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A note before we start that this conversation includes an account of abduction, violence, and sexual assault that some listeners may find distressing.

We went on daily patrols six seven hours a day.

We were shot at, ambushed, and then we had to jump out of black hawks in the middle of the night into the heart of Tulliban Territory.

Lindsay Adario Pulitzerprise winning photographer and chronicler of the extreme and the every day.

My job is to bear witness to everything that happens in conflict zones.

Women continue to deliver babies, I see marriages, divorce, I see death and life.

Do you love the job?

It's something that I do from my heart and my soul.

From Bloomberg Weekend.

This is the Michelle Hussein Show.

I'm Michelle Hussein.

There have been times in my professional life when I've had to take a flat jacket and body armor with me on assignment.

Not that I've ever been a war reporter, but there are places I've needed to go to which carried risk and you always need to be prepared.

Whenever I saw that kit in the hallway before a trip, I always felt a moment of gratitude that this wasn't part of my everyday work.

For Lindsaya Dario, though it is.

She's an award winning photographer who's worked in war zones from Afghanistan and Ukraine to Sudan.

Sometimes it's the writer the correspondent traveling with her who ends up getting more of the attention from an assignment, but it's Lindsay's pictures which bring their words to life.

Some years ago, she wrote her own book about the places she's been, the extreme situations she's experienced, including being kidnapped twice, once in Iraq and once in Libya.

If you're thinking there aren't many women in this field, you'd be right, and that's part of why there's a new documentary about her on Disney Plus.

Intriguingly, it's called Love and War, which is why when we spoke, I asked her, how does love come into it?

Love comes into it in the balance of my family.

You have war, and then you come home to this sort of nest of love with my children and my husband, also my sisters and my parents.

But I think also the thing about war is that you see these incredible scenes of love and generosity and kindness and selflessness alongside brutality.

Of course, you get a sense of love that actually sort of binds people in these horrific moments.

You've witnessed birth, You've certainly witnessed death, You've witnessed grief.

All of this is part of what you do.

Yeah, I mean, my job is to bear witness to everything that happens in conflict zones and also outside of conflict zones.

And so I'm seeing daily life continue under these very difficult circumstances.

So that means, yes, women continue to deliver babies.

You know, I see marriages, I see divorce, I see everything.

I see death and life.

Do you love the job?

Is that also part of the love that's in this?

I mean, I don't think anyone could cover war without loving the job.

It's something that I do from my heart and my soul.

It's something that I do because I believe in it.

Going back in time, I wondered if we could talk about two turning points.

I think they're turning points, the first of which is nine to eleven, and you're already working as a photographer.

But is that the moment where you become a war photographer?

Yeah?

So I was photographing for many years, and then I moved to India in two thousand and in India, I started becoming aware of women's issues in Afghanistan.

It's not about how to come to power exactly, as of being restricted exactly, and.

So I was reading about that, and I was reading a lot about women's issues in Afghanistan, and as a young woman, I was curious, you know, what to Afghan women think?

Not necessarily what does the West think of what Afghan women must feel, but what do they actually think?

And so I went to Afghanistan as I was twenty six years old, and I borrowed money from my sister and I started doing a lot of reporting and photographing what I could of women living under the Taliban and I ended up making three trips to Afghanistan before September eleventh.

So when September eleventh happened and the US was gearing up for war in Afghanistan, it felt very natural for me to go there because I was already quite familiar with it and so had.

A hot time.

Hadn't you se selling those pictures?

Yeah?

I couldn't give.

Them away, I mean is interesting.

No one was interested because it was before September eleventh, and very few journalists were actually working in Afghanistan at the time.

Photography was illegal under the Taliban, So the La Times published some pictures, but really it was difficult to get them published.

And that all changed suddenly with international interest in the country absolutely nine to eleven.

And was there a sense of excitemental thrill then for you that new opportunities are dawning.

Well, I think after September eleventh what became exciting for me is that I had this knowledge that I had procured on my own, and then suddenly it was relevant on a world stage.

