For female photojournalists the past six weeks have been a particularly brutal reminder of the dangers they face. Two photographers have recently been killed while making a record of the suffering on humanity's most extreme edges, documenting the otherwise hidden effects of war on people left to endure tremendous hardship and pain.

German photographer Anja Niedringhaus was shot dead at a checkpoint in Afghanistan on 4 April by a man in police uniform, and just four weeks later, a young French photographer, Camille Lepage, died of gunshot wounds in the Central African Republic. The French government has said Lepage was deliberately targeted and murdered, although it remains unclear if this was at the hands of the Christian militias with whom she was travelling or whether, in fact, her death was an accident and she was caught in crossfire.

"This is a profession of the brave and the passionate, those committed to the mission of bringing to the world information that is fair, accurate and important," said Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press, after Niedringhaus's death. "Anja Niedringhaus met that definition in every way."

Alice Gabriner is a picture editor formerly at Time magazine and now at National Geographic, where about 12 of the 60 freelance photographers are women. The National Geographic Society has chosen to celebrate its 125th anniversary year by showing the work of 11 female photographers in an exhibition entitled Women of Vision (the exhibition runs all year in various venues across the US) because, says its vice-curator Kathryn Keane: "For the last decade some of our most powerful stories have been produced by a new generation of photojournalists who are women."

Gabriner has worked closely with the world's leading female photojournalists, from Lynsey Addario to Kitra Cahana and the responsibility that comes with commissioning people to travel to conflict zones is huge. "We do send these people into danger and of course I think about the risks," says Gabriner. "I'm always astonished by the bravery of these women. I'm getting calls all the time from people who just want a job, desperately want to go here or there and are willing to take the risks and so I'm happy to be able to get them doing a story they want to do. It's in retrospect, even years afterwards, you think about the risks. Photo editors are in a difficult position. Photography is a tough business and the turnover is so great, and people want to get into places that nobody else gets."

Gabriner adds that the worst scenario would be commissioning a photographer she barely knew, so that if anything happened to them on the ground, she wouldn't even know their next of kin.

"I like to try and meet people, to try and get a sense of a person before a commission. Make sure that they understand the risk. I've stopped working with people in the past who I thought were too immature. The truth is that photographers take great risks, but nobody wants to die."

Women in war photography are a relatively new development. But they have played a vital role in the development of photography generally, from the Scot Clementina Maude's pioneering portraiture of Victorian ladies in the 1860s to Londoner Christina Broom – the UK's first female press photographer – and her startlingly atmospheric pictures of first world war soldiers leaving for the front, and the American Dorothea Lange's famous, harrowing images of migrants during the great depression, which helped to change the public perception of poverty in the US in the 1930s. One of the first women widely known to have taken her camera on to a battlefield, certainly from the western world, was New Yorker Margaret Bourke-White, who was allowed to travel with American troops during the second world war and later photographed the Korean war and India's civil rights struggles under Ghandi.

But women still remain a minority in the craft and especially in war photography. Yet, said Gabriner, women often bring something unique to their picture. "Access can sometimes be in women's favour, especially in Middle Eastern cultures, where they can get inside a home much more easily than a man.

Female photojournalists are often telling the stories that are hidden from male eyes, and would otherwise never be covered. Only by getting inside homes in Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban could anyone find out how women were living their lives, while access to other culturally sensitive issues like child marriage and female genital mutilation, while difficult for a western female, are a non-starter for a man.

Gabriner adds: "But equally I think there are situations where it is just not possible for women to work. There was a point in Baghdad for example, when things were very violent and male photographers were having to attempt to blend in with locals – it was never going to be possible for a woman and I had to pull out a woman from the base we had there. But I'd say in most cases I wouldn't consider the gender of a photographer."

