From BLM to COVID-19, photojournalists speak out on covering the stories that matter

2020 was a year of groundbreaking sociopolitical upheaval and the start of a colossal epidemiological crisis. It was also a year that urgently redefined the working conditions of photojournalists. The historic 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the devastating COVID-19 pandemic presented unique challenges for photojournalism, forcing photographers into a terrain defined by new ethical, technological and safety (emotional and physical) concerns, as well as innovative attacks on press freedom.

The newly released book “Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter” (Routledge) unpacks these circumstances, investigating the photojournalism industry’s most critical debates as it also sheds light on the experiences and thought processes of the visual journalists themselves.

Author Lauren Walsh, a professor at NYU and director of the Gallatin Photojournalism Lab, opens the book with a powerful essay that sets the stage, laying out the critical role that photojournalism serves in a world of crisis. From there, the book unfolds with a series of interviews with top photographers who covered these 2020 catastrophes as well as key photo editors who grappled with these unprecedented obstacles inside the newsroom.

“Through the Lens” asks readers to think deeply about events we have only just seen in the news and quite possibly experienced ourselves. Importantly, this book encourages us to consider the efforts behind the camera lens, as Walsh delivers a penetrating look at the challenges and risks visual journalists face to bring us the news in pictures.

Richly illustrated with evocative photos, this book reminds us that photojournalism doesn’t simply mirror the world; it has the power to change it.

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Below are selected images from “Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter” paired with brief excerpts from the interviews.

“This has been a physically grueling year for the newsroom. It has also been a very traumatizing year. One thing that newspapers and newsrooms do not do well is to go back and sort things out. I’m telling my staff, ‘If you need to talk to somebody, a therapist, please do.’ But meanwhile, I’m going on with the program because I have to work. And so you don’t really think about it. You move on to the next thing and we don’t have routine ways of decompressing—especially now when you can’t even hang out with friends or take a trip to the beach, because of Covid. We went through a lot that year and I think anyone who worked as a journalist in 2020 is going to need to spend some time really processing how dramatic and traumatic this was.” – Danese Kenon, Director of Video and Photography at The Philadelphia Inquirer

“You look at this photo and there is something about that shield, something almost angelic. I felt this when I saw that moment. It felt very theatrical. This particular picture is shot with a long lens, and the context is stripped away; but there was something about the gesture that seemed almost religious.

When you can’t see faces, you have to look at the moment another way. Often you want to capture someone’s eyes; they’re expressive. Here, I couldn’t do that, but I think the gesture itself is revealing. Is she holding her hands up for help, or praying? In actuality, she is clapping but I caught her frozen before her hands meet. So then the photo becomes something more than that specific moment; it’s something essential about this greater moment in history.” – Nina Berman, photographer

“[I’ve] built a trust or rapport with the community here in Minneapolis. This is crucial because we need to create better context in the documentation, in order to better understand these situations. And you can’t do that without learning, gaining trust, getting to know the community. For me, this is about a larger issue of integrity and truth-telling, which means challenging the common visual tropes by documenting the smaller, quieter, subtler moments. You learn how to see those moments the better you know the community.

For instance, this photo is more than a father-son portrait. The two are reading a book they picked together from the free library in George Floyd Square. It might be a moment you would otherwise pass by, but this is an image that challenges the usual perceptions of Black men, particularly in this space that memorializes the violent death of a Black man. This is a tender, quiet interaction, and I hope it deepens the context and invites new perspectives on the Black Lives Matter movement.” – Patience Zalanga, photographer

“When you talk about any medically related story, any story with patients involved, then you definitely have to consider issues of privacy. I tried to get pictures inside hospitals, but they’re controlling about letting media in; they’re focused on patient privacy and that means it’s that much harder to show the public what is happening—and yet this is something the public needs to take very seriously. How do you bridge that divide?

… There were times I camped outside of a New York City hospital, trying to get an image that could convey the gravity of the situation. I wound up with pictures of people on stretchers, sometimes pictures of corpses, or I would be at funeral homes. They are not easy pictures to look at, but the threat this pandemic has posed outweighs an approach full of niceties.” – Spencer Platt, photographer

“This is in the main Peruvian cathedral. There is the archbishop of the diocese of Lima, throwing incense, and he will be giving a mass that will be broadcast on TV. The day before that mass, the workers of the church put up all these portraits that relatives sent in. They printed the images right there at the church. For me, this was an amazing story. The people, the relatives, want others to see what is happening. This was a signal from the people. Everyone knows that this mass will be broadcast to millions of Peruvians. The people who suffered were not being represented in local media or by the government, and this was a way for them to gain voice. Collectively, they shout, ‘Look, this is massive. This is not only my relative. Look how many people are here on the benches and walls of this church.’ They were showing the rest of the country that didn’t have an understanding of what was going on.

I lived in Guatemala for many years, and covered civil war there. When I saw these photos in the cathedral, I related them to the portraits of people who ‘disappeared’ in the 1980s. The military dictatorships were denying what was going on with the thousands of people that vanished, but the widows and mothers were in the streets, holding photos, reclaiming their dead loved ones. I felt a resonance with that and wanted to convey that here. This situation, like those of the disappeared who had no voice and no agency, is political. This is happening to so many people and they need help. When there is injustice occurring, people want others to know what is going on.” – Rodrigo Abd, photographer

“One of the conversations that’s been percolating all around the photo community is the legacy, in the US and in Europe—and I’m consciously adding Europe—of the white male gaze, which has brought us the world in pictures for such a long time. That means, for instance, that you had to be rich enough to be able to afford the equipment. That’s just one factor of many that made it possible for wealthy white males to be the purveyors of journalistic photography in places all around the world.

This is significant because it informs the photography we see. There is a white male gaze. As there is a female gaze, and a person of color gaze, and so forth. What I mean is that obviously the person behind the camera is deciding what to show you and what to photograph and how to photograph it.

So the critical question is: is what the photographer sees truly representative of what’s out there? And ever more, the next question is: are the people who are chosen by the photo editor to take the pictures members of the community that is being documented, or are they parachuting in?” – MaryAnne Golon, Director of Photography at The Washington Post

“For this photo, I am dressed just as those figures are. The only difference is that they’re carrying sanitization equipment and I am carrying camera gear.

It was difficult to take this picture, or rather, I was nervous because I just didn’t know if breathing in those fumes was safe. I’m glad I was wearing all the protective equipment…

At the end of March, there still weren’t many people out, walking around the streets [of Wuhan]. But the people you did encounter seemed ‘beat up,’ like they’d suffered a lot. And if you talked about the virus with them, 80% to 90% of them would start crying or otherwise get incredibly emotional about it. They were still very scared of the idea of the virus, but they were not scared of the camera, or of being documented.” – Aly Song, photographer