Carla Williams is an artist, a writer, and a professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also edits the Society of Photographic Education’s journal Exposure.

ENG: You’ve written a lot about race and photography, and that’s something I’m really interested in. Could you talk a bit about what you see as happening right now in photography regarding intercultural representation, diversity, and race?

CW: At this point in my career, I feel like a lot of my work—particularly my work with Exposure as an editor, and as a blogger—it’s sort of like a numbers game. I’ve intentionally taken on the role of someone who is obsessed with chronicling the artists who just keep getting left out of the broader discussion.

En Foco, led by Miriam Romals, and Dodge and Burn, by Qiana Mestrich–what they all do really inspires me.

There’s this segregation that happens—and I think it’s a necessary one—where you have organizations like En Foco who are particularly focused on any artist of color. African American, Middle Eastern, Asian, Latino—sort of “everybody else.” And my blog does the same—because it focuses on primarily African Diaspora artists. But when I took over Exposure, I was determined to see that every issue got balanced.

I’ve worked in this field for over 20 years and diversity is just dwindling. My partner Deirdre even called me yesterday and said, “I’m in MOMA and I’m looking at these books, ‘50 photographers you should know,’ and guess how many are women? 8. And guess how many are people of color? 2!” You know? The numbers were…startling.

It’s like, Really?! Who could consciously publish that in this day and age? Who could look at the entire field of photography and think this made sense? It’s just unbelievable to me that A) the author could conceive of it and B) the publisher could think, Yeah. Good.

So in a sense, my scholarship is less scholarship than it is archival work; making sure that I keep counting, keep taking stock of people whose work already exists.

I had a conversation with Fazal [Sheikh] about the problems of things that are solely focused on or determined by race, or gender, or that kind of thing, [and there are problems]. The mainstream discussions about art and photography will claim that we have gotten past that, but I think we’ve done exactly the opposite. We’ve gone past the discussion of race and not actually integrated that broader approach into our to thinking about art.

I think it’s become a much smaller field than I imagined it was when I entered it. And the possibilities just seem so much narrower now than almost 30 years ago, when I decided to major in photography. If I were a student now, I wonder, is that a field I would choose?

ENG: Why is it important to move away from this homogeneity?

CW: Well, it’s important for me because I am a woman of color, and I want to imagine myself in this field. I want to imagine myself as part of its history, as part of its present—as part of it. And so unless there are other people like me, I can’t imagine my own place.

And if I’m there, then I want everybody else there too. I mean, not to sound Pollyanna-ish or anything, but it’s really crucial. I can’t imagine being part of this discussion if I can’t turn to anyone and engage them with these same ideas about pictures, and what they mean, and how they operate.

So on a personal level it’s really important to me. And on a professional level, photography is such a huge medium. One of the things I’ve always loved about it is that it’s so accessible, compared to any other art medium. It functions in so many ways beyond just art. It is journalism. It is science. It is all these things. And the idea that you would continue to promote it as simply one narrow thing is just bizarre.  I can’t imagine why anybody would be invested in that, because there’s so much more to explore about it. There are so many different layers of thinking about it and approaching it.

ENG: And why is diversity decreasing in the field?

CW: I think a lot of it is market-driven. The way in which photography has gotten inflated in the last 20 years, and the way in which photographs have gotten so much bigger in order to enter into that art-collector’s marketplace—I think all of that plays a role.

And I think the way in which dealers market artists to collectors (and by extension, to museums) has really narrowed the way in which the market values particular kinds of work.

ENG: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. The art that’s in museums and being sold in the high-end galleries is often really different from art that is shown locally, in communities, as a way to bring people together. Can you explain a bit more about that?

CW: I always point to the Becher school—the photographers that studied with the Bechers at Dusseldorf Academy. The way in which all of that work hit the photo scene and particularly the marketplace created a shift away from work that was typically concerned with issues of representation, cultural issues. And a shift away from work which was more on the scale of traditional photo printing.

It’s work that reintroduced a particular modenist aesthetic in this postmodnernism. And it was work that shifted its scale to communicate more with painting and the traditional museum-based arts.

The market for photographs didn’t really exist before the 1970’s, and by the 1990’s it had really shifted. At that point photography entered the market with more aggressively editioned work, larger work, and work that operated more like painting and sculpture and those more traditional western art forms.

And so the work that I think of as “photography” as opposed to “art” is much more photo-scaled, it’s more community-based, and it’s attempting to operate at levels other than the collector’s marketplace.

I think now there is a lot of photography that just operates as “art.” And many of the artists who make it aren’t photographers, per se. They’re artists who work with photography. I come out of a tradition of people for whom the medium is really photography; people for whom It’s as much about the medium itself as it’s about the ideas and the subject in the work.

