Social Justice Photography

For a few months I have been preparing to offer a workshop on social justice photography for a couple of great organizations called Milenio and MetroEast Community Media. At first the plan was for me to offer the workshop for teens and college-aged students, but gradually the plan evolved into a photojournalism workshop for photographers at any level of experience and skill development (both professional and amateur, DSLR and cell phone) who are exploring photography for social change. I know nothing about cell phone photography, so I invited another photographer to do the workshop with me. Biophilicat is an iPhone photographer currently taking phone photography to the next level by using a variety of apps she installs on her phone. Blip is not the perfect platform for her, as her interest is not so much in posting a photograph taken on the day she posts it, but in using iPhone apps to process photographs, with a commitment to processing and posting a new result each day. I have been very impressed by the beauty and variety of her work, and she was a terrific co-facilitator. If you haven't yet visited her journal, I hope you'll do so.

Participants included immigrants of various backgrounds and some seasoned activists, and we discussed what it means to make photographs of rallies, protests and marches in the current climate of police violence and surveillance. We discussed how posting photographs of vulnerable or exploited people can make them more vulnerable and can contribute to their exploitation. We asked each other how we can be sure our photographs are used in service of justice and not in service of the police state. We discussed how to earn and retain the trust of people whose stories we want to tell and whose causes we want to celebrate. 

One person in the workshop has been teaching English as a Second Language to adult immigrants, and she told us she has just lost her job. Fewer immigrants are arriving in the USA because of the president’s xenophobic policies, and those immigrants who are already here are cautious about signing up for language lessons, as that could expose them to investigation by ICE agents. We all sat with the sorrow we feel about that.

Key to the ethics of this work is the connection between a photographer and an activist: the necessity of showing up for justice over and over and getting to know people who are living in the struggle, so that our motives are clear and we don’t appear to be mere dilettantes to those who are risking their lives to work for a kinder, more equitable world. Making human connections--like making good photographs--takes time and persistence. It’s easier to talk about composition, focal point, lighting, and angles than to talk about the work of human connection, and we did talk about the simpler issues. However ultimately it is the human connection that makes this work possible. A social justice photographer is artist, activist, and comrade, with the emphasis on comrade.