the gun just a foot or so away from this guy who's faced through a broken window. Is that that one? Yeah, or less than that. Yeah, yeah, really close. And it struck Kainaz in that great image way. It made her feel.

The closeness of that moment was really strong. And it gave a sense of how dangerous this was. It's a moment captured in time that's just before something, which gives you that sense of tension and fear. And the true sense of, yeah, I guess like no one knowing how this is about to go down. Exactly. But on the other hand, I mean, what if this was the moment right before that man died? And you didn't know yet? I did not know yet, but what if the family saw this photograph? Right. And it's the moment right before potential unknown. But if a person's living, is that,

unknown, but if a person's living is that, is that a, it's like an ethical carol versus a legal call, like if, if the person were dead, that would be something you couldn't do or couldn't do without permission, is how do the rules work right there? Yeah, I mean, this is the thing with ethics, right? There are, there are no rules. Yeah. There's conversations. Kena said she had a lot of conversations about that image with her team, with herself, and eventually. I felt that his face was sufficiently sort of ambiguous. She decided to publish it. Yeah.

Are there images you think just shouldn't be shown that we shouldn't see? It depends on the story, it depends on the time, and that's why I think there are no black and white lines. Talking with Kainas made me look at all the images that have been coming in the past few days. The new questions, I guess. And it also got me thinking about this piece that jadded a while ago, that is about those lines that crawls under them, twirls them, throws them in a blender.

I'll toward this question of what is okay to see and who should really be deciding that. And I'm gonna just play for you now. Okay, so here's how I got to you. Okay. I have a former producer and now a good friend, Pat Walters. Oh, yeah. You know Pat. Yes. We corresponded and then he came to see me speak in San Francisco. Yes, and it was based on something he saw you talk about,

which is why I'm now contacting you. Interesting. Okay. Hey, I'm Chad Abel-Rod. I'm Robert Colwich. This is Radio Lab. And today, a story about a set of pictures. Pictures.

Yeah. And a set of pictures. Pictures. Yeah. And a set of questions about those pictures regarding who gets to see the pictures and who gets to decide who gets to see the pictures. Do we get to see the pictures? Well, that's kind of the question. So I'm not going to answer that yet. But I should say that there are some moments in this story that get a little, what's the word?

Heavy. Heavy, yeah. So be forewarned. But we'll start with the picture taker. My name is Lindsay Adario and I'm a photojournalist. She's been covering war for the last 15 years. I've done military embeds, infantry units, patrol wing, going in, house to house searches.

She's worked in well everywhere. Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, and a million places. She's been kidnapped twice. She's one of Pul well everywhere, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, and a million places. She's been kidnapped twice. She's won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur, and she's been called one of the most influential photographers of the past 25 years. In any case, this particular story, can you set it up a little bit? Sure. So, in December of 2009, she was taken pictures for Time magazine.

She was in Afghanistan, gasmed her district, Helmand province, stationed at a base in the middle of the desert. I was embedded with the Medevac team and their role is to go in and pick up injured troops out of the theater of war. This is a small team of basically helicopter pilots, medics, doctors. Basically whenever there's an injured soldier, these teams are called, whichever team is closest to the injured. We're talking like helicopter dropping into. Oh yeah, I mean this is fast.

So Lindsay had been embedded with this team for a couple of days and not much was happening. So you're just sitting around reading magazines and then rereading the same magazines. And one night really late. I think I was lying in bed and I was totally like, if I wasn't asleep, I was on the verge of sleep. When they, someone ran, was like, there was an alpha. Alpha is like,

alpha means the most gravely wounded. Like, you have seconds to get there. I mean, it's life or death. So she grabs two cameras, her helmet, body armor, runs out to the blackhawk. I strap myself in and we take off. And I think it was about a two-minute flight, which is so fast. And I remember I was shooting the fields as we flew in because I was trying to focus

and see what I can see. Luckily, they had lent me a set of night vision goggles, which was really nice to the military because you can't see anything without them in the middle of the night, because they are using night vision, so they don't ever turn on the light. So if you were to look through the camera directly, you would see nothing. Just blackness. Nothing. So what you do for a photographer, you put the night vision goggles in front of the camera

lens. So it looks green. It's fluorescent green. Does that mean the picture you get is green? Yes. So they fly for two minutes through the pitch black, land the helicopter, she has no idea where. And everything is happening extremely fast.

