Lynsey Addario was freed from captivity in Libya on March 21, along with Tyler Hicks, Stephen Farrell and Anthony Shadid. Nine days later, in New York, she sat down with James Estrin, Kerri MacDonald and David Furst to share her thoughts on the experience. David W. Dunlap edited Ms. Addario’s answers to her colleagues’ questions into a narrative.
I was reading the feedback to the account that Anthony, Tyler, Steve and I wrote. (“Four Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality.”) Some comments said: “How dare a woman go to a war zone?” and “How could The New York Times let a woman go to the war zone?”
To me, that’s grossly offensive. This is my life, and I make my own decisions.
If a woman wants to be a war photographer, she should. It’s important. Women offer a different perspective. We have access to women on a different level than men have, just as male photographers have a different relationship with the men they’re covering.
In the Muslim world, most of my male colleagues can’t enter private homes. They can’t hang out with very conservative Muslim families. I have always been able to. It’s not easy to get the right to photograph in a house, but at least I have one foot in the door. I’ve always found it a great advantage, being a woman.
Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesMarch 11: Rebels with the body of a fighter at the morgue in Brega.That said, I generally have a man accompany me everywhere. When I’m on assignment, I hire either a local translator or a driver who speaks English. And I make sure they’re always with me. I do find that a woman who is alone is more prone to being mistreated than a woman who is with a man.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, the team I hire is everything to me. They are almost more important than me, because they are the ones who open doors and help keep those doors open.
People think photography is about photographing. To me, it’s about relationships. And it’s about doing your homework and making people comfortable enough where they open their lives to you. People underestimate me because I’m always laughing and joking. That helps. They let their guard down.
I try to do women’s stories when I can, but I don’t want to be pigeonholed as just a women’s photographer, because my interest is in covering the whole story — and human rights abuses and humanitarian issues. Ironically, I don’t think I saw more than a handful of women the entire time I was in Libya.
Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesMarch 12: Relatives of Emad al Giryani at his funeral in Ras Lanuf.After the attack on Lara Logan in Egypt, a lot of people started asking, “Why are women covering the Muslim world?” Several people wondered why Western women covered countries where women are mistreated so badly.
To me, that’s not the case. I have always been offered the utmost hospitality and protection and shelter in the Muslim world. I have been fed. I have been offered a place to sleep. My translators and drivers have put their lives before mine. It’s very important for people to recognize that these qualities do exist.
Yes, what happened to Lara was horrible, by all accounts. There’s no question. And when I was in Libya, I was groped by a dozen men. But why is that morehorrible than what happened to Tyler or Steve or Anthony — being smashed on the back of the head with a rifle butt? Why isn’t anyone saying men shouldn’t cover war? Women and men should do what they believe they need to do.
I don’t think it’s more dangerous for a woman to do conflict photography. Both men and women face the same dangers.
Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesMarch 3: Bodies of rebels killed around Ajdabiya.Physically, it’s very demanding. I have to make sure I’m always in shape. I run every day. I’m always at the gym. Because if you do a lot of military embeds, people are not going to wait for you. I’m 5-feet-1. There are times in Afghanistan when, if I have to jump a canal that’s three feet wide, I’m going to have a problem. And I’m not as strong as my male colleagues. But in most of the assignments I do, I don’t find it makes a difference.
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Libya was a hard conflict to cover, finding that boundary when it was not safe anymore. There was one road that led to the front line. That road was being shelled. There was tank fire. There was artillery. There were airstrikes. And there were helicopters coming in. So as soon as you got close enough to cover the conflict, you were also close enough to get fired upon. It was hard to navigate.
You learn the fighting patterns. You try and use that experience to judge how to move forward. But every conflict is different and every conflict has different boundaries. In Libya, it just so happened, the landscape didn’t provide any cover. That was a basic fact about trying to cover the conflict: it was flat, open desert.
Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesMarch 9: Rebel soldiers wept at the hospital in Ras Lanuf.It was so dangerous, we traveled in full cars. It was hard to find a driver. If one person found a driver we’d all pile into that car. We generally were in two cars, with seven or eight photographers.
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In the last few years, people have treated me more as part of the gang. But I think that it is a chauvinistic profession. In every conflict I’ve covered, there’s always been sort of a boys’ club. And there aren’t that many women covering conflict right now. I mean, it’s amazing in this day and age. There are probably a dozen women photographers — at most — whom I see actively in the field, covering conflict.
There are many reasons. It takes a great toll on your personal life. It’s lonely. It’s physically demanding. You have to carry a lot of equipment. It’s emotionally taxing. You see and document things that take a lot to process, both mentally and physically. Most women, at some point, decide they want to put their personal lives first.
Most of my life, I had no personal life. I tried having relationships. But they were never successful because I was never home. That’s my fault. That was my decision. I would leave for an assignment and come back four months later. You can’t ask someone to be in a relationship with you if you’re not home. I think it’s a very good reason that a lot of women decide that they don’t want to do this.
James Estrin/The New York TimesLynsey Addario hugged Michele McNally, the director of photography.I will cover another war. I’m sure I will. It’s what I do. It’s important to show people what’s happening. We have a unique access to what unfolds on the ground that helps our policymakers decide how to treat certain issues.
The hardest part about what happened to us in Libya, our having been detained, is what we put our loved ones through — more than what happened to us. The whole time we were detained, I think our main concern was that our families didn’t know we were alive. And we knew we would be hurting them. At times, it’s a very selfish profession. And it’s hard to put people through what we put them through
It doesn’t always work. Models can, after all, be divas. “It’s not something that you have a lot of control over,” Ms. Davidson acknowledged with a laugh.
