Published in 2021
320 pages
Daniella Zalcman is the founder of Women Photograph, a global, US-based non-profit that launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists. The private database includes more than 1,000 independent documentary photographers based in 100+ countries. Their mission is to shift the makeup of the photojournalism community and ensure that the industry’s chief storytellers are as diverse as the communities they hope to represent. They believe that inclusion and equity work must be fully intersectional, and are committed to supporting and highlighting photographers across the spectrum of all identities.
Sara Ickow is the Senior Manager, Exhibitions and Collections at the International Center of Photography. Previously, she worked as a Curatorial Assistant and Collections Manager with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in their Department of Photographs and as a freelance collections manager. She holds an MA in art history from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she studied photography and time-based media art and wrote her thesis on Walker Evans in the 1930s.
What is this book about?
Open your eyes to a new world view with 100 women photojournalists’ stories from behind the lens.
85% of photojournalists are men. That means almost everything that is reported in the world is seen through men’s eyes. Similarly, spaces and communities men don’t have access to are left undocumented and forgotten. With the camera limited to the hands of one gender, photographic ‘truth’ is more subjective than it seems. To answer this serious ethical problem, Women Photograph flips that bias on its head to show what and how women and non-binary photojournalists see. (Women Photograph was founded in 2017 by Daniella Zalcman, a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer, 2021 Catchlight Fellow, multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation. It is a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists. Zalcman wanted to create a database to connect women photographers and news outlets, as editors often said they did not know where to find them.)
From shooting major events such as 9/11 to capturing unseen and misrepresented communities, this book presents a revisionist contemporary history: pour through 30 years of women’s dispatches in 100 photographs. Each shot is accompanied by 200 words from the photographer about the experience and the subject, offering fresh insights and a much-needed woman’s perspective.
Until we have balanced, representative reporting, the camera cannot offer a mirror to our global society. To get the full picture, we need diverse people behind the lens. This book offers a first step.
Relearn how to see with this evergreen catalogue that elevates the voices of women and non-binary visual storytellers.
