But several analysts have suggested another interpretation for this week’s events—that activities which were known about and once attracted a blind eye have now been used against Mr Ghosn. Japan has never indulged in the stratospheric executive pay common in the West. A ruse by Mr Ghosn to downplay his true total pay might have been considered politic. In Japan lower pay is often compensated for by plenty of fringe benefits that customarily go unreported.
フランス側に日産が乗っ取られることへの懸念が日産にあったのではという推測もしています。
Worse still for Nissan was the looming prospect of a French takeover. While other carmakers have, sometimes disastrously, attempted full mergers with rivals, the alliance has let Nissan and Renault share some functions, such as purchasing, while remaining independent. But this has not brought the full rewards of the cost-cutting allowed by a merger. Mr Ghosn wanted to make the alliance “irreversible”. He planned far more co-operation and probably had the backing of the French government for a merger. That prospect horrified senior people in Nissan, who had become disillusioned with Mr Ghosn, and also worried the Japanese government, which faced the prospect of a huge domestic firm being run from Paris. Mr Ghosn’s exit could signal the re-Japanisation of Nissan.
If the alliance breaks down, it will leave two separate car firms with weak mass-market brands and insufficient scale for the huge investments in electrification and autonomy that all carmakers need to make. Even if it drifts on in its present form, without the advantages of a full-scale merger, it will not be as competitive as the other giants of carmaking—Volkswagen, resurgent after the diesel crisis, and a buoyant Toyota. Mr Ghosn’s departure may well be shown to be justified. But it leaves the alliance in a state of huge uncertainty at a time of seismic change in the car industry.
A friend and fellow war reporter details Colvin’s hard-drinking, hard-living decades and her inspiring career covering one humanitarian disaster after another
Lara Feigel Sat 3 Nov 2018 07.30 GMT
Colvin’s need for war, like her drinking, seems to have become increasingly desperate over the course of her career. There are times when the book risks becoming a hagiography, but Hilsum avoids this by combining storytelling with asking important questions about what kind of service war correspondents perform and what ethical codes they should adhere to. It becomes clear that the entwined motives to get the best story and to change the world don’t always inspire the same action.
War reporters are employed by the newspaper or broadcaster that has sent them, so the first necessity is to get the story. During Colvin’s 27 years at the Sunday Times, its culture changed so that the correspondents were competing to bring back the best stories and to take the greatest risks. Colvin said in 2010: “We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, what is bravado?” She seems to have struggled to distinguish between them, partly because her editors encouraged her to pursue greater feats and partly because of a complicated personal combination of competitiveness, self-destructiveness and passionate sympathy with the underdog. At every point when she drove herself and her collaborators further, she believed that she was alleviating suffering. Sometimes she was, but she was also looking for a good story and fleeing the most recent chaos she had left behind at home.
Marie Colvin was often the first correspondent into a hotspot, and the last out
Nov 1st 2018
Ms Hilsum’s portrait is greatly enhanced by its frankness. Colvin could be reckless. She had already been into Baba Amr and got her story, but returned against advice and without telling her editor. Sometimes she cut corners for a cause. She described a baby’s death in Baba Amr on the basis of a video rather than (as she implied) her own observations, because, the book suggests, she thought the image would move readers to think about Syria’s plight.