Gabriner has worked with many of the women featured here. She says: "They've all worked very hard to get where they are. Stephanie Sinclair is a fantastically dogged reporter, she just never gives up. Lynsey Addario is the same. She combines an enormous human empathy and personal patience in her pictures. But it is tough, you have to stay ahead of the game and keep proving yourself. I've seen a lot of good people fall away. In the past if you had a name, you were fine but now, if your style doesn't evolve, if you don't keep marketing yourself, chances are you will be forgotten very quickly.

"A great photograph is something you feel, in its compassion, its light and colour, its aesthetic. A photographer recently said to me 'I don't take pictures with my eyes, I take pictures with my body'".

In an interview with the photographic blog PetaPixel last October, Camille Lepage talked about her work in South Sudan, where she had gone to live and cover the under-reported conflict in the Central African Republic.

She said: "Since I was very little, I've always wanted to go and live in a place where no one else wants to go, and cover in-depth conflict-related stories… I can't accept that people's tragedies are silenced simply because no one can make money out of them."

Somali migrants anxiously look back from the sea for relatives left behind on the beach as they wait to board a smuggler's boat moored off the coast. Photograph: Alixandra Fazzina/NOOR

Alixandra Fazzina: 'I've had more than a few kidnap attempts'

Photojournalist Alixandra Fazzina. Photograph: Jehad Nga

Alixandra Fazzina was born in east London in 1974 and has worked as in eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, focusing on conflict and its humanitarian consequences. Her work has been published in the Observer and Guardian as well as in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and Stern. She has won several awards covering the plight of Somali refugees in east Africa and in 2010 won the UNHCR Nansen Refugee award – the first journalist to win the humanitarian prize. She is based in Pakistan but has recently returned to the UK.

What drew you to photography?

I was actually a war artist who started taking pictures. I studied fine art at Bristol University and went to Bosnia as a British army artist in 1995. I stayed on and started taking pictures as an extension of what I was doing. I was doing the same with pen and paper as I was doing in recording images with a camera and didn't see much difference between the two, it seemed like a natural shift although, admittedly, being an artist is harder and more exacting. I've always seen myself as a storyteller. I definitely approach stories more as a journalist than as a photographer in the early stages, I try to really uncover things that are more challenging than what you might see on the surface.

How is photojournalism today different from when you first started?

Back then, there weren't the numbers [of photographers] there are now out there, now so many people have cameras. I used to have this big professional kit to carry about, but now everybody has an SLR because the kit is so much cheaper, so much more accessible. It is much harder to make a living nowadays, there just isn't the same editorial market and you have to be very creative in how you approach the work and marketing yourself.

In the past five weeks two female photographers have been killed. How have those tragedies affected you?

It's something I have thought about in the last days since I left Pakistan three weeks ago. Anja Niedringhaus was in a car with reporter Kathy Gannon – who I know well – when she was killed, and Kathy was hurt, and they're both very experienced. So that's very close to home for me. I've been thinking about Camille Lepage. She was 26. People seem very shocked by that, but at that age we feel indestructible. Immune. We all know there is a risk and we try hard to minimise it. But there's a lot of pressure on people to come back with the goods, to get the picture and people are really laying their lives on the line. Somewhere like Syria where staff correspondents and photographers are being pulled out because of the dangers, it's left to freelancers to cover without the support or the experience, its very worrying.

I have a baby now so that makes me think twice and I wouldn't go to Syria – it's too complicated a story and I don't know it well enough. But people run risks crossing the road in London,. There are a lot of irrational fears in day-to-day life, even if you never go anywhere near a war zone. If you want to tell people's stories and you're listening to things that are very powerful, it's hard to see yourself as anything but a mouthpiece.

You were held hostage for several days by Charles Taylor's militiamen in Liberia and nearly drowned when your vehicle became surrounded by floodwater in Pakistan. How do you deal with risk and trauma?

