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<\/a>I wasn\u2019t aware before my deep dive that I had already seen photos made by Lynsey. she has covered the war in Ukraine extensively and some of her most famous ones appeared on newspaper front pages. Take for example that photo of a mother over a white coffin<\/a> containing her child. She looks exhausted. You know she\u2019s been crying for days. You feel the futility of war and the photo haunts you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or her coverage of the California fires which borders on the artistic<\/a>. It shows the scale of the fires, the danger the firefighters are in, how futile their attempts are controlling it are. Like the mother in Ukraine, they look exhausted<\/a> but for different reasons. That looks haunts you as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there is that photo of a mother with her two children killed by mortar clearly directed as civilians. Addario explains in the Boston Globe article<\/a> how the mortar shots were bracketing the civilians and getting closer and closer. She talks about how she debated with herself on whether or not to take the photo because it was disrespectful, but then decided to take it because it was a war crime and it had to be seen by the world. She mentions the moon boots on the little girl and reminded her of her own children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My photography is safe and uncontroversial. I take safe photos of landscapes, of streets of Paris, or of sunrises on the beach. And I write a lot about what photography is and what it means to me. So, I\u2019m in complete awe in front of what Lynsey Addario does. I mean it the way someone who does gentle Sunday hikes in fair weather is awed by someone who climbs Everest without oxygen in their shorts with a piano on their back. She\u2019s the reference point for women behind the lens in conflict zones today. Her name comes up in the first sentence of any conversation about women in war photography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her curriculum is impressive by any standards: Pulitzer, MacArthur grant. she\u2019s been kidnapped and shot at. Enough for several lifetimes. But that\u2019s really only scratching the surface. That would miss why what she does is different from standard war photojournalism. So I\u2019m going to try something else. I\u2019m going to look at how she sees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She has an instinct for knowing where history is going to happen and she demonstrated it early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lynsey Addario was born in 1973 in Connecticut, raised by Italian-American hairdressers. Her parents ran a hair salon and the household was open, eccentric, and creative, with no books in the house. When she was twelve, her dad gave her a Nikon FG. She shot everything without knowing it could become a job. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know photojournalism existed,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After studying international relations at the University of Wisconsin, she moved to Argentina, where photography clicked. Her first serious project was documenting transgender sex workers in New York, which tells you something about her instinct for the margins, for people whose stories are ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2000, at 26, she moved to India on a family friend invitation, with no assignments and no safety net. From there, she crossed into Afghanistan to photograph women under pre-9\/11 Taliban rule after borrowing money from her sister. The Taliban had banned women from working, from education, from leaving the house without a male relative. Addario wanted to show what that looked like. That was before anyone else cared. the photos she took there are among the very few visual traces of what that life was like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I said above she has an instinct for where history would happen: she did all that, took all those risks, without a buyer, without a contract, only because she felt it was important and it was a story that needed to be told.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When 9\/11 happened, her pre-existing knowledge of that world became relevant. The New York Times decided to send her back for her first major assignment. Exactly back to where she was a few years earlier to cover the same story again. She already knew the place, the people, the life, she had been in the right place a bit too early and then she was back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key to Addario\u2019s craft is a mix of relatable details and compassion. It\u2019s the white coffin in the church. It\u2019s the pink moon boots on the dead little girl. It\u2019s the haggard look on the firefighter. She gets close enough to capture these details (think Robert Capa), but you also get a sense of the story. You feel like she\u2019s with the subjects, in the middle of the action. No long lens nonsense. You also feel that she\u2019s showing you her point of view, not a composition designed for effect. No shots from below or above. It\u2019s all eye level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she covered Afghanistan and Darfur, she used black and white a lot more. The pictures were grainy, more contrasty, less forgiving. They felt more oppressive. The subjects were also half seen, through doorways, behind objects in the rooms. She was showing us something that can\u2019t be seen fully. It went well with the feeling that she was steeling these photographs in a country that had banned photography completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That instinct comes at a cost: in Iraq in 2003, she had a close call that would make all of us pack and go home. She was in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq when a car bomb exploded near her, killing an Australian cameraman who\u2019d been standing where she\u2019d been standing a moment before. Then once in hospital, a Kurdish taxi driver pulled up to the hospital and said he had the body of a journalist in his trunk. She ran behind the hospital and wept: \u201cI sort of doubled over and I felt like I was gonna throw up and I started sobbing and said, like, “I just want to go home. I don’t want to end up in the back of a trunk one day. Like I don’t want to die doing this job. I don’t think I have it in me to be that brave.”