{"id":7765,"date":"2026-07-27T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=7765"},"modified":"2026-07-24T09:41:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T07:41:44","slug":"photographer-focus-2-jackie-spinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/07\/27\/photographer-focus-2-jackie-spinner\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Focus #2: Jackie Spinner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

She opens her TEDx talk<\/a> talking about a blue vest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a flak jacket. Twelve pounds of Kevlar, in the specific shade of blue the UN adopted in 1947 for its flag. The colour that says: neutral press, not a combatant. When it\u2019s 120 degrees in the shade and you\u2019re running from mortar fire, she says, those twelve pounds carry all of your history and hopes and dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She kept it after leaving Iraq. It sits in her office at Columbia College Chicago now. She lets her students try it on every January during her war stories class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jackie Spinner with a blue flak jacket<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

How heavy, she tells them every year. Can you imagine running with it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the woman who wore that vest didn\u2019t start out in a war zone. Jackie Spinner grew up in Decatur, Illinois, a pipe fitter\u2019s daughter. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Blue-collar, central Illinois, the kind of town where you don\u2019t grow up expecting to go to Baghdad. Her parents met on a school bus at sixteen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She got her start in journalism through a chance encounter between Little League moms. Not exactly the traditional war correspondent origin story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She went to Southern Illinois University Carbondale for journalism, then UC Berkeley for a master\u2019s. At Berkeley she studied under Neil Henry, a former Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post. Henry asked his students one question that stayed with her: \u201cDid you count the bodies?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She joined the Post in 1995, wrote about accounting policy. Spent years covering financial news from the comfort of the newsroom. And she was bored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI went to Iraq because I\u2019m a journalist,\u201d she wrote later. \u201cWe drive into hurricanes, not away from them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the boredom with accounting policy wasn\u2019t the real reason. The real engine was grief. Her father died of pancreatic cancer in 2001 (an experience I can relate to), sudden and devastating, and she watched a man too young take his last gasps of life. \u201cSomething told me to run,\u201d she wrote in her book, \u201cand I\u2019ve been running ever since, running all the way to Baghdad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wanted to see the country behind the contract stories she wrote from a desk in Washington. So she volunteered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But she also needed a story big enough to get an editor to say yes. That story arrived via instant message about Sabrina Harmon, one of seven MPs charged with abuse at Abu Ghraib<\/a>. Spinner had been messaging her for weeks when she broke the exclusive, and the story ran as a major Post front-pager. Sabrina\u2019s lawyer was named Frank Spinner, no relation, and the courts-martial were coming, so her editor agreed to send her to Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy Sivits was the first soldier to stand trial, and he broke down on the stand. \u201cI\u2019d like to apologise to the Iraqi people and to those detainees,\u201d he said. \u201cI let everybody down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before she left, Don Graham pulled her aside. The publisher of the Washington Post, the man who\u2019d taken the paper through Watergate, talked to her like a parent. \u201cNo story is worth your life,\u201d he said as he grabbed her hand, bent down, and kissed it. \u201cBe careful.\u201d He walked off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She carried that with her into the corkscrew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her first flight into Baghdad was a corkscrew descent to avoid antiaircraft fire. The plane dropped like a stone, spiralling towards the runway. She fell into the arms of Muhammed, the bureau\u2019s security director, a former Iraqi army officer who betrayed Saddam and fought alongside the 82nd Airborne. Her first day she got locked out of the Green Zone during a protest and took a random taxi back to the Sheraton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou could have been kidnapped!\u201d Muhammed said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sheraton wasn\u2019t the Sheraton you\u2019re imagining. Her first room had a flea-infested bed, no air conditioning, and a blood-splattered wall of unknown origin. She hung an Iraqi flag over it to remind herself she was a visitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was the most junior member of the Post bureau staff. Her flak jacket had \u201cPRESS\u201d written in masking tape. A photo from those early days shows her father\u2019s blue hanky tied around her neck, helmet crooked, cheap Jackie O sunglasses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m playing a war correspondent,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The driver Omar 2 told the other Iraqis she wouldn\u2019t last a month. She looked too delicate. They changed their minds when she baked them brownies. She also threw a baseball better than all of them, outshot them at hoops, and could outrun the bodyguard up the stairs during evacuation drills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Iraqi staff took special care of the female correspondents. She wrote that she had one brother in the United States and thirty-seven in Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was Falah, a former Iraqi air force lieutenant colonel making thirteen dollars a month under Saddam. The Post paid him $1,450. He loved American rock and folk music. She\u2019d made him a cassette tape back in college, and now they\u2019d drive through Baghdad listening to Peter, Paul and Mary. \u201cIf I had a hammer, I\u2019d hammer in the morning.