One war photographer's harrowing memoir

Seen above are soldiers carrying the body of their sergeant in the Korangal Valley following a Taliban ambush. / Courtesy of Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage

Lynsey Addario

By Kwon Ji-youn

Lynsey Addario’s powerful memoir, “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War,” does not provide an unequivocal answer to why journalists risk their lives for a photograph or story, but it more than explains why this 41-year-old war photographer “does what she does.”

Addario’s first book, published on Feb. 5 by Penguin Press, gives readers a glimpse of the writer’s career, which took the plunge as the 9/11 attacks led her to some of the world’s most dangerous regions to document truth and record history.

Addario goes straight into raw detail as she opens with her work in Libya during the 2011 civil war.

Her description of an air-struck vehicle that had “human remains … splattered all over the back seat” is disturbing ― she does not blue-pencil any of the specifics. She also recalls her hands and feet being bound by her own shoelaces and remembers being threatened with death.

Cover image for Lynsey Addario’s memoir “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War”

Addario was born into an Italian-American family in Westport, Connecticut, where she received a 35-mm Nikon camera at the age of 13. After a snapshot of Madonna jump-started her photography career, she spent a considerable portion of it with The New York Times. Much of her work focuses on human rights issues. In 2009, she contributed to a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Taliban.

Her camera has captured moments of savage violence and devastating grief. But the MacArthur Fellow answers the introductory question with the following: “When people ask me why I go to these places, they are asking the wrong question,” she writes. “For me, the conundrum is never whether or not to go to Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan; the problem is that I can’t be in two of those places at once.”

War photographers are “greedy by nature,” she notes.

“We always want more than what we have,” she writes. “The consensus in the car at that point was to keep working.”

Addario does not stop at the grisly details. She speaks to women and inspires those whose jobs are as male-dominated as war reporting. She, after all, was working in regions where women are told to remain out of view. She was entering Somalia, where so many children were starving to death, as her own child began growing inside her.

She tells of having to elbow her way to the scene’s core in a fight for appreciation from her male journalist peers. She speaks of worries that should she verbalize the harassment she has endured, her male colleagues would think she was weak. She talks of being shoved out of her comfort zone to document incomprehensible and inconceivable brutality. But nonetheless, to Addario, being a war photographer is less a job, and more a calling.

Addario rehashes the deaths of colleagues, including Anthony Shadid of The New York Times, who had been with her in Libya. He died of an acute asthma attack while leaving Syria in 2012.

It is a surprise that Addario managed a relationship and family doing what she does ― she concludes, “As a war correspondent and a mother, I've learned to live in two different realities … I choose to live in peace and witness war ― to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.”

Perhaps a narrower focus on either war or love could have made the book a more lasting read.

Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress of the “Hunger Games” films, will take on the role of Addario in a biopic directed by Steven Spielberg based on this very memoir.