1987年のベイルートでのパレスチナ人難民キャンプの取材や1999年のインドネシア軍に包囲された東ティモールに最後まで残って報道したことで彼女は文字通り世界を動かしてきました。シリアで亡くなる直前のレポートはShe described a baby’s death in Baba Amr on the basis of a video rather than (as she implied) her own observationsとシリアの活動家の撮影したYoutubeだけを基に報じたことを書いています。活動家に裏を取ったようですが、あたかもそこに居合わせたのようなレポートをしてしまっているのも事実です。本を読むとそれまでは野外病院に出かけていたものの爆撃がひどくなりその時は外出できるような状況ではなくなっていたようですので、同情すべき部分は大いにあります。このレポートの直後に爆撃で命を落としてしまうのですが、Hilsumはシリア軍がジャーナリストを故意に狙ったと書いていて、訃報のニュースを見たときには喜び、作戦実行者には褒美として車が送られたとあります。。。今年Colvinの遺族がアサド政権を訴えたのもわかります。
次の動画がColvinの決死のレポートになります。冒頭にThis report includes graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.とあるように生々しい映像がありますので閲覧にはご注意ください。確かに映像にはAmateur Video / YouTubeというクレジットがあります。
The September 11 attacks produced changes in journalism and the lives of the people who practiced it. Foreign reporters felt surrounded by the hate of American colleagues for "the enemy." Americans in combat areas became literal targets of anti-U.S. sentiment. Behind the lines, editors and bureau chiefs scrambled to reorient priorities while feeling the pressure of sending others into danger. Becoming the Story examines the transformation of war reporting in the decade after 9/11. Lindsay Palmer delves into times when print or television correspondents themselves received intense public scrutiny because of an incident associated with the work of war reporting. Such instances include Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder; Bob Woodruff's near-fatal injury in Iraq; the expulsions of Maziar Bahari and Nazila Fathi from Iran in 2009; the sexual assault of Lara Logan; and Marie Colvin's 2012 death in Syria. Merging analysis with in-depth interviews of Woodruff and others, Palmer shows what these events say about how post-9/11 conflicts transformed the day-to-day labor of reporting. But they also illuminate how journalists' work became entangled with issues ranging from digitization processes to unprecedented hostility from all sides to the political logic of the War on Terror.
Colvinに同行したカメラマンPaul ConroyのUnder the Wireという本が500円代と安かったこともあり並行して読んでいますが、戦場取材の大変さがよくわかります。防弾チョッキを着てパソコン、バッテリー、衛星電話などの持ち物を入れると20キロの重さを背負って移動するなんて行動を続けるだけでもすごいことです。
Colvinを取り上げたニュース番組ではこの問題はスルーしていますし、映画も恐らく彼女が実際に立ち会ったことにしているかもしれません。でもColvinが自ら語ったOur mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice.（我々の使命は戦争の恐ろしさを正確に偏見を持たずに報道すること）を面倒ながらも受け止める必要があるのでしょう。もちろん面倒なことはスルーするのが一番であるということが一般人の生活の知恵であるのは十分に理解していますが。。。
A Private War is a gritty docudrama about the late, great war correspondent Marie Colvin, played in the film by Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl). The first major release of Aviron Pictures, it had its world premiere at September's Toronto International Film Festival and has since received rave reviews from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among other major publications.
COLVIN: The pain of war is really beyond telling. I don't think I've filed a story and felt I got it. I really said what I want people to feel, but I do try and I think whatever the rights and wrongs of a conflict, I feel we fail if we don't face what war does, face the human horrors rather than just record who won and who lost.
Many journalists are given the title of war correspondent. Few have really deserved it as much as Marie Colvin.
Colvin was an American reporter who wrote for the British newspaper The Sunday Times. She was unmistakable in war zones — she sported an eye patch to cover up an eye injured in a grenade attack while she was reporting during the Sri Lankan civil war.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You can hear in that interview in Homs, Marie cared so much about the subject she would report on. We'll get to her death in a moment. But this book is about her life. She grew up in the small town, Oyster Bay on Long Island with a middle-class sort of stable family. A lot of the book is based on her own journals, her observations as a teenager than a college student. She was driven and curious and passionate.
HILSUM: She absolutely was. And one of the joys of writing this book is Marie's diaries. One of the things I enjoyed was - her family were incredibly generous. And I went down into the basement. And there were all these papers. And I found this little white plastic cover child diary, which was locked with one of those tiny keys. And I couldn't find the key. And so I had to slit it open. And there it was, Marie's first diary. And when she's 13, she writes very simply, to church - wore a mini - the mother and the father no like. And I thought, oh, I think I can see the woman I knew in that naughty girl. And then when she was at Yale, she did a class with John Hersey, one of most famous American journalists who wrote the great book "Hiroshima." And when she came out of that class, she said to her best friend, that's what I want to do. I want to tell the really big stories by telling them through the stories of the individuals, the victims of war. And that was what she set out to do.
John HerseyのHiroshimaについては何度もこのブログで取り上げていますが、下記のBBCの記事がどんな作品か、どのような影響を与えたのか説明してくれています。
It was spring 1946 when John Hersey, decorated war correspondent and prize-winning novelist, was commissioned by The New Yorker to go to Hiroshima. He expected to write, as others had done, a piece about the state of the shattered city, the buildings, the rebuilding, nine months on.
