Who Takes the Photo, Tells the Story
The founder of Women Photograph on how diversity in photojournalism can change the conversation. (Yes, it really matters.)
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The world is awash in images. With over 3.2 billion photographs published online each day—that’s over 60,000 snapshots per second—knowing how to read visual images has become an essential skill.
To the Vietnamese-American documentary photographer and educator Daniella Zalcman, this literacy begins with questioning who is behind the camera. In monitoring the photo credits of news images, she realized that men are overwhelmingly the ones framing stories in the media.
Tired of hearing excuses for why women are passed over for assignments, Zalcman launched Women Photograph, a 1,400-strong network of women and non-binary photojournalists. The platform quickly drew a following and has, since its launch in 2017, become a veritable campaign headquarters for a broad range of femme voices.
“It is easy to believe that we, as photojournalists, simply freeze the world around us frame by frame, working as unbiased observers who are fully detached from the events we cover,” Zalcman wrote in her 2023 book, Women Photograph: What We See. “But in reality our identities and lived experiences deeply impact how we access spaces and choose to tell stories."
Earlier this Summer, Women Photograph awarded grants to six photographers selected from over one thousand entries. Not long after, The Persistent spoke to Zalcman about her campaign for diversity in photojournalism—and why it matters.
The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Women Photograph launched at a time when less than one-fifth of photojournalists were women. Have things improved?
It’s been very incremental and very slow. I would love to see things move at a less glacial pace. As reflected in our data, we were steadily increasing in visibility and moving towards parity for the first six years, then we saw that number decrease in 2022 for the first time ever.
By virtue of sheer luck, we launched shortly before the #MeToo movement. All of a sudden, there was this global conversation about gender equality, visibility, and equity when it came to women in the workplace. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, there was a parallel conversation around race. Unfortunately, I think that we are now seeing a backlash to a lot of the benefits that came out of both of those movements. This is not unique to the visual media industry; it no longer feels like it's at the forefront of people’s minds in the way that it was during our first five years.
How do you respond to those who say they’re weary of the gender argument and who question the cause of advocating for women today?
If you hope to accurately cover the entire planet, you need to have a diverse set of storytellers able and willing to do that.
We routinely get frustrated men complaining about this on social media but I'm sorry, they’ve had several millennia of supremacy in pretty much every field. I think it's OK if we are in a period of overcorrection now.
Is there pay parity among freelance photographers across genders?
At some places the day rate is fixed. But generally speaking, men have been primed and socialized to be more comfortable about asking for more. They are statistically more likely to say, “Hey, could you also cover this expense? Hey, could you throw in an extra day rate because I need to spend more time post processing.” Women on average, are less likely to do that and that does lead to a difference in pay.
What excites you about the next generation of women photographers?
We see a level of care, passion, and desire to create personal work.
Among our grantees, we have a photographer from Venezuela [Andrea Hernández Briceño] who is making work about abortion access and reproductive rights in her home country; we have a photographer from Ukraine [Oksana Parafeniuk] who has been documenting the full scale Russian invasion from day one; we have a Nigerian photographer [Taiwo Aina] who really loves athletics and sports and has a series about female boxers in Lagos. These photographers are deeply informed about the cultural, historic and linguistic nuance of the stories they're working on.
Most of this year’s grantees present stories about their own communities. Why is it important to have those insider perspectives?
I think a healthy journalism industry revolves around a balance of inside and outside perspectives. I’ve been an outsider in almost all of the long-term projects that I've covered, so obviously, I believe in the role that kind of journalism plays.
But there’s also a need to overcorrect for the way that journalism has existed for so long. Journalism is fundamentally this very colonial discipline of a small group of people in the West parachuting into the global south and other communities and saying, “Hey, we're going to tell your story for our audience back home.” This strong wave of local journalists all over the world who want to tell their own stories in a much more thorough and nuanced way compared with how outsiders have done it for centuries is really exciting to see.
What do you think about the rise of civilian reporters on social media?
The fact that we now have increasingly financially accessible tools that can take really good photos means that citizens can also document. This is a good thing: After all, journalists aren't always present where news is happening. It used to be that we needed a third party—a newspaper, a magazine, a wire agency, a publisher—to get our work in front of the general public. Now, we have platforms that give us a direct line to pretty substantial audiences.
But this scenario also brings up complicated issues: Newspapers, magazines, and wire agencies have very strict codes of ethics for a reason.
So how can we make sense of this deluge of images from mixed sources?
We have to become discerning consumers of media. I don't think we've kept up with our responsibility as educators, for one: We consume millions of images a year that are deeply important for how we understand the world, yet we’re not teaching young people how to be smart consumers of those images. We spend a lot of time teaching students how to read, interpret, and understand text, yet we don't really require them to understand how to read a photograph.
What is the most compelling reason for hiring a female or non-binary photojournalist right now?
I don't know if I want to narrow it specifically to an identity. But I will say that the argument for hiring a diverse cohort of photographers boils down to ensuring that you are covering a cross section of people and communities and stories accurately. If we’re only sending one demographic to tell every story, we are just going to miss so much and we're likely going to misinterpret so much. My hope is that we will continue to build an increasingly diverse community across all identity markers, whether it's socioeconomic status, race, religion, or age. We just cannot afford to be monolithic.
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