Lynsey Addario - Of Love & War

A monk lines up for a disciplinary session, in which older monks check younger monks robes for cleanliness, as part of training at the monastery at the Paro Dzong in Paro, Bhutan, May 2007.

At the time of this writing I am forty-four years old, and I have been a photographer for twenty-three years. I have likely takenif one eight-week assignment can equal as many as fifty thousand photos, and if I worked some nine months out of the yearmillions of photos in my lifetime. I have photographed in more than seventy countries; covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Libya, and Somalia; documented the lives of thousands of men, women, and children; and witnessed countless moments of tragedy, joy, despair, and humor. I was published in the New York Times and National Geographic, won awards, wrote a memoir, even found financial stability. But I never produced a book of photography. I hadnt believed my photos were good enough.

Contributing to this belief was simply my personality; I always wanted to do better, and I always wanted to do more. In this book, I have decided to include, from my early years, several emails and handwritten letters to my mother and a dear friend, Vineta, which I wrote faithfully from my first postings in Argentina in 1996, and then from India and Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001. Over time, writing letters, and then emails, and eventually journals, would be the way I processed the terrible things Id witness in places like Iraq and Darfur. I include the earliest letter because I wanted to convey, and in some ways understand myself, the youthful ambition that propelled me into this exhilarating and often difficult life. The writings record what its like to experience something for the first timethe first time I walked in a trench; the first time I heard a bullet; the first time I saw a government fall; what it was like to be poor and struggling; what it was like to be lonely; the thrill of getting that first big assignment; the day I chose my career over romance; the day I gave myself permission to be selfish: I dont think I can come home, I think I am in the middle of something good here. The moment I realized what was important to me in photojournalism: documenting injustice.

I also bristled against the idea of a photo book because books somehow seemed like an ending. Yet my stories about people and places never end. I am always finding new stories and revisiting the ones I have done in the past, always wanting to tell the entire narrative behind the images, to follow them on their natural course. So many stories of the twenty-first century spawn new stories. It has been a century of never-ending wars, never-ending side effects, never-ending tragedyand never-ending resilience. From these turbulent decades, I wasnt sure what images to choose. It seemed logical to do a book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what about womens issues and civilian casualties and military deaths and refugee crises? Perhaps there was a book about Darfur or about the drought in the Horn of Africa, but what about the stories specific to women in all of those places, stories that could populate entire books of their own? What about breast cancer in Uganda or maternal mortality in Sierra Leone? I couldnt choose just one or leave any of them out, because they were all special to me. I almost never covered a place only once. I always went back and planned to go back again.