Kiernan Darling
Professor Scott Olsen
Inquiry Written Communication 100
8 October 2021
What She Does
It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario is a memoir of her career as a photojournalist, mostly post 9/11. With her career comes many dangers, like being in an active warzone, along with unpredictable situations that always require her to be on her toes. A main element of the book is the gender discrimination Lynsey experiences as a photojournalist. Throughout the book, she faces sexual harassment and constantly fights to have the same chances as her male colleagues.
In the Prelude, we are first introduced to Lynsey while she is photographing the war in Libya and the effects on the civilian population. The war began in March, 2011 when Libyans revolted against their longtime dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi. Lynsey is with three of her male colleagues at the time, all on assignment for the New York Times to capture this revolution that she described as “quickly becoming a war” (Addario 2). She portrays the events that follow as the four of them and their driver, Mohammed, head for the center of the small town in Libya, called Ajdabiya, in search of the front line. As they enter the active warzone, they see many civilians and fellow photographers fleeing the city. Lynsey gets a bad feeling in her gut, but she feels as if she has to keep going to prove herself to her male coworkers. When she saw other people and journalists fleeing, she says, “I watched in horror as they scrambled into their cars, but I said nothing. I didn’t want to be the cowardly photographer or the terrified girl who prevented the men from doing their work” (10). This is one of the instances where Lynsey self-censors herself because of her gender. In a mostly male dominant profession, it is easy to tell yourself these sorts of things and feel like you are going to be looked down upon because you are a woman. Later in the Prelude, she understands she is self-censoring as she says, “My colleagues would never have accused me of being wimpy or unprofessional; I was the one who was all too aware of being the only woman in the car” (12).
They eventually begin fleeing the city but they don’t get very far when they get stopped at a military checkpoint full of Qaddafi’s men. As soldiers begin swarming their car, all hell breaks loose for them when the rebels begin attacking Qaddafi’s men at the checkpoint, and the four journalists are left to fend for themselves. Before she knew it, Lynsey was alone in the car. She knew she had to get out and run to find cover. Somehow, the four colleagues all found each other in the midst of chaos only to be captured by Libyan government soldiers (Qaddafi’s men). Throughout her days as a prisoner, she experienced things differently from the men of the group. While the men would get more beatings and physically abused, Lynsey experienced more sexual abuse along with some beatings. She explained how, “I again felt guilty for getting easier treatment because I was a woman” (291). She said that, “Getting felt up and fingered through my jeans didn’t seem nearly as bad as that physical abuse” (290). The fact that she had to even endure that goes to show how dangerous and extreme her job is.
In the beginning of Part One, we learn about the background that she comes from. It helps us, as readers, understand how all of the things she has gone through and experienced has shaped her into the woman she is today. From being kidnapped to experiencing many failed relationships, they all built character for her, shaping her into the brave, determined woman she is today. Her childhood was constantly filled with commotion and people, as her two parents were very social. “The Addario house in Westport, Connecticut, was a kaleidoscope of transversities and Village People look-alikes, a haven for people who weren’t accepted elsewhere” (25). Later in life, her parents divorced when her father came out as gay and moved to New York to be together with a longtime friend of her moms, Bruce. After that, she rarely visited her father, but it was him who gave her her first camera, and it was then that she fell in love with photography. As a child, she would photograph random objects to learn how to use the camera and discover the possibilities that a picture can create. As a college student, she began pursuing street photography. She started traveling more and more with her friends, mainly to Europe, as photography grew even more important in her life. “The more I traveled, the more I craved a life of travel (32). Around this time is when she began to dream of a life where she could travel and photograph as a living. Eventually, she found the job that she would come to love, “I had no idea that I would become a conflict photographer. I wanted to travel, to learn about the world beyond the United States. I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people’s most intimate moments” (15). She didn’t really plan to have this career, but then again, no conflict photographer does.
