Armed with a camera

In times of conflict

There is a buzz in the audience at the Frontline Club in west London, the legendary hang-out for war correspondents, where photographer Lynsey Addario is being interviewed on the stage. The news has leaked out that a film is to be made of her autobiography, to be directed by Steven Spielberg and to star Jennifer Lawrence. Addario is uncharacteristically indirect about this, saying only that “some sort of movie” will be made, but you can “never confirm anything in Hollywood”.

Addario is 41. In 2009 she won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, and the year before was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times for its ‘Talibanistan’ series. She has worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Darfur, Libya, Syria and Lebanon but, she says, she is not a war photographer; she describes herself as “a photo-journalist who works mostly in conflict zones”.

Covering conflicts
Addario has all the criteria for being a war photographer — guts and stamina, persistence and patience — but her photographs are about much more than being in the right place at the right time. Her compositions are exquisite, and she specialises in dispelling myths and stereotypes. Her book is called It’s What I Do — and the title says everything about her. Her epiphany as a photographer came, she says, when she realised she “was bearing witness to things first-hand that were shaping policy, shaping our world view as a society, and it is hard to walk away from that. What started out as me being curious about how Afghan women coped under the Taliban was suddenly on the front page of The New York Times — so Bush and the policy makers could see the fruits of their decisions. Then it becomes responsibility: How can I not go? It’s sort of an addiction to bearing witness to things and acting as the messenger for people who cannot actually get their message out.”

She usually knows, she says, when she is shooting if she has hit that zone where it all comes together: “If the light’s good, if people have forgotten that I’m there, if it seems authentic and encapsulates a story. What we’re looking for as photographers is to try and tell a story with each image and to round out each of those images in a comprehensive essay.”

“So if I’m doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I’ll go to her tent, I’ll follow her when she’s working, see what her daily life is like and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame. It’s very seldom that all those things come together; it’s like an epiphany — so when it happens I can feel it in every part of my body. Sometimes I will literally gasp, because it’s a very visceral thing for me.”

In 2008 she was given a grant by Columbia College to document gender-based violence and rape as a weapon of war, and she spent weeks photographing and interviewing women in Congo who were simply casualties of their birthplace. There is a photograph of hers taken in eastern Congo, of Kahindo, a 20-year-old with her two children born out of rape, who had been kidnapped by Rwandan soldiers and held in the bush for almost three years. She is sitting with her children and looking out of her tent, and the light gives it an ethereal, radiant quality, but the image is suffused with melancholy.

Addario says, “As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away. For me it’s about engaging. We are so inundated with pictures of violence and death — we are seeing videos of people being beheaded. How do you take a subject like that and make it so that it draws people in? That’s the real challenge.”
Addario grew up in Connecticut in an Italian-American family. It was her father who gave Addario her first camera, a Nikon FG, when she was 13. A friend of her mother’s taught her how to develop and print film, and she continued photographing throughout her university years.

Off camera encounters
In 2000 she went to Afghanistan to photograph the life of women under the little-known Taliban. Here she honed her skills at establishing a rapport with her subjects and winning their trust. At the time no one was interested in Afghanistan, but the following year, after 9/11, it all kicked off, and it was in Peshawar that she got her big break with The New York Times. She was always clad in a burka, but doing her work was not easy. At an anti-American demonstration in Peshawar with fellow photojournalists she found herself trapped in a crowd and being aggressively groped by everyone around her, despite being dressed according to Islamic custom. She turned round and whacked one perpetrator sharply on the head with her camera lens. She saw his eyes roll back in his head and she ran back to the car, where, she writes in her book, “I found my male colleagues, lounging, all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prize-winning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame.”

In 2004, she went to Darfur to cover the war between the Sudanese government and the rebel militias. She hoped that heart-rending images from Sudan might motivate the UN and NGOs to respond. “This was one of the few times I actually witnessed the correlation between persistent coverage and the response to that coverage by the international community,” she says.

There are many occasions, Addario thinks, when it was her instinct that saved her. “But that instinct can run out. And who knows if I have survived because of instinct or because I am lucky.” In Libya, in March 2011, she and a small group of journalists and photographers were kidnapped. Their driver was a young student called Mohammed. It was a terrain unlike any other, there was a checkpoint and there was nowhere to hide. “We had many signs indicating that we should leave but we lingered too long. And Mohammed died.” She looks at me evenly. “That’s our fault. He could have left, but he didn’t. He paid with his life.”

Addario and her colleagues were tied up and bundled into cars. She was blindfolded, beaten and held for two days, before being released into the hands of the Libyan government, which held them all for a further four days before they were allowed to go home.

After the kidnap something changed for Addario, she finally decided it was time to step back; she was happy with her husband and they wanted a baby. Once pregnant, she was quite ambivalent about it. “I was really grappling with what was about to happen to my personal life, my professional life and everything else,” she says now. “So I did the only thing I knew how to do — which was work, and hold on to my identity.” She carried on with her assignments, and went to Senegal and Saudi Arabia, then did an assignment in Somalia, and then Gaza. She is indefatigable.