 for joining us. Biz has been a long time participant with IDL events and was very involved when she was a student and we're lucky that she's offering internships and joining us today. So I'm gonna ask you first maybe to kind of give you a bio and maybe start from like when you were in Tufts you know and how those projects grew and then we'll move into the other stuff. Sure. So hi everybody. I'm sorry I can't see your faces but it's nice to virtually be with all of you. Thanks Heather for having me. IDL was really what made Tufts a like really incredible experience for me. A lot of the things that I've done since graduating are either directly or indirectly related to things that I did through the IDL and the IDL sort of touched all aspects of my undergrad experience. When I was at Tufts one of the things that really drew me to Tufts was I was really interested in research. I was also really interested in journalism. I knew I didn't want to study journalism as my major. I wanted to do political science and economics but I wanted to be able to do photography and journalism in some capacity. So when I was at Tufts there was exposure which was the photojournalism and documentary studies program that was student led and had collaborations with Seven Photo and the Aftermath Project. And so I got really involved with exposure. I did workshops through exposure which were basically hands-on journalism training with photography, photojournalism and written journalism mentors. And I also was attended weekly meetings. I did EPEC when I was in my sophomore year. Our theme was global poverty and inequality. And through the work that I started looking into that year I then ended up pursuing senior honors thesis that the IDL also supported on the way that 9-11 is written into history textbooks around the world. So from that project I ended up doing a Fulbright the next year in Bangladesh which was also on historiography and the way that history is politicized. Looking at the way that the 1971 war is written into history textbooks and the work that I had done through the IDL both through the workshops, the photojournalism workshops and through getting advising and funding and support on my senior honors thesis. I sort of learned how to do field work and was able to structure and carry out this independent project the year after I graduated in Bangladesh. After that I then did journals and fellowship with what was then Global Post is now Ground Truth which I had also gotten connected with through Gary Knight and Exposure and the IDL. And so from there I did this journalism fellowship that partnered American emerging journalists with Egyptian emerging journalists to cover the Arab Spring and we spent some time in Egypt that fall and I ended up going back in the spring to work with this with a reporting team and through the course of that year I ended up deciding to pursue freelance journalism and photography and so then I worked as a freelancer full-time for four years three four years and then I went back to school to pursue my PhD in political science trying to sort of flesh out the research side of things after having focused on the journalism side of things for the years and I am currently working on my PhD at UC Berkeley I'm based in New York City and I try to integrate my journalism and research work as much as I can and I'm happy to answer questions about either I've focused I've prepared like slides that I can go through or not on sort of my journalism side of things and how it dovetails with research stuff but yeah I think that they complement each other nicely and I think that it's useful to have the skills from each of them for each of the sets of both over units. Great great okay do you want to show your slides first and then we'll go for sure. So I'm going to show my screen let me know if you can see it. Does that work? Awesome so I sort of gave a brief overview of what the first few slides cover but just that in Bangladesh when I was there working on the Fulbright research that I was working on I also started to pursue and develop this project that I started while I was at Tufts called A Woman's War which looks at women in conflict across the globe and the idea is that the sort of theme that runs through a lot of the projects that I've worked on is what is the individual what is like individual memory and individual history what is collective memory or national memory and how do they intersect and what is the ways that their intersection affects the individual experience and the collective experience and so that sort of theme runs through a lot of these projects in looking at the way that women are remembered in conflict I wanted to focus on how women are often written out of history and when they are remembered they're often limited to certain roles so supporter, nurse, victim they aren't allowed to sort of have the variety of narratives that men are often allowed to have so I had started the project on a exposure workshop in Vietnam the summer after I moved to Bangladesh and I continued the project there and then I worked on that project on that Egypt fellowship and then I got a grant an alumni grant through the IGL to work on it in Bosnia I did some work on it in Northern Ireland in conjunction with another job that I worked on there and then I brought it back to the US so through the course of working on this project the thing that was useful for it was that when you're starting out in journalism one of the things that I've gotten as advice that's really good advice is that you want to shoot the work and work on the work that you want to work on so I think one thing that's really important to think about is consider what kind of projects what kind of work is most compelling to you and figure out how you can start to learn and work on that yourself in the hopes that that will then one day be the work that you get hired to do and the reason why that's important is because you want to figure out what your voice is and what you can bring to journalism I think that there are a lot of really important conversations nowadays and I'd be happy to talk about this more in the Q&A of what it means to be to have your identity inform and your lived experiences inform the work that you produce and I think that the idea of objectivity is been used as a way to kind of mask a lot of the harder conversations that journalism has needed to have for a long time and there are a lot of these conversations happening right now with coverage of Black Lives Matter and with coverage with the discrepancies in who gets assigned things and who it covers things and so I think that these are questions that are really important for you yourself as you're thinking of going into journalism to consider to be aware of the biases that you bring to be aware of the perspective that you bring and how that informs the work that you produce. So this project Woman's War was useful for me because it sort of allowed me to understand what my visual voice was like to understand what the experiences that I would have interacting and reporting with all the people that I met through this project it also taught me the importance of collaboration especially if you are an outsider or a foreigner in every country that I worked in I found a young woman who is about my age to partner with on the project who would be from the country who would have you know the the perspective that I would not have to be able to partner on the project together and that was both important in making sure that I wasn't blind to important things that outsiders would miss it was also important in terms of just making sure that I was sort of asking the right questions and it was important in terms of helping me and helping the partner in each of the respective countries focus together on this larger project and I think the sort of insider outsider dynamic was really helpful in playing off the strengths and weaknesses that exist in both of those roles. So the thing that was also useful and interesting about working on this project I'm just clicking through some of the the images from it is that when I started to freelance I was able to show this work around to editors they had a sense of this one issue is that this very long-term very in-depth project as a starting freelancer there are very few editors that are going to be able or willing to assign you to a long-term project like this this is really kind of more