CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Gabriella Angotti-Jones is a documentary photographer based in Los Angeles, CA. One of Artsy’s emerging photo journalists to watch, Gabriella uses her editorial background to inform her imagery, focusing on found light, intimate, storytelling moments and graphic compositions. Her documentary work focuses on the intersection of race, identity, and environmental justice. She was previously a staff photographer at the LA Times, and has worked at papers across the country, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Tampa Bay Times, Las Vegas Review-Journal and New York Times. Her book, I Just Wanna Surf, was published in 2022 by Mass Books.

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

I don't think you can have an objective truth of a reality at all, even if you take a picture of it. What I've learned is as much as I want to pretend that I'm not an active participant, I am. We all are. I'm absorbing and processing and am going to put my own biases and feelings into what I photograph. That's actually how you get good pictures!

I think the work is so much more experiential. I mean I get to hop into someone's reality for a little bit, and try to understand it, and try to go there and just experience it for what it is and ask as many questions as possible, have as many good conversations, and really try to share space and an emotional state with that person to understand what's going on, especially if it's a pretty harrowing story—or even if it's not. I’m just trying to share, experience, collaborate and understand. I’m a storyteller. I really think that's a great way to describe what I do. I enjoy other people and sharing stories. I enjoy learning and trying to translate those experiences into a medium that makes sense, hopefully.

In my AP language class in high school, we had this prompt where we had to choose and write about a main idea, and then you had to argue the details. But the thing for me was that I didn't agree with anything I was reading or writing about. I couldn't write anything in depth or of value to me or anyone, because the topic just didn't resonate, or I didn't know how to resonate with the topic, the details, or even the facts in front of me. It wasn't until I was literally in the last few weeks of college, my professor had us read and then write about the book, “Strangers in Their Own Land.” While I was reading it, I realized that I had a voice, and I had an opinion, and I immediately started seeing the facts that stood out to me, and the facts that I could elaborate on. After that experience, I realized that I have a voice and an opinion. Once I recognize the things that I'm attracted to, or have thoughts on, that's what I should expand on.

I’m Black, I’m a woman, I'm queer and I love punk music. I grew up by the beach. I'm not anything that reality or society really supports, so I'm not really gonna resonate with the things that most people tell me I have to create unless there is meaning for myself. I think being radical and challenging the paradigms for photojournalism is just being based in yourself, which is reality in itself, right? And then you can just kind of go from there. Other people are going to resonate with my experience as a human as opposed to some weird, abstract concept of reality that doesn't really make sense. That is essentially colonization. So yes, I guess that's how I see it. Taking a lot of postmodernism classes in college helped me deconstruct why I felt the way I did and for what reason and the duality and pluralism of reality.

As far as this project, I have always been deeply attached to the ocean. It’s just always spoken to me. When I was in middle school and high school, I went through a lot, and the ocean was always right there for me, but I couldn't really figure out why. It wasn't until I got older and realized that the ocean was the first place I experienced racism and “othering”— especially within the surf and the beach communities. I didn't realize it until I started working on this project. 

I have always been fascinated with how the ocean works, so I worked at a marine research institute in Dana Point. At first, I thought I wanted to be around it all the time and do research, so I started doing research. And then I realized that I liked the lifestyle and photographing it. So I brought a camera and was getting more and more into photographing it, and that’s how I found photojournalism. I like telling stories about the ocean and the people doing research there. Around that same time, I was loosely working on this project on the Wheeler North Reef and the research being done there—it's the largest human-made reef on the West Coast. It’s off the coast of San Clemente and Data Point and is super successful. They’ve completely restored the environment there, and will hopefully bring that work throughout the rest of California. 

