Shumita Basu

I'm Shamitza Basu.

Today, inside the life of one of the world's leading war photographers.

Chances are, if you've looked at the front page of any newspaper over the past two decades and seen images of war, conflict and uprisings from around the world, you have most likely seen a Lindsay Adario photo.

She's documented everything from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Arab Spring and Libyan civil war to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

She's been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship for her work.

And now a new National Geographic documentary film called Love and War looks not only at her extraordinary career, but also at her life at home in London with her husband and their two young sons.

When I sat down with Lindsay, we talked about the dangerous work of photographing the realities of conflict zones and the difficult work of parenting and what she hopes this documentary captures about the complexity of both.

You know, it's striking to me how so many people, I think, are familiar with the feeling of understanding what they're looking at visually, even if they don't have the words for it.

You know, people can look at an image, for example, a Robert Capa and be like, oh, I know that's that's totally a Robert Capa.

That's a Dorothea Lange.

What makes that a Lindsay Adario to you?

I know how I might answer it because I know how I feel when I see your photography and I've seen it so much accompanying some of the most important journalism that I've read and consumed in the past years, you know.

You speak in the documentary about what drives you and what drives your work.

And a lot of it is impact.

You talk about the hope that you have that your images will change.

spark change, that they'll move policy, that they'll shift people's perspective and understanding of conflicts around the world.

And in fact, the documentary opens with a really, really interesting example of exactly that.

It's a deadly mortar strike in Ukraine, early days of the conflict where Russia attacked Ukraine.

And you photographed a family that was killed while evacuating on what was supposed to be a safe evacuation route for civilians.

Tell us a little bit of that story and some of the ethical decisions that came up in not only taking that photograph, but in how you advocated for The New York Times to publish it.