of a personal work and so what I found was that when I was showing more portfolio I needed to fill in the gaps in my portfolio with more of what I would want to shoot on a daily basis and what I've come to really focus on in the past few years is portraiture so it builds on this work that I started I've always been really drawn to portraits but these were not the kinds of portraits that you would produce maybe on a daily assignment I shot this in film I rarely shoot film with the clients that I work for and for my editorial clients and so it was important for me to figure out how to fill in the gaps in my portfolio while also showing this work and saying look this is this is my passion project this is what I've worked on for a long time but I also on a daily basis on a weekly basis these are the things that I want to work on and I think that the thing that's useful again as you're thinking as you're starting in journalism is to figure out what are those things that you want to work on I have never been a spot news shooter I've never been someone that you know gets called when there is something that happens really suddenly and you have to run to the location and make images and file really quickly that has never been my specialty and I know that I don't work super well in those situations what I do work well in is sort of situations that are more that are more feature-based that are more stories that are more person-driven I've done a lot of work on subjects that are sensitive where identities need to be obscured so I've shot a lot of anonymous portraits and I think that that sort of understanding where your strengths are where your strengths lie and being able to communicate that to whoever you're working with is something that's really important and no one will be a jack of all trades you don't want to be a jack of all trades you want to figure out what your voice is and how it can contribute so after I sort of worked on this project and while I was working on this long-term project I also started shooting for editorial publications in New York based in New York and I'd be happy to talk about the process of trying to start to shoot for editorial publications the the the route that people take varies a lot depending on the age that they are when they started working in the industry and what they want to work on in general when I was first starting to shoot I started to freelance in 2012 there was a publication called the New York Times Lens Vlog which is a way that a lot of young photographers would break in that a lot of editors would look at that list at that publication and when new edit when new photographers were featured they would often be able to get assignments from that story that vlog does not exist anymore so that's not a route that you can take anymore but there are other routes one very common route is through doing workshops and meeting editors that way another route that you can take is you know editors are always looking for new photographers they're always looking for people that have fresh perspectives and can offer new work and so even just cold emailing people works although you want to do it very carefully and you want to structure your emails in a very specific way so we could talk more about that later on but when I started shooting I had done a lot of portraiture work I had done a lot of sort of these in-depth longer pieces and I started shooting more of these feature stories in New York and I ended up shooting a lot of styles which was really fun so a lot of like nightlife and culture in New York City and a lot of features so these were things that were more intimate that you sort of had to be able to blend in and gain trust pretty quickly but they were not this was not subject matter that I was used to covering but it had the same sort of fundamental skills the same sort of idea of needing to be able to connect with people and to be able to establish trust in whatever situation you're working in so that you can make images that can capture the idea of a place and a setting in a short period of time and I really love doing this work it was you know it led to a lot of insecurity if you wouldn't get a call for a few days you'd be like oh I'm never going to get work again but it was also a really incredible way to start to see New York City to learn about New York City you know I have my families from New York City a couple generations back but this was a really amazing way to get to learn the city and this very specific part of it that I really would not have had access to otherwise so over the course of this sort of three to four year period I ended up starting to work on some more feature length stories with the paper I would you know go from getting a short portrait assignment or a red carpet step-and-shoot to doing sort of longer term more in-depth pieces and most of these shoots were with the New York Times I started I started being a contributing photographer with them which means that basically it's not an official title it just means you're shooting for them regularly and especially in New York City there's sort of a group of photographers that shoot with them regularly that are not staff but are often called on in any given week and so this story was one of the first longer stories that I worked on with them the editors that I worked on it with was really trusting and great and let me sort of take a lot of liberties with the style like I said the stories that I sort of started getting assignments for with these more sensitive more sort of they would either have to do with youth culture or with relationships or with sort of dynamics between power and people that the way that power affected people at a more individual level the story was about relationship culture at U Penn so basically what the shoots were was I was going to U Penn's campus and I was photographing college students interacting and sort of like on the dating scene and no one people were not supposed to be able to be identifiable this image actually didn't run in the original story because you can see people's faces but the story was trying to convey this idea of dating and it had to do a lot with drinking culture and with sexual violence but no one could be pictured and the images had to be more evocative than they could be literal I did portraits of specific people but again they no faces could be seen no names could be used and this story was one of the stories that really helped me sort of define show editors that I could do these more longer term stories these longer term pieces shooting over the course of two days but being able to create a visual narrative in the course of those two days so the images were very fun to make this was at Spring Fling which Tufts has a Spring Fling U Penn has a similar thing and when I was shooting you know I this was six years ago that I shot the story so I looked pretty young and people would come up to me and ask what I was shooting for and you just have to be able to tell them you know I said I'm shooting with the New York Times we're doing the story on dating culture no one asked me to stop shooting but if they did I would have stopped shooting being forthright and gaining sort of consent in cases where you're shooting like this are really important and I could talk more about that later on I think that because everyone was anonymous in this story it's a slightly different dynamic but you want to make sure that in places where people are being pictured you gain consent you explain clearly what the images are being used for and that people are able to you know give permission or not that varies a little bit when you're shooting public officials or people who are in power but again we can talk about that later in the Q&A if that's something that's of interest to people um so towards the end of this year I shot this in 20 that was in 2012 in 2014 I moved to California to start grad school I'm doing my PhD in political science which seems unrelated but I've tried to tie them together in different ways um in fact my dissertation question which is this how does the trauma of living through conflict affect group relations and reconciliation after war ends is directly informed from all the interviews that I did for the women in conflict project um and so kind of using the themes that emerged from that project I have developed my dissertation work and even though the methods that I'm using for my