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Gerda Taro
Born
Spanish Civil War photographs, 1936–1937
Taro's whole career fits into barely a year, and almost all of it was shot on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. She worked closely with Robert Capa, her photographic and romantic partner, but her own pictures of militia fighters and civilians are close, physical and unsentimental, and deserve to be seen on their own terms. She was covering the battle of Brunete in July 1937 when she was struck by a tank and killed, still in her twenties, and her short career set the template for the photographer who goes where the fighting is.
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Martha Gellhorn
Born
Collier's dispatches from Spain to Normandy, 1937–1945
Gellhorn found her beat in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and never left it. With no credentials for D-Day, she slipped onto a hospital ship, locked herself in a bathroom until it was crossing the Channel, and reached Normandy disguised as a stretcher-bearer, the first woman reporter on the scene. She later covered the liberation of Dachau and kept going for half a century, through Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the 1989 US invasion of Panama. Her attention was always on civilians, and that is why her war writing still reads like a new dispatch rather than a period piece.
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Clare Hollingworth
Born
The Daily Telegraph's German tanks scoop, August 1939
Less than a week into freelancing for the Telegraph in Poland, Hollingworth saw German armor massed at the border and got the story onto the front page on August 29, 1939, under the headline about 1,000 tanks massed on the Polish border. Days later she was the reporter who told the world the invasion had begun. That would be a career for most people; for her it was the opening. She went on to cover Palestine, Algeria, Aden, Vietnam and China, and was still reporting on China from Hong Kong in the 1990s. She died there in 2017, aged 105.
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Margaret Bourke-White
Life magazine's Buchenwald photographs, April 1945
Bourke-White had already helped invent the photo essay for Life when, in 1942, she became the first woman accredited by the US Army Air Corps. Her war coverage peaked at Buchenwald: she was in the camp on April 16, 1945, as the citizens of nearby Weimar were marched through to see what had been done in their name, and her pictures of the survivors and the dead remain some of the defining images of the Holocaust. Start there, then look at how her industrial photographer's eye for scale shaped everything she shot in uniform.
More about Margaret Bourke-White5
Lee Miller
Born
Vogue war reports, including "Believe It," 1944–1945
Miller went from fashion model to the photographer who brought the war into Vogue. She was the only woman correspondent to stay through the siege of Saint-Malo, then followed the Allied advance into Germany, reaching Buchenwald and Dachau. Her report on the camps ran in Vogue under the blunt headline "Believe It," a demand aimed at readers who did not want to. The famous picture of her in Hitler's Munich bathtub, taken by her colleague David Scherman days after Dachau, is the image everyone knows, but the camp photographs are the work that matters.
More about Lee Miller6
Marguerite Higgins
New York Herald Tribune Korean War coverage, 1950
Higgins was in Seoul within days of the North Korean invasion, reported the city's fall, and went back to the front after General MacArthur lifted a ban on women correspondents there. She landed with the Marines at Inchon, and her Korea reporting won her a share of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, making her the first woman to win a Pulitzer for foreign reporting. She had already been with Allied troops entering Dachau in 1945, and later covered Vietnam from the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu onward. A disease she contracted there killed her in January 1966, aged 45.
More about Marguerite Higgins7
Dickey Chapelle
Combat photography from Iwo Jima to Vietnam, 1945–1965
Chapelle's assignment at Iwo Jima was to photograph nurses aboard a hospital ship, and she spent the next twenty years making sure nobody gave her a safe assignment again. She photographed refugees of the 1956 Hungarian uprising with a hidden camera, was caught carrying penicillin to resistance fighters and spent seven weeks in solitary confinement in Budapest, then covered seven wars in five years. On November 4, 1965, she was on patrol with a Marine platoon near Chu Lai when a booby trap went off, and she became the first American woman reporter killed in action.
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Catherine Leroy
Born
Vietnam combat photographs, including the Hill 881 fighting, 1967
Leroy flew from Paris to Saigon in 1966, still in her early twenties, and was soon working at the sharp end of the war. In February 1967 she jumped with the 173rd Airborne during Operation Junction City, the only woman and only non-military photographer to make a combat parachute jump with US forces in Vietnam. Her pictures from the battle for Hill 881 won a George Polk Award, she was gravely wounded near Con Thien, and during the Tet Offensive in 1968 she was taken prisoner by North Vietnamese forces and came back with photographs from their side. Her later Lebanon coverage made her the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal.
More about Catherine Leroy9
Kate Webb
UPI reporting from Indochina, and her capture in Cambodia, 1971
Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Webb spent a decade with United Press International in Asia and took over as bureau chief in Cambodia after a colleague was killed. In April 1971 she and five others were captured by North Vietnamese troops; officials declared her dead, and she later read her own obituaries. She was released 23 days after capture, and her account of those weeks, On the Other Side: 23 Days With the Viet Cong, written in the plain, exact style that made wire copy trustworthy, is a rare view of the war from the other side of the lines. Read her for the discipline of reporting what happened and nothing more.