I'm trying to focus as I'm looking out the helicopter door, and suddenly in my viewfinder I see a man sort of wrapped, I think he was wrapped in a blanket and he gets put right in front of me on the floor of the black hawk. The first thing I thought is I think he's already dead. He seemed completely unresponsive and he seemed so young. I just remember looking at his face and thinking, God, what are we doing here? Within seconds, their airborne again flying back to the field hospital.

Lindsay takes pictures on that brief flight back, grainy, fluorescent, green images of the medics tending to the soldier, checking his vitals. We land at the field hospital. They rush to mount a stretcher into the hospital tent. And the whole team of medics, Navy nurses, the anesthesiologist, everyone is there. They carry him inside and put him immediately on the table, cut his clothes off, their cutting his pants off, open up his shirt, and the room starts filling up with everyone,

because everyone has heard that there's an alpha. And so troops come in from across the base, sort of in support. She says within minutes the room went from just a handful of people, five, six, to a dozen, twenty. And you can hear a pin drop. I mean the room is silent except for the doctors. You know, they're trying to resuscitate him. He had lost, I think, eight or nine pints of blood. They're bringing in blood. They're bringing in all sorts of things.

And I... Are you shooting this all time? Well, yeah, of course. You know, I'm basically trying to be invisible because it's so sensitive to be a photographer in that situation. What I do, I don't shoot like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, you know, I shoot one frame, and then I put my camera down, and I shoot another frame, because you can hear the click of the shutter,

and it is like exponentially louder than normal in a situation like that. What did you get? Did anyone look give you a look of like back off? Well, at one point, I was shooting for probably, I don't know, five or six minutes maybe, and an officer walked over to me and he said, hey, stop photographing. And yeah, and I put the camera down and I looked at him and I said, I have permission. She had worked

all that out beforehand as part of the conditions of her embed. We had had all these conversations, you know, what happens in the case of this? What is my access? What can I do? But at this point, she says the room was full of people from across the base who didn't know any of that, didn't know who she was, that she had permission, and so she was sort of at this fork in the road. There were those, like that officer who clearly felt. Put the camera down.

Stop. Obviously, this is not the time to argue or to be disrespectful. So I didn't say anything else. I put the camera down. But she says the moment she did that. Several other troops said, no. Let her shoot. This has to be documented.

Oh, that's interesting. So you have one guy who says you can't take a picture of this. Right. Almost like anything but this. Right. And another guy is like, no, this, especially. Right, right. First of all, the guy who said no was being protective. It made perfect sense for me.

But I think the guys who stood up and said this has to be documented, I think at some point, everyone realized, like, look, this war is not going away. We are losing so many lives and limbs and no one is seeing it. And keep in mind, this is 2009. This is just a tail end of a 18 year ban where the news media couldn't even photograph military coffins.

In any case, the officer let it go. Lindsay continued to take pictures for about another 20 minutes. She took pictures of the doctor's cutting open the boy's chest, massaging his heart. At some point, I remember someone, one of the doctors looked up and said, does anyone else have any suggestions, basically, for how to save him? And everyone said no, and they sort of disconnected the, I mean, he died. People were looking down and then they were looking at each other and someone went to go get a flag and American flag to drape over his body.