dissertation research vary greatly it's not an oral history and documentary photography project the the sort of main themes are directly informed from this work that I did so the last thing I want to talk about before I open up to questions because and questions are way more interesting is this project that I worked on in the end of 2018 beginning of 2019 where we photographed all of the women that one who are currently serving in congress um it was a project that also has to do with this idea of history and memory and the way that we have written history and who is included and who's excluded this time though it focused on visual history visual memories so the project started when I covered um AOC being elected to congress in November of 2018 so this wasn't her upset primary victory in June of 2018 it was the election that everyone knew she was going to win um she had already been in the public eye for a few months but I got to shadow her for the day election day and it was super interesting seeing her do by of course the media attention on her by that point was sort of like at already super high she was this rising star um and it was super interesting to see this young woman who is one year younger than I am you know is not your classic what a politician looks like um see her doing all the classic politiciany things so you know going to her voting station and her polling place and greeting kids at her polling place or taking questions from the press or you know going standing out the street corner and talking to voters on election day or being at her victory party it was super interesting to see her in these spaces and visually she just didn't look these images were images that I had seen before you know there are visual tropes for political imagery but she was so not the person that I had seen at the center of those images before I had not seen someone that looked like her or who had her background in those spaces bookmarked this previous in the year earlier in the year in March of 2018 I had gone to the national portrait gallery which if any of you museums open up again and we can go back you should go it's in DC it's free as most museums in DC are and it has the portraits the the paintings of all of the presidents throughout the course of US history and when you go in the opening image is the most recent the the last the most recent former president it's a hard sentence to structure um so in this case Barack Obama and when you walk in you know his portrait is spot lit it just like sort of slams you it's a beautiful portrait Kehinde Wiley painted it I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second but then you walk through the rest of the the gallery and if you walk all the way back to the front to the back of it that's the oldest president and you can walk through it goes to modern history and you notice that there are some themes which is they're all painted in a very similar style and they're all for the most part old white dudes um and these visual themes really hit you it as you're walking through this it's you know it's this very beautiful regal gallery the walls are beige there's like red carpets and it really conveys a sense of power and authority but the the the people who are in those frames that's the idea of what we've seen as power you walk to the halls of universities you walk to the halls of congress these are the portraits that we see on the wall this is the visual idea of what we have of power in many ways or that least this is what has been put forward as what power should look like um and then you hit Barack Obama's portrait and it just is striking and how it stands out and candy wiley painted this portrait in this way this is what he has known one of the styles he is known for which is borrowing these postures from historical portrait paintings but adding sort of a surrealist element so in this case the background um of obama's portrait is super vibrant it's covered in leaves and flowers there are flowers from hawaii to nod to obama's birthplace um and it's supposed to sort of jar you in that you know this visual trope you've seen the sort of style but there's something that's different and the difference helps draw your attention to this is a person who we've not typically seen as occupying a visual space of power um and so I wanted to borrow this idea to sort of take the idea that candy wiley uses to use the style of historical portrait paintings but to photograph the original pitch that I came up with was the new women that had been or the new represent historic first so this was a poster that was at AOC's victory party in november of 2018 so kind of capturing this idea visually um so I wrote up this pitch and I sent it to uh the politics editor at the New York Times versus Schwartz-Taylor and the idea again was to photograph just be me with my film camera walking around to the different congressional offices photographing the new members and I did not know this at the time but the times had been talking about how to visualize this new class of women that was coming into congress they had gotten a lot of media attention it was it was the biggest it was a historic class the most diverse the most women um and they wanted to figure out how to visualize that so they didn't know how the holidays were approaching and I came to them with this pitch and they said oh we really like this idea but we don't want to just do the new members of congress let's photograph all of the women that have ever been that are in congress at present so went from around 30 portraits to 130 portraits um and so the we got approval for the project on December 13th I sent the pitch right after Thanksgiving so it took a few weeks to get through all the layers of approval um the editor assigned another photographer to shoot so we could shoot in tandem her name's Celeste Lohman she's like this incredible portrait photographer um and then we started coordinating um this was a giant spreadsheet that we worked off of where while I was waiting for approval for the project we didn't know if it would come through but I wanted it to happen so badly that I started making this spreadsheet with the names and contacts of every single women member of congress existing and to come um and there's no like listserv for congress you have to email each member separately so we had to find the names and contacts for each of the members um and then we had we got approval on December 13th and our first shoot day was December 17 so it was a Thursday and then a Tuesday so over that weekend we had to I spent that Friday all day just sitting at my desk calling offices just like one by one um because you normally as a photographer you don't do a lot of production production just means setting up the shoot coordinating schedules but because we had so little time and because I really wanted this project to happen I offered to help with production so I was coordinating and scheduling in addition to shooting we rented all the equipment we loaded up a giant car we drove down to DC this was the room that we were shooting in we set up two studios in this room so that Celeste and I could shoot at the same time um and on my phone I had the reference images I had these images that we were going to be like borrowing the visual themes from so I can when the congresswoman came in I could have my phone I could explain to them the concept and I could show them these images we had sent their offices beforehand a call sheet which is basically like details on the shoot um but you know members of congress are busy they'd gotten briefed to varying degrees and so I wanted to make sure to sort of reiterate the ideas and that this wasn't sort of a traditional political portrait they weren't going to come in and cross their arms and smile or whatever whatever might be the case whatever might be their classic political pose I was like we want to emulate these postures and this feeling to say you know this is what power looks like now there are more women uh and in congress than ever before and so why don't we have these visual images this collection of visual images for women in congress so one big thing that happened was on the second literally the second day of shooting we photographed Nancy Pelosi which was really helpful in overcoming a lot of the members skepticism where we would email them and saying we're photographing all of the women in congress and they'd say like oh