Lynsey Addario, an OPC member, frequently contributes to The New York Times as a photojournalist who focuses on conflicts and human rights. In the
Feb. 1 edition of the paper’s Sunday Magazine, she is a writer telling a personal story headlined ”
What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everything.”
The essay is an excerpt from
It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, a book being published Feb. 5 by Penquin Press.
Addario became pregnant in 2011 shortly after she and three other journalists working for The Times, including OPC members Tyler Hicks and the
late Anthony Shadid, were captured and held in Libya for six days by pro-Gaddafi forces. While Addario was in captivity, her husband Paul de Bendern, who was bureau chief for Reuters in India at the time, told his wife via CNN, “You’ve gotta come back here because we’ve got to have kids.”
A week after an obstetrician in India confirmed her pregnancy, she went to Senegal on assignment. She writes that with the exception of military embeds,
she accepted all assignments and hid her pregnancy as long as she could: “I adamantly didn’t want any of my editors or colleagues to know that I was
pregnant until I could no longer hide it. I worried about being denied work or treated differently.”
“My friends and family sometimes ask why photojournalists don’t just take fewer assignments to preserve their relationships and their safety, why they
don’t simply work in some sunny studio adjacent to home,” Addario writes. “The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist
is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs
entail different talents and different desires. Leaving at the last minute, jumping on planes, feeling a responsibility to cover wars and famines and human
rights crises was my job. To stop doing those things would be like firing myself.”
Addario won the 2010 Olivier Rebbot Award from the OPC for “Veiled Rebellion: Afghan Women” in National Geographic as well as a citation that year
in Feature Photography for Maternal Mortality in Time magazine. In 2009, she received a MacArthur fellowship.