Lynsey Addario, Photographer

Lynsey Addario

is a photojournalist who has traveled to many conflict zones. She has been to numerous countries in Africa, the Middle East

and South Asia. She often focuses on the situations of women in these places, where

violence or poverty are part of daily life. Since 2000, while still under the Taliban rule, she has been to Afghanistan on many occasions.

The work Veiled Rebellion is photo essay exploring the lives of women in Afghanistan. The series was featured in the December issue of the

National Geographic. She has received numerous awards.

Lynsey is a self-taught photographer. While covering the unrest in Lybia she was captured by the troops of Ghaddafi for six days.

The following images come from the series Women at War and Veiled Rebellion.

Lynsey Addario

Women at War

Blackhawk Pilot, CW2 Jessie Russell, with the United States Army MEDEVAC unit with the 82nd Airborne, Charlie Company, out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, prepares to fly in Helmand Province of Afghanistan, December 1, 2009.

United States Marine with Female Engagement Teams attached to the 2-2, Corporal Lisa Gardner, takes the vitals of a group of Afghan women in Lakari village during a medical outreach in Helmand, Southern Afghanistan, May 3, 2010. Most Afghan women in Helmand are not able to leave their homes, and are not able to be treated by male doctors as per cultural restrictions, so Corporal Gardner assists by taking the vitals of the women, notes the symptoms, and passes everything to Dr. Lt. Morrell for a rough diagnosis, and then hands out medication for treatment.

United States Marines with Female Engagement Teams attached to the 3-1 Marines, Lance Corp Darlene Diaz, 20, from Belvedere, IL, washes up in the morning at the makeshift sinks at Cop Sher, in Helmand, Afghanistan, May 2, 2010. The female marines are attached to infantry batallians and are operating in teams throughout Helmand, and living on remote bases with Marine infantrymen.

Capt. Emily Naslund, 27 who commands the female Marines while in Helmand Province, aimed her weapon while shots were fired on a patrol in Sistane. The female marines, who have been closer to combat than most other women in the war, have encountered a tougher fight than many would have expected.

Lt. Amy Zaycek, center, a nurse attached to the Marines in southern Afghanistan, worked out with other soldiers next to a field hospital run by the military in Helmand Province.

Anesthesiologist Rupa Danier, with the United States Navy attached to the Marines in Southern Afghanistan works out beside the Level II trauma hospital at a base in Helmand Province of Afghanistan, December 2009.

United States Marines, Cpl. Christina Oliver, 25, right, takes off her helmet to show she is a female as a Female Engagement Team is invited by an Afghan girl into their family home in Sistani Village during an operation to clear out Taliban from the area in preparation for parlimentary elections in Southern Marja, Afghanistan, September 15, 2010.

United States Marines with the Female Engagement Teams, Lance Corporal April Whitham, 27, and LC Elisabeth Reyes, 20, visit with Afghan women and their children at the clinic in Now Zad, in Northern Helmand, May 8, 2010. The Female Engagement teams recently helped cordon off part of the clinic to enable Afghan women and men separate sitting areas.

United States Marine, Cpl. Christina Oliver, 25, left, and Lance Cpl. Stephanie Robertson, right, members of the Female Engagement Teams attached to Second Batallian, 6th Marine Regiment, search an Afghan women at a check-point during an operation through Sistani Village to clear out Taliban from the area in preparation for parlimentary elections in Southern Marja, Afghanistan, September 15, 2010.

United States Marines, Lance Cpl. Stephanie Robertson, 20, second from right, and Cpl. Christina Oliver, 25, right, members of the Female Engagement Teams attached to Second Batallian, 6th Marine Regiment, attend a debrief with Fox Company after an operation to clear out Taliban from Sistani village in preparation for parlimentary elections in Southern Marja, Afghanistan, September 15, 2010.