good luck because it's like herding cats but when we were like oh well we photographed she wasn't elected speaker at that point she had been speaker before but you know speaker presumptive Pelosi when we said we had photographed her it helped members say okay I will come down to the studio you don't have to come to my office a lot of them had been pushing us to bring the studio to them which you can see it's not a small setup so lugging it all around Capitol Hill would have been an issue so when we're like speaker Pelosi came she came to the studio she was able to make time in her schedule a lot of the other members a wanted to be a part of it and b had a harder time convincing us that they didn't have time to come to the studio so we shot for three days that week then it was the holidays we went home we came back after the new year so January the very day for all the new members one thing that we asked everybody to do is if you look at the reference images there are objects in a lot of these images so we asked members of congress to bring objects of significance to them so that we could photograph them with those objects and we did not intend this to be the case but it ended up being this really wonderful icebreaker where someone would walk in and they'd be carrying a flag or a necklace and them sharing the story behind the object was a way of establishing you know a quick report and a five minute 15 minute portrait session that we had and we learned some really incredible stories about a lot of these women we also asked them we sent them questions later on that ran as text with the piece and we asked them all the same three questions which is why did you run for office what does being a woman in power mean to you and what do you hope to achieve in the next session of congress so this was the room that we shot in the second week significantly nicer than the first week we had more space and it was really neat photographing everyone on swearing in day also the first day that we were back shooting the second week we photographed a lot of the newly elected members and it was an amazing experience because they were all they'd just gotten the keys to their offices it was the day before swearing in day a lot of them had been painting together and this was the first time they'd seen each other and so there was a lot of hugs we also had some old members come in that day and so the new members were seeing the sort of like senior congress people and they were they had looked up to them for a long time so they were able to greet them and it was we had like a very finely tuned schedule and it totally went out the window because everyone was too excited so it took a lot of coordinating that's a fraction of the number of emails that we wrote those are just at one point my mail app was like i'm not keeping these threads separate and then compress them all so i had a 1200 mail message long thread that was impossible to navigate and then one question was the the project was going to run as its own special section but we didn't know what should go on the cover do you put one woman do you put a grid of all of them we photographed this was a photo op that speaker Pelosi's office organized but it's only all the house congressional democrats which wouldn't work because it doesn't include anyone from the senate and it doesn't include any of the house republicans um so there's a designer at the times who came up with the really good idea that the paper is printed in 27 different locations across the country and so they would geotarget which basically means for each of the locations where the plant is printed where the paper is printed those papers get distributed to a region in the us so we take each region and find a congresswoman from each of those regions and then that would be that congresswoman would be on the cover of those papers that were delivered to that region so they came up with 27 different covers that were delivered that were printed differently across the country and the paper had never done this before um they had never printed this many different covers and so i got to go in the night that the paper was closing and see all the covers laid out in the news room and it was really we laid them out like this and a whole bunch of people came around and like it was like a little gallery exhibit was really cool um so then the the section ended up running it was this i'm gonna just fast-forward to this they we wanted to make sure that we had everyone sort of got equal play time so we had to you know make some images bigger some smaller but there were a lot of members that will you know lesser known congresswoman who wouldn't necessarily get a portrait shoot like this um in the same way that a lot of the more senior more well known um members would get a portrait shoot so someone like elizabeth warren who's done a zillion portrait shoots and then someone like jamie herrera butler who's a congresswoman from washington state who might not really get a call to get photographed like this and we wanted to make sure that everyone was sort of given equal representation and had the ability to sort of be held in equal regard regardless of how well known or how much power they had um so the project kind of lived on people used it in different ways the image on the right is a pictures from um this this middle school librarian in washington state she printed out all the images and put them up as a display that's my grandma she was 95 the year she was born there was one woman in congress in 1924 so it was great to see her with her copy um and then we ended up turning into a book which i can talk to you more about as well thing that i really was grateful for the book that was different from the the paper version was that we were able to include a lot more history so the history of women in u.s politics and we had you know this annotated timeline we're able to include a lot of archival materials um this is janette ranken the first woman who was elected to congress in 1916 in montana this is a portrait of most of the the 65th congress which is the congress that she was elected to if you could find her it's good on you there there she is that's otherwise all all dudes and everyone is white um this is a great little clipping lady members of congress now have a private cloakroom for the first time in 1927 um this is congress all the women in congress in 1960 as you can see they are all white the first um non-white woman was elected to congress in 1964 that's patsy mink and then charlie chisum was the first black woman elected to congress in 1968 um so like drawing this line all the way to the present and we got to do some events with congresswomen as the book came out we did conversations with them about what being a woman in congress is like and how the dynamics differ uh and yeah that's it so i'd be happy to take questions sorry if i rushed through some things um but yeah i look forward to chatting with you all great no problem let's um when do we start well when do we start with the questions one of the questions is is it worth it to go to journalism grad school or get a masters in journalism so i think everybody has different feelings about this the thing that it's incredibly useful for is connections and in an industry where it is very driven by making connections with people um it's useful to have connections and you grad school is one way to make those connections you do not have to go to grad school for journalism um if you can find ways to get yourself out there there are a lot of portfolio reviews that you can go to to meet editors you can do workshops with people um grad school is important for journalism and journalism grad school is super expensive um you do get great skills i just think that there are also other ways to get that training and skills without spending that much money um so i think there i have i know people who want to journalism grad school and say it was the best thing they ever did i know plenty of journalists who never went to grad journalism grad school and also feel very well trained and like they didn't like they didn't miss out on anything a couple of workshops that are really good resources are the eddy adam's workshop is free every year um you have to pay for transportation but otherwise it's free um the new york times does a portfolio review every year it's very hard to get into but if you apply and don't get in apply again