More about Kate Webb10
Christina Lamb
Born
Afghanistan reporting, from the mujahideen in 1987 to Farewell Kabul
Lamb was 22 when a wedding invitation took her to Karachi in 1987, and she was soon based in Peshawar covering the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Within two years she was named Young Journalist of the Year, and she has kept going back to the country ever since. Her Afghanistan reporting won the Prix Bayeux-Calvados, Europe's leading prize for war correspondents, in 2009. As chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times she has covered far more than one war, but Farewell Kabul, her account of the Western war there, is the place to start: it shows what decades of returning to one country give a reporter that a single deployment cannot.
More about Christina Lamb11
Lyse Doucet
Born
BBC reporting from Afghanistan and Syria
Doucet, who grew up in small-town New Brunswick, first went to Afghanistan in 1988 to cover the Soviet withdrawal and has kept returning ever since. She has also covered every major conflict in the Middle East since the mid-1990s, including the civil war in Syria, and is now the BBC's chief international correspondent. Her strength is staying power: she returns to the same places over decades, so her reports carry a memory of what a country was like before the latest war reached it.
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Kate Adie
Born
BBC News reporting from the Gulf War to Kosovo, 1989 onward
Adie became the BBC's chief news correspondent in 1989 and made her reputation reporting from war zones around the world, becoming one of the most familiar faces of British television news. Her assignments ran from the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing to the Gulf War and NATO's campaign in Kosovo. What sets her apart is the clarity of her pieces to camera: calm, plain and exact while events unfolded around her. She went on to present From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4, and her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, is the best way into the work.
More about Kate Adie13
Christiane Amanpour
Born
CNN reporting from the siege of Sarajevo, 1992–1995
Amanpour's reports during the first war with Iraq brought her a worldwide audience on CNN, but the Bosnian War is the work that defines her. Reporting from the front line in Sarajevo, the scene of the longest siege in modern warfare, she put the daily danger to the city's civilians in front of a global audience night after night. That coverage also drew accusations of bias, and she has answered that objectivity does not mean neutrality; that argument over where reporting ends and witness begins is part of why her Sarajevo reports still matter. Watching them is the quickest way to understand how television war reporting changed in the 1990s.
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Marie Colvin
Born
The Sunday Times dispatches from Homs, Syria, February 2012
Colvin covered Chechnya, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Libya for The Sunday Times, and during the 1999 East Timor crisis she was credited with helping avert a massacre. She lost the sight of one eye to a grenade while reporting in Sri Lanka in 2001 and kept going, eyepatch and all. Her last reporting came from Baba Amr in besieged Homs, which she called the worst conflict zone she had ever seen. She was killed there in an artillery attack on February 22, 2012, and a US federal court later found the Syrian government responsible.
More about Marie Colvin15
Anna Politkovskaya
Born
Novaya Gazeta's investigations from Chechnya
Politkovskaya's war was one her own government was fighting. As a special correspondent for the independent Moscow paper Novaya Gazeta, she became well known for investigating human rights abuses by the Russian military in Chechnya, and she was still looking into alleged torture there when she was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006. She is essential because her reporting shows what war correspondence looks like when the danger comes from home as much as from the front.
More about Anna Politkovskaya16
Shireen Abu Akleh
Born
Al Jazeera Arabic reporting from the West Bank, 1997–2022
Abu Akleh joined Al Jazeera in 1997, the year after it launched, and became one of its earliest field correspondents. For a quarter of a century she reported on the occupied Palestinian territories for an Arabic-speaking audience, covering the same streets and towns through one crisis after another. She was shot in the head on May 11, 2022, while covering an Israeli army operation in Jenin. Israel's military said she was likely hit by its fire by accident; CNN and other investigations found evidence of a targeted attack. Her work is the long view of a conflict most foreign reporters only visit.
More about Shireen Abu Akleh17
Anja Niedringhaus
Associated Press photographs of the Fallujah assault, November 2004
Niedringhaus was with the US Marines as they fought their way into Fallujah in November 2004, and her pictures were part of the AP Iraq coverage that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography; she was the only woman on that team of photographers. She made documenting war her life's work, and her images find the human moment inside the operation rather than the spectacle. She was shot dead by a police officer in eastern Afghanistan in April 2014, the day before national elections she had gone to cover.
More about Anja Niedringhaus18
Lynsey Addario
New York Times photographs from Afghanistan to Ukraine
Since 2001 Addario has photographed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan and Ukraine, and she was part of the New York Times team that won a Pulitzer for reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011 she was one of four Times journalists held captive in Libya for several days. In March 2022, in Irpin outside Kyiv, she photographed a mother and her children killed by Russian mortar fire as they fled, an image that forced the world to look at what the invasion meant for civilians. Her memoir, It's What I Do, is the best way into her work and the risks behind it.
More about Lynsey Addario19
Clarissa Ward
Born
CNN's Undercover in Syria, 2016, and reporting from Kabul and Ukraine
In early 2016 Ward traveled undercover into rebel-held areas of Syria, and the resulting reports won a Peabody Award and led to an invitation to address the UN Security Council, where she said there were no winners in Aleppo. As CNN's chief international correspondent she stayed in Afghanistan for days after the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021, and she has reported repeatedly from the war in Ukraine. Her memoir, On All Fronts, is a candid account of how a conflict reporter is made, and a good companion to the reports themselves.
More about Clarissa Ward