Lt. Amy Zaycek, a nurse attached to the Marines in southern Afghanistan, shaved her legs between shift at a field hospital run by the military in Helmand Province.Dec.4.2009

United States Marine, Lance Cpl. Stephanie Robertson, 20, a member of a Female Engagement Team attached to Second Batallian, 6th Marine Regiment, watches 'Finding Nemo' on her laptop at a forward operating base for Fox company in Southern Marja, Afghanistan, September 15, 2010.

CW2 Pilot Jesse Russell, 34, with the 82nd Airborne, takes a nap while on call as a Medevac pilot at a base in Helmand province in Afghanistan, November 30, 2009. Russell is on her second tour in Afghanistan, and is a senior pilot in the military. Women are increasingly on the frontlines throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

HM2 Corpsman Elena Woods, 24, a U.S. Marines with the female engagement team, FET, cleans her gun after returning from a forward operating base at Camp Delhi, in Helmand province, Afghanistan.

United States Marines, Lance Cpl. Stephanie Robertson, 20, a member of the Female Engagement Teams attached to Second Batallian, 6th Marine Regiment, patrols through Sistani Village during an operation to clear out Taliban from the area in preparation for parlimentary elections in Southern Marja, Afghanistan, September 15, 2010.

U.S. Marine, Master Sgt. Julia Watson with the Civil Affairs unit attached to the 2/2 Marines, visits local projects that Afghans would like completed with the help of funds from the military and USAID in the district of Mian Poshteh in Helmand province, Afghanistan.

U.S. Marine, Master Sgt. Julia Watson with the Civil Affairs unit attached to the 2/2 Marines, is approached by Afghan women as she patrols through Zanzir village, in the district of Mian Poshteh, Helmand province, Afghanistan.

United States marine with the Female Engagement Team, Corporal Diana Amaya, 23, assists an Afghan woman and her grandchildren onto the base for medical treatment at the Cop Sher military base in Mian Poshteh, Southern Helmand, Afghanistan, May 6, 2010.

Lynsey Addario

Veiled Rebellion

Afghan women suffer under the constraints of tribalism,

poverty, and war. Now they are starting to fight for a just life.

In Labor on the RoadI saw two women on the side of the mountain, in burkas and without a man. In Afghanistan you seldom see an unaccompanied woman. Noor Nisa, about 18, was pregnant; her water had just broken. Her husband, whose first wife had died during childbirth, was determined to get Noor Nisa to the hospital in Faizabad, a four-hour drive from their village in Badakhshan Province. His borrowed car broke down, so he went to find another vehicle. I ended up taking Noor Nisa, her mother, and her husband to the hospital, where she delivered a baby girl. My interpreter, who is a doctor, and I were on a mission to photograph maternal health and mortality issues, only to find the entire story waiting for us along a dusty Afghan road.

Unafraid to RallyMy first time in Afghanistan, the Taliban ruled the country. The only women on the street were beggars—usually widows or wives of disabled men. On many Fridays the Taliban performed public executions at the sports stadium in Kabul. Ten years later, at a rally for a presidential candidate in the same stadium, women participated—some in burkas, some not. In this picture, the women who did not want to be photographed covered their faces.

An Emerald BrideIt's very delicate to photograph an Afghan wedding. The women are unveiled and often wear revealing dresses and heavy makeup. They are reluctant to share these images with the outside world. At this Kabul wedding the bride is Fershta, 18. She wears a green dress for the ceremony—a color associated with prosperity and paradise in Islamic tradition. The groom is Amin Shaheen, son of film director Salim Shaheen. The sober expression on his wife's face reflects the fact that marriage is an enormous milestone in an Afghan woman's life, not just a celebratory event.

Bibi Aisha was 19 when I met her in Kabul's Women for Afghan Women shelter in November 2009. Her husband beat her from the day she was married, at age 12. When he beat her so badly she thought she might die, she escaped to seek a neighbor's help. To punish her for leaving without permission, her husband, who is a Taliban fighter, took her to a remote spot in the mountains. Several men held her while he cut off her nose, ears, and hair. She screamed—to no avail. "If I had the power, I would kill them all," she told me. I wanted to be strong for Aisha to give her hope she would be fine again. But when she described that moment, I began to cry. Aisha arrived in the U.S. in August for extensive reconstructive surgery.