And I continued photographing and there was a moment where the whole room was silent and people stood around his body draped with a flag and set a prayer. his body draped with a flag and set a prayer. That, to me, is one of the most powerful images that came out of this whole series. There's this old idea and photography called the decisive moment that the world is filled with these far off realities, but every so often a photograph can capture a moment

that boom takes you there. This is one of those photos. In the picture you see all these men and women standing in kind of a loose semicircle. Some of them still have their loose surgical gloves on. They look totally spent. They're all looking in different directions. And they all look like they're not even there, like they're totally lost in their own thoughts. Their attention is clearly inwards. Yeah. I'm sure all those troops were like,

God, that could have been me. Why couldn't we save him? What are we doing here in Afghanistan? Is this war worth it? And to read the expressions on their faces, like it's even, you can be at war as a journalist, but never actually get to the heart of the war, because we don't have access or people don't open up.

And I felt like I really had reached like the crux of the war. It was war. You'd seen an essence of something. Yeah. But then came a problem. Any photos that she had taken that included that soldier's face or any other identifying marks like tattoos and he did have tattoos. According to the rules of her embed, she couldn't use those photos without the soldier's

permission. Right. And you never got to speak to him. No. So was it days later, weeks later, months later, where you began to ask yourself, can I you do I talk to him? No, it was minutes later. I mean, it's the military does not let a journalist cover something like this without coming

directly to that person. And so literally, like, I followed the young man's body out to the morgue and they had to walk him outside. And I remember it was, the moon was so bright that night and I was shooting with the moonlight as he was being carried outside. And then I went back to the tent where I was staying. And within minutes of the military PAO, the Marines, public affairs officers came and said, you know you can't send those images out without permission from the next of kin. That's the rule.

Facilter is unconscious and then dies before giving permission. I have to then go to the next of kin. Then I said, of course, I understand, you know, I'm not doing anything with those photos in that moment. I signed this piece of paper. When I give my word, I keep that word, you know. But then the other side of me was like, fuck, you know, in Vietnam, no one was signing pieces of paper. And in Vietnam, no one had to go to the next to Kim before they published anything. And that's why the American public, I think, rose up against the war in Vietnam because they saw the most graphic, devastating images that were uncensored.

So then what do you do in that situation, circumstance? I mean, imagine you go to the next of Kim, right? Well, you're not allowed as a journalist to reach out to the next of Kim. They asked me, are you interested in being contacted by the next of kin If they're willing to speak to you. Oh, so you can't even actually call no, they will not give you the information But I said you know, of course I would like to be contacted by the next of kin and please pass my information on and I was sort of just waiting I mean at this point, were you thinking the pictures would ever see the light of day?

I had no idea. And... Few days later. Maybe less than a week. Her embed was over. She was flying to JFK on a way to meet her family for Christmas. And I had voicemails on my telephone.

And I listened and it to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice.

I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice. I was listening to his voice, anticipating how difficult that phone call would be. That phone call, when all the fallout, is coming up. My name is Lissina Basilico, and I'm calling from my office in Houston, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Sloan.org. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Okay, I'm Chad Ipomrod. I am Robert Crowlich.

This is Radio Lab. So Lindsay Adario, the photographer, has these photos, these intense photos of a soldier dying, but you can't use them without getting permission from the next of Ken. Right. A few days later, I had voicemails on my telephone,

and I listened and it was his father. His father's name is Todd Taylor, son's name was Jonathan Taylor. And just to jump ahead for a second, as we were talking about the phone call and the fallout from that phone call, I had all of these questions about what Todd Taylor was thinking and questions about his son,

things that Lindsey couldn't possibly answer. So at a certain point in the universe, she just told me, I don't know, I mean, you could maybe interview him. Do you think he would, I mean, is that, is there any prohibition on me talking to him? Well, I'd be happy to give you some. Yeah, I'd love to talk to him. I mean, you can try.

Lindsey put us in touch and I'll just tell you about the visit for a second. Todd Taylor was willing to talk. He had two conditions. One was like, if I'm going to do a story about these photos of his son, I should at least get to know his son a little bit. And the second was that I'd come down to Florida to meet him and his family personally. The destination is on your left. So I did.

