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Poynter: The moment I knew I wasn't going to be a conflict photographer
kainaz amaria
Nov 12, 2018
The Cohort is Poynter's bi-monthly newsletter about women kicking ass in digital media.
I remember the moment I knew I wasn’t going to be a conflict photographer. I was a freelance photojournalist based in Mumbai, India, and in New York for a week visiting prospective clients. All assignments mattered, but there was one publication that I held to an unattainable standard — The New York Times.
I managed to get a face-to-face meeting and found myself sitting across from a news editor on The Times’ international desk. I remember anxiously watching as he flipped through my carefully crafted images, with the occasional head nod. He was kind, said encouraging things, then walked me over to the travel section editor and said, “I have a great feature photographer I want to introduce you to, she’s based in Mumbai, India.”
My portfolio didn’t have conflict, natural disasters, or extreme stories of human suffering. My male counterparts had stories of underage-heroin addicts, scenes of severe flooding and images from nearby Pakistan — all work they produced on their own dime or on spec to fill their book. Basically they paid their way into someone’s worst nightmare to get future assignments.
Ethically, I refused to do that. It’s not that I couldn’t make the images or handle the logistics. It’s that I couldn’t justify asking someone to tell their story if I wasn’t sure I had an outlet to publish in. And because I didn’t have that work, I didn’t get international news assignments. Those went to the expat men in our small photojournalism community. And I made portraits, worked on business stories and took whatever travel assignments I could get.
How many times have you looked back on a moment, interrogated it with fresh eyes and realized — that it wasn’t an anecdote specific to your story, but representative of a larger structural problem?
Here are some facts about the news photography community:
- Professional news photography is dominated by men, with 85 percent of the respondents to the 2015 Word Press Photo Contest survey identifying as male.
- Today, women make up the majority of students in undergraduate and graduate photojournalism programs.
- And even though the top photo editors of National Geographic, Time, The Washington Post and The New York Times are female...
- There are still very few women working on assignments for major international news and wire services.
- The facts are grimmer for women of color, according to Akili-Casundria Ramses, the executive director of the National Press Photographers Association. “I literally know every black woman photojournalist in the U.S., and I can count them on both hands.”
But wait. It gets worse:
- The 2016 New York Times Year In Pictures featured about 145 images, of which only 16 were credited to women. And of the 120-180K images considered, women didn’t even make the 15 percent they represent in the industry.
- Of the women that have managed to break through, they are constantly being written out of the narrative. As Anastasi Taylor-Lind recently wrote for Time magazine, “Women have photographed war for almost as long as men have … However, women are widely overshadowed by the iconized narratives of their male colleagues and feature less prominently in the recounting of photojournalism’s history.”
- Of the 45 photographers recognized by the 2016 World Press Photo Contest, the most prestigious photo prize in the world, only five were women.
- Vogue’s 125th Anniversary piece on women in the media was, you guessed it, photographed by a man.
- And the mere mention of broader representation gets many folks very, very angry.
So, what else can we interrogate? Was there a similar moment in your story? I’m embarrassed to admit for the longest time I believed in meritocracy. A lot of us first-generation immigrant kids were spoon-fed this American fallacy.
I thought I had decided I wasn’t going to be a conflict photographer. But as it turns out, that decision was made for me.
xoxo
Kainaz Amaria
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The moment I knew I wasn't going to be a conflict photographer
FROM THE ARCHIVES | I was a freelance photojournalist based in Mumbai, India, and in New York for a week visiting prospective clients.
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