Lynsey Addario was five months pregnant and taking photos of skeletal children in the Horn of Africa, when she felt her own baby kicking for the first time.
“He came to life as a little person inside me as I entered Somalia, the land ridden with death,” writes the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, of an assignment covering drought victims in 2011.
In Addario’s line of work, death — and new life — abound. Since the mid-1990s, she has covered the Taliban in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Syrian refugee crisis, and countless more conflicts for media outlets including Getty Images, The New York Times, and National Geographic.
Her spectacular and deeply intimate images shine a light on places few would dare to travel, and are now gathered together for the first time in a vivid memoir called “It’s what I do: A photographer’s life of love and war.”
The pictures of malnourished toddlers in Somalia that day came as Addario was coming to terms with her own pregnancy. Until he started kicking inside of her, the 41-year-old had only ever thought of unborn son Lukas as a “pea” or “avocado pit.”
This was an entirely new jolt of reality for the tenacious American photographer — “Before Lukas, you know I didn’t really think about my mortality,” she told CNN.
“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,” she said, her voice warm and raspy over the phone from New York.
Motherhood and mortality
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It takes a strong stomach — and mind — for this line of work, and Addario’s book opens with a gruesome description of an airstrike in Ajdabiya, Libya.
“There was part of a brain on the passenger seat; shards of skull were embedded in the rear parcel shelf. Hospital employees in white medical uniforms carefully picked up the pieces and placed them in a bag,” she writes.
There was part of a brain on the passenger seat; shards of skull were embedded in the rear parcel shelf
Lynsey Addario
How does she cope with the unimaginable horror year after year?”
I do take it away with me, and I’m sure I do suffer from trauma. But I feel as though I’m pretty well adjusted,” she said.
“I do think that the more I cover war, the luckier I feel. I was born in the U.S…. in Connecticut of all places, and so I think it’s very important to not forget that.”
Perhaps covering war doesn’t require a hardened heart — just an exceptionally large one.