After graduating college, she got an internship assisting a fashion photographer in New York City. After learning quickly that she hated it, she moved to Buenos Aires. “Taking pictures became a way for me to travel with a purpose” (33). She started combining the two and traveled around South America as she had done in Europe. While traveling in South America, she came across protests of Argentinean mothers who marched because of their children’s disappearances during Argentina’s Dirty War. She said, “I knew that the mothers’ expressions spoke to me, but I wasn’t sure how to capture the scene I was experiencing” (33). She describes that she didn’t know how to properly photograph so that she could capture all of the raw emotion they were feeling. That inspired her to begin teaching herself, studying photography. Her boyfriend at the time, Miguel, suggested that she go to the local newspaper to try and get a job as a photojournalist. Eventually they gave her work, but did not hire her and none of her photos were ever published. During one assignment, she was supposed to take a picture of Madonna while she was in Buenos Aires filming. If Lynsey could sneak onto set and get a picture, the photo editors said they would hire her. She ended up getting the photo and the job. She received what she defined as the best advice of her career from her Miguel, “‘Stay in Latin America, learn photography, and make all of your professional mistakes in Argentina,’ he said, ‘because if you make one mistake in New York, no one will give you a second chance’” (36). She finally went back to the states and delivered her sample work to places like the New York Post and the New York Daily News. She was hired as a stringer meaning the newspapers would call her if they needed her. After less than a year of being in New York and getting mentored and improving her skills, she longed to go back to a place like Latin America. “One country that intrigued me most, perhaps because it was off-limits: Cuba” (40). During her time in Cuba, she photographed mostly streets and villages. She returned to New York a month later and eventually would travel to Cuba again. After more traveling and more projects, she moved to New Delhi in the beginning of 2000. She said “It would turn out to be the last time I lived in the United States” (49). Being a photojournalist is not always easy as she would come to learn the many struggles that went along with the job.
The biggest issue that Lynsey experiences with her career is the gender discrimination that she deals with in her day to day life. Not only is she undergoing hardships as a female war photographer working in a field full of primarily men, but in most of the countries that she goes to, she is viewed as lesser, making it harder to get her job done. Some male coworkers looked down upon her due to her gender. One of the writers she was paired with for a story told her, “‘I think that, as a woman, you are going to ruin our access,’ he said, ‘so it’s probably best if we do this story separately.’ And he walked away. I was dumbfounded” (106), while they were going to profile an anti-Taliban warlord. Countless amounts of people treated her differently than the men she was working with because she was a woman. Later on in her career, Lynsey and a close female journalist friend of hers are assigned to Afghanistan together to photograph the Korengal Valley, where American troops were stationed. After first arriving at the camp, she wrote, “Everyone gave us that familiar look that male soldiers try to conceal without success: Ugh, girls. The public affairs officer clearly didn’t want us to go to the Korengal because, as he argued weakly, the sleeping quarters and bathrooms weren’t fit for women. Elizabeth told him we could handle whatever the men could. He looked dubious,” (211). During her time in the Korengal Valley, she felt the limitations of her gender. She was tested both physically and mentally of her strength. Even though she regularly went to the gym, she was physically not as fit as the military men who she was walking through the desert with. After witnessing the deaths of men that became good friends and experiencing the terrors of the Korengal Valley, she quoted “I was physically shattered, emotionally fragile, and thoroughly exhilarated to have survived my time in the Korengal. Coming so close to the edge of death and pushing myself to my own physical and mental limits helped me appreciate the beauty of daily life” (238). She decided it was time to head back to her home in Istanbul at the moment. While on her flight home from Kabul to Turkey, she was asked to move spots on the plane because she was originally seated in an exit row. “I was seated in an exit row, and as I stretched out my legs, pleased to not have anyone sitting too close to me, a male Afghan flight attendant came over and stirred me from my solitude: ‘Madam. You cannot sit here. This is an exit row.’ ‘So?’ “Women cannot sit by the exit door. If there is a flight emergency, a woman wouldn’t be capable of opening the exit door.’ I got up, and as I moved to my new seat I watched the attendant usher over a frail old man with a white beard, hunched with osteoporosis, to sit by the exit door” (238).
