Documenting Democracy | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Lots of tear gas, lots of rubber bullets, and I think I lived with garlic and onions in my pockets for like several months because that's one common way to kind of get rid of the effects of tear gas. People would just hand those to you to help you out when you're miserable with tear gas in your eyes.

About a decade ago, Andrea Bruce had a front row seat to revolution. She's a photographer who covered the Iraq War. In 2011, Andrea found her way to the heart of the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests in Egypt, Bahrain, and Morocco. Andrea wanted to capture the moment when people said, "It's our turn to have a voice."

But in the middle of a protest, there was no telling if it would suddenly turn violent, if the police would find a reason to fire into the crowd, and there was no way to tell who was the good guy and who wasn't. It's really complicated. So complicated that I'd get on the airplane and go back to Iraq or go to the United States, and all I'd want to do is watch superhero movies. Because in a superhero movie, there's like a good guy and there's a bad guy, and usually there's something simple that happens, and everything's good.

And that is not what happens in the middle of turmoil and revolution, and especially war. As a foreign correspondent, Andrea saw revolutions give birth to new democracies, and she photographed the everyday people who wanted a seat at the table. Now, Andrea is back home in the United States, and she's pointing her camera at a new subject: American democracy.

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I'm Amy Briggs, and this is Overheard at National Geographic, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, we sit down with a war correspondent who asks, "What is democracy, and what does it look like in the U.S.?" More after the break.

Andrea Bruce is a busy woman lately. She's been photographing the build-up to the U.S. presidential election. She's also in the middle of moving. About a month before election day, Nat Geo sent Andrea to cover the aftermath of wildfires in California, and somehow in the middle of all that, she made time to talk to me.

"I don't know where you get your energy from, but you need to tell me because I want it."

"Well, I also have a two-year-old."

"Oh my God, you have a two-year-old? Wait, you have a two-year-old, recovering from wildfires, you're moving? It's insanity! Did you always have like Wonder Woman levels of energy, or is this a new thing?"

"No, I think I've just mastered the art of naps. It's something I learned covering conflict in Iraq. You know, I can take a five-minute nap and be totally energized for three hours, and then crash again, and then another five-minute nap, and I'm good. So yeah, that's how I survive."

"So how did you start taking photographs?"

"I went to college to be a writer. My last semester, senior year, I took a photo class just kind of as a joke or just for fun and totally fell in love with it. I dropped everything else in my life and dedicated everything to photography and finally landed my first job at a small community paper in New Hampshire called the Concord Monitor."

"So when you were starting off on that first job, were the photographs you took mostly just related to the stories you were covering?"

"Yeah, you know, the Concord Monitor was this dream of a newspaper for young journalists, and I also was given a lot of freedom to do like my own photo column. So I got to write and take pictures on small-town investigative stories, which is really fascinating, and in stories that just kind of show that everyday life because that's what attracted me to photography: that everybody has a story, and it doesn't matter if you're in a small town in New Hampshire or if you're in Iraq. You know, you have a story, and it's important."

"So when you were covering sort of the everyday life stuff in Concord, what did that look like? What were the things that you were drawn to?"

"Oh, I would do things like, for this photo column, I would just say, 'Okay, I'm going to drive in one direction for 14.5 miles down this one road, I'm gonna stop my car and the first person I see, I'm gonna talk to them, and I'm gonna follow them in their life for the next few hours and see what happens.' And that was like the best way to find really interesting moments because everyone thinks their lives are so boring. You just follow people and meet people and talk to them and see what's going on."

"So how did you get from the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire to overseas?"

"I got a job at the Washington Post, and it was just a little, a few months before 9/11. And then 9/11 happened, and I was suddenly covering that from Washington, D.C. I mean, I remember I was living in the suburbs of D.C. and driving in while everyone else in the city was driving out. And then I was sent kind of as an afterthought to cover the Iraq War, and I kind of got there, and then I almost just never left. I found that that kind of small-town community approach to stories and storytelling was actually more valuable in Iraq than it even was in like the United States and New Hampshire."

"Why is that?"

"Because it's hard. First of all, it's hard to get people to pay attention to people who are in a culture, a language, a religion, a situation that's different than their own. So my audience was in the United States, in mostly Washington, D.C., and it's really hard to get people to pay attention to what it's like to be Iraqi. It was hard to get people to pay attention to the war altogether. I mean, no one really wanted to know about it. And I found that covering it like a small town, like I started another photo column called Unseen Iraq, and it was highlighting in the same way the one the column did in New Hampshire, highlighting these kind of small moments that are almost invisible or not really normally newsworthy but show the common humanity of people and life."

"And I thought, okay, well, people aren't going to care about what's happening to someone in a different culture unless they can relate to them first. One entry in Andrea's column is called 'Exam Day at a Baghdad Girl School.' In the photo, high school girls sit in neat rows in front of a blackboard, focusing on test papers in front of them. But Andrea writes that there's more to the scene. The girls are in a neighborhood with frequent suicide bombings. As they take their tests, sirens blare outside and helicopters swoop low over the city. The war didn't stop for exam day. So it's kind of combining the everyday life of living in a war zone with common humanity."

