“They’re quiet. She did yoga to try to stay calm. “Artists have always dealt with the critical issues of their time,” says the Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg. She gives me a friendly hug and then a last, enigmatic smile. The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos on Vogue.com. Poitras was living on 101st Street and remembers walking in the morning to work, unaware of what was happening. Dressed casually in a black cotton shirt, jeans, and sneakers, Poitras, who is 51, leans back in her chair. If she was once a respected but little-known documentarian, Poitras—post-Snowden—has become a powerful force in both film and news media. Laura Poitras has for years been monitored and harassed by the US security agencies whose surveillance activities, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, she helped expose. The people in the kitchen all jump up and run, but Laura doesn’t. I was seriously scared. These days, there’s little chance of her staying under the radar. “She has this profound regard for art and its ability to enlighten and move people,” he says. Ad Choices. The first day I meet Poitras in October, the Intercept, the online media organization she founded in 2014 with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, has just published an explosive series of stories about the U.S. drone program. “I had a real sense that we were moving in a direction that was really dangerous,” she says. “But I love doing this work. Earlier that day, Poitras allowed me to read excerpts of the journal she kept in Berlin, which she has decided, after some hesitation, to publish in the catalog accompanying the Whitney exhibition. “I’d rather not say,” she says. Drone strikes aimed at terrorists, Poitras will tell you, have killed scores of civilians. The mood was celebratory, but what she felt, more than anything, was relief. 'Homeland Is Not a Series' Now Showing on Laura Poitras' Field of Vision Homeland Is Not a Series is a quick, interesting, quirky and insightful look at what has come to be known as "The Homeland Incident," showing now on Field of Vision. Snowden also recognized Poitras’s grit. I’m off-balance”), and a mounting sense of paranoia. “You’ll have people on one end of the spectrum who’ll say it’s not radical enough,” he says, “and another side feeling like it’s an incredible breach of national security.”, Later that evening, Poitras sits in a low-lit Japanese restaurant in SoHo, sipping a green-tea mojito and mulling over all that’s happened in the last two years. Poitras accepted her Oscar last year with a nervous, gracious dignity, thanking her many collaborators but also taking the opportunity to remind the audience that Snowden’s revelations exposed what she sees as not just “a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself.”, She and her Citizenfour crew then practically closed down the Vanity Fair after-party. The exhibit includes a number of short films but is primarily a series of immersive installations, designed almost as a walk-through narrative about the world post 9/11. Like, I really, really love it.” She seems wistful, recalling how working on Flag Wars initially seized hold of her. She recently sued the federal government to obtain records of her various detentions at airports, receiving 800-plus pages, some of which she intends to hang on the walls of the Whitney. Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Poitras has flowing dark hair and gray-green eyes that are wide and watchful. Laura Poitras. Pretty much everyone I speak with about Poitras tells me that she is a seven-day-a-week worker, someone who is both too humble and too driven to pause and survey her achievements, which in addition to her raft of film awards includes a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius grant.” “I’m pretty obsessive,” Poitras says, referring to her marathon workweeks and myriad projects, “but these are good problems to have.”. In her free time, she took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, drawn to experimental, avant-garde film. “There was a lot of unstructured time, which allowed me to develop my senses creatively,” she says. Among its chief revelations is a leaked military review showing that nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan were “not the intended target.” And while Scahill is out making the rounds on cable talk shows, while Greenwald offers a stream of spitfire outrage on Twitter, Poitras is attempting to hit a deeper vein—that of human empathy. “I really think that the war on terror makes us less safe,” she tells me. By the time she was twelve, she had fallen in love with cooking. The anxiety was crushing. She is putting together her first major art exhibition, which will occupy the top floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art beginning this month. The Oath told parallel stories of a former jihadist living freely in Yemen while his brother-in-law languished in Guantánamo. I don’t actually love to travel,” she tells me. Annette Görtz jacket and Rick Owens pants. “I feel bad, too,” I say, acknowledging all the things I want to know. In a cluttered corner, sitting on a file cabinet, is a bronze BAFTA Award looking as if nobody has given it a second thought. “I learned that I actually love filming people, being with them for these long periods of time, in moments of uncertainty, not knowing what will happen.”, She and Goode Bryant were in the midst of editing Flag Wars when the September 11 attacks took place. Yemen’s a complicated place, a flash point in America’s war on terror and currently in the throes of a devastating civil war. Perhaps