CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Jarrad Henderson is a 4-time Emmy Award-winning visual journalist, multimedia alchemist and inspirational educator. Henderson has produced impactful content in large newsrooms for over a decade — specializing in access to visual storytelling education, documentary filmmaking, photojournalism, video editing, media entrepreneurship, media literacy, mentorship and professional development. His previous leadership experience includes serving as the Academic Representative for the National Association of Black Journalists - Board of Directors, multimedia judge for the Hearst Journalism Awards, and as a past member of the Filmmaker Development Council for the Video Consortium. During his 2022-2023 Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Henderson founded Pop Up Docs™, a pop-up style storytelling workshop that provides skill-building courses for aspiring non-fiction filmmakers from underrepresented populations.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

There’s been this conversation recently about the responsibility of documentary film to communities and there are groups that exist like the Documentary Accountability Work Group (DAWG). There was an article from the Washington Post about National Geographic’s Retrograde film1. In the film they identify a person who helped U.S. armed forces (clear bombs) and they used this person’s likeness in the film, he’s identifiable and could easily be tracked. The person ends up getting killed. The question is: should the production company - the director and every person involved in making the film - should they have done more to protect this person who they turned their cameras on? 

We are not having this conversation in journalism schools, in production rooms. And it all comes down to are you going to cause harm? Is there a community, a person, someone who is going to be harmed because of this documentary that’s being put out? We aren't asking those questions enough. DAWG and other groups like that give us a framework to think about that but we need to be asking those questions in the industry. It's not enough to just say ‘no I didn't show them a rough cut because that's not what we do as journalists, that’s not what we’ve done.’ We need to interrogate some of our old beliefs. In journalism, we’re taught about impartiality and being unbiased. One of the ways that manifests in film is that we call it verite, fly-on-the-wall, etc. which suggests that you're just there to observe, that you’re powerless. But the reality is that when the film comes out you hold all the power, you decide how everything was put together and how it came out. That’s a big ass fly. 

We need to reexamine how we teach and work in the industry. We have to be open to that as educators. This is something I think is really unique to the position I'm in as an educator at MSU, the language we use is inherently violent. And especially when you’re teaching at an institution that has experienced a school shooting tragedy, I didn't realize how much of the language I needed to change in my teaching of visual journalism. That was an a-ha moment. We ‘take’, we ‘shoot’, we ‘capture’, etc. This year has made me a better professor because I've had to very consciously stop myself from using that kind of language when speaking with students. Same thing when we’re working in certain communities, where we start exacting our power and we’re using language that is turning the community off and wonder how we’re turning the people off. You have to be conscious of how you're speaking to people in order to negotiate the access to tell people’s stories. It's because you came in with a certain entitlement, with a lexicon the community doesn't connect with. We have to keep developing and evolving as an industry.