So I did. To take it to a family live in a section of Jacksonville that's near a naval base, so there are a lot of military families there. Todd is actually ex-navi himself. He introduced me to his three giant boxers, no jumping. They sort of introduced themselves. And then, I met his daughter, my young, this is my daughter. You need to get jazz. I met his daughters.

I am Lauren Taylor. I am 16, going on 17. Oh, God, she's about to add that in. My name is Mackenzie Taylor. I am Jonathan's other sister, and I am 20 years old. That little voice you heard in the background is Easton. He's about two. That's one of the babies she watches.

Hey, handsome. Mackenzie works as a nanny. Hi. My name's Paige Larson, I'm Jonathan Stepsister, and I'm 21. My name's Sue Taylor, and I'm Jonathan Stepmom. And then of course, I'm Todd Taylor, I'm Jonathan's dad. We're here in my house in Jacksonville, Florida, and today is Jonathan's birthday.

It's April 8th. 2015, so he would have been held today. 28 years old today. 28. When I got there, they pulled out photo albums of Jonathan and we all sat at the kitchen table and looked at pictures. They're pictures of him as a baby.

That was very young. Toddler. This was on the Disney cruise. I took him on. Adolescent. Can you be space center? Teenager, you see him running track. He'd like cross-country. Going to prom. That was Jonathan's girlfriend. The thing you notice immediately in all the pictures. Yeah, big blue eyes. He's got these eyes that are not just blue. They're really blue.

Like if you boosted the brightness and Photoshop or something. Yeah, I think we're on vacation here, but... The other thing you notice. The spatial expressions are really funny and so many. to the brightness and Photoshop or something. Yeah, that's... I think we're on vacation here, but... The other thing you notice, is facial expressions are really funny and so many. He was a big class clown. A lot of goofy faces. Very goofy. Oh, a big goofy cat and goofball. Yeah. Definitely knew how to make anybody laugh. Full of energy, always into stuff. He kept the boys away too. Definitely, most definitely. He made sure if I had boyfriend, he'd call them just to see what grades they had. Really? He would check on their grades? Yeah, kind of give him a little interview.

I do remember he was very protective. If I had a crush, he'd be like, oh no, you're not going to have a crush. No, no boys. There was one time before he left for Afghanistan, like I really sick with a fever. And I remember him holding my hand just so he can make sure that I was okay and took care of me. They told me story after story about how he d do it on his sisters, how he loved to read and wanted to become a history teacher after his four years in the Marines. And inevitably the conversation turned to the day that they found out he died December 1, 2009. They get a call from Jonathan's mom saying, it's that classic scene, oh my god, there are

two Marines at the door. And we just kind of like left everything Sue Todd the girls jump in the car race over They all wanted to get out and we're like no because we didn't really know what was gonna happen So we made all the girls stay in the car and I remember walking in the door and everyone just had this look on their face like the world had just ended. And um... I remember asking what happened. And my mom had told me that he was gone. And the first thing I did was run to his room because everything was the same before he

had left. Remember, open-epping is closet and grabbing one of his shirts and just holding onto it because it still had his scent on it. Then I was really hard One thing that had never occurred to me Totally caught me off guard and thinking about those pictures is that when those Marines came to the door and Told them the news Well, they didn't actually give much news this right here was one of this is what was read

Don actually read me the circumstances of death statement. Hostile action result of multiple traumatic injuries received as a member of a dismounted patrol that was struck by an ID while conducting combat operations in the Helman Province. That was it on patrol, night patrol, that's all I had. So you didn't know anything? That's it. Jonathan's unit was still in Afghanistan, so he couldn't talk to anyone. He had no clue what happened to his son. So when that casualty assistance officer told him, actually there was a photographer in the room with your son when he died.

Automatically, I was like, I wanted to call her. Earlier in my conversation with Lindsay, I'd asked her, what do you remember the call? So the call, I went to my mother's house in Connecticut and I asked my mother to be left alone, which in a big Italian-American family means it does not happen for me. It does not happen for me.

