Lynsey Addario: Women in War. A Retrospective Finds its Rightful Home by Brian Byrd

Brian Byrd is a freelance photographer with over two decades of experience using communication to drive social change. He serves on the boards of the Overseas Press Club of America and WITNESS, a global human rights organization founded by Peter Gabriel.

When New York Times columnist Nick Kristof needed a photographer to join him on a weeklong road trip through Ohio, Mississippi, and Alabama to document the collapse of health care in some of the poorest communities in America, he called Lynsey Addario. He and his wife Sheryl WuDunn had worked with her before — in Ethiopia, in the Central African Republic — and he knew what he would get. Not just extraordinary images, but a collaborator who would push beyond what was in front of her, returning to a subject’s home at dawn or dusk to find the light and the moment that would make a photograph feel true. “She was an essential part, not only of the photography, but also of the reporting,” Kristof told me. She found stories he hadn’t seen. She brought back people he then went and interviewed. When I asked whether he ever had to direct her — tell her what to shoot, where to point the camera — he laughed. “The last thing I’m going to do is tell Lynsey what to photograph.”

What struck Kristof most was not the difference between working in the Mississippi Delta and working in a conflict zone, but the similarity. “The kinds of stories that Lynsey and I both believe in telling tend to be those about people who the world is neglecting a little bit,” he said. Whether in Sudan or in the poorest part of the United States, the goal is the same: find the people no one is paying attention to, and make it impossible to look away. “It takes a certain amount of courage to leave the herd and go off and try to not do journalism about things that are on the agenda, but tackle issues that are off the agenda and try to propel them onto the agenda,” Kristof said. “And that’s what Lynsey has done very well.”

It is also, as it happens, precisely what Addario has done with her new exhibition in Luxembourg.

There is a particular kind of logic at work when a museum built to honor resistance chooses to mount an exhibition about women who endure war. Luxembourg’s National Museum of Resistance and Human Rights, founded in 1956 to preserve the memory of Nazi occupation, reopened in 2024 with three times its original exhibition space and a broader mandate — one that now extends to contemporary human rights and citizenship education. On March 7, 2026, that mandate finds one of its most powerful expressions yet: Women in War, a retrospective of more than twenty years of work by American photojournalist Lynsey Addario.

Drawing on more than two decades of work, Addario’s first solo museum exhibition traces how women live, endure, and resist in the shadows of conflict, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine. Rather than focus solely on front lines, her images bear witness to the intimate, often hidden spaces where war’s consequences register most profoundly: in maternity wards, cramped kitchens, refugee camps, and gender-segregated rooms where women give birth, raise children, mourn, and negotiate survival. Long drawn to documenting injustice against women — from rape as a weapon of war to maternal mortality — Addario uses this exhibition to insist that women are not peripheral to conflict but at its very center, both as subjects and as storytellers. “Men and women have different access, we relate to people on different levels, and people respond to us differently,” she has said — a recognition that it's a field still dominated by men. Women in War stakes out a distinctly female perspective rooted less in sentiment than in access: the hard-won ability to enter spaces closed to her male colleagues and, from there, to expand what the world is allowed to see and understand about war. It is an ambition she identified early. “I became fascinated by the notion of dispelling stereotypes or misconceptions through photography,” she wrote in her memoir. Women in War is the fullest expression of that fascination to date.

The exhibition also documents women who have chosen to fight. Among the photographs are images of women recruits for the U.S. Marines during basic training, Afghan women police being trained at a firing range by Italian Carabinieri, and a devastating portrait of sexual assault survivors. These are not images of passivity. They are images of women stepping into roles that war has forced open, and Addario is there because she understands that these moments — a recruit’s exhaustion, a teacher’s terror — are as much a part of the record as any front-line photograph.

Asked why she felt the exhibition was necessary, Addario was direct. “Women are often overlooked as participants in war, because images of war often focus on men, and the dramatic, kinetic images of the frontline,” she said. “Twenty-five years into my work on the frontlines of war, I increasingly focus on how war impacts women and children, as this is an angle that is often overlooked.” It was a fitting detail, then, that the exhibition was opened by Yuriko Backes, Luxembourg’s Minister of Defense and Minister of Gender Equality and Diversity — a woman who holds both titles.

