Women on the Front Lines and Behind the Lens

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Stephanie Sinclair has mostly happy memories of her childhood in Miami, where she grew up encouraged by her parents to be carefree, confident and defiant. It was there, in an elementary school broadcast arts program, that she requested to be a camera operator, offering the first inkling of what she would do with her life.

Today, she is one of National Geographic's conflict photojournalists, one of about a dozen women among the magazine's 60 freelance photographers.

For the past decade, Ms. Sinclair, 40, has traveled throughout Yemen, India, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ethiopia, documenting the lives of child brides, where girls as young as 6 are offered to older men as wives, often serving as a way to pay off a family's debt. She often wonders what her childhood would have been like had she been born under those circumstances.

“I don't see myself any different from those girls,” she said.

“Most of the girls I have photographed got married between the age of 8 and 13; that's such a pure age,” added Ms. Sinclair, who also does freelance work for The New York Times Magazine, Time and Newsweek. “I really identified with the innocence of that age, and I felt angry that no one was protecting them.”

Several images from her series “Too Young to Wed” are part of “Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment,” an exhibition opening Thursday and on view through March 9, 2014. It features 10 other photographers - Lynsey Addario, Kitra Cahana, Jodi Cobb, Diane Cook, Carolyn Drake, Lynn Johnson, Beverly Joubert, Erika Larsen, Maggie Steber and Amy Toensing - who have been published by the magazine in the past decade.

The exhibition, opening at the National Geographic Museum in Washington with an accompanying book, includes more than 100 images done by the photographers while on assignment for the magazine, covering a range of topics: wildlife, war, landscapes and social justice.

Elizabeth Krist, the exhibit's curator, said that while you can't necessarily identify if an image was captured by a woman or a man, she thinks that gender plays a significant role in how a story is documented, especially with some issues like child brides or sexual assault.

“I wish this book wasn't necessary,” said Ms. Krist, a senior photo editor at National Geographic. “I also think that women are still underrepresented, and I think it is especially true if you look at developing countries. Women are more likely to cover issues that are important to women and to have access to these issues.”

Many aspects of the industry have changed for Ms. Cobb, one of only four women to become a National Geographic staff photographer. She has worked for the magazine for the past two decades, but she still does not believe there are enough female photographers featured in major news publications.

When Ms. Cobb began her photojournalism career in the mid-1970s, she was the only woman on the photo staff at The Wilmington News Journal and remembers constantly feeling she had to prove herself to be part of many of the male-dominated photo pits. It wasn't until 10 years later when she went on assignment in Saudi Arabia for National Geographic that she realized the advantages of being a woman.

“My work in Saudi Arabia could not have been done by a man; it had to be done by a woman,” said Ms. Cobb, who documented the role of women in Saudi society. “That experience was a real turning point for me and how I approached my work. I began feeling more confident that there was a receptive audience for topics that focus on issues that affect women.”

Erika Larsen Tepee-style structures are common in Sami villages, where they are often used to smoke reindeer meat. From “Women of Vision.”

Along with Ms. Cobb, several other women in the exhibit have experienced peril in the line of duty. Ms. Addario, a seasoned conflict photojournalist with more than a decade of experience in the Middle East, has been kidnapped twice, first in 2004 and again in 2011, when she was one of four journalists from The New York Times held hostage in Libya by pro-Qaddafi forces. Ms. Addario was repeatedly threatened and sexually assaulted during their six-day detainment. While reporting in Afghanistan, Ms. Sinclair had to fire her driver after he repeatedly mocked her for wearing a burqa and drove her to several of his personal locations against her will.

“You try not to dwell on these stories too much, but they are all real,” Ms. Cobb said. “They happen to men, too.”

While organizing the exhibit and book, it was important to Ms. Krist that she convey a broad selection of images and photographers, varying in subject matter, location and style. After working at the magazine for more than two decades, she identified one overarching theme among the photographers: the “fundamental humanity in which they approach their subjects.”

“They are the kind of people that you want to be around, the kind of people that you want to build relationships with,” she said.

As a photography intern at National Geographic in 2009, Ms. Cahana pitched more than 50 story ideas to her editors. None were approved, she says in the book. Two years later, the science section of the magazine was preparing an article about the science of the teenage brain. It called on Ms. Cahana, then 22, to document the images.

Ms. Cahana said she thought her age and gender allowed her to seamlessly blend with her high school-age subjects to produce the series, “Teenage Brains.” She worked on the article for almost four months, immersing herself in the high school environment only six years after she had graduated from an Orthodox school in Montréal. She attended classes, went to lunches and participated in after-school activities to meet her subjects. Eventually she realized that she no longer needed to go to school to meet her subjects - they began calling her to invite her out to events, just to have her there.

Ms. Cahana acknowledges that entering into the lives of young girls might not necessarily have been appropriate for an older man. “I was just having an easier time as a younger girl,” she said. Her images, several of which are in the exhibition, include a teenager getting her tongue pierced after peer pressure from a friend and a boxing match between two teenage boys, being recorded by friends on their cellphones to post on Facebook.

“When you really have the time to develop deep relationships with your subjects, it shows,” said Ms. Cahana, who had her first published photograph at The New York Times at the age of 17 and was awarded the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Young Photographer earlier this year.

Working as a young female photographer was not always easy for Ms. Cahana, and she has distinct memories of initially wanting to play down her femininity to be more accepted by the mostly male staff during her first internship. Several months on the job at Flash 90, an Israeli photo agency, she met Benedicte Kurzen, another young freelancer. Ms. Cahana remembers Ms. Kurzen confidently walking into the newsroom, talking about all of the places she had traveled as a photographer.

She also happened to be wearing a skirt.

That brief interaction with Ms. Kurzen changed Ms. Cahana's perception of what was possible. “There was this young woman who was able to carve out this whole identity and still do the work she was doing,” she said. “It made me look at myself and my work completely different.”

Kitra Cahana After working himself into a trance, a man leapt through a flaming pyre in Venezuela. From “Women of Vision.”

“Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment” is on view at the National Geographic Museum, on 1145 17th Street, NW in Washington, D.C., through March 9, 2014.

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