Post-traumatic stress goes with the territory. I've been shot at on numerous occasions and had more than a few kidnap attempts. I've had a few run-ins with the Taliban, who have specifically targeted me. There's a lot of times in my career I have been really, really scared. It can really get to you and still now, if I'm here in London and I see someone walking down the street and I can't see their hands I start to worry they've got a gun. I get anxious sitting in a cafe with my back to the door, that kind of thing. I don't get depressed in the field, the camera can act as a bit of a barrier, but when you're back and are maybe going through your image sheets and you suddenly remember that person, it can really hit home.

There's are a lot of characters I've met whose pain stays with me. Especially as I'm someone who sits down with people I'm photographing and talks to them because I'm looking for that more intimate picture. I remember one girl I had followed as she was trying to flee from Somalia. Her husband had been killed, her child had been killed and she was pregnant. She gave birth on the boat and the people-smugglers killed her newborn. She was about 21. Her hell isn't by far the most horrific story I've come across, but it stuck with me and I tried to find her again but she's disappeared, most likely been trafficked to Saudi. That's upsetting. You don't really get over that.

Does your gender affect the way you work?

Yes, definitely. I don't really like to see gender-specific exhibitions and that kind of thing, but on the other hand I've had access to a lot of stories because I'm a woman. Women can be more trusted, can make barriers fall down a bit more. There was a time on the Pakistan-Afghan border when I was with a woman translator, in the middle of nowhere, and we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by armed Taliban, hundreds of them. I was in a burqa so they didn't know I was a foreigner but we had to walk down the field in front of them, expecting at any minute to be shot. I can't think why we survived, except that they didn't shoot because we were women.

Khalid Saleh Banat, 13, a soldier with the Sudanese Liberation Army. Photograph: Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario: 'Stories I care about happen where there is war'

Photojournalist Lynsey Addario Photograph: Getty Images

Lynsey Addario was born in 1973 in the US state of Connecticut. She made a name for herself covering Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and has since covered conflict in Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon and Congo. She has won numerous awards, including being part of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer prize in 2009 and in 2011 was named on Newsweek magazine's list of 150 Women Who Shake the World.

How did you forge a career in photography and how difficult was it?

My father gave me an old Nikon and I started shooting aged 12 or 13. It was a hobby, but I always thought I would do something in life involving foreign culture or politics. I studied international relations at college and had no formal training in photography but I begged my way to jobs, first in Argentina then freelancing for the Associated Press in New York, by which time I knew that photojournalism was how I wanted to spend my life. I started taking photographs professionally in 1996. It was a roommate who suggested I go to Afghanistan and the story really interested me, the story of women under the Taliban. And, like a lot of stories since, it's rather that the stories I care about happen to be in places where there is war rather than me actively chasing around looking for a war.

You started very young…

I was so driven to become a photographer that I never let my age get in the way. I was underestimated, which was a great thing because when someone doesn't take you seriously then you can only impress. The biggest hindrance was never having a dime in the bank. It's much worse now for people starting out. There are far fewer printed publications and the budgets are so much less. When I covered the first Iraq war for the New York Times magazine they sent me for two months. Now I'd be lucky to get five days. It is an inherently competitive profession.

Does your gender affect the way you work and the kind of work you do?

Yes, a lot. I do think people have treated me very kindly as a woman, especially in the Muslim world. I was kidnapped with three men in Libya in 2011 [Addario was also held hostage in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004] and while I was punched in the face at first, the men were all hit constantly on the back of the head each day and I wasn't. Of course I was groped and they weren't, and who is to say it's better to be groped then to be punched in the head – both are traumatic, but I felt I was spared the violence that the men were exposed to. Our driver, Mohammad, was killed and being responsible for someone's death gave me pause. Of course that makes you re-evaluate the way you work.

Your job is very dangerous…

Yes, and I think about the dangers involved all the time. Since 2010 I have lost a whole series of friends. I had lunch with Anja [Niedringhaus] the Friday before she was killed. We were so excited to finally meet each other because there aren't that many females in war photography and it's that mutual awareness of how you live your life that is so special. It was lovely. And then she was killed. What a shame, what a loss it is to the world because of the work she was doing. You cannot just replace someone with Anja's experience, with her lifespan of work.

