It’s All About the Paper

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00:10
George Gavrilis
You may have never heard of Robert Nickelsberg, but you’ve likely seen his photos in places like Time, Newsweek, or The Wall Street Journal. Wounded soldiers stumbling towards a rescue helicopter in Guatemala, a sea of migrant miners in Brazil caked in mud, climbing out of gold pits. Farmers threshing rice in Vietnam after the war’s end. And all that before Bob first arrived in Afghanistan in 1988 when he documented the country as the Soviets withdrew.

00:41
George Gavrilis
So when Laura needed a photographer to shoot monuments and cultural sites across Afghanistan for a State Department-supported book project, Bob seemed to be the man for the job.

00:51
George Gavrilis
In this episode, Laura and I talk to Bob about what it takes to make a good picture— avoiding the glare of the powerful Afghan sun, melding into the surroundings even with a massive camera around your neck, making the monuments come alive by including the people who surround them, rather than cropping them out. And the most agonizing decision of all: choosing the right paper to print the photos. As Bob explains, it’s all about the paper.

01:24
George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. If you are new to this podcast, we recommend going back to start with Episode 1. For everyone else, welcome back. Let's jump in.

01:44
George Gavrilis
Bob, your first trip to Afghanistan was in early 1988. This was a significant time to be in the country. Najibullah was still in power. He was the Soviet-backed ruler of Afghanistan. And the Soviets had not yet begun withdrawal from the country. It was a restive time, I think. I mean, the mujahideen are fighting the Soviets, Pakistan's ISI, its intelligence services, are operating all over the country, and there's also a movement to unite Pashtuns across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wow. What— what a time to be there. Tell us about it.

02:29
Robert Nickelsberg
It was January of 1988. And there was a funeral of an Afghan nationalist Ghaffār Abdul Khān. I believe he was anti-partition, he died in Peshawar, and his last wish was to be buried in Jalalabad.

02:51
Robert Nickelsberg
And the Soviets were still in power in January of '88. And that border at Torkham was always closed. And the last thing they wanted was media to come in. So they gave media a one-day visa, I think it was January 16, 1988. Media could come into Jalalabad by car through the Khyber Pass. Spetsnaz special forces were all over the place because President Najibullah attended and other Pashtun nationalists, just for the burial.

03:25
Robert Nickelsberg
So we were met at the— early— on the eastern side of Nangarhar and came up for the ceremony. Never having been there legally, because everybody from the media would cross illegally to walk with the mujahideen at that period, and the Soviets were not happy about that. You had to get your Afghan visa at the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi. So the Afghans may have had an embassy but you went to the Soviet Consulate to get your visa.

03:51
Robert Nickelsberg
That's how it worked. And they weren't happy about giving visas to journalists in New Delhi at the Soviet Embassy. In any case, we had a one-day visa.

04:02
Robert Nickelsberg
About halfway through the funeral ceremony, two massive explosions in the parking lot, say at the other end of the soccer field, where the buses— Buses were coming in from Pakistan. And this was a big security risk for the Soviets because where was the opposition but in Pakistan? Al-Qaeda, early days, were in Peshawar. So they knew everybody coming from Peshawar was anti-Soviet, anti-Najibullah.

04:30
Robert Nickelsberg
So was ISI there. But these explosions were massive. And everyone's fled immediately, including my driver. I had no idea where our car was and it was a white Toyota and 99% of the cars were white Toyotas. It blew out everybody's windscreen. So my reporter said his car was full. The bureau chief said now you better find your driver.

04:57
Robert Nickelsberg
I eventually just jumped into a car that was empty. He was going to Peshawar, and he had no windscreen. We drove back three hours at night with no windscreen. He was a Pashtun, we had about three words in English. He was stoned out of his mind and he could barely see. I mean, his eyes were so closed that I don't know how we made it down the Khyber to Peshawar alive.

05:27
Robert Nickelsberg
So 16 people died. 16. That was my first trip. And it was a rock-and-roll roller coaster ever since.

05:42
George Gavrilis  
That's quite the introduction to Afghanistan.

05:45
Robert Nickelsberg
But that's an indication of what it was like there at that point.