She sort of looked at me like, what? And I went up into the gas bedroom and I called him. And he picked up. I think he thanked me for calling him. I don't remember exactly what we said, but I said, you know, I was with your son when he died. And I will give you as much or as little information as you want.

And he said, I want to know everything. Because I wasn't there. I was here. He said, I want to know every single thing. I want to be with my son. Just the ladies and men not be there for him. That's that was hard. Really hard. And I felt very awkward because I felt like, you know, why was I privy to this moment? And he is the father, could not be privy. The most important question to me was, that he suffered, do you think that he suffered? I said no.

She told me, Mr. Taylor, I don't think you suffered. I think he was in shock. I told him everything. How much blood has sun lost? How long did they try to save him? And at some point, I said, look, I have these pictures, I have all of these pictures, I shot everything. And I need your permission to publish the ones that show his face. Oh, yeah, she asked me a proper permission. And he was quiet. I said, I told her, yes.

I said, I'm a total retchess. But he said, can I see them? I'm going to see them first. Before I give permission, I want to see every photo. And I said, you know, I'm not sure you want to see these photos. Because they're graphic, but he wanted to see the out... He wanted to see every photo. All of them. Yeah.

Of course, we were on the phone. I couldn't show them pictures. And legally, I needed permission from Time Magazine to show them anything because, you know, as a journalist, you can't show anything to anyone until it's published. You don't show people pictures of journalism before you publish them. This is one of those cardinal rules that's drilled into every journalist's head.

If you show a subject, the raw stuff before it's out there, you're kind of giving up the only independence you've got. That's why she says ordinarily? I would never ever ever show. Just to play it out for a second if he, to be cynical about it, if you show him the pictures, he might take away permission that he might have otherwise give you. Yes, exactly. Exactly. You can say as a publication,

no, I won't show you those pictures before you have to just say, yes or no, what won't show you those pictures before you have to just say yes or no. What do you give your permission? Like, in a way, if you get down to it, I feel like one of the fundamental layers here is just like a question of who's rights when it comes to that information is more important. I could hear an argument that says the battle is important, it was authorized by public figures, it is carrying America's message into the world and shouldn't America see what goes on. Yeah, but I could hear an argument that says, shouldn't a dad be able to protect who sees his son in that situation? Yeah.

In any case, Lindsay called her editors at time. They had a series of conversations that went all the way up to the editor of time. We had a very intense conversation and we collectively made a decision to show him the photos. To say that decision was unusual from their perspective would be severely understating it. When I first got these from FedEx, I knew they were coming and I was actually scared to look at them. And I was actually scared to look at him. And I saw my son there. And I just kept looking and looking. You can see these were the, in the Medevac, when they got him on, you can see the night

vision, lens. There's Jonathan's body. Yes, there's the space. There's the oxygen. So let's watch on still, see as close there that was. So many hands in their work and you can see they're doing CPR there. Now here you see, right leg is really mangled and broken. That's really why I lost so much blood. It was all right in here. Some of these pictures, or there's some of them that are really hard to see.

Yeah, but even though they show the uglyness of war, I've got a piece of Jonathan. This is my treasure. I've got a piece of Jonathan. This is my treasure. And I'll show you one of the pictures that to me, it always stands out. You brought up the picture of the prayer. All those people standing in a semicircle with far away eyes. Right here. You can just see a little different in their face as hair. I mean, it meant something. He was somebody. He wasn't just a number. Todd said he wanted people to see this picture and the others. To convey what's happening over there. This is going on every day.

And he says for him it's not a political thing. You can feel however you want to feel about the wars we're in. For him, it's about people seeing what is actually happening. I mean, I want to let people see the sacrifice that these boys do. It took Todd and his family over a month to decide what to do about those pictures, whether it's a grant time permission to run the photos or not. He says, ultimately, he called Jonathan's mother over her and her husband and my wife and I, we all discussed it. And ultimately, he said no.

