報道写真家として、母として

後藤さんの事件で紛争地帯を報道することが注目を集めました。渡航を許可するか、どうかという話になってしまうのは止むを得ない部分があるかもしれませんが、紛争地帯を取材するというのがどのようなものなのか、知る機会にしてもいいのではないかと思います。

It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (2015/02/05) Lynsey Addario 商品詳細を見る

Lynsey Addarioさんという報道写真家の女性が回顧録を出したようで、抜粋をニューヨークタイムズで読むことができます。リビアで取材中に政府軍から襲撃される緊迫したシーンから始まり、妊娠して、妊娠しながらも報道写真を取り続けるところを語っています。このためWhat Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everythingという記事タイトルになっています。

What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everything
By LYNSEY ADDARIOJAN. 28, 2015

You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint in a war zone, and each is a gamble. The first is to stop and identify yourself as a journalist and hope that you are respected as a neutral observer. The second is to blow past the checkpoint and hope the soldiers guarding it don’t open fire on you.

In 2011, three weeks into the Libyan uprising, I was in a car with three of my colleagues from The New York Times when we approached a checkpoint near Ajdabiya, a small city near Libya’s northern coast, more than 500 miles east of Tripoli. By then, as a photojournalist documenting conflict zones in the post-9/11 wars, I had been in dozens of risky situations. I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan.

チャリーローズでは、この記事で書いている部分を口頭で説明しています。



お子さんが生まれた後も世界を旅して写真を撮っていますが、In the year after giving birth, I shot assignments in Mississippi, Mauritania, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and India, avoiding any work on the front line, because for the first time, I felt I needed to stay alive.とさすがに紛争の最前線に立つことは避けるようになってきているようです。

Three months after I gave birth, I started traveling again. My first assignment was for The Times Magazine in rural Alabama, photographing families of women addicted to methamphetamine. I cried from the moment I left for the airport, right up to the morning I loaded the memory cards into my Nikons, placed my lenses in their pouches, strung them around my waist and set off to meet the people I would photograph. Being away from Lukas was worse than any heartbreak, any distance from a lover, anything I had ever known, but with my first few frames, I lost myself in my work. In the year after giving birth, I shot assignments in Mississippi, Mauritania, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and India, avoiding any work on the front line, because for the first time, I felt I needed to stay alive. When I was on an assignment, I was confronted with the price of my absence: Lukas calling out “Daddy, Daddy” as I called on Skype from a hotel room in India or Uganda, or him running into our nanny’s arms rather than my own when I returned home. I thought often about how Anthony and Steve had infants who were Lukas’s age when we were in prison in Libya; Steve Farrell has since moved to Brooklyn and is no longer covering war; Anthony died tragically in Syria; and Tyler continues on as a war photographer.

National Geographicの記事ではAddarioさんの撮影した写真も見ながら、インタビューを読むことができるのでオススメです。紛争地帯を取材するため仲間を失ったりすることは避けられないようです。

Witnessing War's Horrors Through a Camera Lens
When Lynsey Addario started out, journalists were respected as neutral observers. Now you can be beheaded.
By Simon Worrall
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 11, 2015

How did the deaths of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington affect you?
I'd been kidnapped in Libya. And when I got out, I felt we were so lucky to have survived. There were so many times we could have been killed. But I felt emotionally pretty stable. Then Tim and Chris were killed almost exactly a month after we were released. I was in New York, having meetings and spending time with friends and family. When I found out they'd been killed, it was as if the trauma I had never suffered after Libya hit me. I don't know if it's survivor's guilt. But my first thought was, "How could they have been killed when we lived? That's not fair." It took a week for me to stop crying pretty much all the time.

There are not that many people who have covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we all know each other pretty well. The night they were killed a big group came together at the Half King, a bar in Chelsea [in New York City] owned by Sebastian Junger. We just cried and hugged. And I think that feeling of camaraderie really helped. I've had many close friends my whole life, but I really gravitate toward my colleagues because my colleagues can understand the way I feel. At this point in our careers, many of us have lost friends and had friends lose a leg. It's something we can understand in a way that people outside the profession have a harder time understanding.

