LIFE IN CONFLICT
War photographer documents history from the front lines.
Lynsey Addario is an American war photographer. Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Darfur, Libya — the 41-year-old has documented history from the front lines, constantly challenged, as a woman working in parts of the world where women are meant to be invisible. In a new memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, the Pulitzer Prize winner offers snapshots of her life in the conflict zone. “I want to force people to see things that they wouldn’t see,” she says. “I try to make images that will make people think, stop, look and ask questions.” Ms. Addario spoke with the National Post from New York, playing a game with writer Joe O’Connor, where he would start a sentence and she would finish the thought.
The woman is walking toward ... a burning factory. There was a huge amount of looting across Iraq, and a lot of what people were stealing was electrical wires, iron, anything. And a lot of that looting caused fires. It looked like the entire country was on fire. I went down south to Basra, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and when I got there, there was a massive fire on the horizon. I wanted to find out what was going on. I said to this woman, “Where are you going?” She said, “My husband works in this factory. There is liquid petroleum there.” I told her there could be secondary explosions, that it wasn’t safe. But she just looked at me like I was crazy and said, “It is my husband,” and kept walking.
The weather that day in Afghanistan ... was crisp, clear and edgy. We had been airlifted to the side of a mountain in the Korengal Valley. On our sixth day of walking, we were ambushed from three sides. The scout team was hit. A Taliban had crawled on his stomach for days so he could pop up and ambush them. He shot three soldiers at close range, killing Staff Sgt. Larry Rougle. The two soldiers in the picture are Specialist Carl Vandenberge and Sgt. Kevin Rice. The photograph was taken on the way to the helicopter and I can remember thinking, “This looks like Vietnam.” It reminded me of an old war photograph. This was war. It was Oct. 23, 2007.
The child’s mother ... was sitting over him, trying to close his mouth and eyes — in desperation. She thought her son was already dead, or about to die. It was as though she were prematurely starting the death ritual. It made me incredibly uncomfortable and sad. The child was still breathing, and she kept trying to close his mouth and eyes. I was almost fivemonths pregnant at the time, and there were dozens and dozens of Somalis lining the halls of a hospital in Mogadishu, during a terrible drought, waiting for care they would never get. It was devastating. And I had my own child inside of me, and he was kicking.
I saw this skeleton ... during the conflict in Darfur. We had walked a few kilometres from Chad into Darfur to meet the rebels, and then they ferried us around the desert showing us all these places the Sudanese government had bombed, or that the Janjaweed militia had come in and burned. There were skeletons everywhere, remnants of burned villages. No one really knows what goes on in conflict zones, and this is true of any war, unless you are there, on the ground, interviewing people. And I ended up going back to Darfur every year for six years.
I remember ... walking into this woman’s home. She was sitting with her two children under a net. They were children born out of rape … to a different man. What was so difficult and yet incredible about these women in the Congo was that they didn’t treat their children as though they were born out of something so horrible. They loved them like any mother would love their children. They loved them with an incredible amount of tenderness.