And so the New York Times sent me on my first big assignment for them, which was covering Pakistan leading up to the fall of the Taliban, and then the New York Times magazine put me on assignment to do the Women of Jihad, and so I started working pretty consistently for the New York Times then.

But that's when you guess you have to learn that there are risks involved in your work, right, You start to have to evaluate that, like covering a war is something completely different to you at that stage.

Absolutely, at that time, there were suicide bombers, there were smaller scale attacks.

The US started bombing Afghanistan, and then we had to navigate how to go in.

There was a whole you know, when do you go into a country when the government or the taller bomb was falling.

You know, when is it safe to actually move into a place that's very hostile?

And so it's always a learning curve.

You know.

Now with Ukraine it's drones, and so I think it's ever evolving.

The other turning point I wondered about in your career was Iraq in two thousand and four, because you had the first of your abduction kidnap experiences.

Then take me back to that time and that place, the really chaotic period after the US invasion, the year afterwards, I mean even.

Leading up to the US invasion, when I was offered to go into Iraq, I didn't think.

I really wasn't sure I could handle a military mbed.

At that point, I had never been in combat.

I was offered a position with one hundred and first Airborne.

I did not take it.

So why did you think you couldn't handle it?

Because I was a woman.

I didn't know if I'd be physically fit enough, if i'd be as strong as the man I was going in with.

I didn't know what it would feel like to be under fire, because even though I covered the fall of the Taliban, it was not combat.

This is going to be frontline, yeah, And I really didn't want to be responsible for holding anyone up or being scared or I just wasn't sure how I would respond.

And so I ended up going into northern Iraq from Iran, and many journalists did, and we were sort of covering the Kurdish territory and there was a proxy war.

It was Lansar fighting US forces backed by Kurdish special forces, and it was there that I was in my first attack that was a very close call that actually killed a journalist standing where I had been standing.

And we were covering refugees fleeing this area, something that I covered a million times now, and all the locals were warning us to leave, and we went to leave, and literally an incoming round came in and landed so close to our car that our entire car flew forward.

And as we evacuated, we went to this school like a few kilometers down the road, and a taxi pulled up and said, is there a journalist here?

And everyone was regathering and the taxi driver said, I have the body of a journalist in my trunk.

Can someone help me identify him?

And I just I remember looking at him, and I ran behind the school and just started sobbing and thinking, I don't want to do this for a living.

I don't think I can stay here.

But there was no way out because Saddam was still in power.

We couldn't go south, Iran wouldn't let us back in, and I basically had to learn how to deal with my fear and how to cover war in northern Iraq.

So before the kidnapping in Iraq, there were like these gradual close calls.

Maybe that's almost a sliding doors moment, that one, because had there been a way out, I probably would have and you might not have gone back to that kind of zone again.

But then you were there in Iraq again, and you were out one day with other journalists, and that was when you got held up at a checkpoint.

Yeah Fallujah.

Yeah.

So I had basically spent all of two thousand and three and the beginning of two thousand and four in Iraq.

I was working with a colleague for the New York Times, and we heard there was a helicopter down, a marine helicopter down.

So we went.

The only road open was a smuggler's route, and as we were nearing the outskirts of Fallujah, we turned a corner and literally the entire road was full of insurgents with kafias their faces, wrapped, rockets on their backs, coloss and a coughs.

They started shooting in the air, where it was terrifying.

They pulled all the men out of the car.

I was dressed in full hit jobs so by a headscarf, everything, and they left me sitting in the car and I was looking out the window watching my colleague get led away.

And this is where you did something really interesting.

You said that colleague was your husband.

Yeah.

I thought if I did that, they would take us as a couple and it'd be more complicated for them to kill us or to figure out what to do.

When you insert a woman into that situation, it's a hell of.

A thing to do, Lindsey, I'm trying to imagine being in the same position, and you're in not safety, but you're in a more protected position in this car, and you're connecting yourself to someone who's being led away.

I guess, but you would probably do the same thing.

I mean, you work in teams in these places, and when you work in war zones, there is a solidarity, and so I didn't think about it in terms of my own safety.

