The tumultuous life and career of Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario is the subject of this National Geographic film, produced and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (who made the climbing documentary Free Solo and the biopic Nyad with Annette Bening as the endurance swimmer Diana Nyad). Addario’s work is certainly amazing and courageous. She has captured compelling images in Ukraine, where her picture of civilian fatalities helped mobilise western opinion against Putin; in Libya, where she was terrifyingly held captive for days along with three other colleagues from the New York Times; and across the developing world where her images of maternal death have been a spur to charitable work around the globe.
Addario is a smart, candid interviewee – we also get shots of broadcast-journalism A-listers including Christiane Amanpour and Katie Couric – who is alive to the dangers of adrenalin addiction and a world in which journalists are increasingly considered fair game in war zones. She is alive also, I think, to the dangers of producing images that are too artistically beautiful. Hers is a job for tough people only; one US army officer calls her “as hard as woodpecker lips” and I believe him.
But I was a little unsure of the way that this film strays almost into Hello! magazine territory by giving us quite so much of her gorgeous and colossally expensive and tasteful house in London, and her sensitive husband and adorable children. There is no reason why this talented, successful photographer should not also be rich; she deserves it. But some of these sequences look like a behind-the-scenes photoshoot of the sort generally policed by celebrity PRs. Well, the work is the most important thing and Addario’s speaks for itself.
Love+War is in UK cinemas from 24 October and on Disney+ from 7 November.
