CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer. She is a Catchlight Fellow, a multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, and the founder of Women Photograph, a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists. 

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

I was at the Arles Photo Festival in 2016 where a former director of photography of a major magazine and I got into a conversation when I basically said, ‘Why don't you hire more women at your magazine?’ Their response was a very matter of fact, a very casual ‘well, there just aren't that many? I would love to hire them. I would hire them if there were more of them. But there just aren't.’ So I basically turned on my heel and stomped back to my Airbnb to begin compiling the start of a Google spreadsheet that became the first iteration of the Women Photograph database.

I started trying to just list out all the women photographers I knew. Then I created a Google Form, sent it out to maybe 40 friends, and said, ‘Hey, fill this out. Send this out to some other women photographer friends, and let's see what happens.’ I spent the next 6 months, I think, trying to build that list as much as possible. I amassed a list of about 450 photographers, I believe that’s the number that I launched the site with. I hand built the site, manually entering every single photograph and every single name and location and website. My first thought was, okay, the most urgent thing here is to create a resource that I can show to photo editors so that I never have to hear that excuse of ‘there aren't that many women photographers’ ever again. Also, from the beginning I thought this needs to be inclusive of not just women, but also non-binary and gender-marginalized folks. So, that was always the explicit framework from the beginning, that there is space here for non-binary, trans women, trans men, folks who in any way feel excluded as not cis-men.

The database was the most important component, but then I also felt very urgently, what are the other ways in which we can create structural support for women and non-binary photographers in the framework of this organization? And so I think within the first few months of launching Women Photograph we also launched the grants. And then, alongside Mallory Benedict, we conceived of the first mentorship program, which ended up launching a little later that year. And then, because I am always, if nothing else, a nerd, I really wanted data. I wanted hard numbers (to show the gender disparity in photojournalism), and I knew that there were only a few ways that I could  simply and cleanly do that. We have consistently been gathering that data (on which photographers take the newspaper front page photographs) for seven years now. I think it is useful in and of itself, in whatever capacity it can serve as a marker of the times and of how things have changed in the industry. 

So, yeah, grants, mentorship, data. And then our workshop. The first three WP workshops that were in person were some of the work with Women Photograph that I'm proudest of. I'm really sad to say I don't know that the in-person workshops will come back because they took just so much work. But I was incredibly proud of the way we ran those first three and then we did three more remotely. Those were our main programs. We've done a lot of other stuff. We raised over $75,000 for an emergency fund in the immediate aftermath of the start of the pandemic. We've done a lot of different things to siphon funding to members for jobs that we've helped produce and things like that. But I think the things that are most true to our mission, and that I'm proudest of are the database itself, the grants, the workshop, the mentorship program, and the data collection.

I also want to say that Mallory Benedict was there from basically the beginning. Women Photograph wouldn't exist without her participation and her insight. Then Sarah Ickow joined, and we had Eslah Attar and Vi Nguyen, who both have moved on but were incredibly valuable additions to the team. Now we have Piera Moore and Lexi Parra working with us. I feel deeply, deeply lucky to have had such incredible people to work alongside.

I don't know that we would even define Women Photograph as a collective per se, but I think the value of creating community for yourself or with others is always in the shared power and knowledge that you can aggregate. I still think that one of the most important and beautiful things about WP was what happened in the early days of having 300 or so people in a Facebook group who all were no more than a couple of degrees of separation from each other. The amount of logistical help and donated labor and emotional support and solidarity (we got from that space) was really critical, particularly when we were also going through the MeToo movement, and all of us, I think, felt angry and upset and frustrated and powerless in a lot of ways. And outside of that, I think it was the first space that I had been part of, where people were genuinely willing to help.

I very much came up in a scarcity mindset industry, where I was in fierce competition with mostly middle aged, tabloid photographers, mostly middle aged press photographers in New York or on the campaign trail. I so deeply loved being a political photographer, but I was treated terribly by the vast majority of the White House photographers. I once had an AP photographer push my tripod and camera down a flight of stairs at an Obama campaign office in New Hampshire. So, when I came up I knew I had to literally and metaphorically throw elbows to just be able to do my job and so to have kind of inadvertently created a space where all of a sudden people were genuinely and kindly and generously saying, ‘Oh, hey! Do you want me to connect you with this editor? I think that would be a really good place for your piece.’ Or like, ‘hey, have you thought about applying for this grant funding? This would be a really good match for you.’ It kind of happened organically. It was just not something I'd ever really experienced, even in the context of deep, wonderful friendships that I've had in the industry. I had never seen (community-building) happen at quite that scale (in photojournalism). And it was a really powerful and exciting thing to watch.