So there’s this split that happened. And I think it’s perfectly fine that it happened, but there’s not a tremendous amount of acknowledgement that both approaches remained vital. Because I think the tendency is to assume that the mold that dominates is the correct one.

And when you have photographic prints that start at $20,000-$50,000—there are not a lot of people who are going to sell at those numbers. The market just won’t support that. So you have this much more rarified realm of collecting.

I’m not really interested in art so much as I am in photography. That’s one of the reasons why I was particularly interested to work at RIT because it’s a school that has a photo program. It’s not a fine art program into which photography enters. It’s a photography program, of which fine art is a component. Although I am “fine art faculty,” one of the things that was really important to me was that it’s a school that has advertising, photojournalism and biomedical photography—all of that is within our college.

And to me, that’s what’s so great about photography—it has all these different kinds of applications, and fine art’s just one little part of that.

ENG: Tell me about some of the major issues you see going on in journalistic photography right now.

CW: It’s a shame if professionals get ousted by amateurs because you become a professional for a reason—there’s more to it than just picking up the camera.

But at the same time, it’s really dependent upon what your audience knows and expects and if your audience is increasingly savvy about its own ability to produce images, I think that really does shift the role that the professional photographer plays in the presentation of imagery, and in the presentation of information through images.

I find that in teaching, I’m more drawn to discussions about journalism than about fine arts because, in this moment, it’s more interesting. We’re facing this real shift in the way we conventionalize photographs in journalism.

Whereas in fine arts, anything goes. You can really make anything and it’s fine. People make daguerreotypes and digital prints, and you can attach an aesthetic and significance to all those choices. But in journalism those questions like, “What are you doing? and why are you doing it?” seem much more vital and necessary to ask.

I think we still do a fairly poor job of paying attention when people represent themselves. People travel more and we have a global economy, so people are coming into greater contact with other cultures, but we still have difficulty understanding the difference between being represented and representing yourself.

And those debates are tough. And it’s not to say that people who represent others can’t do a really terrific job of capturing the complexities and losses of a particular group. But I think, as a whole, that particular debate has overshadowed the necessity of people representing themselves.

One of the blogs that I have is about black photographers and publishing. Basically what I do is collect any book, anything that could be called a book, any publication by or about black photographers, and to a lesser degree (because of my budget), books about black subjects.

The reasons I do it are multifold, but one of them is that I want to make the books accessible. I want to create a small, circulating library.

And one of the challenges of that is I end up buying a lot of books whose images don’t interest me at all. In fact, the vast majority of the actual images I’m not interested in. But I’m really interested in who has made them and why, and why those get published and not others. And also, again, that counting thing. I’m counting everything that has been published, because so far the numbers are so small, in relation to the number of photobooks that have been published in total since 1844 when the Pencil of Nature was published.

And so what I have learned is that I can’t even consider the pictures in the way I would normally consider a photograph because that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that act of representation. And, in that instance, the act of reproduction in print form, and what that means. And then the pictures themselves are sort of secondary.

And that’s a weird thing to reconcile. But until the discussion is more broad across the spectrum of photographs and photography, I think it’s important.

It’s so much a part of our world, our innate curiosity about people. We like to look at pictures of them! We like to take them and we like to look at them. It’s what we do as human beings that have this tool—the camera. it’s just so much a part of understanding the world that we have to negotiate with it. We have to figure it out.

These are similar to the issues that the music industry has been confronting for over a decade now. The industry itself has been slow to respond, and, I think, pretty uncreative in its responses. However, a smattering of individual artists have developed really innovative solutions to the problem of how to make a living while also letting go of their work enough to let it spread. It’s only by letting go that huge audiences can experience their work, which ultimately builds their market.

In March the NPR show On The Media did a fantastic program on this topic within the music industry. They featured one artist in particular, Amanda Palmer, who has excelled at innovating around her marketability and with her fans. “Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer,” she tells producer Rick Karr. “The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.”

Her solutions have included t-shirt projects (one of which raised $19,000 in 10 hours through twitter, according to OTM), flash-mob concerts that utilize public spaces and ask for contributions from fans in person, and by maintaining a blog and a twitter account that allow fans to engage with her in her innovation process, as well as understand more about the real life of a musician (i.e. why artists need fans’ money in the first place).

