I didn’t know a single female photographer who covered conflict who even had a boyfriend, much less a husband or a baby. – Lynsey Addario
I knew that my interest lied in international stories. I was interested in how women were living under the Taliban, for example. – Lynsey Addario
Becoming a mother hasn’t necessarily changed how I shoot, but it certainly has made me more sensitive, and it certainly makes it much harder for me to photograph dying children. – Lynsey Addario
I wanted to continue doing my work, but I had to figure out how. And so what I have basically come up with is that I still go to Afghanistan and Iraq and South Sudan and many of these places that are rife with war, but I don’t go directly to the front line. – Lynsey Addario
My life isn’t always at risk, even if I’m in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn’t necessarily mean being shot at all the time. – Lynsey Addario
I wanted the ideal personal life, but I also wanted to keep rushing off, and that doesn’t work, not unless you’ve got an incredibly understanding partner. – Lynsey Addario
I’m not very religious at all – I was raised Catholic, but probably haven’t gone to church since my Holy Communion when I was about 6 or 7. – Lynsey Addario
I had first visited Kurdistan in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq, camping out in Erbil and Sulaimaniya while waiting for Saddam Hussein’s fall. – Lynsey Addario
If people really saw what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, then they might be marching in the streets to end wars. But you know, I think that no one ever sees because we’re not allowed to see, and we’re not allowed to publish what we do see. So it’s quite difficult. – Lynsey Addario
With each assignment, I weigh the looming possibility of being killed, and I chastise myself for allowing fear to hinder me. War photographers aren’t supposed to get scared. – Lynsey Addario
I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they ploughed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred towards women I was witnessing. – Lynsey Addario
I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan. – Lynsey Addario
When I first started out, I really felt like, ‘I’m a journalist; I will be respected as a neutral observer.’ And I don’t feel like that holds true anymore. I don’t think people respect journalists the same way they once did. – Lynsey Addario
You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint in a war zone, and each is a gamble. The first is to stop and identify yourself as a journalist and hope that you are respected as a neutral observer. The second is to blow past the checkpoint and hope the soldiers guarding it don’t open fire on you. – Lynsey Addario
Since Sept. 11, many of the wars of our generation are in the Muslim world. So as a woman, I have access to 50 percent of the population that my male colleagues don’t. – Lynsey Addario
Let’s get one thing straight: I am not an adrenaline junkie. Just because you cover conflict doesn’t mean you thrive on adrenaline. It means you have a purpose, and you feel it is very important for people back home to see what is happening on the front line, especially if we are sending American soldiers there. – Lynsey Addario
It seems like, yeah, of course – I always think my work is important, or I wouldn’t risk my life for it. – Lynsey Addario
The possibility to mobilize the international community to act on human suffering is what drives me every day as a photojournalist. – Lynsey Addario
I grew up in Connecticut, going in and out of New York City, and I worked in the city in the ’90s. I was freelancing for the Associated Press, and I fell in love with New York. – Lynsey Addario
Obviously I am a photographer and I believe in my medium: I do think that powerful photographs can force change. It doesn’t take long to look and be engaged in a strong image whereas, with a story, you have to actually sit down and pause and be involved in it. – Lynsey Addario
If I’m doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I’ll go to her tent; I’ll follow her when she’s working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame. – Lynsey Addario
Sometimes when I am photographing a major news event, I am suddenly overwhelmed by helplessness. – Lynsey Addario
Nothing seemed more important to me than to make the world aware of the senseless death and starvation in South Sudan. I wanted people to see through the eyes of the suffering so my photos might motivate the international community to act. – Lynsey Addario
As a woman, I have tried to take advantage of the extra access I have in the Muslim world: with Muslim women, for example. Many people underestimate women in that part of the world because, typically, they don’t work. – Lynsey Addario
When I’m documenting, for example, a story on women in Afghanistan, I will do a huge amount of research and a lot of time on the ground just getting to know the women before I even start shooting. – Lynsey Addario
I always knew my death would be a possible consequence of the work I do. But for me it was a price I was willing to pay because this is what I believed in. – Lynsey Addario
I remember the moment in which we were taken hostage in Libya, and we were asked to lie face down on the ground, and they started putting our arms behind our backs and started tying us up. And we were each begging for our lives because they were deciding whether to execute us, and they had guns to our heads. – Lynsey Addario