05:49
George Gavrilis  
Here's a question for you as a photographer. I'd love to understand your instinct at a moment like that, when bombs have gone off at an event. Is your instinct to go somewhere safe or is it to pick up the camera and start shooting?

06:05
Robert Nickelsberg
The latter. Start shooting. I don't like running away from situations, that's not why I'm there, to put it simply. If you can find a quick way to de-conflict this, mediate this situation, there's usually a way. You can quickly see 98–99% of the people are running that way, and there's one or two going forward, they know something. So follow them until you don't feel right and then look for the smoke. And is there a straight line to it? Do you have to go behind a tree, rock, or house, whatever?

06:42
Robert Nickelsberg
I didn't know it was in a bus. I found out later in the news reports that somebody had placed bombs in some of the buses from Pakistan. But that could have been Afghan intelligence trying to screw the Pakistanis or make it appear as though it wasn't them. They were clever.

07:00
Robert Nickelsberg
But I don't have many pictures of that particular thing because it did get hairy and in a sense I'm not walking back to Peshawar through the Khyber Pass, you know. I'd better find a car. So at that point you have to drop the camera and say let's be, you know, rational here. If you're the last person there you're gonna be the first one picked up by the Afghan intelligence people, and, as a foreigner. So, I jumped on that.

07:32
Robert Nickelsberg
Thankfully, we could avoid all that trouble in 2016. I was starting to get tired of chasing car bombs. It's not a lot of fun and they cleverly would have a second bomb 15 minutes after the first one and they'd wait till people came in again. Very often journalists, and then another bomb would go off.

07:59
Robert Nickelsberg
Being first to a situation later on in the 2000s was not a good idea. But you have to process all that too, it requires relying on a lot of instincts for self-preservation and luck.

08:18
George Gavrilis
So Bob, back in Episode 10, Laurie and I spoke about the book, Afghanistan's Heritage: Restoring Spirit and Stone. She brought you on board to take photos for the book. So why don't you tell us the story of the book, from your eyes? Where is a good place to start? What made you want to say yes, to what was ultimately a public diplomacy project?

08:43
Robert Nickelsberg
I have this background in FSA, WPA photography from the '30s and '40s that helped form a baseline for me on what could be done with outside support for photography. That was also a period that was politically inspired to have these programs that would benefit a lot of people. But there was a lot of political opposition to programs like that.

09:09
Robert Nickelsberg
I realized that I should investigate this particular one, because it was not political in the goal of illustrating and documenting all of the monuments and institutions that Laura had in mind—some of these projects that are underway, some that are finished and functioning.

09:33
Robert Nickelsberg
On the surface, I was 100% in on that alone, where I didn't have to work with a reporter, I didn't have a weekly or Friday deadline, shipping film was out, you know, all that background I had in making sure my pictures got to the main desk.

09:55
Robert Nickelsberg
This was a way to blueprint, design a project properly— given the amount of time, what's the right week, not the right week. August is the best month to be in Afghanistan. We had that luxury of scheduling. When the sky is blue every single day, you don't have flight issues in August, usually, in Afghanistan.

10:18
Robert Nickelsberg
So I could get to each one of the places that Laura had on the list. I was able to find and secure the right guide / translator. Of course, this is all collaborating and discussing with Laura about what it would require. I think we riffed on this for hours about what it would take. When I looked at the number of legal notepads that I had gone through writing notes from each conversation that we'd have.

10:51
Robert Nickelsberg
And then we'd have another conversation in three days, I'd have to go back to that page. Ah, remember that idea? Because there were so many things to consider at that time for that part of the State Department, which I always thought was underrated by journalists, never enough coverage.

11:08
Robert Nickelsberg
Short form journalism never really worked on how the cultural support mechanism worked, say, in Brazil or in Peru. It was always the military or the political upheavals that took away the headline. And it pushed aside the cultural and the historical story, which I know people would be interested in if they had a chance to read it. But in order to read it, it has to be put together.