I was taking these really moody pictures of the ocean, and I remember being in photo class and my teacher said, “These photos aren’t just about the ocean, they are about something else. What is going on here?” And I had no idea how to respond. I showed the photos to Danese Kenon (ViewPoint, Chapter 12)  at NABJ one year and she said, “Girl, You need to get in the water. Something's going on here. I don't know what's happening, but this needs to be explored. You just need to get in the water.”  And I was thinking, “Get in the water. I don't even know how I would do that!” Surfing, was always in my mind and the ocean was always in my mind, but it was until after I finished the (New York) Times internship and feeling super worn out—torn down by working in New York and feeling a lot of different ways about how that system works and so I revisited the idea of doing something on the ocean. And then I realized that I surf, but I've never seen anyone else like me surfing. And then I thought, “Wait a second. This might be a story, and then I started doing research and found communities of Black women surfers all around the US. I couldn’t believe it! I started reaching out and photographing some women in Santa Cruz, who are now some of my best friends. As soon as I met them I felt like we were the same—we value nature, we like getting the shit kicked out of us when the wave hits, but we're resilient. We know how to communicate with each other, and then to top it off, we are all a bunch of Black women! There was this immediate camaraderie, which was so inexplicable and just amazing. So that's how it came to be.

There's a culture in action sports, but specifically watersports. It's so intense, and you really just have to keep your shit together all the time, and if you can't, you shouldn't be there. If you mess up or behave like a kook, it can potentially be really dangerous. There is this vibe that screams, “Get out of the water. You don't belong here. Get out of the water. You don't understand it.” Even as a little girl, men were constantly asking me what I was doing and why I was there. Also, I was a young Black girl and they just really didn't understand what I was doing there. They’d ask, “Where are you from?” It was kind of constant. I would think, “Wait a second. I'm from here! Why are they saying I'm not from here and I don't know what I'm doing? I know what I'm doing!” That was going through my head. That's when I realized they were treating me differently. I wondered if it was because I was a young girl and then I remember my mom said, “It’s also because you are a different color. I think we need to have this talk now.” So we did. I think I was seven or eight. There weren't very many mixed race families then, or even Black families in Capistrano Beach. It was hard to find a community to really talk to about this, especially in a specific context of being an ocean person. 

I found a group of women surfers in Santa Cruz in 2019 and started hanging out and photographing every couple of months. Ten badass women, and we just surf together, and it's crazy. We all relate to each other even though we are all really different. People lose their minds when they see us in the water. It's hilarious. Sometimes we're just sitting there eating and some old white dude who's been surfing since the sixties will come up to us and say, “So glad you're here!” And we’re thinking, “What are you talking about? We were always here.” They just never saw the OGs back in the day. I realized it’s because they just didn't even think about race. They just decided to not even think about it because they didn’t have to. The surf community externalizes racism, but I also think we need to have more discussions about how racism is internalized by those who are othered, as well.

I was going to work on this for the rest of my life, because I just wanted to go to work with my friends! And then I met Ben Brody—the Director of Photography for GroundTruth and Report for America—at Eddie Adams, and he’s helped me a lot. He told me that he and photographer Peter van Agtmael were starting this book and zine printing project (Mass Books) and said, “I don't know if you'd be interested in talking to us about publishing your work and you don't even have to publish with us, but we just want to help you.” The project is about a really heavy subject, but I knew that they would be able to do it with such brevity and humor. So, I started working closely with them, and kept them updated on the progress. When it got to the point of being repetitive and was hitting a wall, I went to Ben and Pete, and I said, “This is starting to piss me off.” And they responded, “Okay, it's done. You're done now. You definitely have enough.” 

PVA (Peter van Agtmael) is such an amazing photo editor, he’s a really good journalist and he has an unrelenting sense of humor. I love it. He helped me so much with the sequencing and was able point out the different themes and tones. He knew where to put in the little jokes. I'm still trying to figure out how we did it. He would just go through and say, “This doesn’t make sense.” I would ask why and he would say, “you already made that point right before, and also two images before, so either put it in the back of the book, or just take it out.”

I would send them images throughout the photography process and they would give me feedback on what to photograph. And then we got together and sequenced everything using 3x5 prints and created a skeleton. And then from there, we found the holes for what I needed to still get. From there, I went to Massachusetts to see Ben, where we created a 70 picture edit, sent it to PVA who tweaked it a little bit. Then, I did a couple zoom calls with him and we messed with the sequencing a little bit. From there the work went to the designer, and she put it together. We printed it with NPN Druckers in the Netherlands. And they did an incredible job.

It’s about depression. It's about processing, friendship, racial trauma and personhood. When you surf, different thoughts come to you. You're processing. You're meditating. So we wanted the book to feel like waves rolling in. There's a lot of repetition in it and repetitive repetitive themes that come through, and a lot of repetitive text that are in the form of thoughts—like little meditations—throughout the book.