And it was a lot of back and forth. He said no to showing any pictures at all. Well, he can't say no to any pictures because there's pictures without the face. Yeah, exactly. He said no to any pictures with the face or identifying marks. We decided really that we didn't want these pictures to get out for fear that the sisters somehow would get back to them and that was the big thing. I didn't want them to be able to see this yet.

As their dad, I want to protect them from things or things. So we decided not to do it. Time had planned to run a whole photo spread on the Medevac team trying to say of Jonathan Taylor's life. But since they now couldn't use most of those photos, they had to make the photo spread more general. What had been basically the death of a soldier ultimately became a photo essay on the MetaVact team and those pictures were maybe two pictures or three pictures in that spread

but they were not the focus. The prayer photo is in the new spread because in that photo you can't see his body because it's covered with a flag, there are no identifying marks. But somehow in that context, it's not got the same impact weirdly. Because you're seeing the after without the before? Exactly. And you know, Todd showed me the original photospred, because they had sent that to him. You know. Again, super unusual.

So this is the feature they wanted to do. You know. Again, super unusual. So this is the, this is the feature they wanted to do. Yeah. You see the pictures are so much more clearer. This is kind of the layout that's going to be, to call it 29 minutes, grapping it out. Minute by minute. This whole process. So there you see all the before pictures that lead up to the prayer. And what it seemed to me is like if you don't see all that stuff, the wounds and the blood and the tenderness as they try to comfort him and then the emptiness they feel when they couldn't save him. Like, if you don't see all that, you're not really standing with them in that prayer at the end.

You're still seeing them across the space. Yeah, that's interesting. In the original spread, you are there in that room. They did a great job, you know? It's really powerful. And I couldn't help but think that maybe this would have created that conversation that Lindsay talked about just a tiny bit.

And like, how weird that I'm one of the only people to see it. And to know that like, the only reason I can describe it to you is because I'm on the radio. You know, I will always feel like, journalistically, we, we sacrifice, you know, we did not tell the story as powerfully as we could have, but we had integrity and I feel like we treated everyone with respect and we kept our word. Lindsay and Todd now stay in touch over email once or twice a year. And in terms of keeping your word, Todd has made a deal with his daughters that they can see the pictures when they turn 21. But interestingly, the three of them don't agree as to whether they want to.

Paige and Mackenzie, who are about to turn 21, say they don't want to see the pictures. I just can't handle it. Do you feel the same? I think for me, I just don't want to see him in pain, you know? That's Mackenzie. Yeah, my thing is I just don't want to see it because I'd rather just remember him in one piece how he was and just too sensitive.

That's Paige. Now Lauren, the youngest. For me, she says she needs to see those pictures. Because I want to know what he went through and I like constantly knowing things. And I don't like things being kept from me. And I just wanna, I guess I just wanna visual of. Sounds like a good one.

She says she knows he's gone, but she still somehow needs proof. Mm-hmm. Not that it happened, she knows it happened. But so it feels real. Okay, so big thanks to Pat Walters, um, Cura Pollock, a Taylor family, and of course, Lindsay Adario. She has a book out now called It's What I Do, which is sort of a memoir about her war photography and how it's changed her life, and that book is filled with her photography.

Anything like the ones we didn't see? There's some amazing pictures in there, but nothing like these ones. So yeah, that's it. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krohich. Thanks for listening. And Lulu here again.

Big, big, big thanks to Kainaz, Amaria, for making time for me during a really busy moment. To find out what she's up to, you can follow her on Twitter. And I highly recommend you listen to her interview on On the Media, where she talks about a really troubling double standard in a lot of US newsrooms. Big, big thanks to her. That's it. Goodbye. Thank you for listening.

Hi, it's Caroline from National Tennessee. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abhamrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Louisville Miller and Lockef Nasser are our co-host. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Susie Leiftenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, David Gable, Matt Kielte, Tobel Mow, Annamen, Sarenkari, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Oliai, Sarah Saundbock,

and Johnny Moans. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.