Riots for bread.

Women who tried to commit suicide

by setting themselves on fire.

Many, many women were dying in child birth.

I was kidnapped by Gaddafi's troops.

There was no place to hide.

(applause)

So I was 26 the first time I went to Afghanistan.

And I had been living in India at the time.

And I had a roommate who went to Afghanistan

under the Taliban and he came back

and he said, "You know, you are a woman.

You should go to Afghanistan

and photograph women living under the Taliban,

because no one's doing it."

And he didn't tell me

that photography was illegal at the time,

that you couldn't photograph any living thing.

And that there was no American Embassy,

and that the only governing body was the Taliban,

which was ruled by Sharia law.

But I was 26 and I didn't care, and so, I went.

And I took some pictures of women.

I kept my cameras in my bag,

and I ran around to people's homes.

And I went to the hospitals--

this was a women's hospital in 2000.

There was no medicine, very few doctors.

This was a woman in labor.

This is a very typical scene on the streets of Kabul.

This was the capital at the time.

There were almost no cars.

Women beggars were really the only women

you would ever see on the street.

Any form of entertainment was illegal.

There was no music, no television,

and no cell phone.

So, when I would go to Afghanistan at the time,

I would literally fall off the face of the planet.

I would have no idea what was happening

outside of Afghanistan.

This scene happened. I was out at a refugee camp

because there was a drought in Herat,

which was western Afghanistan.

And I was with my driver and he said,

"Madam, I have to go early,

because my brother is getting married."

And I said, "Great.

Let's go to your brother's wedding."

So, he took me in.

I brought one camera, one lens and I hung out.

And I had been on a street, like the picture

you had just seen.

And we descended down these stairs

and the Titanic was blasting.

And men and women were dancing together.

And this was all under the Taliban in secret.

About 9 years later, National Geographic

assigned me to photograph women in Afghanistan.

And I spent about 2 years photographing.

And the changes that had been made

were astonishing to me.

I had been working pretty much consistently

in Afghanistan since 2000, so I went almost every year.

And my last trip was about 5 months ago.

This is a wedding.

The man on the right is the father of the groom

and he is a filmmaker in Afghanistan.

This is a typical scene of a midwife.

This is in Badakhshan Province.

And that province has very few roads.

So, many, many women die in childbirth in Afghanistan,

mostly because of the lack of access to hospitals

and doctors.

So, what you see here is a woman,

a midwife from Merlin, and she would go out

into very remote villages

and they would make an announcement at the mosque.

And pregnant women and women with young children

would come and meet with her.

And after spending about two weeks

in Badakhshan Province, I was driving back to Fayzabad,

which is the capital.

And I notice these two women on the side of the mountain.

And I said, "That's strange,

there's no man with those women."

And anyone who's worked extensively in Afghanistan

knows that there was always a man with the women.

So we stop the car and Dr. Zieba,

who was my translator and an amazing Afghan woman,

she jumped out and we ran up the mountain

and she said, "What's going on?"

And the woman on the right was in labor,

and her water had just broken.

And they had rented a car and her husband's first wife

had died in childbirth.

And he was so determined to not have a second wife die

in childbirth that he rented this car,

and they were driving from their village to Fayzabad,

the capital, and their car broke down.

And so I said, "Get in my car

and I'll take you to the hospital."

And they said, "We can't.

We need the permission of her husband."

And so I said, "Dr. Zieba, go find the husband."

And fortunately there was a one road

that led throughout the whole province.

So, she took our car and she found

the husband. They all came in my car,

and she delivered.

Everyone always asks me if I took--

if I have pictures of her delivering.

And I stopped photographing at the point

that I left them, that I put them in my car,

because I changed the story as a journalist

and I didn't feel like it was ethical

to keep photographing.

Many women in Afghanistan end up in prison

simply for asking for a divorce, for doing things

that in the west, we would see

as not justifiable to end up in prison.

This is Mida Hall. She was married

at a very young age to a man who was decades

older than her.

He was handicapped, so every day her duties

as a wife were to bathe him and to take care of him

and feed him.