"There's another picture that I took of a man who is a very kind of handsome man. He has gray hair and he's wearing like a suit. He's outside, and he's standing next to some blast walls, and there's a ton of trash, and there are some wild dogs, and he's waiting for his bus to go to work on a Monday morning. It's his Monday morning commute. And he works for the government, and he kind of has his eyes closed. Like this is what living in a war zone is. No matter how normal you look in your normal suit and tie to go to work, you're still surrounded by all the chaos that living in a war zone creates. And I thought about the readers in Washington, D.C. This published on Mondays, like also going to work on their Monday morning commute, and hoped that I could draw connections there."

"So at what point in your work in Iraq did you first start to think about democracy? You know, what it is and how people are thinking about it, were thinking about it then?"

"Well, I've always been fascinated about what women go through in war zones. One common thing that happens to women throughout history all over the world in war zones is prostitution. So Iraq is no exception. So I met this woman named Hala, who was just really strong. Her husband died in the initial bombing, U.S. bombing of Iraq, and she was left with her two children and no way to provide for them. And there are not a lot of jobs available for women, so she turned to prostitution. So I followed her, and she became like my best friend for that year. For basically all of 2004, I hung out with her. We did each other's hair; I met all the other prostitutes that she hung out with. She styled herself after Britney Spears and like had blue contact lenses. Even at times, dyed her hair blonde. One of the questions she asked me one day was, 'So, you know, Americans are always talking about democracy. What does that mean?' And I was like, 'Oh, uh, well, I guess it means, you know, something about the Bill of Rights.' And I named my takeaways from the Bill of Rights, and I was really disappointed with my own answer. It was pretty lame."

"Wait, wait, were you disappointed in the moment or did you think back and go, 'Oh, I could have answered that differently?' How did that go?"

"Oh, I was totally embarrassed in the moment. I was like, right, I am from the United States. We are bringing democracy. But what is that like? Let me define that for you. I'm envisioning like soldiers showing up with something like an apple pie and just being like, 'Here's democracy. There you go!'”

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"Well, that's the thing. And I, and she was like, 'Oh, well, I thought democracy meant money, that you guys were going to make us rich.' And I actually think that was kind of a common misunderstanding of a lot of Iraqis. They're like, 'Well, the U.S. is rich now. The U.S. is here. We're gonna get rich.'”

"What was Hala's reaction to your answer?"

"She just said, 'Oh, I thought it was money.' And then she was kind of disappointed, and we talked about something else. Hala's question stuck with Andrea. The U.S. said it wanted to spread democracy around the world, but what did that mean, and what even is democracy? In 2004, Afghanistan held its first elections after the U.S. toppled the Taliban government. Many Afghans would be able to vote for the first time. The Washington Post sent Andrea and her camera to see what happened."

"Can you set the scene for me? What was going on? What did it look like? What did democracy look like there?"

"Oh wow, I have to say that that was one of the most beautiful situations I've ever photographed. You know, regardless of what you think of the U.S.'s role in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeing people vote in 2004 was beautiful. I went to a small village in Logar province and it was um, these old men came, and they waited for an hour before the poll station opened. And they were lined up—there were like at least 25 older men—and they all had these roses in their hands that they had picked on the way there. And they were like throwing the rose petals on top of everyone and celebrating.

"And then the women came to vote, and they had a separate polling area, but they were all lined up in their burqas, and then they filed inside the polling area. And as a woman, this is one of the big honors of being a female photojournalist is that I got to see them like all pull over their burqas, and then they go in. They had these huge smiles, and they went in and they voted. It was pretty cool."

"Was it surprising at all when they pulled back? Do you know, to see them smiling or to see the rose petals, or did you expect that?"

"No, I didn't expect it at all. I mean, I guess I didn't really know what to expect, but Afghans did embrace the entire process. I mean, you would go to like a campaigning event for one of the candidates, and there would be like a thousand people joyously supporting their candidate because they could, and singing and dancing. And, you know, under the Taliban, things were much different, and you didn't have that kind of free expression. So then to have this very open celebration of an election was fun and something I'm actually not used to in the United States."

"So, you've seen the elections in Afghanistan, and I know you also photographed Egypt's revolution in 2011. What's it like to be there during these historic democratic moments?"

"I mean, you're, as a journalist, you're working on adrenaline. You barely have enough sleep to even think things through. You're kind of reacting to events as they unfold in front of you, and trying to piece it together as it goes. And it's kind of like an aha moment, like, 'Oh, this is what's happening now.' And like in Egypt, you know, you had this revolution which was beautiful, and then you see people like the military helping people overthrow the government. And then you see this slow disillusionment of the military, who they thought of as heroes, and then they realized, 'Oh wait, no, the military is in charge.' And is that really where we want to be too? And watching everyone kind of also react to like, 'What is going on here?' and like, 'Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?' And you know, the truth is that no one is either. There's like good with the bad and bad with the good. It's in, and that is maybe the hardest part of being a journalist and watching all of these things is that there's so much gray, and everything is so much more complicated than people realize."