On the voyage out he fell ill and was given a copy of Thornton Wilders's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Inspired by Wilder's narrative of the five people who crossed the bridge as it collapsed he decided he would write about people not buildings. And it was that simple decision that marks Hiroshima out from other pieces of the time. Once in Hiroshima he found survivors of the bomb whose stories he would tell, starting from the minutes before the bomb was dropped. Many years later he told of the horror he felt, how he could only stay a few weeks.
Hersey took these accounts back to New York. Had he filed from Japan the chances of them ever being published would have been remote - previous attempts to get graphic photographs or film or reports out of the country had been halted by the US Occupying Forces. The material had been censored or locked away - sometimes it simply disappeared.
Freed from the political constraints of living in the White House, these famous women have over the decades shared their personal opinions with the public
By Bianca Sánchez
SMITHSONIAN.COM
NOVEMBER 13, 2018 2:47PM
The release this week of Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, in which the former First Lady shares her personal stories, including some from her time in the White House, continues a decades-long tradition. Beginning with Betty Ford in 1978, the six First Ladies who preceded Obama each published their own unique versions of an autobiography sometime during their first few years out of office.
本の紹介はTOEICでも頻出トピック。memoirもautobiographyも登場していました。
公式1 T1 (新形式T1) Part7
Growing Into Clothes: My Story
An amusing memoir about growing up in the fashion world.
ファッションの世界で育ったことに関する、愉快な回想録。
公開17年12月 Part6
Mr. Tanaka, whose work includes over twenty novels, will be releasing his autobiography, A lifetime in Writing, on June 5.
田中氏は、彼の作品には20以上の小説があるが、自叙伝A lifetime in Writingを6月5日に発表する。
でも、少しでもミシェル夫人を知っているならば、こういう型にはめる規範的な見方をするかなと疑うのではないでしょうか。オプラの動画でも触れていた本の前書き部分のAs if at some point you become something and that’s the end.にならないでしょうか。
Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child— What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America— a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years— from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.
One of the things I learned is that life is an evolutionary process. We are evolving. We will change and grow every year. And I hope that I never stop becoming. It's a title of promise. This is a journey. I'm 54 years old. I'm not done yet. I am still becoming who I am.
a town in Belgium near which three separate battles (1914, 1915 and 1917) were fought in World War I. In the first, the British Expeditionary Force suffered terrible losses, the second involved the first use of poisonous gas as a weapon by the Germans, and the third resulted in the deaths of over half a million men.
Every night at 8pm, traffic through the Menin Gate is halted while buglers sound the Last Post in remembrance of the WWI dead, a moving tradition started in 1928. Every evening the scene is different; buglers may be accompanied by pipers, troops of cadets or a military band. There's usually at least 100 or so visitors, most of whom have some connection to someone who was lost in Flanders Fields.
a series of World War I battles (1917) fought near the small town of Passchendaele in Belgium. About 300 000 Allied soldiers and a similar number of Germans died, in terrible conditions
11 November, the anniversary of the end of World War I, also called Poppy Day. People used to stop what they were doing at 11 a.m. on Armistice Day and stand in silence for two minutes to remember the dead. After World War II it was replaced by Remembrance Sunday in Britain and Veterans' Day in America.
worried about the helmet hair & orange spray tan, couldn't waddle into the rain?
You were hiding in your hotel watching TV & tweeting while world leaders stood in the rain to commemorate fallen soldiers. You were afraid your spray-on tan would run, your fake hair would look even more ridiculous wet & you'd have to hold your own umbrella, if you could open it.
"As we sit here in the rain, thinking how uncomfortable we must be these minutes as our suits get wet and our hair gets wet and our shoes get wet, I think it's all the more fitting that we remember on that day, in Dieppe, the rain wasn't rain, it was bullets"
ただ、こちらは第一次世界大戦関連ではなく、第二次世界大戦関連のもので昨年実施されたスピーチでした。
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remembers the sacrifice made by Canadian soldiers during the Dieppe raid 75 years ago during World War II
A channel port in northern France, from which ferries run to Newhaven and elsewhere; population 34,670 (2006). In August 1942 it was the scene of an unsuccessful amphibious raid by a joint force of British and Canadian troops to destroy the German-held port and airfield.