When she was 21, she asked for a divorce

and she was thrown in prison by his brothers.

This is a young woman.

Women in Afghanistan who are unhappy

or who are ashamed, they don't take a gun

and try and commit suicide the way that we would try to

or that's more typical in the west.

They set themselves on fire.

And many of those women don't die.

So, I did a series for The New York Times

on women who tried to commit suicide

by setting themselves on fire.

This young woman had been accused

by her neighbors of stealing. And she was so ashamed

that she tried to kill herself.

And she died a few days after that picture.

With the Americans in Afghanistan,

one thing they tried to do was train up

a police force of women.

And this is at a shooting range outside of Kabul.

Education has really picked up in Kabul,

that's something when I first I used to go,

there were secret girl schools in people's homes,

hidden from the Taliban.

And now you see women graduating.

This is a women's boxing team.

This is a woman in parliament.

They're women in parliament, sorry.

There are soap operas with women and women actresses.

This is a soap opera set, in Kabul.

This is Trina. She is an actress.

She did soap operas and she was also in some movies.

So, in 2009 and 2010, I accompanied the Marines'

female engagement teams, throughout Helmand Province.

This was a program, started by the Marines,

to have American women engage Afghan women,

because many of the Marines--

all the Marines operating in Helmand Province were men.

And there was a whole 50% of the society,

they couldn't-- they couldn't engage.

And they couldn't go into people's homes.

So, they brought women in. And they had them

talk to Afghan women, look at them

for basic medical treatment.

It was fascinating for me,

because I had been embedding with the military

for many, many years, but I was always the only woman.

So, it was the first time

that I was able to be around women,

to go around and see how they operate

in this hostile environment.

This is a female Blackhawk Pilot, Jesse.

And she used to go in and pick up the injured.

She was working with the Medevac Team.

This is them, training.

This is all in Helmand Province:

cleaning their guns,

relaxing at night.

And it was the first time-- You know,

usually when I embed with the military,

there's no place for me to sleep.

It's always this big crisis,

where is the female journalist gonna sleep.

And so, I finally was able to sleep

in a normal cot with a bunch of women,

which was really fun.

And I loved seeing them still try and do their makeup

and be feminine even on the front lines.

And we patrolled.

And we were shot at.

This was before 2013,

when women were allowed on the frontlines.

So, this is all in 2010.

(audience laughing)

I love this picture.

In 2009, I was given a MacArthur Fellowship

and I wanted to focus on maternal mortality,

and why women die in childbirth.

And so--

And it's a body of work that I have been doing

now for about 5 years.

I went to Sierra Leone, to photograph

in the Magburaka government hospital.

It was a place that I knew many, many women

were dying in childbirth.

I went there one day and met Mama Sise.

She was a woman who was pregnant with twins.

She gave birth to the first twin in the village,

and the second twin wouldn't come out.

So, she took a canoe across the river.

There was an ambulance waiting

for her across the river.

And she drove about 4 hours, across bumpy roads,

to get to the hospital.

And this is when I met her.

She had delivered the first baby about 24 hours earlier.

She was so scared and tired to push,

because she was just exhausted.

And she finally gave birth and the baby was--

I thought, was still born. But the nurses spent about

45 minutes resuscitating the baby.

And they have very little there.

They don't have traditional machines

like we do that can-- oxygen and everything.

They're literally smacking the baby

and trying to bring the baby back to life.

In that time, Mama Sise started bleeding.

I thought there was something wrong,

but I'm not a doctor, I'm just a photo-journalist.

And so I kept asking, "Why is she bleeding so much?"

And they were just mopping up the blood

and saying she's fine.

Finally, I went to go get the doctor,

and he was in surgery.

When I came back, her blood pressure was down

to 60 over 40.

They picked her up and carried her across

the hospital where the doctor was.

There was one doctor in the entire province.

And by the time she got there, she died.

This is her sister who was also a midwife,

who had arranged to send her that ambulance

because she didn't want her to die.

This is the mother finding out that her daughter

has just died.

And this is in the ambulance. I went home with her body...

and photographed the rituals

surrounding her death

and her burial.