Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist discusses work at Town Hall South opener
Lynsey Addario has seen things that would turn up not in our wildest dreams but our worst nightmares.
Bloody, brutal conflict in some of the most unforgiving places in the world. Human beings suffering under the bootheel of oppression. Pitifully substandard medical facilities that contain patients dying for want of basic treatment.
Addario has taken all of this in during a career as a photojournalist that has spanned close to 30 years. A 50-year-old native of Connecticut, Addario’s career has taken her from Argentina and Afghanistan to Chad and Cuba and many other points in between. The author of two books and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, Addario discussed her work and some of the people she has encountered in her career on Nov. 7 at Upper St. Clair High School as Town Hall South kicked off its 2023-24 lecture series.
Joking that being the youngest of four sisters is “probably the best training ever to become a war photographer,” Addario took the audience on a much more somber journey to such strife-ridden hot spots as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Libya.
With a particular interest in women’s rights, Addario’s photos illustrated the repression of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and horrific rates of maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. During the Iraq War, she photographed wounded U.S. soldiers.
During the uprising in Libya that deposed the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Addario was captured. She was held by the forces loyal to Gaddafi for a week. During those seven days, Addario explained, she was threatened with death and repeatedly groped.
At the checkpoint where she and her colleagues were seized, she remembered “a wall of bullets” flying around them.
Addario’s photos have appeared in some of the United States’ premier publications, including The New York Times, Time, Life, National Geographic and Newsweek. Life declined to publish photographs she took of wounded U.S. troops in Iraq in 2004, with the explanation that the images were “too much for the public to handle.”
Addario responded by asking, “Why did you send me to war if you don’t think the public can handle it?”
Some assignments have taken Addario off the world’s battlefields, such as a photo essay for The New York Times Magazine about Marike Vervoort. The Belgian paralympian ended her own life in 2019 due to advancing sympathetic dystrophy, a degenerative disease that attacks the spine and muscles and left Vervoort in debilitating pain. Addario recalled seeing Vervoort having difficulty breathing, and the photographer decided to help her sit up. Doing this, she crossed something of a line in journalism, which is not involving yourself in a story.
“There are a lot of lines you’re not supposed to cross in journalism, but I’ve crossed a lot of them,” she said.
In addition to her work appearing in newspapers and magazines, Addario has also written two books: “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War” from 2015; and “Of Love and War,” in 2018.
The Town Hall South lecture series continues Tuesday, Dec. 5, with an appearance by chef and food writer Ruth Reichl. Additional information is available at townhallsouth.org.
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