“You don’t understand. This is history. I have to photograph it now. Later is too late.”
April 19, 2011 | Source: Monroe Gallery of Photography
Via The American Society of Cinematographers
"After all I have done to get these images of war, up close, personal, soldiers and civilians, please stick your neck out in the most minimal way. To hear that you don't want to "risk further scrutiny" after I risked my life for two months is the most offensive thing I have ever heard."
You don't understand. This is history. I have to photograph it now. Later is too late." New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario is talking to Army Captain Dan Kearney at 6 a.m. on the side of a mountain in the dawning Korengal Valley of northeastern Afghanistan. It is fall, 2007, and Kearney's forces have dropped into a village to confront insurgents following nighttime bombing by American planes. There likely has been "collateral damage." Afghan civilians have been wounded and Addario wants Kearney to help her get to them to document the injuries. Khalid, a seven-year-old boy with shrapnel wounds and watery eyes becomes a haunting portrait that underscores the absurdity of a term like "collateral damage."
At first, the photo was going to be the cover image for a NY Times Sunday magazine feature story. But it was quashed. Then it was to be in the story inside, then on the Times website on a slideshow—also all quashed. Kathy Ryan, the photo editor argued for inclusion on the website; editor-in-chief Gerry Marzorati refused, citing that it could not be proven that Khalid's and other villagers' wounds were caused by American bombs; so, the photo was not run despite strenuous pleadings by Addario. Later, Captain Kearney affirmed that most likely the wounds were caused by shrapnel from American bombs.
This sense of urgency and fierce dedication to her assignments pervades all of Lynsey Addario's photographs. Here is part of what she wrote to the then current editor-in-chief of the magazine in defense of her work.
"After all I have done to get these images of war, up close, personal, soldiers and civilians, please stick your neck out in the most minimal way. To hear that you don't want to "risk further scrutiny" after I risked my life for two months is the most offensive thing I have ever heard."
She takes no prisoners in her fierce focus. There are few images of stasis or quiet moments of idyllic peace in the maelstrom of her work.
Five years after graduation from Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, Addario was working as a professional photojournalist for the Buenos Aires Herald. Shortly after, she was in Cuba for AP. The past decade she has worked for the NY Times and its magazine as well as for National Geographic. Always on the move, she somehow made time to marry Reuters journalist Paul de Bender in July 2009.
Addario may be an anomaly as a conflict photojournalist: a woman in a field dominated by men. On many of her assignments she is paired with another woman, journalist Elizabeth Warren, covering stories from each of their perspectives, in images and words. It is Warren who recalls the incident that opens this essay. Embedded in the fall of 2007 in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, much as Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger had been for their Oscar nominated documentary film, Restrepo, Warren was already months pregnant. She and Addario are self-described "partners in crime" on assignments throughout the decade's conflict zones. Here is a PBS slideshow of the Korengal Valley story.
And here is Warren's account of her and Addario in the Korengal.
Rubin also discusses her relationship with Addario and their history in northeastern Afghanistan in a recent feature article in the Winter 2010 issue of Aperture magazine. It is worth getting, not just for Rubin's detailed account of her relationship with Addario, but as a lesson in the daily rigors of the conflict journalist:
Rubin writes about Addario's penchant for using wide lenses, for working in close:
Wide angles lure me into Lynsey's work. The intense focus that opens to another layer and then another and another. I asked her once about that. "I don't know. I just see that way."
There is no better introduction to the way Addario "sees" than going to her website. The stark, severe black field comes up right away. A seven-image slideshow follows.
Links to the left side of the homepage lead to slideshows of other photo essays.
Hotspots of international conflict, all the usual countries run amok with warring men, are listed, a veritable Zagat guide into hell. But what else emerges as you look, are links to essays that document women's issues: women in the military, women's health and maternity in Africa, female-self-immolation in Afghanistan, an Indian beauty pageant, transsexual prostitutes. She's on the front lines in war zones, alongside the boys—but she also stalks a space and themes that most male photojournalist eschew. As you get to know her work, you realize that covering women's issues is not an ancillary assignment. It is as much the core of her identity as an "engaged observer" as her higher profile war stories. She does not just caption the images; she narrates the story beyond.

