‘Free Solo’ Helmers’ Doc on Photog Lynsey Addario

American Pulitzer prize-winning conflict photographer Lynsey Addario is profiled in Love + War, a rock-solid documentary feature and the latest collaboration between filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who made doc Free Solo and the biographical drama Nyad together. Assembled from the rich pickings of Addario’s own still photography plus material shot by photojournalists she collaborates with (such as Ukrainian Andriy Dubchak) and Thorsten Thielow, Love + War‘s credited DP, this offers a visually harrowing but often ravishing record of some of the many conflicts Addario has covered over the years. That includes the ongoing war in Ukraine, where an early photo of hers became the first evidence of Russian forces targeting civilians, and before that Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya (where she was kidnapped along with three other journalists) and many others.  

But what’s quite novel about this work, as opposed to any number of well-made docs about (mostly male) war photographers, is that it directly addresses how Addario’s job impacts her as a mother. In sequences many working parents will relate to, Addario talks about the guilt she feels while abroad over leaving her two young sons at home in London with their father, journalist Paul de Bendern, and then feeling guilt when she’s home for not being at the front line. Sure, married male parents feel such guilt as well, but few of them are ever asked on a stage, as we see here, whether they would consider quitting their job for the sake of their children.

Meanwhile, Thielow’s camera captures her kids in tender moments, clinging to her or sometimes discombobulated by their mother’s absence. Both she and de Bendern are remarkably candid in front of the camera, as are Addario’s three sisters, her mother and her father and stepfather (married to her dad) back in the U.S. as they recollect the ambition that seems to have motivated Lynsey from childhood onward. At one point, a colleague describes her and another female journalist as “hard as woodpecker lips,” a turn of phrase that’s apt but perhaps not entirely a compliment.

Meanwhile, even though for years she’s resisted letting her gender define her in relation to work, Addario reflects on how her being a woman enabled her to get access to women-only spaces. For example, she can interview and photograph women in Afghanistan living under Taliban rule, and shoot a story in impoverished Sierra Leone, where lack of medical provision means she ends up seeing a woman die after giving birth. The latter story wins justified acclaim, and in the final moments of the film it’s mentioned that after some pharmaceutical executives saw the resulting article, they pledged to commit more to maternal health in the area to prevent such tragedies in the future.   

Deftly edited by Keiko Deguchi and Hypatia Porter, Love + War condenses a lot of intense material into a running time that feels longer than its 90-odd minutes, not because it drags but because the images are so harrowing at times. There are moments when some viewers might long for a little more detachment and aesthetic assessment, especially from the likes of photography editor Kathy Ryan of The New York Times Magazine, who is in a position to describe what’s so distinctive about Addario’s talent. She notes, for instance, that it’s important that Addario chooses to shoot in color instead of black and white, and I for one would have liked to hear more about these sort of technical decisions.

But those are minor quibbles over what’s a remarkably strong work, one that many viewers will find themselves planning to show their own daughters (and sons) to inspire bravery on a level practiced by Addario and her colleagues.