\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, because it wasn\u2019t enough, the kidnapping in Fallujah in 2004 happened. She was in a car with Matthew, a colleague from the New York Times she\u2019d fallen into a relationship with, when armed men surrounded them outside a village called Garma. They pulled the men out, and she jumped out of the car, rubbing her fingers together in a gesture she hoped meant \u201chusband and wife\u201d to the masked gunmen. They were held for a day, dispite hiding their passports in her underwear. Their press IDs were discovered but somehow they were released. Despite all that, she kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next came Darfour. She snuck across the Chadian border with reporter Lydia Polgreen and documented a massacre the Sudanese government was denying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2007 she embedded with the 173rd Airborne in the Korangal Valley for two months of daily patrols during Operation Rock Avalanche. During that time, she covered everything: ambushes, rest, soldiers laughing and soldiers crying. She photographed body bags of soldiers she had been with an hour earlier and the pictures were sent to Life Magazine which rejected them because apparently reality would have been too hard for the American public to see. Sigh. That\u2019s exactly why the photos should have been published. The \u201cUSA! USA!\u201d public needs to know the reality of the wars they wanted (that\u2019s me saying that, not her).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Incidentally, Life Magazine also rejected another series of soldiers being evacuated on C17 medevac planes. She had been invited by the military to document the process and the series made a very powerful illustration of the cost of war. Life decided once again that showing the glory of war was good, showing the reality of the pain wasn\u2019t acceptable. If I had a subscription I\u2019d cancel it. Addario has never been interested in the glory part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2009, she won the MacArthur Fellowship (the \u201cGenius Grant\u201d, and a Pulitzer as part of the New York Times team covering Talibanistan. When shd answered the call from MacArthur, she thought hr friend Ivan was playing a practical joke on her. Until she checked the phone number on Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It didn\u2019t stop there. In 2011, she was kidnapped (again!) in Libya along with three New York Times colleagues and held for seven days. She was blindfolded, tied, repeatedly beaten in the face. She says that she \u201csaw stars, like in the cartoons\u201d. She even suffered mock executions. That time, she wasn\u2019t sure she\u2019d live for very much longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A month after her release, her friend Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya, along with Chris Hondros. During the same mortar attack. Tim was the co-director of Restrepo<\/em>, one of the most important war documentaries ever made. She wondered at the time why she did that job and whether she should go back again. She did of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a direct line from Dickey Chapelle<\/a> and Addario (hence the reason they both appear in this series). They have the same drive, the same refusal to accept that war isn\u2019t a place for women, and the same need to show the reality of it to the world. Chapelle talked her way onto military transports, bribed officials, and outlasted every gatekeeper who told her the front was no place for a woman. Addario does exactly the same thing a couple of generations later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the thing Addario is the most proud of isn\u2019t covering war and risking her life. It\u2019s photographing Marike, a Belgian Paralympic athlete who chose euthanasia after a lifetime of chronic pain. she spent three years with him, documenting her life, earning her trust, and she was there for her last moments. The project left more drained than any war she reported on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider this for a minute: Addario has been kidnapped, beaten, survived mock executions, she was wounded, escaped death many times, and what she calls the hardest thing she\u2019s ever shot is a peaceful room with a woman choosing to die on her own terms. Addario\u2019s photos often feel personal, but this time the whole story was really personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marike\u2019s story wasn\u2019t requested by a newspaper, it wasn\u2019t in the news at all, it wasn\u2019t fashionable or urgent, but she saw something important the world needed to know about. As with Afghanistan pre-9\/11, maybe she was a bit early but in the right place. The fact that France just passed laws allowing assisted dying<\/a> makes me think that it might well be the case. It just applies to a single person instead of a whole population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she\u2019s not away for war or a ground-breaking story, she spends time with her grandmother, Nani, who turned 107 and is an Instagram favourite (one of my grandmothers turned 105). To me it makes sense: she needs something at home that grounds her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also she married Paul, a journalist she met on the streets of Istanbul. Their kids will feel the pressure to be journalists! In her book, she describes her first impression: Euro,\u201d taking in his flashy watch, his trimmed beard, his impeccable English accent. He was the kind of journalist who bragged about reopening the Reuters bureau in Algeria, and she found him borderline arrogant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n