I thought about it in terms of how can I help this situation?

And I think it did help diffuse it didn't it?

I think it did in the end.

I think it did.

They held us for a day.

It was terrifying.

Of course, we had guns to our heads.

They questioned us repeatedly, and in the end they ended up letting us go.

You've also been on embeds with the US in Afghanistan, and when you've written about it in your book, I think one gets a sense of the humanity of the soldiers as well as the civilians.

You were embedded, I think with one group for two months, and at the end of that some of those you'd been with were killed.

Correct.

I was embedded with the one hundred and seventy third Airborn in the Corngall Valley, and that was in two thousand and seven, at the time, arguably the most dangerous place in Afghanistan, and we intentionally asked to embed there because we wanted to understand why there were so many civilian casualties in Afghanistan given the incredible technology that the US military had, and so we were very lucky because we were allowed as women to go to sort of the heart of the war and we spent two months with them and witnessed, you know, went on daily patrols six seven hours a day, we were shot at, ambushed, and then at the end we went on Operation Rock Avalanche, which was a battalion wide operation.

We had to jump out of black Hawks in the middle of the night into the heart of Tulliban territory.

And it was really on these missions that you learn what wars about.

It was one of the few times, ironically, in twenty five years of covering conflict that I really felt like I was at the heart of war because you're on the side of the mountain with a group of young American men who are told they're fighting for democracy, and you just sort of see the cost.

You really understand the complete disconnect between the Afghans who didn't want the Americans there and the Americans who thought they were helping the Afghan and young American soldiers dying and Afghanist dying.

So what was it for?

And you don't see those scenes unless you really invest the time.

Did you have those conversations?

I'm wondering what the dynamic is like on an embed when you can clearly see this, because you know Afghanistan and you know how the civilians feel about the presence, and it's evident in the fact that the attacks are taking place.

But do you have those conversations with the soldiers?

Not really.

I mean I think for them at that time, they were sort of despondent because they had been there so long.

It was so incredibly dangerous.

I mean, we were shot at almost every day on every patrol.

They were living in bunkers on the side of a mountain, and everyone was really lonely.

Their personal lives were falling apart, and so they would talk about what are we doing here?

But I think in terms of the greater political context, we never went there.

It was very much about just kind of being there, having the trust of the soldiers, being able to access these embeds in these scenes.

Do you think your presence represents something to them, some kind of assemblance for world outside.

Yeah.

They kept asking us, like, you're really here because you want to be regular.

They could not believe it, and so I think they were very grateful that we were there, that the American public can see their service, could see what they were going through.

I think that for them it's like a validation of what they're doing.

One of the people who was later killed in action, you knew that he was planning to go home and propose to his girlfriend, and you end up photographing Rugel his body bag.

Yeah.

We were ambushed in Operation Rock Avalanche, and it was so chaotic and that we heard that there was man down and I'm photographing, and I realized I had photographed two of the three wounded.

And then as I was making my way to the landing zone where the METAVAC was coming in to take out the wounded, I thought, where's because I knew his call sign and he hadn't come out.

And then I saw the scout team sort of emerging from the dust carrying a body bag.

And it was in that moment that I thought, I can't believe he's dead.

You know, this young man who was so alive and talking about his future and then seeing him be carried in a body bag was really devastating.

And the other soldiers are crying, and then I.

Was crying, of course, because you make that connection, and then you think of his parents, you think of his loved ones, and you think they don't even know yet that they've lost their loved one.

Do you have a struggle with leaving any of that behind at the end of the day because you also need to you must need to compartmentalize, or do you not think of it that way?

Is the emotion part of what makes you a great photographer?

I think a combination.

I mean, I definitely allow myself to feel, and I have, I think, an extraordinary amount of empathy, and that I wish I wasn't so emotional, but I think that it's important, and I think that when I stop feeling, I really need to be worried.

But I also compartmentalize when I go home, because I have to be present for my personal life and I owe it to now my children and my husband to not live in this very dark place of sadness and war all the time.

I carry it with me.

I make it a point to not just forget about things, but I definitely have to compartmentalize so that I can be present.