the next year um also if you just google portfolio reviews photojournalism there are great lists that exist um the nice thing about portfolio reviews is you can meet editors talk to them show them your work and sort of really connect with them the before you go to a portfolio review you really want to make sure that you have you've done a lot of thinking about what sort of things you want to work on and you've also done your research on whoever you're meeting with so you want to really tailor your portfolio to the editor that you're working you're meeting with because if you show if you meet with the editor of vogue and you show them sort of a classic newspaper shooter portfolio they're gonna be like i can't this work is great but i can't assign you so you really and it also is not a great sign they feel like maybe um you didn't do your homework so you want to make sure that you're doing your homework and all of these sorts of things that you're going to great and then another question is how important is it to get um some type of experience in undergrad i think journalism experience in undergrad is a great thing to do you do not have to study journalism it does not have to be your major i worked on the observer when i was at Tufts um and it was great i worked as the photo director whatever the photo art director i don't know what the title was but i assigned people and i edited photo essays it was great for me to learn that i did not want to work as an editor as well i liked being more i like doing the photography but it helped me think more narratively and think about how stories could be shown and needed to be structured to be able to present to an audience so i highly recommend getting journalism experience there's also really good um now everything's online there's so many resources out there a lot of photography people are running workshops online or offering talks and you know everyone's at home so people are way more willing to have conversations with you um as we're sort of in this very weird limbo period and also um since one of your projects kind of developed or you know if you did it's an undergrad what would it be like for say someone to kind of start just independently working on a box without you know and maybe looking for a mentor or somebody but just pursuing an interest initially definitely so i think that one great thing to do is if you if there are people at Tufts that you know that can serve as your mentor if you have a photography teacher that you love or if there's a journalism professor that you really like approaching them and saying you know i'm working on this project here's a one page memo on it here's what i've shot so far i'd love to you know sit down with you have a zoom call with you and get your feedback um and it's always worth asking always be kind always be sort of um understanding that people have a lot going on but saying i you know i'd be really grateful if i could maybe send you sporadic updates and get your feedback on this um you can also do that with your peers so getting together a collective of people that you can share sort of ideas with each other and work together on developing a project um and making sure that you you have someone to keep you accountable and to give you feedback is something that's really i find really helpful um if there's also a photographer that you really love or an editor that you really love there is no harm in sending them a very kind email and saying you know i'd really like to get get a night if you have any time i'd really like to share your ideas i'd really like to hear your ideas on this thing that i've been working on the thing that i think is important if you do that is to a um make sure that again you're tailoring it who they are so reference work that they have already done and to be make sure that you're making it as digestible as possible so don't send them everything you've done send them maybe a two paragraph memo and attach 10 a pdf of 10 images to the or embed 10 images in the in the email um and that's a great way to be able to share some work and try and get some feedback i've gotten a lot of emails that are like very clearly form emails where someone copied and pasted and just emailed like 20 different people and was just like hello i would like your thoughts on this and i'm much less likely to reply to those emails that i am to emails that are sort of more thoughtfully constructed great um okay so how did you build confidence to take photographs without disrupting the scene that you were in what are some personal challenges that have been present through your career that have evolved along with it so i think that more than confidence it's about um understanding sort of the power dynamics that exist in photography if you are going in with a camera that already puts you in a position of power um and being mindful of how to just how to empathize and how to connect with people i think that one thing that is really important is you're not going in and like taking photographs it's photographs are always mutually constituted you are i had a photography teacher that said in every portrait every photograph there are three things there's the subject there's a photographer and there's the relationship between the two of them and i think that some of the most important conversations that are going on right now is saying we need to think more about that dynamic and to not pretend that creating photographs is just some objective truth about what's happening every single situation is modified by having a photojournalist come into it and it will be modified differently depending on that photojournalist their identity their background and the the demeanor that they bring into it are they really aggressive are they really um deferential are they sort of what how are they entering the situation and how are they interacting with the people that are in it so i think more than building up confidence it's about practice just going out there and working i still get nervous sometimes when i go into a situation where i you know it's a new situation i don't know what i'm going to find and i think listening to that nervousness and listening to your gut is really important for safety and it's really important ethically to say i don't feel great about this and why don't i feel great about this am i just sort of anxious and nervous or i don't feel great about this because i because this is not an image that i should make um just because something's happening just because you have access to it doesn't mean that you need to make that image that you should make that image and i think that that's something that i'm continually trying to work on and think about um and i have a lot of conversations with a lot of my friends who are also photojournalists about that okay um what forthcoming project are you excited about if you don't have one in the works what kind of project are you dreaming of some very good question um i right now am in sort of like dissertation writing mode so that's kind of which is not a photography project um there were a couple projects that i've been working on that kind of got uh set aside it's like a skewed because of the pandemic some things about the centennial suffrage that we're still trying to make happen um but is a little bit harder because of we want to be safe and not you know it's it's a little bit more difficult to work right now but uh the the things that i think are really have been really of interest to me this year are um centennial suffrage and then also the census is something that i've been trying to work on visually because i think super important informs a lot of policy in the us um and i think that figuring out ways to have it be more of a concrete thing that people can visualize and think about is would be useful in a increasing census participation and be um understanding how it's really politicized and can have really profound ramifications okay so um what do you think it takes to make a project like useful what kind of characteristics make a project more durable or adaptable to evolution mention people use the women in congress in different ways that's a really good question i think it varies a lot i think one of the things that i love about photography is i make an image and people interact with it in a way that's totally different from maybe what i was thinking about when i made that image uh i think that something that i feel