I feel very in touch with my mortality and more cautious as I get older. I think journalists are more and more a target than they ever were. Kidnapping is on the rise and some countries you can't go to at all without being immediately targeted. You are there to spread an eyewitness account and there are a lot of dictators and warlords in the world who don't want anyone to bear witness to what is going on under their watch.

How do you deal with the levels of hurt and suffering that you must witness?

I carry it with me. It's important not to forget. If nothing else, what I see in places like Darfurcorrect reminds me of how lucky I am to be born in a country where I've been allowed to become the woman I am. And I am grateful for that every day, I'm grateful not to have to walk 3km each day to collect water, I'm grateful not to have been a child soldier. But it's been 14 years of photographing devastation – and I don't know where it goes, everyone asks me why I'm not insane.

I think about my chances of being killed all the time, too. But war is war, bullets don't discriminate and mortars fall where mortars fall. I don't just go to war zones or conflict for the sake of it, there has to be a story that I think is worth telling and there are a lot of stories I want to tell.

Lynsey Addario's book It's What I Do will be published by Penguin in the US in January 2015

Hunger Overcomes Fear by Maggie Steber.

Maggie Steber: 'I was almost beheaded by guys with machetes'

Photographer Maggie Steber Photograph: Maggie Steber

The documentary photographer Maggie Steber was born in 1949 in Texas. She has worked in 64 countries and her work in Haiti – she was sent there to cover riots in 1986, became gripped by the country and has returned every year since – was made into the book Dancing on Fire. Steber won critical praise for Rites of Passage, her documentary of her mother's descent into dementia. She has been awarded the Leica medal of excellence and has worked for the Guardian, Newsweek, Life and National Geographic. She lives in Miami.

How did you choose your career – was photography always what you wanted to do?

I started out working as a reporter in small-town Texas, but after a year of that Texas felt a little too small and I went off to New York, aged 21, to seek my fortune. I was picture editor at Associated Press for four years and I learned to love photography, so I started to freelance by going to Africa. I was working as a journalist in what was then Rhodesia, covering the war. I loved writing – and still do – but it's a lonely thing, it's all in your head, whereas a photo takes you into the world and I love that. We need images to remind us of who we are – my own image of myself is this wild horse running across the open plain. That ties together a lot of personal things for me so I love that metaphor!

How do you deal with the risk inherent in your work?

When you're young you don't think about it at all. You're fearless, you take more risks. And of course a lot of people cover wars to kickstart their careers, to get noticed, and sometimes very sad things can happen. But I do think that if you are going to do it, to have this kind of career, then you do it earlier rather than later, when you are fearless.

I think as we get older we do think more about death, although for myself I'm certainly glad that life doesn't last for ever – that would be exhausting. I've had a very rich life and a magical life. If I died tomorrow I'd die happy. I'm a little nobody from Texas and look where I've been – 64 countries, all that breaking news, joy and sorrow, and what I have seen. Who knew?

Does your gender influence the way you work and the kind of work you do?

In Afghanistan and Iraq I think women are very exposed because these are cultures with ideologies in which women are regarded as expendable. I feel equal to my male colleagues and I never stop to think, "I'm a woman, I shouldn't do this." I also try to encourage other women; it's a damn sight better to be generous than to be competitive. It's astonishing how many young women are now coming into photography, and of course there is always interest in younger people from picture editors.

People can tire of you very quickly, and as a woman it's tougher. I think that is worse now than it has ever been. A man can act aggressive and demanding and he's viewed as strong, whereas a woman knows her mind and she's a bitch.

When have you felt most at risk in the field?