11:39
Robert Nickelsberg
So this was, I felt, a legitimate, sophisticated way of putting a project together, and we knew we would have equal access to the texts. Perhaps if we had a disagreement, we could iron it out and finesse it properly. The picture editing, I wanted it to be fully responsible for, I didn't want to have it be interpreted through a picture editor.

12:07
Robert Nickelsberg
George, so I'd send in 10 rolls of film, unseen, unprocessed, and the lucky people in New York had to go through it and find one. And I had no say in the matter, I could tell them if it was the wrong picture, because the caption doesn't go along with the story. But in this case, we had full control. And not to pat ourselves on the back here, we put a lot of effort and brainpower into pulling it off.

12:40
George Gavrilis
So Laurie, how did you and Bob find each other?

12:44
Laura Tedesco
Bob was giving a talk at the State Department on his first book on Afghanistan. I attended the talk, because I was interested in the topic. I was also kind of evaluating whether I thought Bob would be a good partner for me on working on what I knew was going to be a very big project.

13:06
Laura Tedesco
So I attended the book talk. I don't think Bob knew I was in the audience. I'm sure he didn't. But then I think we had lunch afterwards, Bob, and we got a chance to sort of chat a little bit. I think it took me maybe a month or so before I got around to asking you if you would be interested to work on this project.

13:25
George Gavrilis
Did you like each other instantly? Or was it a work in progress?

13:29
Laura Tedesco
Bob? [laughing]

13:33
Robert Nickelsberg
It was fine. It was a—

13:35
Laura Tedesco
[laughing] It was fine.

13:37
Robert Nickelsberg
Wait a minute. Hang on.

13:39
George Gavrilis
Laurie's sure is laughing a lot instead of answering.

13:42
Robert Nickelsberg
Hang on. That — that— Laura's laugh— I'm not gonna read between laughter here. It's genuine. But you know, the lunch afterwards where we sat in the State Department cafeteria, you know, there wasn't even a tablecloth, you know, it was food on a tray. And the people who set up that particular US State Department event, were the ones who picked up the tab for that and actually said, you know, let's get about eight people together.

14:14
Robert Nickelsberg
And Hannah and Laura— Hannah's our mutual friend— attended. Hannah had been based in Islamabad, so we had a similar foundation in the region. The adrenaline for me talking about 25 years of Afghan history— This is sensitive territory, you know, mujahideen, Al-Qaeda, 9/11. All that stuff is wrapped into the book, part of my collective memory of working in Afghanistan. The questions were carefully asked of me in that book discussion— I had to come down a little bit for that lunch.

14:48
Robert Nickelsberg
So Laura was one of eight people at the table. And it was very pleasant. You know, she didn't spill her glass of water. She didn't, you know, yawn. I'm joking.

15:01
George Gavrilis
Why don't we talk about some of the pictures in the book?

15:04
Robert Nickelsberg
But, wait a minute, Laura— Laura didn't say, didn't have her impression.

15:09
George Gavrilis
Well, her answer was her suspicious laugh.

15:11
Robert Nickelsberg
[laughing]

15:12
Laura Tedesco
[laughing]

15:13
George Gavrilis
But yeah, if you want to answer, Laurie, go ahead. Now's your chance.

15:17
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, no, no, I know. Yeah, definitely. I liked Bob. I liked his talk a lot, the way he spoke about his pictures, the lunch was fine. He didn't spill his glass of water. He didn't yawn. It was good.

15:32
Laura Tedesco
Although I think that, as we were building the foundation for the project, in my recollection, at least, there were a couple of times I asked myself where I was like, Oh, I don't know if this is gonna work out— that my language about it and your language, we hadn't found enough of a common language.

15:52
George Gavrilis
What typifies that?

15:54
Laura Tedesco
Well, so here's just one example. Bob was asking me for a shot list. In my head, we had four conversations already. And I was talking about the sites. In my head that constituted a shot list. I didn't understand exactly what Bob needed. And it took me a while to figure out.

16:14
Laura Tedesco
Concurrent with us really building this project, I was also traveling constantly. I mean, in the span of six months, I think I was in Karachi, Colombo, Kabul, back and forth. So I wasn't able to give this project 100% of my focus, probably when it needed more focus than I could give it at the time. Anyway, but now, what is it? It's like, yeah, it's years later, we're friends. For sure.

