Sam Fragoso

In 2015, Lindsay Adario published an essay in the New York Times Magazine titled, What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover?

Everything.

Adario, now a mother of two, has since continued her work in the male-dominated world of conflict photography.

But the gendered question around the perceived limits of working mothers is at the heart of a new documentary called Love and War.

It paints a comprehensive picture of Adario's life both in the field and back at home.

Since September 11, 2001, Adario has covered nearly every major conflict and humanitarian crisis of her generation, including the Ukraine War, where she has been on assignment from the New York Times since 2022.

In the process of creating what she calls a historical record, she's been kidnapped twice, thrown out of a car on a highway in Pakistan, and been ambushed on two different occasions by the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents.

People have a tendency to move on, she says in Love and War.

It's my job to get people to continue paying attention.

Lindsay Adario, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Thank you so much.

I want to begin where the film does on March 6th of 2022 in Irpin, Ukraine, where you're on assignment for The New York Times.

And I believe it's there that you're photographing Ukrainian refugees, children, peaceful civilians attempting to flee the violence that had begun just days earlier.

In the distance, we see a family with backpacks, a blue roller suitcase, and they make it safely across the Irpin River and into Kiev, where they then enter your frame.

Can you tell us what you saw next?

And so on the front page of The New York Times.

Speaking of the documentary, one of the reasons you agreed to participate in the film is because you had seen several other films about war correspondence.

And they were always about men and, quote, no one ever really got it right.

What did you want to correct in making this movie?

There's a moment in the film where we see you in Somalia, Panama, and the Darien Gap, where you're working to tell these urgent stories, to show us in vivid photographic detail the cost of conflict, while also fielding a typical call from your family back home.