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A photojournalist focuses on love and war

Matt Damsker
Special for USA TODAY
'It's What I Do' by Lynsey Addario

Photography has never been a more democratic pursuit than it is now, thanks to the lenses on our smartphones, which often yield the sort of radiant imagery that was once the sole province of professionals. Still, it takes more than pixels to produce important photo-documents: it takes nerve, dedication, a great eye and access to the events that shape our era for better and, too often, for worse.

The best photojournalists don't take pictures, after all; they deliver evidence — of war, suffering, and the complex consequences of geopolitics, and they do so in ways that challenge and move us.

Lynsey Addario is among them. Her new memoir, It's What I Do, overcomes the modesty — if not the banality — of its title, and engages us in a direct account of how a young woman toughed her way to the front ranks of photojournalism, a longstanding men's club and an especially dangerous profession in these terror-driven times.

Addario's work for America's leading news outlets has taken her everywhere most of us won't go: Afghanistan before and after the Taliban; war-torn Iraq; a devastated Darfur; the Congo, where she indelibly exposed violence against women; and Libya, where her narrative peaks with an account of her 2011 kidnapping by pro-Gadhafi forces. Her accolades — the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for The New York Times, a MacArthur Genius Grant — seem like Little League trophies compared to her achievements on the ground. Who is this warrior with a Nikon?

She grew up not in a troubled land but amid the upper middle-class comforts of Westport, Conn. Her parents ran a successful hair salon, and while there was plenty of drama to go around — her father eventually left her mother after admitting and acting on his homosexuality — young Lynsey wasn't drawn to conflict all that much.

But at age 13, she got her first camera — a casual re-gift from her dad, who had received it from a client — and she was hooked, photographing obsessively through college (a major in international relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), in New York City, and then in Argentina, where she began to freelance for the Buenos Aires Herald. A career was born, and by the time she returned to the USA in 1996, she was working steadily for the Associated Press.

Addario's prose is, perhaps inevitably, flatter and more superficial than her photography. We may not get descriptive depth from her words, but her story is compelling, and the action is relentless. There are more than a few love affairs with darkly handsome men who share her tenuous moments in the field. And there are numerous close calls with fellow journalists in Baghdad and elsewhere, as bombs go off, cars are held up at checkpoints, and Addario fears for her life almost hourly, it seems.

By the time she and several male journalists are kidnapped in Libya, Addario is accustomed to the constant threat and volatility of her vocation, and she exhibits something of a Hemingway-esque fatalism and attention to detail.

While colleagues around her are killed, and despite a car crash that crushes her collarbone, she more than survives the war zones and its anxious hours. She emerges intact and in love, a seasoned pro, wife and mother, with stunning photographs that bear witness to the ongoing savagery of the 21st century — and to the human dignity that endures within it.

It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

By Lynsey Addario

Penguin Press

3 1/2 stars out of four

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