"And you know, when you're reading a paper or a magazine, really, you just want it to be simple. It's not."

As Andrea covered wars and revolutions overseas, something nagged at her over and over. People asked her the same question as Hala in Iraq: "What is democracy? This thing the U.S. says it wants to spread around the world. This thing some Americans are even willing to die for." Andrea wanted to know what other Americans thought. So in 2015, she came home; she started a new photo project called Our Democracy.

"So normally, I get an assignment, or I come up with a story idea and try to find the people who fit this idea or this theme or this premise that we've researched. What I was trying to do with this project is something completely different. I just wanted to listen, which is a lot of what we do when we do things overseas. Because, you know, I'm not part of that community, but for some reason, when we're covering a community in the United States, we think that we know them already, which is kind of ridiculous. Because, you know, the difference between someone living in like Detroit versus Montana versus Louisiana is so different. They're almost like different countries sometimes. So to think that I would know everything that everyone goes through and their issues is pretty ridiculous. So I wanted to go with an open mind and have almost like tiny town hall meetings just to hear people out—like what do you think democracy means?"

She held more than a dozen of these tiny town hall meetings all over the U.S. In Memphis, Tennessee; in a small town in West Virginia; on land belonging to the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. Andrea asked people whether they felt like they had the power to make change, and Andrea says the answers surprised her.

"If you take away kind of politics and you listen to people, the big division in the United States is actually between the rich and the poor. And maybe that's obvious to other people, but it wasn't what I expected to find. Because it's not necessarily people living in poverty, but it's sort of like right above the poverty line—so people who have no safety net. And regardless of like what race they were, where they lived, or what their job was, they all kind of had the same reaction. And that was, 'You know what? The people in government, the national government, they don't do anything for us. We have to do it ourselves.' And they feel like democracy or having a voice isn't for them; it's for people who have money. And that was such a crazy takeaway from this project. It wasn't at all what I expected to find."

"So did witnessing the elections and revolutions, you know, as a journalist, did it make you think differently about how you participate in democracy as a citizen?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. I guess for me personally, I find elections really important. I find going to town hall meetings or school board meetings really important, and I am such a geeky fan of those meetings. I think one of my biggest challenges in the past few years is how do you make a town hall meeting sexy? How do you make it beautiful? How do you make people understand the importance of just that simple meeting? And how boring they can be, but how important they are to participate in? It's not easy."

"So I'm curious. You know you've just moved to North Carolina, but I know like you work all over the country. Where are you going to be on election day? Where's the best place to cover that story this year?"

"I'm sure I'll be somewhere in North Carolina. During the last presidential election, I was here in Pamlico County, which is the county where I live, and I covered it from here. It was fascinating because I went to every polling place in the county. That was my goal, and I was doing it for myself. It was part of the project; it wasn't really for a publication. I just wanted to see. One of the polling places was this brick building with one tiny window. No other one. Just one tiny window, and it had on the door handwritten 'Vote here' in a scribble like off of a page that was like torn out of a notebook. It was like lined paper, and I was like, whoa, this almost looks like a strip club more than a polling place. I don't know what's going on. So I went in, and I saw two guys who just got off work, and it was probably like it was dark, so it was probably like around seven o'clock or so here. And two guys who came in, and they were like—they looked really nervous. I asked them, and they were like, 'Well, they actually asked me, like, where do I go?' And there's like this one woman at a table; she'll help you. And they were like, 'Well, we've never voted before.' That was just like a fascinating moment, and I'm curious again what people in this county will do. So hopefully, I'll be here."

"Now that you know you've done all this work covering democracy and, you know, looking at community in the United States, I'm curious if you could go back to Hala to the time, you know, she asked you about democracy. If you could have a do-over, what would you tell her? Like, what is democracy?"

"I guess I would say that democracy is a place where you feel like you have an equal chance to make a difference in your community or to change your situation in your community. So I guess maybe that's what I'd say. But I'm more interested in knowing what everyone else wants it to be also—not just even how they define it now. Because if we don't know what it is, or if we don't have a common understanding of it, then I guess it would be hard to know if it disappears."

Andrea Bruce's photo project is called Our Democracy. We have a link in our show notes where you can see some of her work.

More after the break.

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Check out some of Andrea's photography in her show notes. We have a link to her project Our Democracy, and you can also see photos from her time as a foreign correspondent. Also, we have some tips to help you understand election night. Take the maps you see on TV; they may be misleading. We'll show you a better way to visualize vote totals. Also, elections can be especially confusing for kids. Hear how experts say you should talk to them about what's going on. And for subscribers, see photos from four countries where women have gained a lot more political power. Andrea Bruce captured the women in charge and the women still fighting for change. That's in the show notes right there on your podcast app.

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Overheard at National Geographic is produced by Jacob Pinter, Brian Gutierrez, and Laura Sim. Our senior editor is Eli Chan. Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardulon. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris. Hansdale Sue composed our theme music and engineers our episodes. This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. Susan Goldberg is National Geographic's editorial director, and I'm your host, Amy Briggs. See you next time.

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