It seems to me there are two main elements to this innovation process. 1) Eschewing what people won’t pay for, and figuring out what people WILL pay for. In the music industry, people don’t really want to buy cd’s any more, but they do want to buy tshirts. They want merch. Bands have become brands. 2) Merging with patterns, and leveraging social media. People are spending their time and money on interacting digitally—so Nine Inch Nails, famously radical in the way they interact with their fan base, (making online treasure hunts for example) has developed an iPhone app. Radiohead was one of the first bands to shift the responsibility, and the power, overtly to the fans by releasing their album online for free, and asking people to make a donation in an amount of their choice. People want to support the stuff (music, pictures, objects) they love, so if you stop manipulating them and acknowledge the power they have as fans, you can catalyze voluntary, genuine, at-scale support.

I think it’s time for photographers to start innovating in similar ways. Journalism itself is iterating, testing out new models like ProPublica, citizen journalism, and new digital formats. So what are photographers doing? (Please send me examples of innovators in this arena!)

One evening last spring, I had a friend who specializes in word-of-mouth-marketing tell me, “Eliza, I want to challenge you to make your images shareable on the web.” I had been asking him for advice, but I had not expected him to say this. At first I thought NO WAY.

But after a year of blogging, browsing, tweeting and generally engaging with photography on the web in a new way, I think he is absolutely right. One of the best things photographers can do for themselves is to build an audience, and you can’t build a large audience right now without using the internet. I don’t lose anything from a) putting my images online, and b) putting them under a Creative Commons license. Even without that symbol, anyone can repost my images anyway, citing the fair use policy (which I agree with—we need cultural commentators just like we need artists).

It’s not as if I can make money from those images when they are 72 dpi anyway. Perhaps in a print format—either as fine art prints, or as printable files for editorial content—but my images on the web are not at a size where someone can print them nicely (or, not the way I print them, anyway!). And helping my images get spread around the web basically acts as free advertising on my behalf. It only helps me. By putting them under Creative Commons, I become an active participant in cultural change, rather than impotently fighting the inevitable. I become someone who is using the strengths of the internet to my own advantage. In a way, I regain control by giving up control. And I acknowledge the immense creative power that lies in building upon the work of others, which we do all the time.

A Developing Story has just launched a campaign that builds upon this same idea. They are asking why awareness campaigns, designed to save lives through health education, can’t be put under a creative commons license so that humanitarians, doctors, social workers and volunteers can have materials constantly available to them in the work that they do. It’s an interesting question.

All images in this post are licensed as Creative Commons on Flickr.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

I asked Maria Valdez what she likes to write about. “Well, I write poetry. And I write about the system. The CPS[1] system. Because I’ve been in and out of it a lot,” she said. “And I write about my mom. Because she passed away when I was two years old.”

“I tend to want more than I have,” she said. “But I think taking pictures I’ve learned that what I have is enough, you know? When I go around and take pictures, it’s like, ‘Look at everything that I live on and everything that I have!’”

That statement startled me—how true it is! Sometimes, looking is having—that’s why we love pictures so much, because they give us experiences, relationships and objects. They help our imaginations stretch father.

“There are some things that you can’t change with photography,” she told me. “But what you can change is the littering, the trash…everything that you can see. Like graffiti.”

I asked Marcus Vega what impact he sees photography as having on the group of students as a whole. “It’s grabbing everybody,” he told me.

“Like when I come here, I get to escape from my daily life,” Marcus said. “It just cancels out everything. It’s like a whole new environment.

“With photography, it adds on to the tools that I’m equipped with to tell my story and what it is that I see around me. It’s another outlet.”

One of the questions I had for the students was how they thought the program impacts their community as a whole. Each of them told me that the kNOw’s program helps people learn more about what’s happening all around them.

Marcus said, “With the kNOw, basically, what we’re doing is we’re informing the community about what’s going on. Because everyone’s off doing their own thing. And it’s good to see someone else’s side of it. It offers a whole different perspective, a whole different view. Like what people usually ignore–it gives them a chance to sit back and really see it.”

This kind of work also builds relationships. Miguel Martinez described how people will come up to him and say, “You write for the kNOw?!” or “I saw your article!” In a way, it gives people permission to talk to each other, and to talk to each other about difficult and meaningful issues.

Jaleesa Vickers has written some incredibly challenging pieces about her experiences, including essays on self-harm, racism, depression and bisexuality. When I asked her about what kind of reaction she’s gotten to her work, she said, “For the articles that I’ve been writing, because they’ve been so personal, usually it’s been shock. But I kind of like that reaction from people, because it gets them to think.”

She approaches photography with the same mentality. “Just like writing, I like to get people to think. To think about what I’m taking pictures of—usually, my community: what it needs, what has happened to it.”

And the benefit? “I think what we’re doing just gives other people a greater sense of community,” said Jaleesa. “Because they’re so wrapped up in their own lives, what we do helps them know what’s going on around them, if they don’t have the time to see that. I think that’s the major benefit from doing all this.”

