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

by Lynsey Addario

revolted against their own homegrown tyrant, Muammar el-Qaddafi.

He had been in power for more than forty years, funding terrorist groups across the world

while he tortured, killed, and disappeared his fellow Libyans. Q...

While covering war, there were days when I had boundless courage and there were days, like these in Libya, when I was terrified from the moment I woke up.

The front line moved along a barren road surrounded by sand that stretched flat to the blue horizon. Unlike in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were no bunkers to jump into, no buildings to hide behind, no armored Humvees in which to crouch down on the floor. In Libya, when we heard the hum of a warplane, we went through the motions: We stopped, looked up, and cowered in anticipation of rounds of ammunition or bombs and tried to guess where they would land. Some people lay on their backs; some people covered their heads; some people prayed; and some people ran, just to run, even if it was to nowhere.

It is often this way in war zones for journalists and photographers: an endless negotiation of who needs what, who wants to stay, who wants to go. When do we have enough reporting and photographs to depict the story accurately? We want to see more fighting, to get the freshest, latest news, to keep reporting until that unknowable last second before injury, capture, death.

We are greedy by nature: We always want more than what we have. The consensus in the car at that point was to keep working.

Laurent Van der Stockt, a notoriously gutsy conflict photographer, who had covered most of the major wars of the past two decades—he had been shot twice and hit once by shrapnel from a mortar round on the front line—was staring at the long line of cars draining out of the city.

I looked out the window and tried to retreat to a comforting place in my mind.

“Guys, it’s time to go,” Steve said, and I sensed I had an ally in my fear. “Yeah, I think so, too,” I said. I was grateful for Steve’s voice of reason, but our suggestion went unanswered by Tyler and Anthony.

Some were watching the approaching action with nonchalance; others were scurrying around, shooting their weapons into the air. I was directionless. I didn’t want to be here or there, and could barely lift my camera to my eyes. Even the most experienced photographers have days like this: You can’t frame a shot, catch the moment. My fear was debilitating, like a physical handicap. Tyler, meanwhile, was in his element, focused and relentless. I imagined the images he was capturing while I was clumsy, scared, missing the scenes, clicking the shutter too late.

THAT DAY IN LIBYA I asked myself the questions that still haunt me: Why do you do this work? Why do you risk your life for a photograph? After ten years as a war correspondent, it remains a difficult question to answer. The truth is that few of us are born into this work. It is something we discover accidentally, something that happens gradually. We get a glimpse of this unusual life and this extraordinary profession, and we want to keep doing it, no matter how exhausting, stressful, or dangerous it becomes. It is the way we make a living, but it feels more like a responsibility, or a calling. It makes us happy, because it gives us a sense of purpose. We bear

witness to history, and influence policy. And yet we also pay a steep price for this commitment. When a journalist gets killed in a firefight, or steps on a land mine and loses his legs, or tears his friends and family apart by getting kidnapped, I ask myself why I chose this life.

feel more comfortable in the darkest places than we do back home, where life seems too simple and too easy. We don’t listen to that inner voice that says it is time to take a break from documenting other people’s lives and start building our own.

But when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine.

faces, because they were in the wrong place in relation to the sunlight. Sometimes I was simply too tentative and insecure to get close enough to them. Sometimes I missed a perfect moment, unsure of my instincts. I was untrained, but I began to teach myself, studying photography in books and newspapers, to see how powerful scenes could make a tired old story new again. I kept going back to try.

We were both curious and cared deeply about what was happening in the world; it was our bond. But Miguel was a very private man. In me he recognized an extrovert, someone who loved to meet people and ask questions.

One day they told me that Madonna was filming the movie Evita that night at the Casa Rosada, the president’s house in the city’s main square. I already knew that, because I’d read in the paper that she was staying in a hotel suite for $2,500 a night and had set up her own gym in the room. I’d thought about her personal gym all morning as I went for a jog in tired shoes and sidestepped piles of dog shit.

Until I saw Salgado’s exhibition, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a street photographer or a news photographer or whether I could make it as a photographer at all. But when I entered the exhibition space, I was so overcome by his images—the passion, the details, the texture—that I decided to devote myself to photojournalism and documentary photography. Something I had perceived until that moment as a simple means of capturing pretty scenes became something altogether different: It was a way to tell a story. It was the marriage of travel and foreign cultures and curiosity and photography. It was photojournalism.