So we go back in time then to your birth family, your parents, and your sisters when you were growing up.

I think, because you're the youngest of fool, your older sisters have said that they deserve some credit for what you are because they toughened you up.

Yeah, they were really tough on me.

I mean, anyone who has older sisters knows it's generally not an easy path.

We grew up in Connecticut and a very sort of open, eccentric household.

My parents are hairdressers, and we had very few rules at our house growing up.

But my three older sisters, who I'm now very close to, were really tough.

I mean they'd sort of they'd picked me up.

They picked up me, they'd call me names that were constantly slamming the door in my face and telling me I couldn't join in.

And I guess yeah, in a sense, they did.

Dof for me.

You had to go really far from home to carve out your own path.

I feel, yes I did.

But your parents being hairdresses, I mean, I'm thinking headdresses have to be good with people, they have to be able to talk to anyone, And perhaps that is a thread that you've brought into your professional exactly.

It was really a household where we sort of opened our doors to anyone and everyone.

And I think that that made me who I am in terms of being able to walk into any situation not be judgmental, really be able to accept people for who they are and where they're at.

What was the first time you picked up a camera?

How did that happen?

My father gave me a camera when I was about twelve years old.

A client of his gave him a camera, and I remember I had no idea how to use it.

So I started reading all these manuals of like how to photograph and and so I started taking pictures of inanimate objects because I was too shy to approach people.

And then I would sit on the roof and try and photograph the moon.

And it was an awakening for me of sort of a different way of expressing.

But it really wasn't until I graduated and then I started photographing people and really started becoming aware of photojournalism as a way to tell stories.

But you hadn't grown up with photojournalism.

Is that right now?

I think it wasn't a house which had newspapers coming in.

You're not looking at images of like conflicts around the world.

Really, it was not an intellectual family.

We had no books in the house except for the encyclopedias, and so it wasn't until really I went to university and I was determined to do something that was more intellectual, obviously because I grew up in such a creative family, and I studied international relations and I did not want to be a photographer at all.

And then I graduated and the only thing I wanted to do was photograph.

And it wasn't until I realized that you can photojournalism with sort of this great marriage between that it existed and yeah, that it existed, which sounds ridiculous, But if you don't grow up in a family with newspapers and where you're constantly sort of privy to what's happening in the world, why would I have known about photojournalism.

Your craft today?

When you go out on assignment, and you've been on many tough assignments, including Ukraine and recently Sudan and Gaza and other places.

But when you're going out and you presume you want to come back that day with something hug of course, what do you set out Do you set out to think today, I really want to capture a particular kind of scene.

Yeah, are you going with the flow.

No.

I guess what people don't understand it is that photojournalism and being a photographer is not just about taking photos.

There is so much that goes into it.

So as I'm gearing up for a trip, I spend an extraordinary amount of time doing research, updating myself on what's happening right now.

Are you looking for locations or thinking everything?

That hospital is somewhere I'd like to go to.

That kind of person is someone I want to find.

I'm looking for themes.

I'm looking for contacts.

I'm looking for hospitals.

I'm looking for schools.

I'm looking for what is the story of the moment, what is important?

And how can I advance the story?

What's not being told, what's happening to women that is rape being used as a weapon of war.

I'm looking for sort of everything.

So when I finally get on the ground in a country, every day I have a list of things in my head.

I'm making notes, I'm doing reporting on the ground.

I'm constantly updating my shoot list.

And sometimes things are serendipitous.

Sometimes I'll be driving and I'll see this extraordinary scene and I'll stop the car and that might be the photo for the day, But I always have an agenda somewhere.

But that shoot list, when you're thinking about it in advance and making that list, is it visual that you actually have.

Do you think in that way?

Yeah, well I think in words.

Do you think in images?

I think in images.

In Sudan, for example, I knew that food is an issue and there is malnutrition, and so when I'm going in, I know I have to look for a communal kitchen, one of the emergency response rooms, food distribution.

You know, is there some place that I can show that people are starving.

I'm making a list because there are things I've read about.

