Lynsey Addario

It’s What I do

In her engaging memoir, Lynsey Addario, an award-winning war photographer, recounts how she got into the male-dominated field of photojournalism. Her stories range from shocking, for example, when she was kidnapped in Libya, to inspiring, when her work shines a light on suffering and injustices that might otherwise have stayed in the dark. In everything she does, she shows great empathy and stresses the importance of taking pictures of people that don’t compromise their dignity. She also recounts her difficulties imagining herself as a mother without giving up her work and life as she knew it before. A truly inspiring book from a courageous woman!

“With each new assignment – whether I was in Congo, Darfur, Afghanistan, or elsewhere – I felt more fortunate to be an independent, educated woman. I was thirty-one years old, and I cherished my right to choose my love, my work. I had the privilege to travel and work away from hardship when it became too much to bear. Most people on earth didn’t have an exit door to walk away from their own lives.

The trials I faced now seemed surmountable simple because I now knew there were people who had overcome much greater hardship. Suddenly my childhood in Connecticut, which I had thought to be the most normal childhood in the world, seemed lavish and full of opportunity. My mother had always told me I had no patience for anything – for waiting in line, for traffic, for my career to take off. Perhaps the years of working in the developing world, where daily frustrations and delays were an integral part of life, gave me the patience and perspective I never had as a young woman. The sadness and injustice I encountered as a journalist could either sink me into a depression or open the door to a new vision of my own life. I chose the latter.”