Photographer Lynsey Addario is profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review; the piece highlights her work as a voice for Pakistani refugees, US marines, and Syrian war casualties—all while balancing her life as a mom:
The photo of the Syrian teenager with the baby captures exactly the kind of moment that Addario claims to grasp more fully now that she is a mother herself. “My experience as a parent has taught me a new understanding of the subjects I photograph,” she writes.
Addario didn’t always think that motherhood would benefit her work—quite the opposite. In 2009, after she was injured in a car accident while on assignment in Pakistan, friends suggested that she take a break from work and get pregnant, as her fiancé had been urging her to do. Addario was infuriated. “If I took six months off to have a baby, I believed I would be written off by my editors,” she writes. “I was in a man’s profession. I couldn’t think of a single female photojournalist who was married or had a child.”