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| "I saw two women on the side of the mountain, in burkas and without a man. In Afghanistan you seldom see an unaccompanied woman. Noor Nisa, about 18, was pregnant; her water had just broken. Her husband, whose first wife had died during childbirth, was determined to get Noor Nisa to the hospital in Faizabad, a four-hour drive from their village in Badakhshan Province. His borrowed car broke down, so he went to find another vehicle. I ended up taking Noor Nisa, her mother, and her husband to the hospital, where she delivered a baby girl. My interpreter, who is a doctor, and I were on a mission to photograph maternal health and mortality issues, only to find the entire story waiting for us along a dusty Afghan road." Addario works so close up that she has run smack into numerous situations that could easily have meant her death: a kidnapping; a car wreak that left her driver dead and her with a broken collarbone—and most recently, an arrest, detention and beatings that put her and three other NY Times journalists in the world spotlight when they went missing in Libya for six days.The story of their capture and eventual release highlight the risks taken every day by the men and women who give witness of the world's traumas.  Four "NY Times" journalists with Turkish ambassador (center) after their release in Tripoli. Here is an audio interview with Addario and Renee Montagne of NPR on April 1, describing the ordeal she and her three times colleagues endured: Margaret Warner on the PBS Newshour interviewed both Addario and Anthony Shadid who is the NY Times Bureau Chief in Beirut and who was arrested with her. One section of Addario's website features images of Afghan women who have tried to immolate themselves to escape violence and oppression.  "Bibi Aisha was 19 when I met her in Kabul's Women for Afghan Women shelter in November 2009. Her husband beat her from the day she was married, at age 12. When he beat her so badly she thought she might die, she escaped to seek a neighbor's help. To punish her for leaving without permission, her husband, who is a Taliban fighter, took her to a remote spot in the mountains. Several men held her while he cut off her nose, ears, and hair. She screamed—to no avail. "If I had the power, I would kill them all," she told me. I wanted to be strong for Aisha to give her hope she would be fine again. But when she described that moment, I began to cry."
 I took the bottle of petrol and burned myself," Fariba, who is 11 and lives in Herat, told me. "When I returned to school, the kids made fun of me. They said I was ugly." She now says, "I regret my mistake." The reasons for her action are unclear; Fariba claimed a woman came to her in her dreams and told her to burn herself. Many Afghan women burn themselves because they believe suicide is the only escape from an abusive marriage, abusive family members, poverty, or the stress of war. If they do survive, women fear being shamed or punished for what they did and may blame a gas explosion when they were cooking. Doctors know when the burns were intentional from their shape, location, and smell."  "In Esteqlal Hospital in Kabul, doctors tried to save 15-year-old Zahra, who had doused herself with petrol and set herself on fire after she was accused of stealing from her neighbors. The teenager, from Mazar-e Sharif, suffered burns over 95 percent of her body. She died three days after I took this picture." Her passion to document the horror of their fate led her to move beyond these still images to a video documentary with her voiceover narration of the women's plight. Be warned, this is a difficult video to watch. But hope for a brighter future for Afghan women is documented in this beautifully arrayed essay for National Geographic titled Veiled Rebellion. It covers a full spectrum of the lives of women in this hardscrabble country struggling to engage the contemporary world outside its boundaries, even as powerful internal forces try to quash it. The essay speaks to the long reach of Addario's mission letting the world know the reality and the aspirations of Afghan women.
But hope for a brighter future for Afghan women is documented in this beautifully arrayed essay for National Geographic titled Veiled Rebellion. It covers a full spectrum of the lives of women in this hardscrabble country struggling to engage the contemporary world outside its boundaries, even as powerful internal forces try to quash it. The essay speaks to the long reach of Addario's mission letting the world know the reality and the aspirations of Afghan women.  "With face, hair, and arms in full view, actress Trena Amiri chauffeurs a friend around Kabul on a Friday. She blasts her favorite songs off a cassette and shimmies and sings along, tapping the steering wheel as she dances in the driver's seat. Even in relatively progressive Kabul, men and women glare, honk, and scream at her. It provokes men in Afghanistan to see strong women. It symbolizes a freedom they just aren't comfortable with. Amiri fled her husband of seven years, who, she says, kept her home and beat her. She left her three sons behind. She doesn't plan to remarry but knows she might have to in order to survive in Afghanistan, where women are dependent on men for so many things. When I ask about her current boyfriend, whose name is on the gold bracelet around her wrist, she says she couldn't marry him: 'He won't let me act anymore, and I want to continue my art.'"
The photojournalists that I know personally do not seek the spotlight. The stereotype of the gung ho, half mad provocateur played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, is mostly fiction. Being a weeklong international media sensation is not a fate that either Addario or Tyler Hicks would have chosen. But like my photojournalist friend, Jehad Nga, who was also arrested and interrogated in Libya a few weeks before them, the facts of their ordeals brings into all too sharp focus for the rest of us just what is the cost of these so compelling photos—images made in the face of danger, that they bring to the rest of us, who over a cup of morningcoffee impassively scan the tribulations and exaltations of our fellow man.  |