very strongly is a lot of the times i think sometimes projects will get dumbed down because or shortened because editors think that audience members have a finite amount of time that they want to interact with something something i i tend to think that readers are more sophisticated than we get them credit for and letting people into the process people really want that people really want to know why images look the way they will look what is the sort of motivation behind them um and what the meaning is rather than just being presented you know images to just interact with so i think that as you're working on projects and when you're talking about making them durable to evolution really documenting your process along the way and having a really good i emphasize this all the time having a good organizational system and keeping track of your notes and materials is something a you'll thank yourself for later and b is helpful when you're putting together the project because you're able to see oh i started out in this place and now it exists here um and i think that that evolution is part of the project in and of itself um can you talk more about the consent process when you're shooting portraits for photos and places like basi and herzegovina how did you communicate the aim of your work to your subjects and your value added to them it's a really important question and i i always emphasize that this is one of those places in which research and um journalism interact really well and research you have the institutional review board and you apply and you go through ethics review journalism doesn't have that so if you want you need to hold your i mean newspapers have ethical standards and as a journalist you're following those standards but you are holding yourself to them there is no separate review board that will hold you to them so i think that that's a really important thing to think about and consider all the time when you every single day you're out you're thinking about what what will this image do does this person that i'm working with that i'm photographing fully understand the context in which it will be used do they understand the ramifications that could potentially result from this image being published especially if it's a more um delicate or legally sensitive subject um so that's something that i emphasize all the time and i don't think that there is enough training in that in journalism programs or in journalism in general so the onus is often on the individual to educate themselves which is not great but is the way it is um so for consent that was the reason why it was really important to me to have partners on the ground um who are my age who are also women um who could be like true partners on the project so that they you know if the photographing and if they didn't speak english if i didn't speak the language we would be able to make sure that the the partner that i was working with was fully informed about the consent process and was able to sort of take the person through the consent process um the benefit also of the women in conflict project is by the time i got to beyond Bangladesh basically i had a body of work already so i was able to show subsequent women that i interviewed previous interviews previous photographs so they could get a sense of the project and get a sense of the larger purpose of it i've also tried to stay in touch with a number of the women so that i can share the images with them and show the way in which the project has sort of been put out into the world but i think that making sure that you're very clear on the consent process and you're very clear on the ways in which you're comfortable with the images being used and not being used is really important great um so how are you able to best present yourself as a freelancer when you were first starting out what kinds of techniques did you use did you feel like you have an array of published pieces in order to be as successful as a freelancer or you know can you get your door so i think again understanding what your being able to communicate what you want to work on and what your sort of what makes you different or what you think your strengths are is really important um because there are so many photographers in the world there are so many journalists being able to say this is where i excel this is where i am able to sort of do things differently is useful and so that when an editor has a story they're like oh this story is about this i remember so and so is good at this or can do this um so having examples of that is the easiest way to be able to do that to be able to show a project doesn't have to be published it could be something that you've worked on on yourself um but to be able to structure that project in a way that you could show it to someone and communicate it you can publish it on instagram is a great way to get your work out there having a website is always great but honestly people use instagram a lot these days and so you can get really and making sure that you have text to go along with your work that if you're not speaking the the purpose of the project the person can read about it and understand it i think that you know being a photojournalist a huge part of that is being a journalist and to be able to write your captions to report out your photos if you're not working directly with a writer to be able to do that half of it is also really important um do you have any advice for how to put the subject your photographing at ease i found it difficult to elicit the right emotion i'm looking for in the portrait shot so i think that one thing that you want to think about is are you eliciting an emotion or are you helping sort of create a space where the emotion will exist that's like a weird differentiation but you a portrait again is about the subject the photographer in the relationship between the two of them so to use as an example the women in congress shoots i had five to 20 minutes with each woman and sometimes they would get in front of the camera and they'd smile really big and sometimes that is their personality that's an accurate representation of them but we were also trying to convey a sense of power and we were trying to sort of create this studio space in which that can sort of come to fruition um so i think that you want to make sure that you're trying to convey the person rather than just your idea of the person if that makes sense that's hard to do if you have a very limited time with the person what i try to make up for that with is to do research on their background or to try and read about them so that even if i don't have a ton of time to interact with them and get to know them i hopefully know a bit about them to inform the shoot itself but one thing that i think is important is to a just make them feel at ease no one is really going to it's going to be really hard to make a good portrait if the person is really uncomfortable so putting them at ease you know i try not to take out my camera the second that someone will i walk up to someone so even in the case of the women in congress shoots i would have my camera on a table to the side and i'd meet them first i'd back when we shook hands shake their hand i'd talk to them for a couple minutes and then i'd go get my camera as opposed to being like hi nice to meet you and then just putting a camera in their face um but then also just talking throughout the course of the shoot is really important there is nothing that is more uncomfortable than sitting in front of a camera and having the person behind the camera say nothing so i sometimes do this too much when i'm photographing i'll say like this is really great or um i will often use my body to help show people how to move so if i want someone to move their head to the right i won't just say move your head to the right i will actually do the motion myself um and that sort of art of directing is everybody does it differently i it's really instructive to be able to watch ever other portrait photographers work because everybody does it differently but for me it's about really trying to establish a rapport in a short period of time and actually like i i'm very physical when i direct i i will jump up and down i will like move around and use my body to help show them how i'd like them to people it's natural that people mimic what you do so if you smile they will smile if you if you ask them to take a breath so that