Had one of the more interesting and challenging assignments that took up the better part of last week. The piece was to focus on Najibullah Zazi, the alleged Afghan-born terror plotter with deep roots in both Colorado and New York. More specifically, the photographs needed to focus on the Colorado places significant to the plot. The challenge of the assignment was one of finding pictures to illustrate the mundane, bedroom community where he resided before his arrest. Complicating the assignment was the fact that the subject of the article had already been extradited, precluding most of the obvious images.
It doesn’t take a Susan Sontag to figure out that there are certain things that photographers gravitate towards and certain things that they don’t. Aurora, Colorado is not one of them. And the part of it that Zazi lived in, even less so. Whitebread, tract housing perched on the shore of the great plains, Aurora is little more than houses stacked on houses stacked on strip malls, with a sprinkling of apartments. Zazi himself lived in one of the newest parts of the city (technically Centennial, Colorado) in a gated apartment complex just a stone’s throw from one of the area’s newest commercial experiments, a gigantic outdoor mall with a town square-styled epicenter, surrounded by boutique stores, restaurants, a cinema, and all the warehouse-sized stores that the developer could fit onto the land. To the south, a golf course. East, a reservoir catering to suburban recreation. And, of course, the great, flat plains.
Not exactly the kind of seedy, dark, underworld you’d expect Bin Laden’s protégés to be hanging in. Even after the alleged purchase of the hair-care supplies needed to build the bomb, Zazi is reported to have checked himself into Homestead Studio Suites, a nondescript chain of pleasantly colored and landscaped extended-stay kitchenettes. You know, the kind of place a visiting manager would stay while he set up a new office branch. Boring. Safe. Beige.
So the assignment took me on a short tour of suburbia, dodging security guards hired to protect the hotel’s image, trying to figure out how to make a picture of a gated apartment with management not too keen on the negative press brought by the scandal. All this capped off with the warehouse that sold the chemicals and a smattering of reportage from the land of the nondescript.
In the end, I found a nice group of apartment residents to host me for the 80’s/Madonna-themed 40th Birthday party of resident Jennifer Williams. After all, it’s not trespassing if you are a guest. For all the hassle of getting turned down by the apartment managers, a little bit of patience and a little bit of luck put me in touch with something that really showcased how normal Zazi’s host community is. A few more days of traipsing through the four wheel trails cut onto the plains (just out of reach of Aurora’s eastward expansion), a visit to the reservoir, and some properly timed appearances at the Beauty Supply Warehouse, and the essay on all things mundane was ready to go.
Originally slated for a several page spread, the Afghanistan War bumped the layout to something a bit shorter. Still, the folks at Time are among some of the most talented and supportive in the business. I’m proud of what ran and happy to see some of the additional work that popped up in the Time.com edit of the photographs.
The article is available here. Time’s online essay can be viewed here.