There are things that I know help comprehensively tell a story, and so it's not just about showing up somewhere and looking for pretty pictures.

There was a day early in the war in Ukraine in February twenty twenty two when you were out and you ended up seeing Themoth immediate Aftomoth actually being almost in the middle of a Russian struggle.

I was evacuated.

Civilians tell me about that day because it led to a famous image that you've taken.

But I want to know the before sure, and the often so it.

Was actually March sixth, twenty twenty two, and at that point the situation in Butucha and Airpine was a bit of a mystery.

Everyone knew the Russians were there.

They had sort of encircled the area.

A lot of civilians started fleeing to Kiev across the broken Earpen bridge.

The bridge had been broken intentionally by the Ukrainian forces to stop the Russian advance, and so I had seen these photographs of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians leaving Bucha and Eirpeine across the bridge the day before, and I didn't know about it, and I was really upset with myself because it was a really important moment in the conflict, and so I made a plan to go the following morning, and it felt incredibly tense, and I had been worn that there was shelling on the other side of the bridge, and so we took cover behind this wall near the bridge, and we were photographing civilians leaving, and it was a known civilian evacuation route.

So when the first mortar round came in, I thought, well, the Russians know this is all civilians, so they won't kill them.

Because of course, putin had said repeatedly, we are not targeting civilians, and so my security advisor said, would you like to leave?

And I said, no, no, no, they're not going to target this.

This is all women and children and elderly.

And so I was shooting and then another round came in a bit closer, and so we dove for cover behind the cement wall, and almost immediately a third round came in and landed with like twenty meters between me and the family, and I saw the flash of the round.

The mortar round hit the pavement and it was a ball of flames, and dove behind this wall and when I popped up, I thought that it was a soldier that had been knocked down, because they were calling for a medic.

And as I approached, I realized that there were children.

I mean, I first noticed these moon boots and I thought, I can't believe there was a family.

And I'm scanning the scene and I'm shooting, and there's still rounds coming in, so I know I have to work quickly.

Of course, my instinct is to leave, but I don't want to leave because I've just witnessed what I thought was a war crime, and so I'm shooting, and then I work my way around the scene and I see the faces, and I'm thinking to myself, the New York Times will never publish civilians who have been killed.

But I have to document this just for the sake of documentation, and I'm trying to do it in a respectful way, in a way that's dignified.

Of course, I don't know if the family is dead or alive.

And then we have to run away because there rounds still coming in.

And when I get back to the car, I called my editor and I said, I've just waitness this, and I'll send you photographs if they're in focus.

Of course, I had no idea if I'd even properly made pictures, because I was still in shock.

And the New York Times did make a decision to run the photos on the front page on the house floor they were used.

They went sort of viral, just to prove that civilians were being targeted.

Why was that so exceptional to publish those pictures, because these are culpses.

These are faces of corpses that are visible the picture.

In my many years of covering war, it is always a huge debate whether to publish the dead, especially when their faces are identifiable.

In this case, I tried to shoot in a way where their faces were not, but it wasn't very graphic.

It looked as if everyone was sleeping they had been knocked over by the sheer impact of the blast, that we had only been spared because actually the blast went in their direction and not our direction.

You said you were shocked, but we also angry.

Oh, I mean I was angry.

I was upset.

In the documentary, you can hear me cursing because I didn't even realize that Andre, my colleague, had been shooting the whole time.

And so I somehow convinced myself from the time we got into the car to back to the hotel, that actually it wasn't really a close call, that we were fine.

We were quite a distance.

And when I got back to the hotel, Clarissa Ward, who's the CNN correspondent, messaged me and said, are you okay?

And I said, yeah, I'm fine.

She said I saw the attack.

I said, how did you see the attack?

And she said Andre posted it on Facebook.

And my heart sort of sank because then I realized my family will have seen it, perhaps my children will have seen it, and I realized it actually was as close as I thought it was.

In a situation like that, if you'll editor whoever you're trying to sell the pictures to says, actually, we're not going to use that for whatever reason, maybe even sometimes because it's not interesting enough in the brutal realities of the way New covered.