their shoulders go up and you take a breath themselves it'll be easier for them to do it so just making them feel not bizarre on the other side of the camera is a good first step um one undergrad majors are generally found in the journalism world good question um any kind of like social science major so political science psychology sociology anthropology all of those majors the sort of research methods involve interacting with humans a lot of the time so you know if you're doing fieldwork you will often interact with people or you'll do historical research which is similar to a lot of reporting um archival work um so anything that's in social science but it can be anything i mean you need science journalists that have biomedical background so it could you any any major can be can inform journalism so great um what are resources you recommend for understanding rules of consent when taking images in public so a lot of the time people will say you're in public it's legal this technically is so if if you are in public it is technically legal to take photos of anyone and anything but i think that it is more important to think about what are you photographing how will it affect the people that you are photographing and that differs depending on whether or not you are photographing again elected officials people who are in power average citizens um you know i think that you need to have this sort of nuance thought process about it um i was on a jury earlier this year for a photo competition and there was photos of the aftermath of hurricane dorian in the Bahamas and in one of the photos there was a body a dead body the person's black and you don't see their head and you see like the rest of their body their clothes but the body is decomposing it is really dehumanizing and we got into a long discussion where a couple of the other jury members wanted to award the photo and i thought really strongly that this is not a photo that we should be encouraging to be made this is uh it's in public but there's no way to get consent to make this photograph the person is dead um and when you're thinking about what this photo says and what it means we are way more likely to see photos of dead non-white bodies than we are likely to see photos of dead white bodies and there's a reason for that because it's we are more comfortable with dehumanizing um there's more of a culture of dehumanizing non-white people than there is white people and i think that that is an important conversation to think about when you're making images even if you're in public you're photographing humans and you need to think about them as individuals and as humans and i think that um it goes beyond just the legality of it it goes into what that image means who is in that image and i often think about what would this person think if they saw this image um how does this image contribute to the larger conversation about this topic um this community and i think that that's really important because um i often think something that's useful to do when you're thinking about this this is a very abstract concept so it's often useful to have very concrete thought processes to think about for this um if you say you're working on a story if you google image search something about that story what are the images that come up the most commonly what are the first top 20 hits for images um and do you think that that should be the visual narrative that exists or do you need to challenge that narrative in some way what are the tropes that exist around any given subject any given community and why do those tropes exist and how are you contributing a lot of the times i will take photos that i will never file later and i just think that because in looking at them later i say it's not an image that is going to contribute to the conversation this is not an image that i think the person that would be in this that is in this photo would if it was a photo that i took on the street that there's just a bunch of people on the street and i i didn't get consent i didn't walk up to every single person and get consent later on i sort of walked myself through the process of would everyone in this photo consent to this photo or would they not so it's almost you get consent from people as much as you can i try to walk up to people you often need captions as well to get people's names um when you're working for a client but i sort of hold myself to a second level of consent where when i'm editing when i'm going through my photos i think about what do these photos do and what do they represent and um do i consent to letting this photo exist in the world because as the photographer you have that control you you decide what gets released and what does not hey um is journalism a field someone could turn to later in their career i think anything's a field that you can turn to later in your career i think it's careers are often non-linear so yes i there are a lot of mid career fellowships there are a lot of people i know that you know we'll start out one way i i decided that i wanted to do journalism first because i thought it would be harder to return to journalism later in your career it's hard to have a family and be a journalist um a lot of journalists a lot of reporting things are done in the last minute so arranging for child care is hard if you're a freelancer health benefits is hard you know i set myself a very hard deadline to get back to grad school at 26 because i was going to lose my health insurance at that age um from my parents and so i think that thinking about those very real concerns is important too um so for me i wanted to do journalism earlier in my career because you know i have more i had more willingness to sleep in crap on crappy beds when i was 21 than i do now so but i think like you can do it either which way great great um and also a question about like if you're um an inter you're from a different country working in another country what is that visa wise or anything like that that's a really good question i am not an expert in international visas and i think that the situation is evolving very quickly in the u.s um so i i'm gonna have to say i don't know on that one but there are i would google that there should be some good resources on that um and if you want to follow up with me later on i can see if i have any friends that might know more about that than i do um well how about for you working on uh journalism like in another country when you went to basnia or whatever what kind of visas or anything good question so it varies a lot in some countries you do not want to go on a tourist visa if you are working as a journalist the the consequences of being found out that you're working as a journalist on a tourism visa are very high um in some places it's just standard to go on a tourism visa even if you're working even if you're working on a project it also varies depending on whether or not you're on assignment working for a client or you're working on your own project so in when i was on the egypt fellowship i had to get a journalism i think we got business visas um a lot of the other part that when i was in basnia i was on a tourism visa because i was basically taking photographs and not really working for a client so i think it varies depending on the degree of like officialness that you're with are the photos going to be published i have a good friend that works in venezuela a lot she's american and she her byline was never on her photos because she wanted to continue to work in venezuela was not able to get a journalism visa and so um if she published photos under her name and then tried to go back into the country she wouldn't be able to get back in so it just varies a lot and it changes tasks so this is one of those things where it's good to have a network i'm a member of there's a lot of really good networks nowadays photographers there are existing organizations like npva which is the news press photographers association i'm a member of women photograph um which has a very robust facebook group where people post questions and people can reply so like how much would you price this photo for or what would this has has anybody worked in this context and can they offer suggestions on this um so getting plugged into those communities is really important because it's a very independent career so having great okay there you go then journalism and news reporting have been under attack lately