NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario was the final speaker of the 2022 Ray and Stella Dillon Lecture Series at Hutchinson Community College on Tuesday. Addario knows that photographing war is a challenge for anyone and that in some societies in the Middle East, it's even more difficult as a woman, but she also saw that as an advantage.
"As a woman, I could go into people's homes," Addario said. "As a woman, I had access to men and women. The Taliban generally wouldn't go into places that was for women, so that was amazing, because I could photograph in all those places. The Taliban were men."
Addario's latest assignment is the war in Ukraine and she plans to return next week. She believes in both the photo and the journalist part of her title.
"I think a caption is as important as a photograph," Addario said. "It's my responsibility, not only to take a photograph, but to get the reporting information right and to make sure that all of that information that appears with the photograph is accurate. I think a lot of people don't realize that about photography, that you are as much a reporter as you are a photographer."
Addario is a regular contributor to National Geographic and the New York Times and also provides select images to the Getty Images service.
"I don't send all of the stories that I do to Getty for syndication," Addario said. "Some of the ones that are very sensitive, that I can't control, I don't syndicate through them. I just hold them."
Addario is careful about trying to make sure that the story her photos tell wherever they are published is consistent with what she was trying to tell when she took the photo, but with the proliferation of photo usage on social media and across the internet, it can be hard to make that happen.
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