I was almost beheaded once by guys with machetes in Haiti, but interestingly enough it wasn't in the obvious places that I've felt at risk. The most scared I've been was of an African guide who pulled a knife and tried to drag me into a cave when I was doing a story about the history of the slave trade in Senegal. That was in a nice place, a pretty island, not at war. And I've had more embarrassing sexual assaults on the New York City subway than anywhere.

What do you love most about the job?

The people you meet. The people who allow you into their lives at perhaps a vulnerable moment and teach you something. One time I was in Texas doing a story about war letters. I was with a Mexican woman who had lost a son in the Iraq war. I photographed her in her son's room, in her house, but I just wasn't getting it, the picture that spoke to her loss. On the fourth day we were both sitting at her kitchen table and talking and talking and we ended up weeping together. I felt a connection with her and I realised I had to collaborate with her. We got the shot: she's lying on the bed looking away from her son's picture and it talks to her feelings of how she has to move on. It opened the story. And I don't think I'd have got that if it wasn't with another woman. Those are the people you remember. Not the famous ones, the most humble people.

A young girl cries after being circumcised in Bandung, Indonesia on April 23, 2006. Photograph: Stephanie Sinclair/VII

Stephanie Sinclair: 'I think a photograph can have incredible power'

Photographer Stephanie Sinclair Photograph: Mitchell Prothero

Born in 1973, Stephanie Sinclair is a New Yorker who studied journalism at the University of Florida before beginning her career at the Chicago Tribune, which sent her to cover the Iraq war. She moved to the Middle East, working as a freelance for six years and beginning what has become a decade-long interest in documenting underage marriage. She has worked in Yemen, Afghanistan, Tanzania and Ethiopia. She was part of a Tribune team that won a Pulitzer prize for its investigation of the airline industry in 2000 and has also won three World Press Photo awards. She now lives in Brooklyn.

Why photography and how did your early career evolve?

Really, I just wanted to do something creative, something that fed my need to express myself about the world. I tried poetry, writing, painting, but none of it really "took". I couldn't really express everything I felt in the same way as I could when taking a photograph. So photography was the way.

I feel lucky that I started out in "snap" photography, working for a couple of newspapers in the US, which was a great learning curve . You're shooting multiple assignments every day. No excuses. You have to come back with a picture every time. So that's a great way to learn to work quickly and still do a good job. A lot of the work I've done on child marriage and on self-immolation of young women (in Yemen, Afghanistan and Ethiopia) has involved a very long time getting access but sometimes only a short time, in some cases just 15 minutes, to take the picture. So my background has been really helpful.

Why did documenting child marriage become such a focus for your work?

I started in 2003 when I was asked to cover the issue of self-immolation by young women in Afghanistan for a women's magazine. I ran into multiple girls who had been married underage. While it wasn't the reason girls were setting themselves on fire, it was a common factor in a lot of the cases.

I really believe in this project and as I've been working on it for more than a decade I have seen a lot of changes. It's enormously satisfying when you finally get your images out there and I believe they can communicate and be a catalyst for change. There's a global campaign now against underage marriage and I like to think I'm a spoke in that wheel. I think a photograph can have an incredible amount of power.

Does your gender have an impact on your work, and have other women paved the way for you in photojournalism?

I definitely think there's an advantage to being a woman. You have to play to your strengths in any art form and you bring who you are into your work so I bring being a woman. With child marriage, a man couldn't do the same work in that kind of area at all. I have access as a woman to stories that my male counterparts don't.

There are several women photographers who have inspired me. Lynsey Addario was doing great work in Afghanistan when I was still a newspaper photographer in Chicago and I was very inspired by her work. Jodi Cobb, the first female photographer to work for National Geographic [and one of the first to cross China when it reopened to the west] is someone I look up to very much. And Donna Ferrato's work on domestic violence in the US had a real influence on me. A lot of work has come before me that women have done that's both inspired me and made me feel I could be part of it as well. Interview by Jim Powell

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