彼女もイスラム国の危険性を語っていました。それまではジャーナリストはneutral observerとして敬意を払ってもらっていたそうです。

Since you wrote the book, a new, even more deadly, foe has emerged in the Middle East. You've also become a mother. Has the spate of beheadings by IS deterred you from reporting on them?
The question that I get all the time is, Now that you've become a mother, do you still do this work? I roll my eyes because, yes, I still do this work! Of course, every time I almost die, or a friend loses his life, I have to pause and reevaluate how I can continue to do this work in a way in which I can stay alive.

IS has changed the dynamic 100 percent. When I first started out, journalists were respected as neutral observers. In 2004, we were kidnapped by a group affiliated with al Qaeda. But they let us go when they ascertained we were journalists. Now you can get beheaded for doing your job as a journalist.

So every assignment, I have to weigh where am I going, what is the story I'm covering, what can I contribute to that story, and how close am I going to be to IS. The last time I was in Iraq, I couldn't get a straight answer from the peshmerga fighters where the front line was. Almost as a joke, I'd say, "OK, so where is IS now?" "Oh, they're that way." "Well, no—I want to know where they are. Not a direction!" [Laughs]

In my 20s and early 30s, I felt invincible. I hadn't lost friends. I hadn't been kidnapped twice. Motherhood has made me realize that I need to stay alive. I have this tiny little person who's depending on me. I'm more cautious. I don't go right to the front line. I cover the same places and the same stories, but I try and stay back a little bit. But am I giving up the work? No! Will I give up the work? No!

NPRのフレッシュエアーでこの本が出ていることを知ったのですが、彼女は２度の誘拐など修羅場を切り抜けた経験を語ってくれています。相手の文化を知ることの大切さを訴えます。



Twice Kidnapped, Photographer Returns To War Zone: 'It's What I Do'
FEBRUARY 11, 2015 2:05 PM ET

GROSS: Well, once, when you were getting groped in Pakistan, you said to the men, haram - which means forbidden - don't you have sisters, mothers? Aren't you Pakistani men Muslim? You did say that. Was that effective?
ADDARIO: Yeah, I did. And that's what I was referring to when I first said - I think, you know, another very important thing is for a journalist who covers the Muslim world, we have responsibilities to be familiar with that culture and to know how to respond to that. So, for example, I know that men put their sisters and their mothers on a pedestal - Muslim men. And it's important for me to say, look, don't you have a sister? Don't you understand I am like your sister? Don't touch me.

ニューヨークタイムズの書評では写真はすばらしいが、文章がおおざっぱになってしまっていると少し苦言を呈しています。書評にある通り、この本には彼女が写したたくさんの写真も掲載されているのでお得かもしれません。

‘It’s What I Do,’ by Lynsey Addario
By SCOTT ANDERSONFEB. 4, 2015

In the photographs liberally scattered throughout “It’s What I Do” are clues to how Addario rose to the top of her field. The very best photographers develop an ineluctable bond with their subjects, an intimacy built on patience and trust; in the strongest photos here, such as her portraits of women rape victims in Congo, her ability to capture their strength and vulnerability is profoundly touching.

Yet the qualities that make for a brilliant photographer may not make for a brilliant memoirist. Only occasionally does Addario linger long enough to render the kind of fully sketched scene that makes the account of her kidnapping in Libya so riveting. Instead, she has a tendency to tell her story in a summary travelogue fashion, with people and places and events — even the succession of disappointing boyfriends — flitting by at such a rapid clip as to blur to dimness. What makes this doubly frustrating is that when Addario does slow down, she is incisive: In the acutely observed account of her negotiations with a young Taliban visa clerk, for example — a complex dance requiring her to shift constantly between submission, flirtation and defiance — the reader is likely to learn more about the capricious nature of Islamic fundamentalism than from a dozen essays or position papers.