War photographer at centre of new Spielberg film

Her parents were hairdressers in a small town in Connecticut, so it wasn’t exactly written in the stars that Lynsey Addario should become one of the world’s best known war photographers.

Even after her Italian-American family got her a Nikon camera for her 13th birthday, she thought “photographers were crazy rich kids” with time on their hands. But fate was about to deal Addario the first of many strange hands that would take her to Afghanistan before September 11 turned the world upside down, and then from one war zone to the next.

“I never set out or wanted to cover war,” the 42-year-old, who has continued to cover conflicts since becoming a mother five years ago, told AFP. In her book, It’s What I Do, Addario tries to make sense of what got her into one of the world’s most dangerous professions. Despite several scrapes with death documenting wars from Iraq to Congo, “I didn’t think anyone would read the book,” she said. “It felt really uncomfortable... egotistical (even). I thought, who would possibly care about my life ” Steven Spielberg for starters. He is about to tell her story in a new film in which she will be played by Hollywood’s hottest property, Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence.

It will centre on her kidnapping in Libya in March 2011, when she was held with four other New York Times journalists by soldiers loyal to Colonel Gaddafi as large parts of the country rose up against him.

That nightmare which included beatings, death threats and Addario being molested by her captors, ended with the journalists being released after a few days. Their driver Mohammed, who had been “frantic” with fear as they lingered amid sniper fire to photograph rebels along the road to the besieged town of Ajdabiya, was not so fortunate.

“I didn’t want to be the cowardly photographer or the terrified girl who prevented the men from doing their work,” Addario wrote later, questioning their actions. As they were taken away, Mohammed was shot by the roadside. It was his death, and that of her friends and fellow photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros who were killed in Gaddafi’s hometown Misrata the following month, that pushed Addario to put pen to paper.

As she tells it, Addario — who won a Pulitzer prize as part of a New York Times team in 2009 — is an accidental war photographer. It all began after she was sent to Afghanistan in 2000 to photograph life for women under the Taliban.