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Wars through photojournalist Lynsey Addario's lens

With her trained lens, Lynsey Addario has documented civil wars, the refugee crisis, and conflict situations around the world from South Sudan to Pakistan. She speaks to Amrita Madhukalya about the dangers and the freedom of being a woman on the frontline.

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They make very few like frontline photojournalist Lynsey Addario. How otherwise can one explain the nonchalance of the woman sitting across me, who’s been kidnapped, assaulted, shot at, and yet, does not bat an eyelid when she recounts them. It is perhaps the tough experience that leads to the nonchalance.

42-year-old Addario is a celebrated photojournalist who has over 16 years of experience of reporting from conflict situations. She has shot pictures for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, LIFE, Getty, and National Geographic, to name a few. In conflict and post-conflict areas, she focuses on the struggle of women and children during the war.

“What I look for is how women and children are affected; I look at the civilian toll. I try and understand the sufferings of the non-combatants,” says Addario, who started out by covering Afghanistan under the Taliban in 2000. “Since then, I have reported from Iraq, covered Darfur, Congo, South Sudan, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria.”



Afghan women suffer under the constraints of tribalism, poverty, and war. Now they are starting to fight for a just life. Photo courtesy: Lynsey Addario

Addario, born to a family of Italian immigrants in Connecticut, started her work from Buenos Aires Herald in 1996. In her 16 years of conflict reporting, Addario has been kidnapped twice. She has been in an accident, has been shot at and has seen two of her drivers die in front of her, which she says, is “a horrible thing to carry around”.  

While in Iraq, she was kidnapped in 2004 in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle by an insurgent group affiliated with the Al-Qaeda. Later, in 2011, she was taken captive by Qaddafi’s forces.

“In Libya, during the popular uprising, I was taken in by Qaddafi’s forces and kept for a week. I was tied up, blindfolded and beaten; I was punched repeatedly in the face. I was groped by men every hour for the first three days. I was touched by almost every man there, and my clothes were torn. There was the fear of rape the entire time. As someone who has covered rape as a weapon of war used by men for many years, I knew the risks,” says Lynsey.

“But, that’s just one of the risks as a woman, and for men, because men get raped, too. Journalists are targeted more in kidnapping; there are bounties on our heads, ransoms being paid. It is a massive risk right now, especially in the middle east. These are things that constantly change the dynamics of being a journalist. When I started out, I don’t think journalists were targeted as much as they are now,” says Lynsey.

Sudanese Liberation Army soldiers wait by their truck while hit by a sandstorm in North Darfur, Sudan. Photo courtesy: Lynsey Addario

These are not the only dangers she has faced; apart from being part of an active combat in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, considered the focal point of the jihad, Lynsey has been attacked by Talibani men in Pakistan’s Peshawar for doing her work. In 2009, while returning from Islamabad after a assignment from a refugee camp, the car where she was travelling will a few other journalists overturned. One of the journalists died, and Lynsey broke her collar bone. She was in hospital for more than a month.  

Lynsey’s book, It’s What I Do, a candid memoir of her work in these 16 years, is a bestseller. And it does not come as a surprise to hear that Steven Spielberg want to make her biopic based on the book, with Jennifer Lawrence playing the lead. “I try and not shy away from talking of the important issues in the book, specially of the issues women face in these situations. I’m a journalist and I will be damned if I didn’t,” she says.

True to her nature, Lynsey reported from the frontline even when she was pregnant. At seven months, she was in Gaza, and in a very public incident, in 2011 she accused the Israeli soldiers at Erez Crossing to Gaza of mocking her, strip searching her and forcing her to go through an X-ray repeatedly despite being pregnant. The New York Times wrote a letter of complaint, and the Israeli Defence ministry, later, apologised.

One of her focus areas today is the Syrian refugee crisis. She has been tailing the lives of refugee women and children to document their punishing schedules. One of her cover features of the New York Times -- 'The Displaced' --follows the life of Hana, a 12-year-old living in a refugee settlement in Lebanon.

“I started covering the Syrian refugees in 2012, and have since covered them in all the bordering countries --Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan. Most recently I have been covering them arriving in Europe. I think what people don’t understand about those who have been made refugees, is that they are pulled out of school. Most of them have witnessed very heavy combat, their homes have been bombed, and most of them have been running for their lives. They have been robbed of their childhood,” she says. “None of them have the luxury of being able to live carelessly like so many kids so, just because most of them barely have time. They work to make ends meet, even as refugees, long and arduous days in the fields picking cucumbers, in slums. When they have the time to play, a lot of them cannot forget what they have seen. There’s a lot of psychological trauma there.”

She says that while documenting Hana’s life, she went to a psycho-social counselling with her and saw the children being asked to draw something they loved, and something they hated. “One of the girls drew me, ‘This is for you, because you tell the world about our problems’, she said. The teacher then told me that the girl had not spoken a word in one year,” recounts Lynsey.

She says that the most difficult thing for refugees is to accept that they are never welcome. And that most of them work for 12-14 hours just to make ends meet. “Hana gets up at 4am and works under the sun for hours. In the plum orchard that she worked, at around 10:30-11 am, I saw children falling off trees due to exhaustion,” she says.

Lynsey says that her focus is always to capture the powerful imagery that can come out of a humanitarian crisis. And that, censoring Aylan Kurdi image is downright criminal. “The picture resonated with the world; it could be your son or your brother. The one picture motivated the European Parliament Act, it made people sit down and notice and care about the refugee situation. It turned the tide and brought the attention on the families and their children who were dying at sea,” she says.          

And it is the lure of journalism that keeps her going. “I still really believe in the power of journalism, and the importance of being open and honest. As a photographer, I’m constantly trying to take pictures that are so powerful that they make the reader stop and and to care enough to ask questions,” she says.

Lynsey was in Delhi later last year for Tina Brown’s Women In The World conference. Here’s a video of her in conversation with Cate Blanchett: 

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