先週末パリに行く前にカナダのトルドー首相が訪れたのがフランスのVimy。第一次世界大戦の頃はカナダは独立国家になっていなかったのですが、カナダからの兵士が戦った場所のようで、この記念碑はCanadian National Vimy Memorialだそうです。
(Oxford)
Vimy Ridge, Battle of
An Allied attack on the German position of Vimy Ridge, near Arras, during the First World War. One of the key points on the Western Front, it had long resisted assaults, but on 9 April 1917 it was taken by Canadian troops in fifteen minutes, at the cost of heavy casualties.
two long battles that took place in the valley of the river Somme in northern France during World War I. In the first battle, which lasted from July to November 1916, more than a million British, French and German soldiers died. The second battle lasted two weeks in the spring of 1918, and almost half a million soldiers died. Very little ground or any other advantage was won by either side in these battles, which are considered among the most terrible in history.
At 11 a.m., Nov. 11, 1918, the guns along the Western Front in France and Belgium fell silent. World War I, known at the time as the “Great War,” was at an end. What began in August 1914 as a conflict among the European powers that was widely predicted to be over by Christmas had exploded into the largest and bloodiest international conflict in history, involving dozens of countries from all corners of the globe. The hostilities involved Japan, which fought on the side of Great Britain, Canada, France, Belgium, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and a handful of other countries against Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Turkey and Bulgaria.
Historians generally agree that somewhere around 9 million military personnel perished in the war and another 22 million were wounded. It’s believed that more than 9 million civilians also died in the conflict. The war profoundly influenced everything that followed it in the 20th century, including World War II and the resulting Cold War.
A century later, Nov. 11 continues to be known as Remembrance Day, or Veterans Day in the United States. Today, as solemn official ceremonies to mark the 100th anniversary take place in many parts of the world, we look back at Japan’s role in the war and how that role shaped the country domestically and on the international stage.
For the United States, revolution in Saudi Arabia would be a game-changer. While the United States can live without Saudi oil, China, India, Japan and Europe cannot. Any disruption in Saudi oil exports either due to unrest, cyber attacks or a new regime’s decision to reduce exports substantially will have major impacts on the global economy.
My family moved around a lot, but one constant at Christmastime at my parents’ house is Satsuma mandarins—in a fruit bowl in the kitchen, or in the toe of my stocking. They come into season in November, hit the grocery shelves just after Thanksgiving and they are the best citrus by about a mile and a half.
YEMEN’S ECONOMIC CRISIS WAS not some unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the fighting.
In 2016, the Saudi-backed Yemeni government transferred the operations of the central bank from the Houthi-controlled capital, Sana, to the southern city of Aden. The bank, whose policies are dictated by Saudi Arabia, a senior Western official said, started printing vast amounts of new money — at least 600 billion riyals, according to one bank official. The new money caused an inflationary spiral that eroded the value of any savings people had.
The bank also stopped paying salaries to civil servants in Houthi-controlled areas, where 80 percent of Yemenis live. With the government as the largest employer, hundreds of thousands of families in the north suddenly had no income.
反政府のHouthiにしても援助を利用して私腹を肥やしているケースもあるようです。
THE SAUDI COALITION IS NOT solely to blame for Yemen’s food crisis.
In Houthi-held areas, aid workers say, commanders level illegal taxes at checkpoints and frequently try to divert international relief aid to the families of soldiers, or to line their own pockets.
At the United Nations on Tuesday, Mr. Lowcock, the humanitarian official, said that aid workers in Yemen faced obstacles including delayed visas, retracted work permits and interference in the work — problems, officials said privately, that were greatest in Houthi-held areas.
Despite the harrowing scenes of suffering in the north, some Yemenis are getting rich. Upmarket parts of Sana are enjoying a mini real estate boom, partly fueled by Yemeni migrants returned from Saudi Arabia, but also by newly enriched Houthi officials.
Local residents say they have seen Houthi officials from modest backgrounds driving around the city in Lexus four-wheel drives, or shopping in luxury stores, trailed by armed gunmen, to buy suits and perfumes.
ショッキングな写真を載せたこの記事に関してニューヨークタイムズはThis is our job as journalists: to bear witness, to give voice to those who are otherwise abandoned, victimized and forgotten.と弁明をしています。
The images we have published out of Yemen may be as unsettling as anything we have used before. Here’s why we made the decision to publish them.