16:52
George Gavrilis
All right, well, then, then this is my cue to jump to the pictures.

16:56
Laura Tedesco
Yes.

16:58
George Gavrilis
Yeah, tell us about that lovely cover photo, the one of the Citadel in Herat and the marketplace around it.

17:04
Robert Nickelsberg
There's a lot that goes into finding a cover shot in and of itself, it's a bit intimidating to have that over your head as a photographer. Very often you find a cover shot in a place that you didn't intend to find one.

17:23
Robert Nickelsberg
I had been to this particular spot in Herat the night before when they have a night market. So all the lights are on. The Citadel above it may have had a few spotlights on it. But it didn't have that prominence, that sort of looming prominence that it does in the daylight picture. I realized that the night market went around the perimeter of the fortress. But where was the most amount of foot traffic? The nuts and dry fruits, that's going to be one of the busiest places no matter what. That and the fresh vegetable stands.

18:04
Laura Tedesco
Bob, wasn't it right before Eid also? It was like right before an Eid holiday. So the markets were especially busy.

18:13
Robert Nickelsberg
Yes. Part of our need for more time may have been based on that. We couldn't find anything for three, four days. But in any case, with the guide / translator, also a good journalist, I just parked myself on a railing in this position, and just waited 10, 15 minutes, to see.

18:36
Robert Nickelsberg
And there are a lot of outtakes to this because the fellow you see in front of the three-wheeled taxi on the left would be in the middle. But that would not be the right position. So you had to take almost film it and get the right coming and going from right to left, left to right. And the kids I didn't really see until that night, I didn't see them in the car, I did sort of the lower side of my view of this frame.

19:08
Robert Nickelsberg
The woman in the backseat in the shadows on the right side of the car that I didn't see until weeks later when I re-edited this and sent cover possibilities to Laura to see which one would check off the boxes that were needed for a good representation of a lot of effort and funding and manual labor into a project that would relate well to a foreign audience.

19:36
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, I had to get the cover photo approved by about nine different people. Bob, you and I narrowed it down to maybe three possibilities for a cover photo. And then, as I was trying to sort of shield you from some of the sausage-making of all the clearances and kind of advocacy and discussions that happened behind the scenes to put what is a kind of unorthodox project like this book together.

20:04
Laura Tedesco
I remember having extensive discussions with people in the State Department as to why they liked a picture or didn't like a picture. And it's the best one for the cover. Are you happy with that picture, Bob?

20:19
Robert Nickelsberg
Absolutely.

20:20
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, good.

20:22
Robert Nickelsberg
We had to turn a horizontal into a vertical and that's for any art department, that's tricky. You have to have that empty space above to put your title and logo and whatever. But it continues to get my attention when it's lying on a table. It's gussied up in reds and neon and your eye goes to a lot of different places within the frame. And there's you see it differently each time you do look at it like a carpet or jazz or a painting.

21:05
George Gavrilis
This was, like you were saying, a very different project for you, a very different beast. So what did you learn about Afghanistan in the process of doing this?

21:13
Robert Nickelsberg
Certainly, spots that I put my fresh eyes onto, that I never expected to get to, or not have the time to devote to not just a drive by, you know, 30 seconds, and then we got to get to the airport kind of moment. We could get to a location, morning, noon, night. Again, second time, too. And that is really how you put a really strong story or document together.

21:47
Robert Nickelsberg
First impressions are important, but then you see it and develop it. I'd moved two inches or over to the right, and one hour later in the day. Yet, you would toss that out of your mind on a, say, a journalism mission, you just couldn't afford that. An hour, you had to be somewhere else. So these were locations that I could devote the proper amount of time to. You get the most amount of traffic and the most amount of activity, drama.

22:18
Robert Nickelsberg
A market, for instance, is all day. But Eid generates a lot of foot traffic. At the shrines themselves, people take them very seriously and go into this sort of silent meditative mode when they enter and you try not to disturb them while you're working. And let things flow naturally. And that was the beauty of being able to go back again on a second day to see if it was empty of people.

