“Behind the Lens: Female Photographers Unveiling the Harsh Realities of War in Ukraine 2024”

For Lynsey Addario, a renowned war photographer, documenting conflict in 2024 revolved around a six-year-old girl from Ukraine. During most of the summer, Addario shadowed Sonya and her family as they faced the final moments of her brief life in a hospice in Chernivtsi, western Ukraine.

The girl’s treatment for retinoblastoma, an aggressive malignant eye tumor, was hampered by the Russian incursion in February 2022 and subsequently faltered when the family had to flee to Poland as refugees due to the violence. By the spring of this year, her body was afflicted with tumors.

Addario’s portrayals of Sonya’s final days, printed in the New York Times in October, are heartbreaking yet filled with tenderness and affection: Sonya swings high, lies entwined with her older sister, and sits in the family vehicle, her small face pressed forehead to forehead with her weary mother.

Despite her extensive background in covering war and sorrow, Addario asserts that Sonya’s passing left her “numb with sorrow”.

She remarks: “But expressing emotions on assignment isn’t a weakness. You must direct this into the craft because my aim is to make people aware of what is occurring to regular individuals during conflicts.

“For me, the images of Sonya and her family constitute as much a part of war photojournalism as anything I captured on the battleground.”

Julia Kochetova, a young photojournalist hailing from Ukraine, has similarly been chronicling the war in her nation this year. It represents only one of 170 battles that have concurrently erupted worldwide in 2024. For Kochetova, war photography is “not solely concerned with the machinery of warfare, which I despise – it’s about the humanity you encounter while on an assignment”.

Her images of drone operators from the Khyzhak Brigade, concealed deep within the forests in Toretsk, reveal the solidarity and closeness of soldiers cohabitating in combat. “This conflict is the pivotal moment for our nation that most Ukrainians will endure [through],” she states. “The individuals I photograph are all conscious of how significant this is.”

She has captured thousands of images this year, but the ones that resonate with her the most depict an air raid on a children’s hospital in Kyiv in June. “When the Russians targeted the hospital, countless individuals gathered to clear the rubble in hopes of finding children under the debris,” she recounts.

“There were countless chains of hands aiding – people of all ages, all genders. I haven’t experienced anything comparable since the revolution. It was a true sense of togetherness. That’s what I aimed to encapsulate in the images I took that day.”

This year, photojournalists in Gaza have carried the tremendous burden of documenting the conflict between Hamas and Israel for the world (no international reporters have been permitted into Gaza by the Israeli authorities since the war commenced in October of the previous year) while simultaneously striving to survive and care for their own families.

Fatima Shbair’s imagery is relentless in its stark representation of the human toll of war and the unceasing barrage of airstrikes, famine, displacement, death, and sorrow.

Samar Abu Elouf, a freelance photographer in Gaza, has produced some of the most vital images of the conflict, illustrating parents bent over the remains of their deceased children, neighborhoods devastated, and children’s faces gazing upwards as bombs cascade down. It is, as she has expressed, a task worth risking her life for.

“I’m not merely an individual with a camera – I’m a person,” she conveyed to CNN in July. “Being a journalist in Gaza feels as if you’re dying on the inside repeatedly.”

The Egyptian photographer Nariman El-Mofty also dedicated months to covering Gaza from the viewpoint of children ensnared in the war. She was four months expectant when she began to narrate the tales of a group of injured children evacuated from Gaza and taken from a hospital in Cairo to receive specialized treatment in Italy.

Her photographs from Italy possess a futuristic essence, almost as if the children had been transported to another world. “Which in numerous respects they had,” she expresses. “Thechildren were utterly astonished. They had been uprooted from their ravaged residences in a conflict area and found themselves in a nation they hadn’t even known was there.

“Everything felt extraordinarily peculiar and foreign to them. There is no way to anticipate what lies ahead for them.”

El-Mofty believes she is “compiling a file for the future.”

“Photography transcends language,” she states. “I’m not naive, I don’t assume my images will effect any change, but it’s my responsibility to assert ‘this transpired to individuals because of warfare.’”

The magnitude of the humanitarian disaster that has stemmed from the civil war in Sudan prompted NPR photographer Claire Harbage to visit Chad this year to cover the lives of some of the countless refugees who sought safety across the border.

“The inquiry I constantly strive to resolve is: how do you emotionally link individuals to a conflict in a location like Sudan, which is receiving a fraction of the attention that other wars are garnering this year,” she explains.

Reaching refugee settlements in Chad was intricate and arduous. The narratives she encountered there about the war in Sudan were “simply heartbreaking,” she notes.

“However, the people there desired to converse. They wished to share their experiences with the world.”

Harbage endeavored to listen to as many accounts as possible. “There were numerous individuals who wanted to speak – about the men they had lost, the sexual violence they endured, the hardships they had overcome.

“I was attempting to discover ways to depict the reality of what they were experiencing without dehumanizing their stories.

“You aim to express that this occurred to them but they are still living and striving to create a future for themselves.”

In a year overshadowed by conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, striving to capture narratives from lesser-known clashes has become increasingly pressing. Arlette Bashizi’s visuals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her native land, illustrate people enduring a relentless civil war, fleeing communities in Masisi territory after confrontations between M23 insurgents and the military.

In another depiction, she reveals a different aspect of life, seldom highlighted in photographs from the area. It captures a moment of collective joy as displaced individuals at the Kanyaruchinya camp in North Kivu province celebrate together.

“I never opt to document warfare in my homeland, but when you reside in a nation that has been impacted by conflict for decades, it doesn’t feel as though I have a choice,” expresses Bashizi. “At times, covering conflict renders me feeling powerless, yet I want the world to remember the consequences that warfare is inflicting on Congolese civilians.”

The Colombian photographer Fernanda Pineda focused this year on chronicling the lingering effects of conflict on Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in Colombia as part of a project with Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

She states: “It is nearly impossible not to become a conflict photographer [when operating in your homeland] because conflict exists in our memories, in our history, now and likely forever.”

In her visuals of the Chachajo Mojaudó and Puesto Indio communities, Pineda emphasizes the vacant areas in the community left by conflict and their joint efforts to heal. One picture portrays the room of an Indigenous guard slain in a clash with armed groups, his wife and child mirrored in a shard of glass. The image has been ripped and then sewn back together by one of the community’s traditional healers.

“For me, [conflict photography] is not solely about documentation but about connection, comprehension, and constructing something meaningful,” she asserts. “What I aim to highlight is the remnants that warfare leaves and how individuals endeavor to mend and redefine their lives and environments to heal those scars left behind.”

“The sheer scale of the anguish everywhere is staggering,” states Addario. “It’s not our role to produce photographs that are easy for the audience to view, yet we need individuals to care. This seems to be becoming increasingly challenging.”

In 2025, the Guardian’s Rights and Freedoms series will persist in covering how warfare impacts women and children globally. You can keep track of our reporting here