On-air disc jockey Rokhsar Azamee, idolized by young Afghan girls, works a TV call-in show featuring song requests. Banned under the Taliban, television now has a huge audience, and Azamee's show is one of the reasons. Several popular programs currently feature women.

A male Ethiopian surgeon (wearing a green cap, at center left) shows the female staff at Malalai Maternity Hospital in Kabul how to repair a fistula—an abnormal hole between the vagina and bladder or rectum that can lead to infection and incontinence. The condition often occurs during childbirth in young mothers whose pelvises are not fully developed. If the problem isn't corrected with surgery, a woman is typically seen as bringing shame upon the family and is shunned by her husband.

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A Teacher's TrekAll village women are invited to come to health and hygiene classes taught by a traveling midwife—wearing a white hijab and glasses in this photograph. She works for a mobile clinic sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund and the international medical relief group Merlin, which brings pre- and postnatal care to women in isolated villages like this one in northeastern Badakhshan Province. She travels with a male nurse, who gives routine checkups to the kids

This mother walked five hours to see a midwife at a mobile outreach clinic in the village of Koreh-e Bala. She waits outside a family compound for medical advice about her ten-month-old baby, who has been sick since birth.

Afghan policewomen handle AMD-65 rifles at a dusty firing range outside Kabul. They are trained by carabinieri, Italian military police from the local NATO troops. Joining the police force is a bold decision for an Afghan woman. Insurgents often attack the police. Very few women get permission to sign up from their husband and male relatives. Of 100,000 officers, only about 700 are female. Yet women are welcome recruits. They can take on tasks that men cannot because of Islamic custom: frisking other women, searching homes where female family members are present. Many who take the job are widows of fallen officers cast in the role of breadwinner. The pay is about $165 a month.

These young Afghan women are part of a team that will compete at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, where women's boxing will debut as an official sport. The athletes triumphed just by getting their families to sign on to the idea of their daughters participating in sports. During matches in public venues, the members of the Oxfam-supported team, now competing in South Asia, cover their hair with hijab worn beneath their head guards. That's not a problem for the International Boxing Association, as long as the boxer's face is clearly visible. Here, practicing indoors in Kabul, they can go bareheaded.

These two girls have been dressed up and made up for a relative's wedding in Kabul. Many Afghan women and girls put on makeup and spend hours at the hair salon for such an occasion. Young girls are able to show off their makeovers. But once a girl arrives at the age of puberty, she masks herself from men with a burka or hijab.

With face, hair, and arms in full view, actress Trena Amiri chauffeurs a friend around Kabul on a Friday. She blasts her favorite songs off a cassette and shimmies and sings along, tapping the steering wheel as she dances in the driver's seat. Even in relatively progressive Kabul, men and women glare, honk, and scream at her. It provokes men in Afghanistan to see strong women. It symbolizes a freedom they just aren't comfortable with. Amiri fled her husband of seven years, who, she says, kept her home and beat her. She left her three sons behind. She doesn't plan to remarry but knows she might have to in order to survive in Afghanistan, where women are dependent on men for so many things. When I ask about her current boyfriend, whose name is on the gold bracelet around her wrist, she says she couldn't marry him: "He won't let me act anymore, and I want to continue my art."

A female inmate at a Mazar-e Sharif prison has just been released, prompting Maida-Khal, 22, to cry out because she is still trapped in her cell. When Maida-Khal was 12, she was married to a man of about 70 who was paralyzed. "I was so young, I couldn't carry him because he was so heavy, so his brothers would beat me," she recalls. When she asked for a divorce four years ago, she was imprisoned. "I am in jail because I don't have a mahram [male guardian]. I can't get a divorce, and I can't leave prison without a man." She says, with remarkable understatement, "I have had a difficult life."