There are great images in the world. There are pictures that move you to tears, or to joy, or that seem to lift you up. But community-based-photography recognizes that there is another beautiful aspect to photography—that the process of making pictures builds relationships and makes people happier. You don’t have to be a famous photographer for your pictures to be powerful. And whether it’s used in communities that are strong or communities that are struggling, photography is a remarkable tool for bringing people together.

Says Miguel Martinez, “It’s just a real interesting, fun thing, taking pictures. I really cannot put it into words. When you get one good shot, you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m going to keep going.’”

In case you missed it last week, here is a slideshow of a few of the kNOw’s photos for 2010.

Thank you Jaleesa Vickers, Marcus Vega, Maria Valdez and Miguel Martinez for talking with me!

James Nachtwey, Afghanistan

Recently, I’ve been thinking about war photography, and the moral arguments that commonly support it. I’ve been seeing people use those arguments to advocate for certain practices in photography in general, and I think there are problems with that.

To me, war-phototography is not the same as non-violent-photography.

For example, in the movie War Photographer, by Christian Frei, photojournalist James Nachtwey describes his process like this: “In a war, the normal codes of civilized behavior are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so called normal life, to go into someone’s home, where the family is grieving over the death of a loved one, and spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn’t be done.

“Those pictures could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I’m photographing. It’s simply impossible to photograph moments such as those without the complicity of the people I’m photographing; without the fact that they welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there.”

The film shows Nachtwey building relationships, asking questions, and getting to know communities in a conscientious way, even as it also shows him taking pictures in the midst of explosions. But the film emphasizes the picture-taking, not the communication, which I think sends a false message.

I can see how, in a violent situation, neither the photographer nor the subject might be concerned with asking permission or communicating verbally. I can see how permission could be implicit. But I also know that it is easier not to ask permission. It is easier not to communicate. And it’s very easy to misunderstand.

So I’m wary of implicit permission, especially when it’s applied to non-violent situations. I often hear photographers say they are “giving a voice to the voiceless” or “bearing witness.” And when that is the aim, I think that some level of collaboration between photographer and subject—some kind of overt permission—is necessary for the image to have a positive impact.

In a fantastic essay for the online journal Soundscapes, Hans Durrer confronts this issue, saying, “In times when (some) photographers hold celebrity status, it is useful to be reminded that a good photograph does not solely depend on the photographer’s ability to choose the right subject, location and light, but also on the chemistry and the collaboration, between photographer and subject…Despite my deep sympathy for socially inclined photographers, when the people portrayed feel ashamed of their portraits, there clearly is something wrong with this kind of photography.”

That is just an electric statement: When the people portrayed feel ashamed of their portraits, there is something wrong with that kind of photography.

This doesn’t only happen in journalism. It also happens in collaborations between photographers and nonprofit organizations. I spoke to Benjamin Chesterton the other day, who runs the multimedia production company duckrabbit and the blog A Developing Story and he said, “It’s amazing to me that these NGOs’ awareness campaigns will say they’re giving a voice to the voiceless, but you never hear a single actual voice from the community that’s being represented.” This is happening right now with UNICEF’s new Put It Right campaign. Photo/audio slideshows that duckrabbit produces use voices in an incredibly powerful way, as in this one made for MSF (Doctors Without Borders).

Artist Fazal Sheikh photographs war and the issues that surround it, and is a photographer who takes permission seriously, and emphasizes it. Rather than seeing permission as a burden, Sheikh actually builds better projects and makes better pictures by asking permission. Which is intuitive, but not if you’ve just been watching War Photographer.

In his introduction to the book A Camel for the Son, about Somali refugees living in Kenya, Sheikh writes, “I arrived at the camp at Liboi in February 1992 on a UNHCR flight from Nairobi along with news journalists, most of whom were staying for one or two days. The war was fresh and the competition for pictures and stories was fierce.

“I decided to stay on longer and asked one of the Somali leaders whether he would allow me to work in the camp. Some weeks earlier, on the Sudanese border, I had asked an elder the same question. ‘Why are you asking me?’ was his reply. ‘I am only a refugee.’ But his tone made it clear what a violation it was for the refugees to have strangers moving through their communities without their consent.”

This is someone I can look up to. This is someone who has created a process that lines up with his stated goals. He also makes incredibly beautiful images, whose beauty has a lot to do with the energy, self-assertion, and self-possession that people display in front of his lens.

Seeing the strength, the individuality, and the self conscious composure of his subjects, I feel devastated and enraptured; humbled and uplifted. I feel sad. I feel educated. I feel inspired. And I feel proud to be the audience at the end of a photographic process I believe in. By making pictures that his subjects are not ashamed of, he allows me, as the audience, to shed my shame as well.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.