By Eric Nagourney and Michael Slackman
Oct. 26, 2018
Some readers may feel they want to look away, too. And if experience is any guide, some are going to demand to know why we are asking them to look at all.
But we are asking you to look — and not just at Amal, but also at Shaher al-Hajaji, a scarred 3-year-old boy in the grip of malnutrition, and at Bassam Mohammed Hassan, an emaciated, listless young boy with an empty look in his eyes.
This is our job as journalists: to bear witness, to give voice to those who are otherwise abandoned, victimized and forgotten. And our correspondents and photographers will go to great lengths, often putting themselves in harm’s way, to do so.
This report, “The Tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s War,” was written by Declan Walsh, and the photographs were taken by Tyler Hicks. To bring it to you, they not only had to navigate their way through a country devastated by war but also through their own emotional trauma.
先ほど紹介した報道写真家のLynsey Addarioさんの記事も今週のNew York Times Magazineに載るそうでウエブサイトに上がっていました。リンク先の記事ではAddarioさんの写真やビデオも一緒に見ることができます。こちらはHouthisがどのような組織かわかる読み応えのある記事になっています。印象としてはアフガンのタリバンみたいな感じですね。
Saudi Arabia thought a bombing campaign would quickly crush its enemies in Yemen. But three years later, the Houthis refuse to give up, even as 14 million people face starvation.
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Photographs by LYNSEY ADDARIO
The Houthis, who are named for their founding family, have lost much of the southern territory they once ruled, but in most ways the war has made them stronger. Battle has sharpened their skills and hardened their resolve. It appears to have deepened their hold over a population that is weary of revolt and desperate for order of any kind. Some families, I was told, keep donation boxes with the words “In the Path of God” printed on them; everyone, young and old, contributes what cash they can to the war effort. Just before I arrived, members of a northern tribe not far from Sana, the capital city, packed up several hundred vehicles with grapes, vegetables, sheep, calves, cash and weapons. The convoy drove some 170 miles, across mountains and deserts — at constant risk of Saudi airstrikes — to support Houthi fighters on the front line near the Red Sea port city of Hudaydah.
It is tempting to see a certain poetic justice in the Houthis’ vengeful rage against Saudi Arabia. Their movement was born, three decades ago, largely as a reaction to Riyadh’s reckless promotion of its own intolerant strain of Salafi Islam in the Houthi heartland of northwestern Yemen. Since then, the Saudis — with the help of Yemen’s former ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh — have done all they could to corrupt or compromise every political force strong enough to pose a threat. The Houthis are a result: a band of fearless insurgents who know how to fight but little else. They claim a divine mandate, and they have tortured, killed and imprisoned their critics, rights groups say, just as their predecessors did. They have recruited child soldiers, used starvation as a weapon and have allowed no dissenting views to be aired in the media. They have little will or capacity to run a modern state, and at times have seemed unwilling or unable to negotiate for peace. But this, too, is partly a measure of Saudi Arabia’s fatal arrogance toward its neighbor, a long-term policy of keeping Yemen weak and divided.
The truth was somewhat different. The Obama administration agreed to support what the Saudis called Operation Decisive Storm with considerable reluctance, seeing it as an unwinnable proxy war against Iran. One former administration official told me the decision was partly a measure of tensions with Riyadh over the pending Iran nuclear deal, which the Saudis viewed as a potentially dangerous act of appeasement. Refusing to back the Saudi adventure could have damaged an important relationship, the official said. The risks of supporting it seemed acceptable, at least at first. But the Houthi forces proved unexpectedly resilient. Within weeks, Pentagon officials began complaining about the clumsiness of the Saudi bombers and the absence of any clear war strategy. John Kerry, Obama’s secretary of state, tried and failed to negotiate a truce.
But the Saudi case for war has not been paired with any realistic strategy to win it. Like many other Arab countries, Saudi Arabia has never built a substantial land army, in part because its rulers fear that a strong military could be used to overthrow them. For all the bombs being dropped on Yemen, the Saudis lack the ability to push the Houthis back from the border; instead, Houthi combat squads regularly attack and rout Saudi ground forces inside the kingdom. The Emiratis, the other main force in the coalition, have been more involved in training and supporting local Yemeni groups to fight against the Houthis. They have also done a slightly better job of encouraging an alternative model for the country; in Mukalla, a semblance of normal city life has resumed. But some of the Emiratis’ partners are corrupt and extremist and have a history of fighting among themselves. They have also been accused of orchestrating assassination campaigns against local Yemeni figures whose agendas they oppose.
