Lynsey Addario Book Report Assignment

In Lynsey Addario’s book It’s What I Do, tells hers experience as a woman entering a man’s world of photojournalism. Because of this she has had to work hard in her photography, yet one of the things that makes her photography so great is she truly tries to connect with the people she is photographing so the story that comes through her pictures can impact the reader more than it might have originally. I can understand her sense of drive and duty towards photographing war-zones mainly because she is driven with the need to photograph people’s lives in these situations and tell their stories. While I understand it, I think you have to have extreme amounts of courage to even think about going into a war zone to begin with let alone do it to gather pictures of complete strangers.

Since she continues to  go to war zones and take pictures of some of the hardest topics to photograph, let alone discuss, makes her pictures have such an impact and major contribution to journalism because while a person can read something and understand it a picture can slam that story and impact the public more because it is harder to forget an image then it is to forget something written down.

She has used techniques of changing her position of the camera and working with the depth of field to give some of her photographs a much more interesting look to them so that they grab the public's attention and make them interested in the story then they might have without the picture being on there. Her style can be distinguished from other photographers because she is trying to focus on the subjects faces and their emotions then what is the major story. Like the picture of the Fall of the Taliban in Kandahar, December 2001 on page 111. Yes it is about the people that were under the Taliban but you can see his face in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they were right there and could almost strike a conversation with the man in the photograph.

Since Lynsey Addario tries to connect with the people she is photographing, she comes to care for them as a person and always see’s them as a person and not a subject or a project that she is currently doing. On page 196 she shows her character and how she genuinely cares for everyone that she photographs. “I told the crew of people I was traveling with that we would take Mapendo to the hospital,...they protested...I told them that they could either share the car...or they could sit on the roof of the car, but she was coming with us.” (196.) In my mind the fact that she was going to help a complete stranger that she has never met to me meant that she genuinely believed that the photos she was taking could somehow help these people and give them a chance to survive and better their lives.