Of course, that’s just one photo.
But it’s one of many spectacular
images and photo essays by Addario—
most of them tragic and heartbreaking,
and several that are almost too pain-
ful to look at—included in her recent
oversized retrospective book, Of Love &
War (published by Penguin Press).
For me, it’s a quintessential image
by Addario that powerfully and poeti-
cally conveys our era, an age of constant
aggression, which she alludes to in her
introduction, calling this new cen-
tury “a century of never-ending wars,
never-ending side effects, never-ending
tragedy,” yet, despite all this, she adds,
“and never-ending resilience.”On Becoming A War Photographer
Of Love & War is certainly a large,
oversized anthology that chronicles
Addario’s career since the late 1990s.
However, it’s also something more.
“It's a retrospective of my photos,”
says Addario, “but it's also sort of a
scrapbook of my thoughts. I didn'twant a typical book of photography.
I wanted to make it more personal
and be about my journey as a photog-
rapher and the narrative of not only
my career but also of the moments of
frustration, those moments of being
really lonely.”
You can get a sense of this scrapbook
sensibility right from the start: The
first photo in the book is actually an
image of a letter to her friend, Vineta,
written in March of 2000, in which
she describes being in Kashmir, or, as
she says in the letter, quoting President
Bill Clinton, “the most dangerous place
on earth.”
At the end of the letter, she says, “I
never thought I’d be attracted to these
kinds of pictures, Vin, but I guess I am
trying to capture their lives, the tan-
gible tension along the frontier, to put
some faces to all the gunfire and con-
stant aggression between the two coun-
tries that I read about every day in the
papers. Somehow, I always end up see-
ing everything through this humanistic
looking glass, without ever perceiving
my own danger.”
It's a captivating way start to the
book, since the handwritten letter
seems to predict the path that she will
take—which includes covering wars
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, SouthSudan, Libya and other countries; get-
ting published in The New York Times
and National Geographic; being kid-
napped twice; writing a memoir; and
winning major awards, including a
MacArthur Fellowship (or “genius
grant”) and being part of The New
York Times team that was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for International Report-
ing in 2009.
But what’s also powerful aboutpresenting the book in a somewhat
rough-edges-and-all manner is that
it provides a sense of transparency,
that allows you to trust her storytell-
ing. In fact, what’s important to see
throughout the volume, particularly
for young photographers who wish
to emulate her, is what an all-around
excellent communicator she is, in not
only her photos but also in her writ-
ing. She’s exceptionally focused.Telling War Stories About Women:
Photographing Noor Nisa
Addario’s 2009 photograph of Noor
Nisa, a young pregnant Afghan woman
in a remote province of Afghanistan,
is an excellent example of the photog-
rapher’s instincts for seeing an oppor-
tunity to capture a memorable image,
tell a remarkable story and also gain
more insight into what it means to be
a photojournalist.
“I was working on a story on mater-
nal mortality,” says Addario, “a body
of work I've been doing for the last
10 years or so. I had been traveling in
Badakhshan province of Afghanistan,”
a province with one of the highest rates
of maternal deaths in the world. “I had
been meeting with women in hospitals
and very remote clinics.”
Addario says while traveling throughAddario says, “Noor Nisa, 18 (right),
in labor and stranded with her mother
in Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan,
November 2009. Her husband’s first
wife died during childbirth, so he was
determined to get her to the hospital,
a four-hour drive from their village. His
borrowed car broke down, and I ended
up taking them to the hospital, where
Noor Nisa delivered a baby girl.”“...I am trying to capture their lives,
the tangible tension along the frontier,
to put some faces to all the gunfire
and constant aggression....”
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