Lynsey Addario

I started freelancing for the Associated Press. I had a great mentor there who sort of taught me everything.

I got rejected from journalism school!

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.

Sometimes when I am photographing a major news event, I am suddenly overwhelmed by helplessness.

One day I am at home, watching dramatic images of Iraqi Yazidis fleeing for their lives being aired nonstop on 24-hour news channels. Days later, I am there, staring at tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis and feeling a 35-millimeter frame cannot capture the scope of devastation and heartbreak before me.

I grew up in Connecticut, going in and out of New York City, and I worked in the city in the '90s. I was freelancing for the Associated Press, and I fell in love with New York.

I'm not the kind of person to sit and dwell for ages on something that happened. I go through something, I experience it, I try to learn from it, and I move forward.

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.

A lot of women act like it's the easiest decision, and I'm just going to have a baby and put my life on hold and not be worried about it. Well, I was worried.

If I'm doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I'll go to her tent; I'll follow her when she's working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.

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.

I think there were times when I first started out, when I was covering Iraq - I was basically living there in 2003 and 2004 - that car bombs and attacks became so the norm that it was weird for me to leave and realize that no one else actually cared about what was going on there.