22:50
Robert Nickelsberg
I could work differently with a mosaic, for instance— If there were people crossing the area that I needed to set up a tripod, you don't want people walking through it all the time. So again, the options were, to my benefit, to exploit differently than I normally would as a journalist.

23:15
George Gavrilis
There's a very striking photo, many striking photos, but I think it's a photo that you love very much as well, Laurie, of women pilgrims in the north at Haji Piyada, a very famous site, abutting adjacent to Noh Gumbad. How do you show up at the entrance to a women's shrine and photograph them while being invisible? What do you have to do to cloak yourself?

23:45
Robert Nickelsberg
Be patient. Put the camera down. As people come in, don't shock them. You wait till they take their spot and go into sort of this prayer mode, where they don't see anything other than what's on their mind at that time, and what's on their mind better not be you. And I'm a male in a mostly female presence. That has its own subtleties and nuances.

24:12
Robert Nickelsberg
It's watching the flow of humankind as they approach a place with such respect, and yet tradition. You know that small child that is with them now, maybe in 20 years, will be coming back bringing their children. It is a real important significant part of their daily life that is rugged, challenging just to put food on the table. Yet this is their period to themselves. And this is also part of their spiritual medicine.

24:48
Robert Nickelsberg
There's the clinical side, and there's the spiritual side. So this was the spiritual side of their life and you had an inside seat to it. Don't blow it. Don't drop something, you know, don't light up a cigarette, you know, I mean, not that I would, but there are people I've seen do that, you know, and it's not the place for it. Show equal amount of respect and knowledge and study. And you'll be able to spend a quality moment there with them.

25:24
George Gavrilis
And what I noticed about the photo is that the women are going about their business, they are laser focused on the shrine, but their children are all looking at you and smiling, just beaming. Is that generally how children are? Are they very curious when a guy shows up with a camera?

25:41
Robert Nickelsberg
They photobomb all the time and it's awful. I can't tell you how many frames we had to toss and I didn't see it at the time until— what's that kid doing at the ankle level looking at me with a smile he just ruined the great serious mood of that picture! But that's innocence there, you know, that's genuine. They'd rather be playing in the sandbox, you know, rather than being dragged along.

26:07
Robert Nickelsberg
At the same time, they were being taught and imprinted there about what we do on a Thursday or you know, where they go on the way to the market, they zip off and stop at the shrine. And this is where they maybe meet other people, you know, that they normally wouldn't see in the course of a day, at the shrine. This is like the water pump, you know, where everyone lines up to get their bucket of water in the villages. That's where the communication is. And it can be surreptitious, if something is wrong for a neighbor, that's not spoken about while there are men around.

26:46
Laura Tedesco
There's definitely only women at the shrine. And I think all the children with them happened to be girls in the picture.

26:55
George Gavrilis
That's right.

26:57
Laura Tedesco
And that's another layer of the significance of a space like that shrine that's really a special place for women. It becomes known to the girls as a safe place for them to go. Where you just referenced surreptitious, it's a place where women can not only go to pray, but where they can go to exchange information that may not be safe to exchange in the presence of others.

27:22
Laura Tedesco
But that touches on such a connecting thread to every picture in the book, and something that was very much part of the vision of making the book with Bob. These monuments, these sites, these historical places in Afghanistan very much remain on the lived psychological, social, cultural landscape of Afghans now.

27:49
Laura Tedesco
Noh Gumbad, the site, what is it, it's eighth, ninth century, so it's well over a thousand years old. The shrine Haji Piyada, I think it's 16th century. So we're talking about sites that are hundreds of years old that are still very significant for Afghans right now.

28:15
Robert Nickelsberg
So the woman sitting on the bench at the concert grand piano struck me as something way off the normal orbit that you'd come across a student in a school. When you walk into that National Music Institute, you hear sounds of cellos, trumpets. Maybe I don't think there was a harp there, but just noises that you would never hear anywhere else in Kabul or in Afghanistan, for that matter.

