Lynsey Addario

Life and work

Lynsey Addario grew up in Westport, Connecticut, where her parents, Camille and Phillip Addario, worked as hairdressers. Both of her parents are Italian-American. She finished high school at Staples in Westport in 1991 and earned a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. She later received honorary doctorates from that same university in Humanities and from Bates College in Maine.

Addario started her professional photography career in 1996 at the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina, despite having no formal training in photography. She returned to the United States in the late 1990s and worked as a freelancer for the Associated Press in New York City.

Within a year, she went back to South America. There, she built a reputation by documenting Cuba and how communism affected its people. A few years after that, she moved to India to shoot for the Associated Press, leaving the U.S. behind.

While based in India, Addario traveled through Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, concentrating on humanitarian topics and women's issues. Following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, she made a decision to photograph Afghanistan and Pakistan under Taliban rule. In 2003 and 2004, she covered the Iraq war from Baghdad for The New York Times.

Over the years, she has reported on conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, the Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Ukraine. She has also worked on stories across the Middle East and Africa. In August 2004, she shifted her focus to Africa, specifically Chad and Sudan.

Her photographs have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, and National Geographic.

On May 9, 2009, while in Pakistan, Addario was in a car accident on the way back to Islamabad from a refugee camp assignment. She broke her collarbone, another journalist was hurt, and the driver died.

Addario was part of a group of four New York Times journalists who went missing in Libya from March 16 to March 21, 2011. On March 18, 2011, The New York Times reported that Libya had agreed to release her and her colleagues: Anthony Shadid, Stephen Farrell, and Tyler Hicks. The Libyan government freed them on March 21, 2011. Addario has stated that during her captivity, the Libyan Army threatened to kill her and repeatedly groped her.

Impact on Gender Representation through Photographing Conflict

Lynsey Addario's career has focused on capturing the experiences of women and children during conflict, often highlighting gender issues. Her work in Afghanistan documented some of the most dangerous and controversial subjects, including maternal mortality, women voting, struggles with unhappy marriages, and protests involving self-immolation. Her series "29 minutes" shows the human toll of war.

Through her research on maternal mortality, she photographed the harsh realities of young women with dangerous pregnancies. These images helped lead the Merck corporation to increase its donations to global maternal health efforts. More recently, Addario has covered the war in Ukraine, photographing women and children forced to flee the fighting.

Awards

Addario received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 2002. In 2008 she was awarded a Getty Images Grant for Editorial photography for her work in Darfur. She received a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2009, and that same year was part of a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, partly for her work in Waziristan. In 2015 American Photo Magazine named Addario one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years.

She received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 2017, and an Emmy Award nomination for 'Finding Home' with a team of others for Time in 2018. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2019, and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 2020. In 2021 she won First Place, Magazine Photojournalist of the Year from the National Press Photographers Association. She received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation in 2022, and a George Polk Award in Photojournalism in 2023 for an iconic photo of a family slain fleeing Ukraine.