Lynsey also experiences sexual harassment as a photojournalist. While in Pakistan after 9/11, she was photographing protests against President Bush. “One day I went to one of these demonstrations with a handful of male colleagues. Though I was dressed as a Muslim- respectfully, with not a strand of hair showing- the Pakistanis knew I was a foreign woman simply because I was carrying a camera, working, trespassing in a man’s world. To them, that was enough to merit a quick feel on any part of my body. They perceived foreign women based on what they saw in movies, often porn movies: easy and available for sex. I tried not to make a scene in front of my peers. I didn’t want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news, so I continued photographing, ignoring the sweeping of hands on my butt, the occasional grab” (96). At the same demonstration she said, “My male colleagues were nowhere to be found. I tried to focus on shooting, but this time there were not a few hands on my butt but dozens. And this time it wasn’t a subtle feel but an aggressive, wide-handed clutch, butt to crotch, back to front. I kept shooting” (97). Unfortunately, this wasn’t even the worst that she would come to encounter. During the time that she had been kidnapped, she experienced the most sexual harrassment from Qaddafi’s soldiers. “The vehicle began to move, and within seconds the soldier spooning my back started tracing his fingers across my body,” she describes one of her encounters, “I squirmed and pleaded, ‘Please, don’t. Please. I have a husband.’ He covered my mouth with his salty fingers and ordered me ot to speak as he continued groping me. I could taste the salt and mud from his skin on my lips as he continued grabbing at my breasts and butt, clumsily tracing my genitals over my jeans” (284). That’s not the only time that this sort of thing happens to her during her time as a prisoner. While being transported, she came across multiple different soldiers, all of which disrespected her and her body. “A few different men put their hands between my legs, over my jeans, and rubbed my genitals with their fingers. They were more aggressive than all the others before them, laughing when I pleaded with them to stop” (291). Sadly, this is far from all of the sexual harassment she experiences while on the job.
Not only does she experience gender discrimination and sexual harassment, but she captures the stories of women in war torn, third world countries that are experiencing far worse things that people in our society could not even fathom. There were many instances where she was shown how lucky she was to be a woman born in America. While visiting the homes of women in Afghanistan who were hired by the UN to secretly teach vocational skills, due to the Taliban’s banning of most things, she was shown just how blessed she was. “The women also put my life of privilege, opportunity, independence, and freedom into perspective. As an American woman, I was spoiled: to work, to make decisions, to be independent, to have relationships with men, to feel sexy, to fall in love, to fall out of love, to travel” (76). She understands how blessed she is to have been born in America.
In the beginning of her career, Lynsey struggles as she tries to uphold a balance between her home life and her job. She says, “I have missed the births of my sisters’ children, the wedding of friends, the funerals of loved ones. I have disappeared on countless boyfriends and had just as many disappear on me” (21). This is one of the many sacrifices she has had to make for her job, but she adores her career and makes sure her readers know that she wouldn’t change her profession for the world. “Under it all, however, are the things that sustain us and bring us together: the privilege of witnessing things that others do not; an idealistic belief that a photographer might affect people’s souls; the thrill of creating art and contributing to the world’s database of knowledge. When I return home and rationally consider the risks, the choices are difficult. But when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine” (22). She is explaining that she knows her job is not the typical nine to five, but she wouldn’t want it any other way.