What does that do to you?

Well, I mean, on these assignments, I can't do anything, really, I mean ethically, I have to just say okay.

In this case, I was terrified they would say that.

And because I had survived the attack and I knew that it was intentional targeting, I really went to bat because this was a situation where I actually witnessed bracketing of mortar rounds onto a civilian evacuation route, and so for me it was very important to publish these pictures.

I want to ask you to put on your headphones and listen to something that you said a few years before that, And it was when you had been in Libya in twenty eleven and you had been held hostage by Gadaffi's troops in really difficult circumstances, and after you had come out of that, you went on CNN and you were asked whether these kinds of risks and realities of your work were worth it.

When I was blind for it and bound and getting punched in the face, I said, why do I do this?

Who cares about Libya?

Why do I care about Libya?

You know, these are questions I asked myself repeatedly.

I do it because I believe in it.

I do it because I think our policy makers need to have a first hand view of what's happening on the ground to make informed decisions.

I think it's very important.

But is it worth my life?

Is it worth doing this to the people I love?

It's a difficult question.

They were traumatic days.

I can see that from the descriptions you've given before.

But how can you encapsulate what happened in those eight days after you abducted in twenty eleven with other journalists?

Yeah, I was taken hostage with three other journalists for the New York Times, three men.

We were blindfolded, tied up, beaten up.

As the only woman, I was groped repeatedly by numerous men.

And the most terrifying thing about being in captivity is that you have no idea what will come next, and so it's really about getting through minute by minute and can I survive being punched in the face and groped and breathed on punched in the face.

Yeah.

There was a moment in the very beginning of the captivity where they tied me up and put me in a vehicle on the front line, and they were sort of laughing at us because we were literally held on the front line while bullets and bombs were kind of raining around us in the crossfire.

And at one point a soldier came over and sat next to me, and I thought, very stupidly that he was going to offer me water, because even in Iraq when we were held hostage, they were quite kind to us.

You know, they weren't beating us.

I mean, the bar is low, but you know, they weren't beating us, and they were giving us water.

And so in Libya when he sat next to me, I looked at him and I thought, Okay, he's going to offer me water, and instead he pulled his fist back and just punched me square in the face.

And I'm tied up, and I remember just putting my head down and actually seeing stars like in the cartoons, and my first thought was, oh, that's where the cartoons get the stars from.

And then I thought, I can't believe this man has just punched me in the face a bound woman, and so I just started crying.

And you don't want to make any noise because you don't want to offend anyone.

So I was being very quiet and I just put my head down and tears were rolling down my face.

And then he just walked away, and another man came over and put his cell phone to my ear, and his wife was on the phone and she said you are a dog and I said no, actually, I'm a journalist and she said you are a donkey and I said, no, Sahafa journalist.

And it was mock executions.

It was threatened constantly with tonight we will kill you.

There were moments where one soldier had a gun to my face and he was caressing my cheek with his finger, saying tonight we will kill you.

I mean, it was just a constant barrage of fear and emotions.

And you're hearing your coagues being beaten up, yeah, exactly all the time as well.

I know you lost colleagues in other incidents in Libya, and I remember being there in May of twenty eleven, close to where you were that day, but filming a documentary, so away from the front line.

But I remember being in a hotel where there was a note saying, if anyone knows where the possessions of Tim Heatherington are, please let us know.

And this was someone you know, you'd been with him, another journalist who was killed in that period.

But I remember the effect on me because I knew him only by name, but seeing that little note on the wall and thinking he stayed in this hotel and one day he went out and he didn't come back and people are looking for his things.

It was such a tiny detail, but it just made you think of the days when everything changes.

Yeah, I mean Tim and I were together in the cornngall.

Actually we covered Operation Rock Avalanche together.

In Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan that we spoke about and made a film about it.

Yeah, he made an incredible film about it, Ristreppo, that's worth watching.

Tim was an incredible photographer.

He was a very thinking photographer, very sensitive, and on his way into Libya, he had been emailing me asking for advice on what the frontline was like, how to cover it, what he needed to bring.