28:45
Robert Nickelsberg
And I went back a number of times at different times of the day to find that when they practice or when they're instructed or when they have access to that piano, because that girl would have to give up that bench for somebody else to come in. But also to see a Yamaha piano in a place that you're lucky to have, you know, anything newer than a 1995 Toyota.

29:13
Robert Nickelsberg
Everything about that environment there was hyper real for me, including her ability to play with both hands, with proper posture. My mother trained as a concert pianist for a while in her life. So I have this in my mind, we grew up with a concert piano in our house. And it's a place of honor. And not everybody gets to sit there and play on the 88 keys.

29:45
Robert Nickelsberg
This woman, with all the violence that she faces on coming to school, and on the way home from school, this was a very peaceful enlightened moment. If peace would last long enough that she could actually have another language, not just Dari, Pashtu, but music as another language. That was unique.

30:06
Laura Tedesco
We could not have anticipated at the time that Bob took the pictures in the Music Institute, in the National Museum, at really every site, we could not have anticipated how the significance of the pictures would change.

30:24
Laura Tedesco
Because that National Institute of Music, it's closed. If it were open, there would be no female students in there. Not allowed. The picture of the shrine that we were just talking about, Haji Piyada, it's just women present. Bob, did you see them walk in with male relatives escorting them? I don't— He's shaking his head "no". I don't think they would be allowed to go from their homes into the shrine by themselves now.

31:06
George Gavrilis
Laurie, how much did the paper that you used for the book cost?

31:10
Laura Tedesco
I don't remember the cost of the paper. Here's what I remember. Bob was never happy with any of the paper samples he was getting. And it took what felt like months and months of Bob being extremely picky on the paper. And then I remember seeing the cost of the paper and being like, Oh, Jesus, alright. But we made it work. Bob knew how important the paper was. Therefore, I was not going to argue with him about it. But I don't remember the price of the paper. I just remember Bob was not going to settle for anything that was not above excellent.

31:57
George Gavrilis
What makes for good paper in the eyes of a photographer like yourself? What do you look for?

32:03
Robert Nickelsberg
First off is the weight of the paper, how thick it is. And you would take a corner of a page and with your thumb, flip the sharp 90 degree and how it flips back and forth. You certainly don't want it to crease, for instance, you want something that holds up. And that paper is attached to a binding. So when you ask about paper, George, you also have to eventually talk about the binding.

32:30
Robert Nickelsberg
This particular paper also absorbs ink better than a paper of less quality. And those colors, given the amount of time we spent on the digital files, demand, in my mind, a good paper. We're not sparing the blacks, we're not going to spare the reds, and I want to be on press. This particular press agreed to having me there as the sheets were coming off to approve it.

33:00
Robert Nickelsberg
You understand something we take very much for granted in picking up a book, what goes into making a better book. And that paper Xantur, you listed on the back page of credits, so people understand that this wasn't just a random choice. We wanted this to be known that thought and concern for every inch, millimeter, of the book was taken into consideration. And that includes the quality of paper.

33:34
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

33:35
George Gavrilis
There's one thing I learned through this book. And that is that Afghans do not slouch. Oh my god, these people have straight backs.

33:47
Laura Tedesco
That's a really cool observation, George, I hadn't noticed that.

33:51
George Gavrilis
Oh my goodness. Even the kids backs' straight as boards. The guy that you mentioned on the moped or the motorcycle outside the Citadel on Herat, it's unreal how straight his back is.

34:05
Laura Tedesco
[laughing]

34:07
George Gavrilis
So with that, this has been fun.

34:15
George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

34:31
George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 18: It’s All about the Paper — Robert Nickelsberg

Topics Covered in this Episode
First trip to Afghanistan, 1988
The photographer's instinct, in a war zone
Photographing the book, a public diplomacy project
How Bob and Laura met
Pictures in Afghanistan's Heritage: Restoring Spirit and Stone
Cover photo: the Citadel at Herat
Photographing for this project vs. for journalism
Photographing Women in Afghanistan
Photographing Children
Photographing Afghan Musicians
Paper choice for the book

Recorded on October 14, 2021

You can read more about Robert Nickelsberg on the blog post "Afghanistan Coming Closer."