but they still serve a critical role in society given the complexity of the relationship between journalists and the public today how do you see the role of journalists changing in the future in particular if there's an important message that needs to be disseminated such as over 19 journalists due to convince the public giving the increasing distress yeah this is really freaky to i think that one of the things that i was most concerned about when trump took office was more than any specific um policy agenda which many which have been incredibly detrimental um the erosion of norms and institutions including the the institution of news um and the institution of truth um whatever truth means you know i think that like we talked about objectivity before that is there are really important debates about that but i think the idea that there cannot be accurate reporting is really problematic or that accurate reporting is seen as not accurate if it doesn't you know conform to a certain viewpoint um this is a really hard one i think that the best thing that journalists can do is dot all their eyes and cross out their t's i think it's the sort of idea that you want to um really really well report a piece i think that information is still getting out there and i think that there's better reporting now than there's been i think that journalism is actually producing more and better work than it has in a long time um that being said i think that the sort of the idea of fake news and the erosion of trust in the media is incredibly um dangerous and so i don't know what i would say as as an individual journalist i just try to be intentional about the things that i give my time to and i try to work on stories that i think will be um that will contribute in some way um i think as i've gotten further along in my career i've you know you gain more ability to pitch stories and to as you work with more editors and you're able to sort of like um establish relationships you know you have your you can be more of a provider of ideas rather than just a taker of ideas um or just a taking what assignments you can get so i think that when you can start to put out more and be intentional about what work you're working on that's one individual way that you can work on it but just being rigorous in your approach is another way um you find that there's a certain set of expectations about the path of photo journalists to take throughout their career for example moving from freelance to working at one publication i think there used to be like i remember when i was in college um there was often like this idea that people would like make their name by shooting conflict and i knew that that would not be my path i think that that's not it's it that doesn't exist anymore i think people recognize that there's no one path um it's not go to journalism grad school and then intern at a local newspaper and then do it just to a the jobs don't exist anymore in many cases and be it's just too it's you can't have one size fits all i think that journalism is more diverse than it's been in the past and so the career paths are more diverse um and so i think that there are certain things that are seen as good to do i think working on your own work is good to do i think getting some experience shooting some kind of daily assignments is good to do but none of these things are necessary um and people if you talk to 10 different photographer journalists they'll have 10 different ways that they came to photojournalism great and then um how difficult is it to get a non-freelance position as a writer what's it like to be a freelancer i can't answer the non-freelance writer position because i don't know i've not applied i've only ever been a freelancer and predominantly worked in visual journalism rather than written journalism but um i can speak to what being freelances like like i said it's super important to have a community you have you are not just a photographer you are a manager you are an accountant you are a logistics coordinator and a travel agent and you are doing many different jobs all at once and so being organized and figuring out what time management strategies work for yourself is really important because you are basically waking up every day and structuring your own day so the way i like to do it for myself is to kind of decide what a given week is going to look like it will change if you get in a time it will change but i try to wake up and say okay this week i'm really going to try and move forward on these projects or this grant that i'm writing or this pitch that i'm developing and trying to structure your time each week for me is more manageable than trying to structure every single day individually um and then it's also useful to i think i have long-term things that i think about so thinking in terms of like semester or three month periods it's also useful to say over the course of the next three months i really want to work on x y and z but everyone has their own sort of way that they like to work some people i know wake up and they do writing for a few hours every day or they do you know they go out and they make sure that they're shooting every day to some extent so it's just again you talk to five different people i do want to offer this disclaimer is that all of this stuff that i'm talking about is entirely my perspective and like not law or fact in any way i think that i've talked i've been to many talks where people sort of speak as if they are talking as the absolute authorities and there's no absolute authority it's different for every person so i want to offer that caveat great and then the last question is could you speak a little bit more about your experience with the full right scholarship program and um what were your takeaways from the program and how did it shape your early career so this is i can't emphasize this enough and especially for the ijl the ijl i'm sure that there are institutions that other undergraduate uh school other there are programs at other undergraduate institutions but the ijl is incredibly good at emphasizing the possibility and the importance of doing independent research as an undergrad which is something that i think helps you understand how to structure projects and gain experience that you often have to wait like 10 years in your career to do in other contexts where you're always working for other people to be able to do your own project and do your own research or do your own journalism that's a really unique thing and i would 100 take advantage of it as much as you can while it tuffs and working with the ijl um and the reason why that's important i think is because again like i said you learn all the different elements of working on a project what does it mean to take a project from its inception to its conclusion and i think that the thing that i learned through the work that i did while on a whole bright scholarship was like how to be my own boss how to structure my own time how to reach out to contacts how to operate safely in a context that i was not used to um i learned all these things sort of on the ground i had had training and some of them i had not had training and others of them and i think that the thing that was really helpful was um it basically allowed me to fast forward in my career in a lot of ways that i was able to gain experiences that if i had sort of had a established position somewhere i would probably not have been able to do until i was like with an organization for five years so i highly recommend applying for a full bright um i did the scholarship program rather than the ETA program the other great thing is that Tufts has its own internal review policies for a lot of these fellowships um where you apply and you develop your application in advance and you apply internally and you get reviewed internally and you get feedback on your application so that by the time your application gets sent off it's much stronger so i know that the internal deadline is usually around august every year so i definitely definitely recommend i mean the worst case is that you work on the application and then you don't get it great well thank you biz for taking the time with us today of course thanks guys feel free to reach out to me um my email i'll put it in the chat um and yeah thanks everybody yes well we'll look forward to when your documentary comes out thanks yep all right thank you we'll see you soon bye take care