CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Dustin Chambers is a freelance photojournalist and filmmaker born, raised, and currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. His work regularly appears in publications like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Atlanta magazine. Chambers traces and traverses histories of justice, highlighting the beauty and the championing of people, raising those stories that are often being erased. What centers his practice is a deep love and appreciation for the cultural, political, and social nuances of the South. 

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

One of the main tenets of being a freelancer, in general, is communication—being able to communicate concisely and quickly and accurately. A lot of what we’re doing is communicating through pictures and captions for our job while we’re actually doing production but you’re also communicating with a lot of different editors and subjects, maybe PR people. So there's a mixture of communicating well and being very organized about it bc you will inevitably have a lot of balls in the air. Just speaking about PJ assignments, which are always overlapping so you're almost always in the middle of at least two stages. One morning I might have an assignment and that afternoon I need to process photos from a shoot the day before and I need to edit and tone and send them off. A lot of juggling between that, communicating, invoicing and the sort of administrative aspects of the business. 

When you are getting an assignment, you are almost always getting an email and it’s someone maybe not even telling what the assignment is going to be but asking for your availability. If photo editors are working how they should be, you are the only person getting that email so the sooner you respond to that email whether or not you can do that, the editor is going to note the speed at which you responded and it is either going to allow them to give you that assignment or move on to another photographer if you're unavailable. So, communication can include responding quickly to acknowledging the important details that they've offered in an assignment email. Not just saying “yep, I got it” but “yes, I will focus on horizontals,” etc. Also, a follow up is important, let them know how (the assignment) went. If you feel like you're having an issue during the assignment, you should never hesitate to reach out to a photo editor and say I need your help. The more communication you can have about what happened and what didn't happen can go a long way to creating a rapport with an editor. It's hard to build a rapport with editors because they're often hiring you from across the country or world and rarely are you able to shake their hand. So, they are entrusting you based on your website, maybe a quick phone call with you, to go out and do whatever they need you to do under their and their news org’s name. So the more comfortable you can make that line of communication both ways, the more excited the editor will be to work with you again. 

(This practice of clear, consistent and effective communication to build rapport with editors also segues into successful pitching.) One thing that I've learned in the past few years and gotten more confident with as a practice is pitching and keeping eyes out for stories that are interesting to me or I think will be interesting to a particular editor or paper. A lot of that is researching my state and my city and keeping up with the news because that knowledge can really turn into work. This is essentially what pre-production is besides getting your gear together and pre-writing caption info, it’s not just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. It’s paying attention and … (coming up with your own stories.) Roughly my work is 70% assignment, 30% pitch. 

There are probably four or five outlets that will want (a story) and 10 people that might shoot it, so staying on the ball and actively pitching is really helpful and it turns out editors really appreciate it. You're taking a lot off their plate in terms of finding a story, finding an event and finding a photographer because you’re the photographer pitching an event tied to a story, so it’s all one package. I’m often pitching to editors or desks or just a group of the people I know who are editing politics: I would send something politically related to them. 

I think a pitch is really dependent on the client. So like Bloomberg for instance, you can be pretty general with them. They’re interested in business and industry. They’re often writing updates about an industry so they’re not sending photographers out to illustrate the fact that corn prices went up, they’re usually digging into an archive of images they already have. I pitched Georgia’s top crops to Bloomberg and that turned into around four assignments because they didn't have a GA peaches archive. Or the cotton fields in georgia. It’s really about learning about your region and what kind of stories would you expect to be written about the region in the future. Those are the kinds of photos that a wire service would want. For something like the Times, it’s staying on the ball of what’s happening in the news.  

I think every pitch is different but every pitch needs to be newsworthy. It needs to answer the question of ‘why do I care right now?’ It can’t just be interesting. There are so many interesting people and stories and it’s great to have a log of stories in your head but not until something in that story changes dramatically or ends or begins, you need to be able to point to a wider story that yours speaks to, whether that be sociologically, economically, environmentally. A news peg. But it can be about a date too. If the World Cup is coming to Atlanta in two years, what kind of industries or preparations are leading up to that that will make for a meaningful story leading up to that larger event?