It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

by Lynsey Addario

With my subjects—the thousands of people I have photographed—I have shared the joy of survival, the courage to resist oppression, the anguish of loss, the resilience of the oppressed, the brutality of the worst of men and the tenderness of the best.

He interrupted me. “What happened? Why did you leave? Why are you not married?” Mohammed was no longer a Talib to me. We were simply two people in our twenties, getting to know each other. “In America women work,” I said. “And right now I am traveling and working.” He smiled. “America is a good place,” he said. “It is.”

“Wearing a burqa is not a problem,” another said. “It is not being able to work that is the problem.”

I didn’t wait to find out what happened to him; instead I sprinted back to the car, where I found my male colleagues, lounging, all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prizewinning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame.

Young American soldiers, many of whom had never traveled abroad before, much less to a Muslim country, didn’t realize that a basic familiarity with Arab culture might help their cause. During night patrols, fresh-faced Americans in their late teens and early twenties would stop cars jam-packed with Iraqi family members—men, women, and children—shine their flashlights into the cars, and scream, “Get the fuck out of the car!” Armed to the teeth, they busted into private homes late in the night, pushing the men to the floor, screaming in their faces in English, and zip-tying their wrists while questioning them—often without interpreters and while the children stood, terrified, in the doorway.

The Americans wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, but a convenient form of democracy that allowed them to censor the media.

The Americans set up impromptu checkpoints along the roads and erected stop signs in English—a language and script not all Iraqis understood. Cars that failed to stop before the checkpoint were fired upon. I witnessed two entire families killed at the same checkpoint within twenty minutes of each other.

Tread lightly, be respectful, get into the story as deeply as I could without making the subject feel uncomfortable or objectified.

Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions.

I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they plowed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred toward women I was witnessing.

“Marry your best friend,” my mother used to say. “You don’t want to marry for passion, because the passion fades. Marry someone who makes you laugh, who you can spend time with. Looks fade. Passion fades.”

“Madam. You cannot sit here. This is an exit row.” “So?” “Women cannot sit by the exit door. If there is a flight emergency, a woman wouldn’t be capable of opening the exit door.” I got up, and as I moved to my new seat I watched the attendant usher over a frail old man with a white beard, hunched with osteoporosis, to sit by the exit door.

How could I describe the disconnect between the soldier’s mission in Afghanistan and the Afghan’s desire to be left alone? How could I describe the terror I felt when I was crouching behind the tipped-over log, with bullets skimming the top of my head; the sadness of seeing Rougle’s body in a bag, of seeing these strapping American boys in their twenties reduced to tears and horror after being overrun by an enemy they never saw?

I had worked in the Muslim world for eleven years and had always been treated with unparalleled hospitality and kindness. People had gone out of their way to feed me, to provide me with shelter in their homes, and to protect me from danger. Now I feared what this man might do to me. For one of the first times in my life, I feared rape.

My eyesight was -5.5; I was nearsighted and almost blind without them. My glasses had been stolen with our gear. If I cried a few times a day, I thought, I could keep my contacts moist.

Soldiers led us outside of the prison once again blindfolded and bound, but this time with plastic zip ties that cut deep into our wrists. I asked them to loosen them. They tightened them even more, these plastic ties I had seen used by the U.S. military on so many Iraqis and Afghans.

Tyler, Anthony, and Steve kept getting beaten with fists and rifles. Getting felt up and fingered through my jeans didn’t seem nearly as bad as that physical abuse.

Just as in Somalia, when I had felt my baby moving inside me as I witnessed the suffering of other infants, I could suddenly understand, in a new, profound, and enraging way, how most people in the world lived. I had been seeing that reality for years. But somehow, I had to admit, my pregnancy and the vulnerabilities of motherhood had offered me yet another window on humanity, yet another channel of understanding.

It’s not always easy to make the transition from a beautiful London park filled with children to a war zone, but it’s my choice. I choose to live in peace and witness war—to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.