CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Co-author Judy Walgren is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, photographer, photo editor and chair of the Photography Department at Foothill College in Los Altos, California.  Previously, Walgren worked as the associate director for the Michigan State School of Journalism, the director of photography at the San Francisco Chronicle and on visual staffs at the the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post and Dallas Morning News. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

In 2018, I took a job in the Michigan State University School of Journalism as a photojournalism instructor. I knew I wanted to work with the Survivors from the scandal stemming from a gymnastics trainer who sexually abused hundreds of people over many decades. As I began doing research and scanning media images to learn more about the brave people who stood up to the abuser, I found two types of images: those showing them confronting him in court, clearly upset, with many sobbing as they let him know how his actions had affected their lives. The other images showed the women gathered on a large stage during the Espy Awards. They were elegantly dressed in evening wear and if you did not know where and what was happening, one could easily think that they were photographs from a beauty pageant. Many of the images were placed in grids—stripping the individual personality characteristics from the people in the images. One magazine thought it would be a great idea to photograph the Survivors all wearing white, which for me was a bizarre and overly simplistic approach. The same story had images of the judge and the prosecutors wearing black and dark blue, indicating power and status. Yes, the work they did was important, but so was the work that each of the Survivors did by confronting the criminal face to face! Why couldn’t they wear power colors, too?

I started to think about visual identity, representation and the chasm in the visual archive for each person photographed in both settings. I wondered what resides in the space between anguish and exaltation. I wondered if any of the Survivors would like to make an image with me that could provide a more holistic visual representation of themselves and/or their lives. Thankfully, one of the Survivors who managed a private Facebook page for the larger group was gracious enough to publish a post about the idea and in the end, I had about 40-50 people who responded. I wanted to provide each person photographed total agency in the way the images were made and published. This process forced me to revolutionize the way I was taught and mandated to make work in the past because I wanted each person I photographed to collaborate on every aspect of making their images—from brainstorming ideas, to image selection and approval. I also agreed to seek their permission l anytime an image was used. 

I found the experience much more rewarding than past portraiture sessions for publications. I was able, in real time, to adjust and support the person being photographed to appear how they wanted to look, not just how I wanted or how a photo editor expected. I understand that time does not always allow us to be able to work like this, as the process is slow and labor intensive, but each of us can certainly take a less hierarchical approach to portraiture than how we have in the past and include the people who are generously providing their (unpaid) time and possibly reliving painful emotions to illustrate a story or project, in the ideation and selection processes whenever possible. Involving the people being represented in our images in the image-making process, in my opinion, does not make that work “unobjective.” For me, working like this is the exact opposite—it makes the work more accurate.