Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

Lynsey Addario

Women Men Life

As a war correspondent and a mother, I've learned to live in two different realities... but it's my choice. I choose to live in peace and witness war - to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.

Lynsey Addario

War Peace Experience

I was undeterred by the danger of traveling as a single American woman through Taliban-governed land. I believed in the stories I wanted to tell, the stories I felt were underreported, and I was convinced that that belief would keep me alive.

Lynsey Addario

Travel Anger Would

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

Power Change Age

You have to believe 100 percent in what you're doing, that some picture or some thing we do is going to change the world in some tiny, minute way.

Lynsey Addario

Change You World

To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives, so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single one.

Lynsey Addario

Work Home Your

One day I am at home, watching dramatic images of Iraqi Yazidis fleeing for their lives being aired nonstop on 24-hour news channels. Days later, I am there, staring at tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis and feeling a 35-millimeter frame cannot capture the scope of devastation and heartbreak before me.

Lynsey Addario

Home Art Age

I've seen so many photographers rush to do books the minute they start shooting, but one great thing about photography is that the images don't go away, so the more I sit with these images, the more I learn which ones have had the most impact.

Lynsey Addario

Great Art Age

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

Mom Men Art

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

Home You Very

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

Work Love York

Don't expect things to happen fast. Be empathetic with the people you are photographing. Don't be concerned about money.

Lynsey Addario

Money You Wit

I was lucky because I had parents who have enabled me to do whatever I was passionate about and never held my siblings and me back from anything. But I think a lot of people don't have that experience.

Lynsey Addario

Experience Who Whatever

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

Very Us Union

I'm constantly struggling. You know, the stories that I feel like I could cover, do the work that I want to do and being a mother. That's really where my struggle is - and being a wife and having a life - and for me it's really hard to find that balance. I'm always struggling to find that balance.

Lynsey Addario

Work Life You

Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

Lynsey Addario

Women Men Life

The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn't become scarier over the years; it had become more normal.

Lynsey Addario

Car Years Year

I just immediately connect everything to the wars I have been covering overseas, and that's not the case back home. I wrongly assumed all Americans at home were as consumed with our troops in Afghanistan as I was abroad.

Lynsey Addario

War Home Wrong

I didn't want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news.

Lynsey Addario

Whether Want Term

It's very hard to turn your back once you're aware of what's going on, and you're aware of the injustices, and you're aware of the civilian casualties. It's much easier if you have no idea and you've never seen it.

Lynsey Addario

War Your You

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

Work Women Men

Most people, when they meet me, one of the first things they say is, 'Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to war? Why would you go into these places where you know there's a risk of getting killed?'

Lynsey Addario

Every story takes its toll on me and leaves an impression on me.

Lynsey Addario

As a Western woman in the Middle East, I am often put in a different category. I am sort of like the third sex. I am not treated like a man. I am not treated like a woman. I am just treated like a journalist. That is usually really helpful.

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

By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years.

Lynsey Addario

The Taliban rose to power in 1996, vowing stability and an end to the violence raging across the country between warring mujahedeen factions, and to implement rule by Sharia law, or strict Islamic rule.

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

For me, it's more about being there, bearing witness to history, bearing witness to what's happening, what our country, the position our country is taking overseas. I want policy-makers to see the fruits of their decisions, basically, and to try and influence foreign policy.

Lynsey Addario

In so many countries, Western journalists are viewed simply as dollar signs. We're ransom objects.

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 do think my childhood is one of the fundamental reasons that I'm able to do my job. We were raised in this totally nonjudgmental family. We never knew who was going to walk in the front door. And as a journalist and a photographer, you walk into so many different scenes that you have to be open to everything.

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

A lot of women act like it's the easiest decision, and I'm just going to have a baby and put my life on hold and not be worried about it. Well, I was worried.

Lynsey Addario

I've rarely seen portrayals of photojournalists that seem accurate.

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

For a journalist who covers the Muslim world, we have responsibilities to be familiar with that culture and to know how to respond to that.

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

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

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

I had imposed unspeakable worry on my husband, Paul de Bendern, on more occasions than I could count.

Lynsey Addario

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.

Lynsey Addario

Sometimes when I am photographing a major news event, I am suddenly overwhelmed by helplessness.

Lynsey Addario

To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single image.

Lynsey Addario

I think when I started going to war zones and started covering humanitarian issues, it became a calling because I realized I had a voice, and I can give people without a voice a voice... and now it is something that sits inside of me every day.

Lynsey Addario

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 think it's important to have perspective and to look at what you don't necessarily want to see.

Lynsey Addario

I would never think of myself as a role model.

Lynsey Addario

With photography, I always think that it's not good enough.

Lynsey Addario

I've always wanted to do a photo book, but I've never done one because I've never felt ready; I just didn't feel my work was good enough.

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