And then I of course went missing and he came in while I was in captivity, and so we never actually saw each other.

And when I got out, I was dealing with my trauma of what we had been through.

And then about a month after we had been released, I was in a meeting actually, and I looked at my phone and I got a message that he had been killed, along with Chris Hondros, who was another incredible photographer, and their death sent me into this tailspin that my own captivity had not.

And I think a lot of it had to do with survivor's guilt.

You know, why do some people live and some people don't?

You know, nothing really makes sense in those moments, and there's no reason why we should be alive after Libya.

I mean, there were so many moments where we should have been dead, and then they got killed, and so you have to ask yourself why you survive and others don't.

It's a really tough question, do you ask yourself?

Yeah, because it's an impossible one to answer, so you're sort of torturing yourself by asking it.

Yeah, I asked myself.

I asked myself in the same vein that I ask myself why I'm so driven to do this work, despite the costs, despite the sort of emotional toll and the fallout on my loved ones.

You've got young sons, and in the film we see you bathing the little one, and he says, do you have to go away like this?

And please?

Can you only go away for one day or three days?

And you're trying to explain to him that some of the places you go a really far away but that's really hard.

It's really hard.

It's so hard.

I mean, keep going away, you do, keep going back to these really tough places.

I do.

And he keeps asking me those questions.

Now he's six, and even the thirteen year old, who will be fourteen, they both ask me all the time.

Why do you have to go?

Lucas says, is it dangerous?

Is there fighting?

What do you say to is it dangerous?

I say it's dangerous, but I know how to stay safe.

And you know I don't go to where it's too dangerous.

Is that true?

Look, there's an unpredictability in war, you never know, but there's also an unpredictability in life.

I believe in this work, and I believe this is where I need to be, and I hope that my children can learn from that dedication.

Would you have gone to Gaza, for example, if journalists had been allowed, Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

And I think I, like every international journalist and war correspondent, really struggles with the fact that no international media has been allowed Indagaza.

And I think that for any of us who dedicate our lives to this work, the tools we have to dealing with witnessing this trauma and witnessing this devastation is to go and do something, to go and at least be a platform for the people on the ground, at least provide a voice for them, and to have those tools taken away is incredibly debilitating.

Palestinian journalists have been documenting the war at great cost, and they die, Yeah, some of them targeted exactly Vira over two hundred.

Do you think that there's been enough solidarity with them, the fact that this is the deadliest period I'm documented for the last thirty years for journalists Palestinian I hope.

So.

I think we can only amplify their voices, and we can also point out the incredible work they've been doing.

I think that we can point out the fact that many journalists have been killed and targeted and hope that it's not with impunity.

Hope that at some point there will be someone called to be responsible for this.

I think the fact that most Palestinian journalists are sort of dismissed as being part of Hamas, which is ridiculous, and for us to stand up, as in national journalists, to say no, these are accredited journalists.

These are people risking their lives to bring the world the truth.

Can we talk, lindsay about images and what you've seen over your career because you began your work in the age before social media, and the fact that we live in a world where people scroll from one short form video to another, you know, videos roll into each other.

That how many people consume information and news for that matter.

What does that mean for your work?

Yeah, it's a very different thing.

Because when I first covered conflict, we were the only way that a story could get out.

People really relied on us to tell their stories.

The responsibility felt even greater.

Now we're in a situation where people can disseminate their own stories.

We're sort of inundated by images and reporting.

I think the main thing that we have to be conscious of is it's so important to understand where you're getting your information, and so when you see something on social media, no one cannot automatically take it as truth.

And now in the age of AI, it's hard to verify images.

You cannot just look at an image and know that it's reality.

And so I think that the role of journalists is more important than ever because we really have a responsibility to make sure we're doing our job as responsible journalists, that we're doing the fact checking, we're getting the facts straight.

And I think that it is it's very important.

Is it harder for an image that you or anyone else takes to have lasting impact?

I'm remembering the National Geographic cover with the young, nasty instant mc curry, Yeah, that's right, and then the image of the refugee child drowned.

