Lynsey Addario Book Report

    I really enjoyed most of Addarios' early stories about her childhood and when she first started to work in the photojournalism world. My favorite anecdote of hers would have to be when she was photographing Madonna while she was filming Evita, and she was given a telescopic lens because I have personally been there at the beginning of my photography experience. 
    Her style is very unique as she both has photos of things happening mid-scene, but she also has portrait photos of people in places she has traveled. The photo that was a mid-scene photo that caught my attention was the cover photo that you see when you open up Chapter 9. It's clearly a scene she was witnessing rather than a photo that was a portrait like the photo of Khalid that's at the very end of chapter 9. But both of these photos share the same quality of that they are truly showing the reality of these places, leaving nothing to the imagination. 
    The idea that she is able to travel to all these high-conflict zones, even after being kidnapped and losing friends in these places and show the stories to the public is remarkable but also very insane, especially after she got married and had a son. I know for myself I would never be able to do what she is doing after all the life altering events she has had, but it's impressive that she is still able to do those things. Many of the lessons or information that the book had given was not useful to me and what i want my photography career to look like, but the idea that it never hurts to ask really helped me this term. 
    She explains that if she hadn't asked the security guard to let her in to photograph Madonna she would have never gotten that photo, that set off her career in photojournalism. Some of my favorites photos of her are the transgender prostitutes in New York, her women of Jihad series, and the one I'll include, chapter 7, photo with skeleton. Why these photos stand out to me is that they show the reality of a situation both here in the United States but also in other parts of the world that most of do not often think about, regarding what the lives of the people who live there are like. 
    One of my favorite quotes from this book is in chapter 14 “The risks I took now had higher stakes. Every night when I put Lukas to sleep, I thought about whether I would be there to watch him grow from this perfect soul, a beautiful a infant, to a toddler, to a teen, and into a man. I struggled with the question of why I put us, and my extended family, into the equation of uncertainty, but I hoped Lukas would understand my commitment to journalism one day, as his father intrinsically understood.” The main reason why this quote stood out to me is because I do have a bit of same fears that Addario has regarding her situation and how it affects her child and her family. 
    These photos show the everyday scene in these areas and really captures it in a remarkable way. This is a heavy book but I did enjoy reading it, some of the content hit very close to home for me and did make some parts harder for me to read but I would recommend that people either read the book or they go and listen to the interviews she has been apart of. She gives a lot of inside information about the places and the people who she meets and is able to explain the situations that the people she is interviewing, but also the experiences that she has faced during her travels. She doesn’t sugar coat anything that she is writing about so that you are truly able to at least get a idea of what is going on in these places a that most too us will not have the opportunity to ever visit.

(Photo credit Lynsey Addario) 



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