2015年に自伝がでた時にもこのブログで紹介しましたが、報道写真家のLynsey Addario。パキスタンやリビアで誘拐された経験を持ちます。これまでの写真をまとめた本“Of Love and War”を出したようでインタビューに応じています。彼女を主人公にしたハリウッド映画でスカーレット・ヨハンソンが演じることが話題になりましたが、最近カッショギ事件でヨハンソンが辞退したとニュースになりましたね。
20 years of photographs of conflict and women’s issue are collected in her new book “Of Love and War”
By James Estrin
Oct. 23, 2018
Q: What’s different about being a photographer today than in 2000?
A: I think the main thing is that journalists are a target now in a way that they weren’t before. I think that I used to find security and protection in saying, “I’m a journalist” and feeling that people respected journalists. Obviously now I don’t feel that’s the case.
Look at [Jamal] Khashoggi. Look at Marie Colvin. Myself when I was kidnapped with Tyler [Hicks], Steve [Farrell] and Anthony [Shadid] in Libya. Journalists are constantly the targets of governments who do not want certain stories told. And the governments act with impunity, and often get away with it.
I think that requires journalists to do their homework. They have to understand the situation on the ground. They have to make sure that they have a very trustworthy team.
Q: What about being a woman photographer? Is there any difference from 2000 to today?
A: Unfortunately I don’t think there is a huge difference. There are not many more women working on the front line now than there were when I first started. I always assumed that would have changed, but I don’t really see that.
There are a lot of female photographers working domestically in the U.S. but not necessarily ones that are willing to work in war zones or go into the situations where I’m working. I’m always very happy to see another female photographer when I’m out in the field.
I’ve always said I think it’s a big asset to be a woman in this field, given the countries that I work in. I have access to men and women.
Q: There’s a half of the world that men can’t really photograph in some countries.
A: Exactly. And if they can photograph them, then the access is going to be very uncomfortable and a lot more restricted.
Q: I mean that there’s a critique that our coverage of news was totally Western-centric and at times colonialist. It’s only when it started getting too dangerous that we started employing more local people.
A: Sure. I get it. Look, in an ideal world there would be so many more local photographers and journalists because I think that they should be telling their own stories. But I think the reality is that because sometimes they live under governments that don’t really allow for freedom of expression, they feel more threats telling stories in an honest way in their own countries, especially sensitive ones about human rights abuses or political issues. They can’t really tell those stories without running the risk of getting thrown in jail. As outsiders, we are able to go in and tell much more politically sensitive stories.
The reality is all of these stories need to be told, and if it’s told by an outsider or an insider, the important thing is that the stories are getting told. I think in an ideal world, you’d have more insiders and some outsiders. But sometimes that’s just not possible.
When people start critiquing how stories are told, it’s often people who have not been outside the comfort of their own country. But it’s good to entertain all criticism because it’s very important to talk about these things.
In her first published collection of photographs, Of Love and War, photojournalist Lynsey Addario looks past her subjects’ impossible circumstances to show beauty and their humanity.
by ERIN VANDERHOOF
OCTOBER 30, 2018 6:11 PM
The cynical view is that the conflicts don’t always get resolved, but the press just goes away. For example, your photographs of the Syrian conflict have so much emotional force, but the war is still going on. How do you stay hopeful despite that?
The war has gone so long, and because it’s been so graphically depicted over and over, the public has become inured to the violence and suffering. It’s dangerous, because we have a job as photographers and journalists to keep those stories on the radar, and it’s hard to do when the public doesn’t care.
At the end of the day, a compelling story will get people’s attention, but if you just bombard people with images of violence, they’re not gonna care. It’s about humanizing the story. It’s about showing an intimate view and giving people a way to enter the story and to care. That takes more time and it’s hard to do. . . . We live in the age of social media, and we’re bombarded by thousands of images every day. So you have to figure out how to make your work stand out. I try to do a different take on a scene. What is interesting to me is going to places that people have forgotten about. A story is less interesting to me if there are 35 other photographers standing next to me. I’d rather now go to places where people aren’t really going anymore. I was just in northern Nigeria, and I just got back from Yemen. These places are hard to get to, but [the stories] need to be told.