I knew then that I wanted to tell people’s stories through photos;

to do justice to their humanity, as Salgado had done; to provoke the kind of empathy for the subjects that I was feeling in that moment. I doubted I would ever be able to capture such pain and beauty in a single frame, but I was impassioned.

walked through the exhibition...

was an overzealous twenty-two-year-old, dressed in stylish jeans, a crisp button-down shirt, and black rubber-soled platform shoes.

No photographer on that list would ever say no to an assignment, even if it meant ditching a romantic dinner, or waking up at 5 a.m. to stand outside a courthouse on a freezing New York morning for a perp walk, or taking lame photographs of a kid playing in a leaking fire hydrant on a hot summer’s day. In the

early days the assignments were grim, but I took them—happily.

Cuba. In 1997, Communist Cuba was embargoed, and Americans rarely visited. Being a foreign journalist in Cuba was also risky; the government monitored foreigners they suspected would publish negative stories about the ailing Communist system. I didn’t know anyone who had been there; at the time I didn’t know one foreign correspondent and knew few other journalists. But I was bursting with curiosity and the daring of youth. I was fascinated by the steady rise of capitalism in such a steadfastly Communist country.

We began exchanging the usual questions, small talk, one-word inferences, and waited for intonations that quickly became familiar.

I had expected Cuba to be this ominous, scary dungeon, but the people were so warm, so candid—just like anyone else.

Minders were government-appointed guides who accompanied journalists around, wrote up reports detailing every person the journalists interviewed and every place they visited, and then passed this information on to the government.

While all who worked at Publicitur and the International Press Center were eager to show me Cuba’s touristy sights—Varadero Beach, the Tropicana, the recently restored Old Havana area—they were equally eager to keep me away from the run-down neighborhoods.

walked the city from end to end, for hours and hours each day, in search of images, drenched from the humidity, exhausted from the heat, and sick of hearing the flirtatious “ssssst” from men surprised to see a foreigner.

An AP reporter wanted to explore the idea that transgender prostitutes were society’s throwaways. It was my first long-term assignment, my first opportunity for a real photo-essay.

I decided to venture out on my own, and for weeks I went out almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night—often without my cameras—and hung around the Meatpacking District like a groupie, trying to gain the women’s

trust. I was the only white girl among a tribe of Latinas, blacks, and Asians, and they were skeptical of my intentions.

As I gained their trust, my photographs became more intimate; time allowed me to see things I hadn’t before, like when a tough guy who looked as though he had strutted out of a Snoop Dogg video would gently comb his transgender girlfriend’s hair in the dim light of a street lamp while she waited for her early morning clients.

The streets hummed with constant movement, a low-grade chaos where almost every aspect of the human condition was in public view. The vast disparity between India’s wealthiest and poorest made for an incredible juxtaposition of people and street life.

But I could endure anything for the prospect of beautiful negatives. I spent all my money on film.

Men had their hands cut off for robbery, and women were stoned to death for adultery.

Were Westerners imposing their own set of values on a Muslim country? Were Afghan women miserable

living under a burqa and under the Taliban? Or did we just assume they were miserable because our lives are so different?

“Every image-maker will be in the Fire, and for every image that he made a soul will be created for him, which will be punished in the Fire.”

But aside from a brief moment when I wondered whether I would be able to carry out my work, I wasn’t scared. I believed that if my intentions were for a good cause, nothing bad would happen to me.

On Ed’s recommendation I immediately sent a bunch of e-mails to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and to several local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), introducing myself as a freelance photographer interested in photographing the lives

of women under the Taliban. Almost immediately I began to receive responses. I was shocked: I didn’t have backing from a major publication—to them I was a nobody—but they still took the time to answer my e-mails and offer logistical support. Few journalists were covering Afghanistan under the Taliban, and they were grateful for my interest. I arranged to arrive in two weeks.

The Taliban comprised primarily Pashtun men, though some Tajiks and Hazaras were also members.

As my mahram, he had to accompany me, a woman alone, wherever I went. From the start of my journey, I struggled with how to skirt the Taliban photography ban: images burned my eyes and my soul, but I was too nervous about the consequences to dare sneak a picture as I looked out the car window and watched potential frames fade into the moving countryside.

Much to my surprise, many Afghans, male and female, were open to being photographed.

From then on, I knew to search for moments like that—more intimate, more private, when Afghans were so enveloped in thought that they forgot to worry about whether the Taliban might be lingering nearby.

We drove again, and I watched the sandy brown mountains fold like rumpled bedsheets into layers of vegetation, and clay houses fade into the land.

As I awoke the next morning and prepared for my day, I realized that I had even grown to appreciate the constant presence of my mahram, the unfamiliar peace I found when I surrendered control to Mohammed, to our driver, to a man.