CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is an award-winning documentary and portrait photographer, writer, and curator in New York City. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She has also been published in Vogue, National Geographic, The Washington Post, VOX, NPR, BBC, The Nation, Le Monde, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She is co-author of the independently published MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first anthology in nearly 30 years that highlights photography produced by women of African descent. 

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

I love portraiture but more specifically I like environmental portraiture. I don't want to be in a studio because I'm also thinking about the archive, recording what was happening at the moment. So what's important to me is to know the location, the sense of space and time, where we are, where you are as the sitter. Your environment at the moment is going to tell me a lot about where you are at this time. I’m doing this book on Black photographers and I’m photographing  a range of people who have been moving around their whole lives but right now in 2024 this is where they are. That's very important! That's why I like to ask where you want to be photographed. I was photographing Jenny Baptiste and she said ‘oh I have a studio in Brixton and I also spend time in this museum, so let’s kind of recall that because these spaces and places are very important to me.’ 

When I photographed Kennedi Carter, she still lives in North Carolina and it's important to note that she was in North Carolina at the time I photographed her. She's in her twenties and who knows, 10 years from now she might live in Italy, she might live in London. But at the time of the photo, this was her home and this is how it looked and this is how she felt in this environment. I want to see your home. I want to see your streets. What space is important to you, where are you activated, what has meaning, what has significance to you?

I did a portrait series on Black women writers and everyone selected their location. I went down to Miami, photographed Edwidge Danticat in her backyard in the Arts District. I went to Philadelphia and photographed Sonia Sanchez in her longtime home in Germantown, which is slowly gentrifying so this image is now historic. I like to get a bit of history in the photograph with the person at that time. So that's why environmental portraiture is very important. In the studio, you could be anywhere. It could be any time. 

When I ask people where they want to be photographed, if they say the park, we are not going to the park unless there is something in that park that lets us know where it's located. It has to be very distinct because we are trying to record a space, a place and a time. I always have a conversation about the purpose of the portraits and I think that opens up to the sitter saying how they want to be portrayed. There’s a conversation and there’s questions, so that gives me a lot more context about who I'm photographing and also there’s a thing about knowing who’s photographing you. We are preserving each other in a way. I'm preserving them in a photograph and they’re preserving me as a documentarian in their memory. Sometimes we look at photographs and we don’t know who made that photograph, but the sitter can say I encountered this person at this point in my life and they can say this is who they were and this is what they represented and this is what they shared with me. When I make a photo of someone, they need to know enough about me to remember me. Because this is part of a moment in time. It's a cognitive and spiritual archive. It’s also a memory and memories are very important to me. It has to be an exchange in that way.