it’s an inbred cautiousness—a deep, protective impulse that’s kept her safe and productive through years of working in high-risk environments. Stepping onto an elevator one day, she bumped into actor Zachary Quinto and a Hollywood film crew working on the Oliver Stone version of the Snowden story, due out this spring, featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden, Quinto as Greenwald, and Melissa Leo playing the role of Poitras. He contacted her after seeing a short documentary she’d made about William Binney, a whistle-blower who left the NSA in 2001. Her father was a computer programmer at a hospital, her mother a registered nurse. “It was pretty extraordinary that this was the outcome.” Coughlin recalls sitting on a couch at 4:00 a.m. next to Poitras and her Oscar. “I turned to her and had a kind of ‘Holy shit’ moment, like, ‘Look at where you are. Laura Poitras in her New York studio. Poitras lived there for a while, in a small apartment in the middle of Sana’a, the capital city, filming her 2010 documentary, The Oath. It’s not relaxing at all.”, Poitras was 35 years old when she embarked on her first long-form documentary, collaborating with a filmmaker named Linda Goode Bryant on Flag Wars, which followed a conflict over gentrification in a traditionally African-American neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Knowing the stakes were high, she limited contact with friends, moved to a new apartment, and stopped carrying a cell phone, knowing it could be used to track her location. Join Facebook to connect with Laura Poitras and others you may know. Her work has taken her to Iraq, to Guantánamo Bay, and perhaps most famously to Hong Kong in 2013, where she spent eight tense days holed up in a hotel room with Edward Snowden, filming him up close and in real time as he went from an anonymous computer nerd to the world’s most wanted fugitive. Laura Poitras: A profile. “And the camera doesn’t move. But it didn’t feel that way then. Laura Poitras Photo: Conor Provenzano / Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art When she was a child growing up in an affluent suburb of Boston, Poitras … “My ‘threat rating’ was the highest the Department of Homeland Security assigns.” Laura Poitras, 2006 interview with PBS For reasons she didn’t understand, Poitras had been put on a terrorism-related watch list by the U.S. government. ”), bouts of what seems like depression (“I don’t feel good or grounded. As a teen, she often escaped into the city to see live music (David Bowie, Talking Heads) and movies (A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver) at art houses. “It’s always a contradictory experience,” Poitras says with a laugh. All the while, she continues to work with a small team of journalists, divining information from the seemingly inexhaustible Snowden archive. Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to The New York Times has noted the parallel to Poitras. How can we understand it on more human terms?”, Laura Poitras Anarchist: Satellite Feed With Doppler Track (Intercepted May 28, 2009), The studio is a large concrete-floored room filled primarily with computer equipment. “But it didn’t feel that way then. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. It all seems to be part of the post-Snowden resurfacing. After finishing high school, she worked for a number of years as a sous-chef in prominent French restaurants—first in Boston, then in San Francisco. Reading the documents, she discovered that a secret grand jury was convened in 2007 to investigate her on charges of conspiracy, stemming from a day in Iraq when U.S. soldiers spotted Poitras on a Baghdad rooftop holding a camera and apparently deemed it suspicious. When I ask if it feels good to have a cell phone again, Poitras laughs. “It doesn’t let me rest or sleep.”. “It was a very profound experience,” she says. It was that moment, that scene, that made me understand what a singular talent she is.”. More important, it was a revelation for Poitras about what she wanted to do with her life. “I’m a different person, holding a camera. Which, it would seem, is how she likes it. And it was.”, She and Snowden corresponded with mutual caution for several months. Twice now, I’ve attended premieres of her films—crowded, celebratory affairs meant to be all about her—and each time she seemed deliberately to get lost in the crowd. I’m normally pretty shy. She will speak animatedly about films she loves (the documentary Man on Wire, the HBO miniseries The Jinx), artists who’ve inspired her (American photographer Trevor Paglen), or books that have given her insight (George Orwell’s 1984). She was one of few journalists well versed in digital security at the time. And then you have to get all dressed up and go.” Her go-to designer, she adds, is German Annette Görtz. It’s a Friday evening, and the restaurant is now crowded. Her film CITIZENFOUR won an Oscar for best documentary. Her steeliness behind the camera is legendary. The sky-cam is an experiment. Fashion Editor: Tonne GoodmanHair: Tim Rogers for Living Proof; Makeup: FrancellePhotographed at Praxis Films, New York. I loved the fact that every day you had to make something new.” It was also, she adds, good training for the quick-paced, high-stress filmmaking she would later do. “I’m interested in going back to these themes of the war on terror,” Poitras says. Her reporting on NSA mass surveillance and Edward Snowden also received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. “I feel bad,” she says finally, acknowledging all the things she won’t tell me.

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