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" As a woman, I have tried to take advantage of the extra access I have in the Muslim world: with Muslim women, for example. Many people underestimate women in that part of the world because, typically, they don't work. "

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" Since Sept. 11, many of the wars of our generation are in the Muslim world. So as a woman, I have access to 50 percent of the population that my male colleagues don't. "

Lynsey Addario

World

Colleagues

Woman

" By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years. "

" I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan. "

" I try not to get caught up in how our society is so inundated with images, and stay very focused on the work that I'm doing. "

" The more I photographed Muslim women, the more I was able to metaphorically strip away the burqas and hijabs, and start chipping away at the profound misconceptions that existed in other parts of the world about these women and their culture. "

Lynsey Addario

Culture

Away

" To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single image. "

Lynsey Addario

Story

People

" I'm constantly struggling. You know, the stories that I feel like I could cover, do the work that I want to do and being a mother. That's really where my struggle is - and being a wife and having a life - and for me it's really hard to find that balance. I'm always struggling to find that balance. "

Lynsey Addario

Work

Life

" I'm not very religious at all - I was raised Catholic, but probably haven't gone to church since my Holy Communion when I was about 6 or 7. "

" I was lucky because I had parents who have enabled me to do whatever I was passionate about and never held my siblings and me back from anything. But I think a lot of people don't have that experience. "

" For me, it's more about being there, bearing witness to history, bearing witness to what's happening, what our country, the position our country is taking overseas. I want policy-makers to see the fruits of their decisions, basically, and to try and influence foreign policy. "

Lynsey Addario

Try

Influence

" In a place like Afghanistan where the society is completely segregated, women have access to women. Men cannot always photograph women and cannot get the access that I get. "

Lynsey Addario

Society

Place

" I come from a big family of hairdressers; they didn't read newspapers. I would say, 'I'm off to Afghanistan...' and they would say, 'Have fun!' "

" The Taliban rose to power in 1996, vowing stability and an end to the violence raging across the country between warring mujahedeen factions, and to implement rule by Sharia law, or strict Islamic rule. "

" I had first visited Kurdistan in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq, camping out in Erbil and Sulaimaniya while waiting for Saddam Hussein's fall. "

" You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint in a war zone, and each is a gamble. The first is to stop and identify yourself as a journalist and hope that you are respected as a neutral observer. The second is to blow past the checkpoint and hope the soldiers guarding it don't open fire on you. "

" Becoming a mother hasn't necessarily changed how I shoot, but it certainly has made me more sensitive, and it certainly makes it much harder for me to photograph dying children. "

Lynsey Addario

Mother

Shoot

" I think it's important to have perspective and to look at what you don't necessarily want to see. "

" With each assignment, I weigh the looming possibility of being killed, and I chastise myself for allowing fear to hinder me. War photographers aren't supposed to get scared. "

" As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away. "

" I didn't want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news. "

" As a Western woman in the Middle East, I am often put in a different category. I am sort of like the third sex. I am not treated like a man. I am not treated like a woman. I am just treated like a journalist. That is usually really helpful. "

" My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time. "

" The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires. "

" I think when I started going to war zones and started covering humanitarian issues, it became a calling because I realized I had a voice, and I can give people without a voice a voice... and now it is something that sits inside of me every day. "

" Journalists dedicate their lives to covering war - they make many personal sacrifices, and it's not something that's gender-based. In a place like Libya where there's heavy fighting, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. "

" I was undeterred by the danger of traveling as a single American woman through Taliban-governed land. I believed in the stories I wanted to tell, the stories I felt were underreported, and I was convinced that that belief would keep me alive. "

Lynsey Addario

Belief

Woman

" Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women. "

" I wanted to continue doing my work, but I had to figure out how. And so what I have basically come up with is that I still go to Afghanistan and Iraq and South Sudan and many of these places that are rife with war, but I don't go directly to the front line. "

" My strength is looking for composition and light, and I think those things come in the quieter times of war or photographing people affected on the margins of war - civilians, refugees; that is where I really excel. "

" I never went to school for photography and started when I was pretty young. I was somewhere around 12 or 13. I started photographing as a hobby and carried that hobby through high school and university. "