The beach and Vietnam you'll mention.

So images like that, which you and I both remember.

Is it harder now, when again, we have so much coming in for anything to have that kind of impact?

Well, I don't know, you know, Eilon CURTI was at a time where we did have social media already and that image rose.

To the top, But it was before TikTok, it.

Was it was before TikTok, But I think we were at that point already inundated by images.

You know, there were so many images from the refugee crisis coming out, and that image was so poignant because of the position of that little boy, the fact that he looked like he was sleeping.

He could have been any one of our children.

It's very difficult with images because people need to find a window to relate.

They need to find a way into an image, and so if it's too graphic, often people will turn away because it's too hard right now, especially right now.

And do you think of that as you're taking the picture?

I do you think of that?

Have to frame it slightly differently, to almost sanitize it a bit.

No, what I do is I'll shoot in many different ways.

I mean, I will shoot the sort of pure graphicness, and I will also just shoot.

I'll try to make it more palatable.

I'll try to make an image that I think the public in the handle and that the New York Times will actually publish, because most people will not.

Publish an image that is gratuitously graphic.

But what is the change you've seen?

I'm wondering if the appetite for the graphic image is less now.

Well, I think the appetite is less, but actually the tolerance is more because we see so many graphic images.

If you look at the images that have come out of Gaza, I mean they're horrific, because what's happening there is horrific.

I mean you see children being pulled from the rubble, you see mothers over their children.

There's no end to the horrors we see coming out of Gaza.

It's not to say that those images will be published in print, but they certainly are out there, and I think we as a public are used to seeing them over and over.

And that's a pretty devastating place to be, you know, where we are at a place where I can look at an image and say that is the most horrible thing I've ever seen, But actually I saw that same image yesterday.

In these interviewes, I normally ask people about their weekends, but I feel like with you, it's yeah, you're laughing because I get it, Like it's not a week day, what's a weekend?

But is there a key dividing line between being on assignment and being at home?

Is that the fundamental dividing again in your life.

Yeah, when I'm working, there are no weekends, obviously, and when i'm home, I'm still working all the time.

But I do try to carve out time with my kids.

Sometimes my thirteen year old wants nothing to do with me anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

But I'm there and I'm cooking for them, and I'm trying to be present.

But the work doesn't stop because you're doing the captions and you're processing the images, and you're probably thinking about the next the next assignment.

I'm planning the next assignment and I'm writing another book right now, so that's taking up a lot of time.

And you exercise.

We see exercising in the film, and it really made me think about the level of physical fitness that is not nice to have.

It's essential for your job.

It is.

I mean, most people who do my job are men, most of them are young men, and so I am in my fifties and I have to be fit.

I have to be able to carry gear, I have to be able to run with it.

I have to just not let my physical fitness ever get in the way of work.

How do you switch off?

I switch off when I'm with my friends and family, you know, I make a conscious effort to come home from six weeks in Ukraine and throw a dinner party for twenty five people because it makes me happy.

I mean, it makes me happy, but I mean the complexities of human life and your domestic life and human arrangements that can be messy in a way that perhaps when you're on assignment you're in a certain mode.

Well, when I'm on assignment, I try not to think too much about my kids and my family because then I feel like it will affect too much the decisions I'm making on the ground, and I have to really stay focused, and so I'm not facetiming with my kids every day.

I'm not talking to my husband.

I'm trying not to be too distracted by my kids.

Really, But when you picture them, because you do think visually, when you picture the home life, the perfect weekend, the perfect home moment, what do you see?

What's the image in your mind's eye, just sort of me in the kitchen, cooking or baking, and the kids coming in and out doing their thing.

We have a very unconventional life, much like how I was raised, because we let the kids have a fair amount of freedom in deciding how they want to spend their weekends.

But your life has these two extremes, yeah, does, and you that's the way you want it.

I presume I don't really have a choice.

I mean, I think when I decided to have a family, that meant living between two very dramatic extremes, and it meant sort of being torn always between these two worlds.

Lindsay Adara, thank you, thank you, thank you.

And that's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week.

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