Lynsey Addario: Love + War
Lynsey Addario
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Lynsey Addario has filled tomes with her work. As an American photojournalist, who has covered conflict, humanitarian crises, and women’s issues around the Middle East and Africa on assignment for The New York Times and National Geographic for more than two decades, she has brought issues from around the world into sharp focus.
Addario has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Syria, and ongoing war in Ukraine. In 2015, American Photo Magazine named her as one of five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, saying she changed the way we saw the world's conflicts. Addario is the recipient of numerous awards and two Emmy nominations.
With, as she says, "no previous photographic training,” Addario began photographing professionally with the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina in 1996. After years of moving around the western hemisphere, capturing images of struggles for multiple publications, she began to focus on women’s issues throughout the middle east. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, she decided to photograph the Iraq War.
Since then, Addario has shifted her focus to Africa and the struggles there. Somehow through all that traveling and work, she managed to get married and have children. Now, she is constantly forced to choose between the work she feels called to and the family she loves.
While photojournalism may sound like a fairly safe career, Addario’s work has been anything but. In order to capture life on the front lines of war and strife, you have to put yourself on those frontlines. Addario was one of four photojournalists kidnapped in Libya and was beaten and threatened with death. She has been at the receiving end of a Russian shelling in Ukraine and unfairly stripsearched in Israel. Each time she leaves her family, she can’t be certain she’ll be back.
While it may seem odd for a mom to leave her children behind for work, for Addario, it is a choice she is driven to make. She loves her work and she is dedicated to telling the stories of those struggling throughout the world.
Addario has every right to believe in the work she does; photojournalism has and does change the world, if even minutely. At one point in her career, Addario went to Sierra Leone to cover the high rate of mortality of mothers during childbirth. While there, a woman named Mamma Sessay was delivering twins. The first child came out without issue, but the second became stuck. Mamaa Sessay was forced to canoe across a river and travel by ambulance for six hours to get to the one doctor in the province.
Mamma Sessay was able to give birth to her second child once there, but afterward she began to bleed out. The one doctor had moved on to a surgery and was unable to help her. She died. Addario’s coverage of the event ended up in Time Magazine, which was put into the hands of board members at Merck; they made the decision to start Merck for Mothers and put $500 million aside to help fight maternal deaths.
In her darkest moments, when Addario has been forced to face her own mortality and danger in her work, she relies heavily on the resilience and strength of the women she has met throughout her career. Though she has been forced to witness untold trauma, she has also been an eyewitness to the resilience and altruism of mankind.
Addario’s life and work has been partially captured in Love + War, a documentary by Academy Award®-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. She has also turned her work into multiple books, and now, a lecture series.
Addario brings that series, "Of Love and War: Stories of Tragedy and Resilience from Across the World," to Tulsa on November 6. Thanks to Tulsa Town Hall, she will present a stunning and personally-curated selection of her work from conflict zones across the world, revealing both intimacy with her subjects and major threats to human rights. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and life in Afghanistan under the Taliban to the daily reality of women in the Middle East, Addario’s stories and images illustrate the immense human capacity for tragedy and suffering, but also for hope and resilience.
We hope you will join us in Chapman Music Hall for what promises to be a fascinating lecture.
For more information, visit https://www.tulsatownhall.com/lynsey-addario. To see Addario’s breath-taking work, visit https://www.lynseyaddario.com/.
Tulsa Town Hall presents
Lynsey Addario | Love + War: Stories of Tragedy and Resilience from Around the World
CHAPMAN MUSIC HALL
November 16 at 10:30 a.m.