For 25 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario has covered nearly every major conflict and humanitarian crisis of her generation, from Syria to Sudan to Ukraine. The dangers she encounters on assignment are increasingly serious; the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 2024 was the deadliest on record for journalists.
"We're in an era where journalists are routinely targeted and routinely killed," she says. "Journalism is equated with death now, in a way that it wasn't when I first started out."
Over the years, Addario's been kidnapped twice, thrown out of a car on a highway in Pakistan, and been ambushed, on two different occasions, by the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents. Still, she says, she sometimes finds parenting two young kids more challenging than reporting from a war zone.
"When I'm in a war zone, that is my focus and that's all I'm doing. ... I go in, I make calculations about the danger, I photograph, I try to tell stories, I go back to the hotel, I file, I try not to get hit in a missile strike," Addario says. "But with kids it's like I can't control when their emotions arise or when their needs arise and it's a full-time thing and it's very hard to do to have a full-time job as a parent."
Often, Addario's work makes it impossible to be physically present in the way other parents can be. "I'll sign up to be the mystery reader at school and I go and read to Alfred's class and then I have to cancel because I get stuck in the Darién Gap."