



1 / 11 Chevron Chevron Lynsey Addario : “One measure of how dangerous a place is for me is that, when I first went into Iraq, I was wearing jeans and T-shirt. I would photograph on the street as a Western woman and it was no problem. Then I had to start wearing an abaya all the time and I really had to try and disguise myself more. All of the women in Iraq did. It was sort of like watching the covering of a country. It was like watching a country become more insecure.”—September 2009. Kabul, Afghanistan. Basra May 26, 2003. An Iraqi woman walks through a plume of smoke rising from a massive fire at a liquid gas factory as she searches for her husband. The fire was allegedly started by looters picking through the factory, and residents in the vicinity feared the explosion of the four liquid gas tanks on the premises. Lynsey Addario.

“At the heart of photojournalism lies a confounding paradox,” writes The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins in the forward to “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,” by Michael Kamber, out from University of Texas Press on May 15th. “The people most attuned to the events unfolding before them, the most careful observers, the men and women endowed with the most searching and sensitive eyes, are ordinarily silent… To miss the photographers’ perspective—to hear what they have to say—is to be deprived of a wholly different sensibility,” for “the photographer has a different way of knowing.”

This book, ambitious in both its breadth and depth, and published as we approach the ten-year anniversary of the war in Iraq, is a collection of interviews and photographs from thirty-nine of the world’s top news photographers who documented the conflict, and is dedicated to the more than a hundred and fifty journalists killed there.

“Photojournalism is today an embattled profession,” Filkins concludes. “When you read the testimonials here and peruse these stunning photographs, you may find yourself wondering whether the war in Iraq, for the men and the women with cameras, was the last of its kind.” All of the captions and quotes above are excerpts from Kamber’s book.

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