Love+War (15)
Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi 
★★★

THIS documentary chronicles New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario’s ascent in the male-dominated world of conflict photography. Her work is dangerous. She’s been kidnapped twice while on assignment in war zones — something she has to wrestle with each time she leaves her husband and two small children to go on assignment. The documentary takes us on a whistlestop tour of her assignments, intercut with episodes of her family life in the US.

Behind the camera, Addario is torn between her unwavering commitment to her work and the competing demands of motherhood.

I am instinctively sceptical of the motivations of photographic journalists who go to war zones to document other people’s wars. Is it altruism or the need for an adrenalin rush and fame back home? She is a first rate photographer with a track record from Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine among many other places of conflict.

This documentary accompanies her to the front line in Ukraine, and back home in her New York apartment where her husband, also a journalist, looks after their two small children. The film cuts from her shooting images of the bombings and casualties in Ukraine to sitting comfortably on a couch at home with her husband viewing these self-same images on a laptop, now featured on the front pages of big circulation newspapers. This contrast is so incongruous.

She is a feisty woman who does the work because she “wants to affect policy.”  Whether such photos can really have an impact on political policy-makers is questionable, as they are instrumentalised by the big media owners and politicians for their own purposes. What is a moving human drama for Addario is for them ammunition in a global ideological struggle. Do we need any more images of war – any war – to learn that it is hell? She doesn’t question the ethics of working as an embedded photographer with US troops in Afghanistan or even ask why the US is there in the first place. There is little to no context given to her photos.

Love + War raises many questions about war, the role of imagery in making a political statement, as well as the conflict between motherhood and family life on the one hand, and the mortal danger of taking photos on the front line on the other, but it offers no real answers.

In cinemas October 24, and streaming on Disney+ from November 7