Empty opium pods litter the home of a woman addicted to the drug in northern Afghanistan’s Balkh Province. She says she collected the opium harvest as a child, became addicted at age 12, and has eaten and smoked the drug ever since. "Opium is my son, is my daughter," she says. "All winter I didn't have food. Opium was my food." Now she relies on neighbors to look after her. Afghanistan supplies most of the world's opium, used to make heroin. A 2010 survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that one million Afghans between age 15 and 68—8 percent of the population—are addicted to drugs. The number of opium users has risen by more than 50 percent since 2005, to 230,000.

"I took the bottle of petrol and burned myself," Fariba, who is 11 and lives in Herat, told me. "When I returned to school, the kids made fun of me. They said I was ugly." She now says, "I regret my mistake." The reasons for her action are unclear; Fariba claimed a woman came to her in her dreams and told her to burn herself. Many Afghan women burn themselves because they believe suicide is the only escape from an abusive marriage, abusive family members, poverty, or the stress of war. If they do survive, women fear being shamed or punished for what they did and may blame a gas explosion when they were cooking. Doctors know when the burns were intentional from their shape, location, and smell.

In Esteqlal Hospital in Kabul, doctors tried to save 15-year-old Zahra, who had doused herself with petrol and set herself on fire after she was accused of stealing from her neighbors. The teenager, from Mazar-e Sharif, suffered burns over 95 percent of her body. She died three days after I took this picture.

Gulam Farouq, a soldier in the Afghan National Army, hands out bread to Afghan widows and other women outside the shrine to Sufi poet and philosopher Kwaja Abdullah Ansari in Herat. In a country with 35 percent unemployment and 36 percent of people living below the poverty line, Afghan soldiers and police officers typically collect donations from visitors in the area around the shrine and pass them on to the poor and the disabled.

Lance Cpl. Elisabeth Reyes of the U.S. Marine Corps chats with Afghan women and their children at a clinic in Helmand Province, located in the south and considered one of the country's most dangerous areas. She is a member of the relatively new female engagement teams that accompany all-male foot patrols. These teams communicate with, and try to gain the trust of, Afghan women, who are not allowed to speak to men outside of their family in this conservative region. Reyes and other team members helped cordon off part of a clinic in the district of Now Zad to provide separate treatment areas for the sexes.

Many girls in Afghanistan get no education at all. Even those who do enroll in a school typically study for just four years. So these members of Kabul University's class of 2010 are definitely in the minority. Wearing hijab under their mortarboards and seated in separate rows from their male peers, the women pictured are graduates of the department of language and literature. The Taliban had banned the education of women, but classes resumed after the regime fell in 2001. This graduation was held under tight security at a hotel in Kabul because of an upsurge in terrorist attacks.

In Herat the shrine to Shahzada Qasim, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, is more than a thousand years old. One day of each week a section is partitioned so women can come to worship. Cordoned off to create a sanctuary for women, these prayer sections seem to me like some of the safest, most intimate places in the country. The women at the shrine in Herat are enveloped in chadors that cover them from head to foot, influenced by the style favored in neighboring Iran. In this shrine and in shrines throughout Afghanistan, some of the women weep uncontrollably. I always wonder why they are crying. Perhaps because of the deeply emotional nature of public prayer and the holiness of the place?

An Afghan holds her sick daughter before Dr. Zubeida, a midwife from the mobile health unit funded by UNFPA , as she inquires about her daughter's condition as Zubeida offers pre-natal and anti-natal care, and are given counseling by in Charmas Village, a remote area of Badakshan, Afghanistan, August 9, 2009. Afghanistan, a country with little infrastructure, few clinics or hospitals, and dismal roads leading to many villages, has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. Restricted access, coupled with a culture that keeps women at home, and subsequently often out of hospitals, leads to a staggering number of maternal deaths per year.

Heart of darkness: New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario stands near the frontline during a pause in the fighting March 11 2011 in Ras Lanuf, Libya

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