The exhibition is not a traveling show making a stop. It was created specifically for this museum, as part of its Women in Conflict cycle of historical and artistic exhibitions. That distinction matters. It means the work has been conceived in dialogue with a space whose permanent collection already addresses persecution, forced conscription, and the Holocaust in Luxembourg. Addario’s photographs are entering a context that takes the cost of war seriously.

The museum approached Addario about eighteen months ago. Working with curator Perri Hofmann — who also curated her retrospective at the School of Visual Arts in New York — Addario combed through more than twenty-five years of work to find images organized around women specifically in the context of war. “There are themes that often come up in my work, and are often one of the ensuing effects of war,” Addario told me: “displacement, civilian casualties, survivors of rape as a weapon of war, injustices against women, and maternal mortality — which often is a result of the destroyed infrastructure of a country in the wake of war and the fact that many educated professionals, like doctors, leave when there is war.” She and Hofmann also made a deliberate decision to include recent work from 2025, particularly from the wars in Ukraine and Sudan, ensuring the exhibition speaks to this moment as much as to the previous two decades.

For those unfamiliar with Addario’s career, the breadth is staggering. She began working in 1996, and her trajectory since then reads like a map of the world’s worst crises. Two Pulitzer Prizes. A MacArthur Fellowship. Two kidnappings. Assignments for the New York Times, National Geographic, and Time. In 2015, American Photo Magazine named her one of the five most influential photographers of the previous twenty-five years. Her memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, became a New York Times bestseller. Her photography collection, Of Love & War, followed in 2018. She began a long-term project on maternal mortality in 2009, documenting women dying in childbirth in Sierra Leone, India, the Philippines, and the United States. But until now, she has never devoted an entire retrospective exhibition to the plight of women in wartime. Women in War represents a consolidation of a thread that has run through her entire body of work — the status of women, motherhood in conflict, survival and resilience in the face of destruction — now given its own room to breathe.

The museum is treating the exhibition as more than a gallery event. From March through December 2026, programming will include guided tours of Addario’s photographs, introductory workshops on photojournalism and image analysis, discussions on ethics and the role of artificial intelligence in image-making, and thematic conferences on war photography, the status of women, media responsibility, and image manipulation. The content is being tailored for an unusually wide audience: families, schoolchildren, students, tourists, photography professionals, journalists, refugees, and expats. Several public meetings with Addario are planned, during which she will discuss her career, methodology, and commitments.

In a smart programmatic move, the museum will also organize a photojournalism contest inviting participants to produce a series of images on the daily lives of women in Luxembourg — grounding the global concerns of the exhibition in local reality. The results will be presented in an open-air exhibition, alongside a separate free outdoor installation on Place de la Résistance featuring Addario’s work.

An educational guide will accompany the exhibition, designed for teachers to address human rights, conflicts, humanitarian crises, and the specific challenges faced by women working as photojournalists. The guide will also explore how empathy develops through visual expression — a pedagogical ambition that feels timely, given how quickly the capacity for sustained looking is eroding in our image-saturated environment.

On opening day, Love+War, the National Geographic documentary about Addario directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, was screened at the Neimënster Abbey in Luxembourg City. The film traces Addario’s career in the male-dominated world of war photography — a subject she has spoken about with characteristic directness. “I kept seeing men in the protagonist role,” she has said. “I thought maybe it’s time to feature a woman, to show young women that it’s possible to do this job and have a family. It’s messy, it’s hard, it’s exhausting, but it’s possible.”

That tension — between vocation and vulnerability, between the field and the family left behind — lies at the heart of both the documentary and the exhibition. It also speaks to why the Women in Conflict cycle at this particular museum feels like more than institutional programming. A space built to remember resistance is now asking its visitors to consider what resistance looks like today, and who is doing the resisting.

From 2027, the exhibition will be available for display at other European museums and institutions. It deserves the widest possible audience. When I asked Addario what she most wanted viewers to carry with them, she spoke not about her own work but about the conditions that make it possible. “Increasingly journalism is under attack, and we are at the mercy of leaders who try to shape world views based on their opinions rather than fact,” she said. “We need journalism and freedom of speech more than ever now.”

Women in War by Lynsey Addario runs from March 7 through December 20, 2026, at the Musée National de la Résistance et des Droits Humains, Place de la Résistance, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. Admission is free. For more information, visit mnr.lu