Lynsey Addario

Pictures of pain open a world’s eyes

Lynsey Addario BA1995 goes to work in places where war and deprivation rip at the seams of humanity, carrying a camera and a rare outlook to make it through the workday.

“Every time I’m in a situation where I think, ‘Okay, this is it; I’m not going to make it out of the situation alive,’ I sort of shut down,” Addario said. “I almost go into a very calm mode ironically, and very Zen, and very much like, ‘Okay, I have to get through every single second.’”

Addario gives the world a window to some of the most urgent human crises of the 21st century as a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist whose images weave a narrative of the realities of war and suffering.

From Gaza to Afghanistan to Sudan to Iraq, Addario has documented trauma and hope. After a Haitian earthquake, she was in a displaced persons’ camp when she saw and photographed a woman in labor.

“I’d been attending funerals, talking to people about their mourning process,” she said. “It was all so negative, and then you witness the birth of a baby. It was an incredible scene to see a life being born into all this destruction.”

From The Park

I believe in fate and believe that when it’s time to go, I’m going to go. And I would rather have a camera in my hand when it’s that time.

Source: Used by permission of copyright holder.

Her work aims to open the world’s eyes.

“I want people to care about issues they wouldn’t necessarily care about, whether that’s war, racism, civilian casualties — just general injustices,” Addario said.

She’s survived ambushes, a car crash in Pakistan that killed the driver, a kidnapping in Iraq and being held captive with three other journalists for several days in Libya in 2011.

In Libya, Addario was blindfolded and bound. “I was punched in the face a few times and groped repeatedly,” she says. “It was incredibly intense and violent.”

Addario, who never studied photography, remembers UW–Madison as “diverse and filled with international students, a school that was equally fun and educational.”

Addario wrote the best-selling 2015 memoir It’s What I Do.

“It’s been optioned by Warner Bros. and Steven Spielberg will be directing and Jennifer Lawrence will be playing me, which is a very odd thing to say,” Addario said.