The Pulitzer Prize-winning American photojournalist and New York Times bestselling author on her new photobook Of Love & War, taking Jennifer Lawrence on assignment, her tendency for self-criticism and why she kept her pregnancy a secret for as long as possible.
Lynsey Addario is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photojournalist and New York Times bestselling author who regularly works for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine. Lynsey began photographing professionally for the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina in 1996 with no previous photographic training. In the late 1990s, she began freelancing in New York City for Associated Press, where she worked consistently for three years before moving to New Delhi, India, to cover South Asia for the Chrstian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and Houston Chronicle. In 2000, Lynsey first travelled to Afghanistan to document the life and oppression of women living under the Taliban, and made three separate trips to the country under Taliban rule before September 11, 2001.
Over the past 15 years, Lynsey has covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. In 2015 she released a New York Times best-selling memoir, It's What I Do, which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist and which was quickly optioned by Warner Bros. studios and slated to be a Steven Speilberg production starring jennifer lawrence but has now morphed into a directed by Ridley Scott production starring Scarlett Johansson.
Lynsey has been the recipient of numerous international awards throughout her career, and in 2015, American Photo Magazine named Lynsey one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, writing that “Addario changed the way we saw the world’s conflicts.” In 2009, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, for which she received a professional stipend from 2010 to 2015. She was part of the New York Times team to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her photographs in ‘Talibanistan,’ published in the New York Times Magazine. In November 2015, she was awarded the Excellence in International Reporting Award from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, DC, a Gaudium award from The Breukelein Institute in New York, and the el Mundo Journalism award in Barcelona, Spain. In 2016, Lynsey was part of the New York Times team nominated for an Emmy Award for her collaboration in the The Displaced series for the New York Times Magazine, a reportage documenting the lives of three children displaced from war in Syria, Ukraine, and South Sudan. She was the recipient of the Overseas Press Club's Oliver Rebbot award for 'Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad in Magazines and Books,' for her series Veiled Rebellion, an intimate look at the lives of Afghan Women.
Her new photobook Of Love And War, which represents a career retrospective to-date, was recently published by Penguin Random House.
In episode 096, Lynsey discusses, among other things:
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“When I’m photographing there is no place else I’d rather be. It is the one place I’m fully present with whoever is in front of my lens, and I’m in the moment. And I can’t really say that about many other places.”