\u201d He had to lie to his neighbours about where he worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was Abu Saif, the fixer. Former Iraqi Airways pilot who arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma for aviation school in 1975. His mantra for postwar Iraq: \u201cIf you\u2019re going to get raped, you might as well enjoy it.\u201d As a fixer, he said, \u201cI know my people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was Little Naseer, the errand boy in his twenties who left school in sixth grade because his family couldn\u2019t afford the teacher bribes. After Spinner taught him to say \u201cThe dinner is ready\u201d in proper English, she sent him to the bureau chief Rajiv\u2019s door. From down the hallway she heard: \u201cThe dinner is ready. You are welcome.\u201d Silence. Then Rajiv screamed \u201cSpin!\u201d She\u2019d ruined the ritual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf the Post closes its office here,\u201d Little Naseer told her, \u201cI can buy a taxi and work. Under Saddam, I couldn\u2019t do this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in Decatur, her twin sister Jenny was writing letters, fifteen of them, one to open each Sunday. Their childhood ritual was to say \u201cI love you\u201d before sleep; \u201ctoo\u201d wasn\u2019t allowed. The code: \u201cMe, too\u201d meant \u201cI love you, you\u2019re my world, never leave me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As eight-year-old twins, they once imagined their worst-case scenario. A man with a gun shooting them both. They debated who should die first. That game came back to Spinner in Baghdad. The worst-case scenario wasn\u2019t a game anymore. It had a number attached. The insurgents put a $50,000 bounty on her head. A bit low to her taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019d given a talk at the US embassy in Baghdad. An Iraqi journalist printed what she said on the front page of his newspaper. She had to leave the country for a few days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fifty thousand dollars. Somewhere in the city, men were counting that number and thinking about her. What it felt like to walk through a market knowing that, to sit in traffic and watch every car that lingered too long. She kept reporting, kept moving. The same instinct that made her argue with a childhood twin about who dies first. That\u2019s how you survive. You keep playing the game out in your head so it can\u2019t surprise you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a woman in Iraq was a strange negotiation on top of all that. Her book opens with something called \u201cA Short Guide to How Not to Be an American Woman in Iraq.\u201d The rules: wear lots of lipstick, because Iraqi women love flashy lips painted in bright reds and oranges. Trade all your silver jewellery for gold. Don\u2019t look happy. Never drink directly out of a water bottle even if it\u2019s 120 degrees and you\u2019re about to pass out. When walking down the street, never look a man directly in the eyes. \u201cHe\u2019ll think you\u2019re a whore.\u201d Wear shirts long enough to cover your behind. If you\u2019re invited to tea, drink it even if you question the water source, because only rude Americans wouldn\u2019t accept an invitation to tea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wore long sleeves and long skirts and learned to lie about being married, about having children. Better to be a mother who left her child behind than no mother at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She survived mortar attacks, car bombs, the Battle for Fallujah, and a kidnapping attempt outside Abu Ghraib prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She survived by swimming. Not literally. The Sheraton pool in Baghdad was too exposed for that, too vulnerable to sniper fire. Instead, the swimming was in her head. In the opening pages of her book, Tell Them I Didn\u2019t Cry<\/em>, she describes it: slow laps in the chilly waters of a long rectangular pool that exists only in her imagination. She called up that image to keep from drowning in the pressure and the fright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That image, the imaginary pool, is the same kind of trick as the childhood worst-case scenario game. You build the thing in your head so the world can\u2019t surprise you with it, rehearse the worst so you can stand in the middle of it and keep working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is another way she stayed awake late at night: she made cookies in the hotel. It helped her through the hours of waiting for foreign contractors to be beheaded. Literally killing time waiting for someone else to die. Her thinking was that if she was nice to Iraqi police guarding the hotel and kept them full of baked goods, when the insurgents came they\u2019d protect her as one of the good ones. \u201cLet the little one go. She made us cookies\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the kind of dark humour you develop when you\u2019re living with a $50,000 