By James Lomuscio
Westporter Lynsey Addario, the 1991 Staples High School graduate whose passion for photography began at age 8 with a hand-me-down camera, later becoming an award-winning combat zone photojournalist in the Middle East and Africa—even surviving a 2011 Libyan capture and sustained beatings—was honored tonight at the Westport Library’s BOOKED for the Evening gala.
Lynsey Addario acccepts her BOOKED for the Evening award tonight from Maxine Bleiweis, Library executive director, and Michael Guthman, board president. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Helen Klisser During for WestportNow.com
Family, friends and colleagues were among the hundreds who packed the library’s main floor to celebrate the local woman who donned a burka after the Sept. 11 attacks to penetrate the closed world of Taliban women, photographing and interviewing them, and later oppressed women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Dafur and Iraq.
Ivan Watson, CNN senior international correspondent who grew up locally, was one of the many who praised Addario’s courage and commitment to exposing human rights violations and the horrors of war.
“In Baghdad and other conflict zones, during the day we would witness carnage that continues to leave deep emotional scars,” Watson said in a tribute video by Westport filmmaker Doug Tirola.
“But in the evenings she and I could swap stories about grabbing slices at the Westport Pizzeria or swim practice at the Westport Y, and that was always an incredible source of comfort.
“Lynsey’s subjects, the people she photographed, they recognize Lynsey’s authenticity, the strength of her character, and that’s why they let her in to share their most private moments,” he added. “It also doesn’t hurt that Lynsey is one of the incredibly brave, driven and hardworking photographers in the business.”
He noted that Addario “has literally bled to be where she is today,” but that the arc of her career was also punctuated by more subtle observations in societies “that do not always welcome foreign observers,” images of refugee brides in Syria, “indelible images of women on Jet Skis in Saudi Arabia,” and contestants at a beauty pageant in India.
At the library’s podium, Kathy Ryan, director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, recalled how Addario, “an up and coming photographer,” called the magazine 14 years ago shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and said that she had access to the women of the jihad in Pakistan.
“Lynsey said she could get this access,” Ryan said. “She went on to get an amazing set of pictures. Not only that, she did the interviews, which is also very unusual. So (that was) her first story with The New York Times Magazine, and at the time I didn’t even know it was her first story with the magazine. I don’t think I knew until I read the book.”
Excerpts of her book, “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War” published by Penguin Press this past February, were read tonight. The best-seller and will be brought to the big screen with Steven Spielberg as director and Jennifer Lawrence in a starring role.
“So many women are casualties of their birthplace,” it reads. “They had noting when they were born and they would have nothing when they died. They survived off their land and through their dedication to their families, their children.
“I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners had even read about, and they plowed on. I openly cried during the interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred toward women that I was witnessing. The sadness and injustice that I had encountered as a journalist could either sink me into a depression or open a door to a new vision of my own life. I chose the latter.”
In 2009, Addario married Reuters journalist Paul de Bendern, and they have one son, Lukas, 3.
During tonight’s ceremony, Ryan brought rounds of laughter when she recalled that the only time she saw Addario, always fearless in the face of danger, terrified. That was when she told Ryan she was pregnant.
