She documents war’s darkest truths — then returns home to her family
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This is In Conversation from Apple News. 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.
I'm constantly feeling for the people I cover. I'm constantly putting myself in their shoes.
She's been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship for her work.
What experiences shaped Lynsey Addario's career as a war photographer?
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.
I became a parent after I had been kidnapped twice. I had been thrown out of a car on a highway in Pakistan. I had been in a Taliban ambush, an ambush by Iraqi insurgents. I mean, the list goes on and on.
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.
Mm-hmm. And I felt like we're in a time right now where journalism is really under attack. First of all, I think that people don't understand what it is we do and especially as frontline photographers and journalists. And I also made a decision to just be completely transparent and vulnerable and open because I know what I ask of my subjects. And I did not think it would be helpful if I tried to paint a sort of pretty perfect picture because that's not at all who I am.
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?
Oh, you're asking me to analyze my own photos.
Yeah.
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.
Thank you. I guess it would be wide angle. I generally shoot wide angle. I get very, very close to my subjects. I use natural light. I don't use a flash. I try to get sort of very intimate scenes. I often photograph women and children, not exclusively. And I'm trying to capture emotion and evoke emotion. So I think I hope that sort of gives some of the parameters, of course, while telling a story.
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.
Sure. So it was March 6th, very early on in the war. It was a few weeks after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And One of the things, of course, I have to do as a conflict photographer is go in and try to cover as many different elements of a story that I possibly can. And so people fleeing from missile strikes, from mortar attacks is something that I'm often looking for because it shows the urgency and the impact on civilians.
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