‘It’s not our job to make photos that are easy to look at’: the female photographers exposing the cost of conflict in 2024

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For Lynsey Addario, a celebrated conflict photographer, covering war in 2024 was all about a six-year-old girl from Ukraine. For most of the summer, Addario followed Sonya and her family as they navigated the final stages of her short life in a hospice in Chernivtsi, western Ukraine.

The girl’s treatment for retinoblastoma, an aggressive eye cancer, had been disrupted by the Russian invasion in February 2022 and then lapsed when the family were forced by the fighting to move to Poland as refugees. By the spring of this year, her body was riddled with tumours.

A small semi-conscious girl with one eye missing lies next to a woman on a bed, holding a syringe over her stomach as a nurse looks on

Addario’s images of Sonya’s last days, published in the New York Times in October, are shattering but infused with tenderness and love: Sonya flies on a swing, lies curled around her big sister and sits in the family car, her small face resting forehead to forehead with her exhausted mother.

Despite her vast experience of covering war and tragedy, Addario says Sonya’s death left her “numb with grief”.

She says: “But feeling emotion on a job isn’t weakness. You have to channel this into the work because my goal is to get people to pay attention to what is happening to ordinary people during conflict.

“For me, the photos of Sonya and her family are as much a piece of war photojournalism as anything I shot on the frontlines.”

Two drone operators work outdoors at night by artificial light

Julia Kochetova, a young photojournalist from Ukraine, has also been documenting the war in her homeland this year. It is just one of 170 conflicts that have simultaneously raged across the world in 2024. For Kochetova, war photography is “not just about the hardware of war, which I hate – it’s about the humanity you experience when you’re on an assignment”.

Her photographs of drone operators from the Khyzhak Brigade, hidden deep within woods in Toretsk, show the camaraderie and claustrophobia of soldiers living close together in combat. “This conflict is the most crucial moment for our country that most Ukrainians will live [through],” she says. “The people I photograph are all aware of how momentous this is.”

A woman in the foreground holds a large chunk of rubble as multiple figures around her join a clear-up operation against a backdrop of bombed buildings

She has taken thousands of photographs this year, but the ones that stuck with her most document an airstrike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv in June. “When the Russians struck the hospital, hundreds of people came together to clear the debris in case there were kids under the rubble,” she says.

“There were endless chains of hands helping – people of all ages, all genders. I haven’t felt anything like it since the revolution. It was a real sense of unity. That’s what I was trying to capture in the photos I took that day.”

A man carries a small child and his household belongings beside a road full of people on the move

This year, photojournalists in Gaza have borne the enormous weight of documenting the war between Hamas and Israel for the world (no foreign journalists have been allowed into Gaza by the Israeli authorities since the war started in October last year) while also trying to survive and look after their own families.

A boy looks up at the sky while carrying a small girl as other children react with shock and surprise

Fatima Shbair’s photos are unwavering in their stark portrayal of the human cost of war and the relentless assault of airstrikes, hunger, displacement, death and grief.

Samar Abu Elouf, a freelance photographer in Gaza, has created some of the most crucial images of the conflict, showing parents crouched over the bodies of their dead children, neighbourhoods razed, and children’s upturned faces staring at the sky as bombs rain down. It is, she has said, a job that is worth dying for.

“I’m not just a person with a camera – I’m a human being,” she told CNN in July. “Being a journalist in Gaza feels like you are dying on the inside over and over again.”

A young girl looks apprehensive as she stands inside an X-ray machine and strips of coloured lights play across her body

The Egyptian photographer Nariman El-Mofty also spent months covering Gaza from the perspective of children caught up in the war. She was four months pregnant when she began to tell the stories of a group of injured children evacuated from Gaza being taken from a hospital in Cairo to receive specialist care in Italy.

Her photos from Italy have a futuristic quality, almost as if the children had been taken to another planet. “Which in many ways they had,” she says. “The children were so overwhelmed. They had been taken from their destroyed homes in a war zone and ended up in a country they hadn’t even known existed.

“Everything was so strange and alien to them. There is no way of knowing what will happen to them in the future.”

Six figures, most of them in green hospital scrubs, surround a bed where a small girl, her right leg ending in a bandaged stump, undergoes medical treatment

El-Mofty feels she is “creating a dossier for the future”.

“Photography is a universal language,” she says. “I’m not naive, I don’t think my pictures will change anything, but it’s my job to say ‘this happened to people because of war’.”

The enormity of the humanitarian crisis that has followed the civil war in Sudan led the NPR photographer Claire Harbage to travel to Chad this year to report on the lives of some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who tried to flee to safety over the border.

A woman with a large bag balanced on her head and another at her feet stands beside five children on rocky terrain

“The question I always try to answer is: how do you try to emotionally connect people to a conflict in a place like Sudan, which is getting a fraction of the attention of other wars happening this year,” she says.

A woman standing on bare earth with a field in the background looks directly at the camera

Reaching refugee camps in Chad was complicated and difficult. The stories she heard there about the war in Sudan were “just devastating”, she says.

“But people there wanted to talk. They wanted to share what was happening to them with the world.”

Harbage tried to listen to as many stories as she could. “There were so many who wanted to talk – about the men they had lost, the sexual violence they had faced, the things they had survived.

“I was trying to find ways of showing the reality of what they were all going through without dehumanising their experiences.

“You want to show that this happened to them but they are still alive and trying to build a future for themselves.”

A group of 20 or 30 people, facing in all directions, many with their arms raised in celebration

In a year dominated by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, trying to get stories from lesser-known conflicts has become increasingly urgent. Arlette Bashizi’s images from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her home country, show people facing a relentless civil war, fleeing villages in Masisi territory after clashes between M23 rebels and the army.

In another shot, she captures a different side of life, rarely shown in photography from the region. It shows a moment of shared joy as displaced people at the Kanyaruchinya camp in North Kivu province dance together.

A woman walking outdoors carries a child and personal belongings on her shoulders, surrounded by crowds of people doing the same

“I never choose to cover war in my country, but when you live in a country that has been affected by conflict for decades, it doesn’t feel like I have a choice,” says Bashizi. “Sometimes covering conflict makes me feel powerless, but I don’t want the world to forget the impact that war is having on Congolese civilians.”

The Colombian photographer Fernanda Pineda spent this year documenting the enduring impact of conflict on Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in Colombia as part of an assignment with Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

She says: “It is almost impossible not to become a conflict photographer [when working in your homeland] because conflict is everywhere in our memories, in our past, now and probably for ever.”

A woman wearing a sleeveless orange dress holds orange flowers to her mouth

A woman wearing a sleeveless blue dress wears a garland of leaves round her neck

In her images of the Chachajo Mojaudó and Puesto Indio communities, Pineda focuses on the empty spaces in the community left by war and their collective efforts to recover. One shot shows the room of an Indigenous guard killed in a confrontation with armed groups, his wife and baby reflected in a scrap of mirror. The photo has been torn and then stitched back together by one of the community’s ancestral healers.

“For me, [conflict photography] is not just about documenting but about connecting, understanding and building something that holds significance,” she says. “What I want to show is the traces that war leaves behind and the ways in which people seek to heal and redefine their lives and spaces to repair those wounds left behind.”

“Just the scale of the suffering everywhere is overwhelming,” says Addario. “It’s not our job to make photos that are easy for people to look at, but you need people to care. This feels like it’s getting harder all the time.”

An image shows items on shelves including a small rucksack and a frame within which we see the faces of a woman and baby. The image has been torn and sown back together

In 2025, the Guardian’s Rights and Freedoms series will continue to report on how war is affecting women and children across the world. You can follow our reporting here

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