bounty on your head. The kind of dark humour she saw on *M*A*S*H* on TV was now hers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She left the Post in 2009 and spent the next few years doing what she\u2019d always done, going where the stories needed telling. She was a Fulbright scholar in Oman. A founding editor of Iraq\u2019s first independent student newspaper, and a literacy project in Belize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She arrived at Columbia College Chicago in 2011 as an associate professor, tenured, overseeing the Photojournalism major. She teaches international reporting, advanced local reporting, and social and digital storytelling. She\u2019s an advisor to the Student Veterans Organisation. She\u2019s never left \u2018s never far from war and its consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She modelled her teaching on Neil Henry. \u201cDid you count the bodies?\u201d Her students don\u2019t know her background. They don\u2019t know she was a blue-collar girl from Decatur whose family relied on food baskets and a father who worked construction. They don\u2019t know she was an intern at The Post who lived out of her car at a campground because she couldn\u2019t afford rent. Her students called her the drill sergeant behind her back. The armour she wore in Iraq had followed her home. It had a different purpose now. It was hiding her from her own students. \u201cI didn\u2019t yet understand that the classroom would become a new kind of frontline,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then she became a mother. She adopted three sons from Morocco. Her first son was diagnosed with autism at age two and the second received the same diagnosis at the same age. \u201cWithin weeks of taking my second baby home from an orphanage in Morocco, I was back in the classroom. Overwhelmed, exhausted, scared.\u201d The university denied her maternity leave because she adopted, didn\u2019t give birth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

War taught her to endure, not to ask for help. That\u2019s an essential survival skill in Baghdad. You don\u2019t stop or complain. You get on with things because stopping will get you killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But motherhood doesn\u2019t work like a war zone. You can\u2019t outrun a child\u2019s needs. There\u2019s no outshooting a health diagnosis. The coping mechanisms that kept her alive in Iraq, the keep-moving-deal-with-it-alone-never-show-weakness ethos, became barriers between her and the help she needed. She was a single mum with three boys, a full teaching load, and a lifetime of training in not asking. She was overwhelmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But slowly, she started sharing her life with her students. She told them about the blue-collar girl from Decatur who didn\u2019t know which fork to use at a Washington Post dinner party. About the food baskets, the campground, the imposter syndrome that followed her through every newsroom and classroom she ever walked into. Also about the adoption, the diagnoses, the exhaustion. \u201cI started to see them really as another mother\u2019s child,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it took me being a mother myself to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her most recent project is called \u201cDon\u2019t Forget Me\u201d. It\u2019s a documentary about autism in Morocco. She also made a documentary about the war and was featured in a PBS Frontline piece. Her work has used by many TV channels such as MSNBC and NPR. She holds an honorary doctorate from Lakeland College. She\u2019s a visiting scholar at the International University of Rabat in Morocco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of that is very impressive and most of us would be proud of accomplishing half of it. But what is important about Spinner isn\u2019t photography in the strict sense. It\u2019s the way she sees. A journalist\u2019s eye, a photographer\u2019s framing, a teacher\u2019s patience. She collects stories. Every assignment, every documentary, every classroom, it\u2019s all the same instinct: show me what\u2019s really happening, don\u2019t let me look away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She still has the blue vest in her office and lets her students try it on, so they can feel how heavy twelve pounds is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t read about her life and forget about it the next day. It stays with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Sources:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Tell Them I Didn\u2019t Cry<\/em> (Scribner, 2006)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. TEDx Talk, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4N2cCuSc_0M<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Wikipedia (for fact-checking)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. CV Page, https:\/\/www.jackiespinner.info\/cv<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    #Photography #History #PhotographerFocus #Opinion<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    She opens her TEDx talk talking about a blue vest. It\u2019s a flak jacket. Twelve pounds of Kevlar, in the specific shade of blue the UN adopted in 1947 for its flag. The colour that says: neutral press, not a combatant. When it\u2019s 120 degrees in the shade and you\u2019re running from mortar fire, she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-opinion","category-photographerfocus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7765"}],"version-history":[{"count":51,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7960,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765\/revisions\/7960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}