As a war photographer, she is always traveling making it hard to keep up with the relationships she has previously established whether that be family, friends, or love interests. She describes it as follows, “I often lived with an aching emptiness inside me. I learned early on that living in a world away meant I would have to work harder to stay close to the people I loved” (79). Just because she was in such a pressing field of work doesn’t mean she couldn’t have or keep relationships, she just had to do things a little differently than others. When she first began her career, she wondered if she would be alone for the rest of her life, never marrying, because no one could understand her lifestyle. A coworker once told her, “In this profession relationships ended in either infidelity or estrangement. A dual life was unsustainable” (102). She started to believe that after she had countless relationships fail. Soon enough, the right person found her, Paul. He understood her lifestyle and knew how to keep up with it because he, too, was just as busy, yet they still found time for each other and made things work. She described him as the first person ever that she could see herself marrying. Paul soon became her husband and they went on to have a child together. She would experience very difficult and traumatic encounters with her work but she finally had a person, like Paul, to lean on. The way she describes it is by saying, “I turned off the trauma and sadness of my work in order to enjoy my happiness with Paul. Walking between worlds is one of the great privileges of the foreign correspondent. I never forgot what I had witnessed, and I talked often of my experiences, but I didn’t let them overwhelm my personal life” (247). She finally learned to balance her personal life with her work life, something that so many war correspondents sadly never achieve.
A big struggle that Lynsey often had with her job that she came across was the cultural barriers. Whether it was between her and the people she was photographing or soldiers and natives of the land, she witnessed them far too much. One of the first experiences she personally had with cultural barriers was when she first went to Afghanistan to photograph women living under the Taliban. She was at the Embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan waiting for a visa when she started to try and talk to the man behind the desk, Mohammed. They began talking about marriage and the differences between relationships in the United States and Afghanistan. “Why was I saying this to a Talib at the Afghan Embassy? Given the cultural and language barriers between us, I felt certain that he understood no more than 10 percent of what I was saying” (60). Lynsey says this after trying to have a conversation with Mohammed. Later in the chapter, she described the two of them as “simply two people in our twenties, getting to know each other” (61).
Over the course of her time in the Middle East, she came to learn that most Muslims were extremely hospitable. “I had worked in the Muslim world for eleven years and had always been treated with unparalleled hospitality and kindness. People had gone out of their way to feed me, to provide me with shelter in their homes, and to protect me from danger” (282). When meeting with a Taliban commander, he and his soldiers presented her and her coworker at the time with hospitality. They had served their guests tea and they were worried when Lynsey couldn’t drink her tea because of the Hijab she was wearing. They had come up with the idea that she could face the wall so she could remove her veil in order to drink her tea, “And so, in a room full of some of the most vicious fighters against the United States and everything it stood for, I stood in the corner and faced the wall as I drank my tea” (254). Unfortunately, two cultures cannot always see eye to eye. After Saddam Hussein fell, Lynsey was on a mission in Baghdad where American soldiers had been stationed to liberate the Iraqis. Unfortunately, Lynsey describes that as, “The Americans didn’t understand the value of honor and respect in an Arab culture. Young American soldiers, many of whom had never traveled abroad before, much less to a Muslim country, didn’t realize that a basic familiarity with Arab culture might help their cause” (136). More issues arose that she was there to bear witness to after Iraq began falling apart, “Throngs of Iraqis lined up for hours outside banks to withdraw their money, screaming with frustration as they struggled to get through the doors. American soldiers shot off their weapons above the crowds, sometimes punching the very men they were there to ‘liberate’” (134). A lot of it stemmed from the cultural barriers.
Lynsey also witnessed the constant discrimination against the native women. So many of them were victims of sexual assault and because they were women, they were viewed as nothing more than an object to bear men children. While interviewing and photographing women in North and South Kivu, she was opened up to all of their experiences. “Some spoke about how they became infected with HIV, or how their husbands left them upon learning they’d been raped; some spoke about how they were abducted and kept as sex slaves for up to several years, forced to bear the children of their rapists” (191). All of the women she had interviewed astonished the readers with the gender discrimination going on in the entire world, one of the biggest issues of this book.
Works Cited
Addario, Lynsey. It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Penguin
Press, 2015.