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The MOOD Podcast
In The MOOD Podcast, Matt Jacob, renowned cultural portrait photographer, dives deep into the world of photography and the visual arts, with guests from all around the creative industry, across all parts of the globe, sharing inspiring stories and experiences that will leave you wanting more. With years of experience and a passion for storytelling, Matt has become a master of capturing lesser-told human stories through his photography, and teams up with other special artists from around the world to showcase insights, experiences and opinions within the diverse and sometimes controversial photography world.
You can watch these podcasts on his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mattyj_ay.
You can also follow Matt's work on his Instagram @mattyj_ay and his website: https://mattjacobphotography.com.
The MOOD Podcast
Seeing the Unseen: Dr Lauren Walsh, EO77
What's the emotional cost of documenting humanity's darkest moments?
Dr. Lauren Walsh is a professor, author, and thought-leader in the realms of photojournalism and visual storytelling, and in this episode she reveals the profound responsibilities photojournalists carry in documenting conflict and crises while addressing the ethical dilemmas they face. We also talk about mental health challenges among photographers and the important role images play in shaping public discourse and promoting healing.
Key Topics Discussed:
- Dr. Walsh's background in literature and photojournalism.
- Photojournalism in today’s fast-changing media landscape.
- Ethical dilemmas in photographing conflict and human suffering.
- Mental health challenges in hostile environments.
- Technology, including AI, and the impact on visual storytelling.
- Photography's role in documenting justice, history, and reconciliation.
- Advice for aspiring photojournalists to navigate the challenges of the profession.
- The need for critical media literacy among audiences.
- Insights on the future of photojournalism and the necessity for responsible documentation.
Find Dr Lauren Walsh's work on her channels:
Website: www.laurenwalsh.com
Instagram: @lwalsh242
Referenced book in the conversation:
'We Cry in Silence'
https://www.smitasharma.com/book/book-we-cry-in-silence
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Welcome to the Mood Podcast, uncovering the art of conversation one frame at a time. I'm your host, matt Jacob, and thank you so much for joining me today. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr Lauren Walsh, a professor, author and thought leader in the world of photojournalism and visual storytelling. As the founding director of New York University's Gallatin Photojournalism Intensive, lauren has dedicated her career to exploring the ethical, emotional and philosophical dimensions of photography and photojournalism. Her work bridges the gap between academia and practice, providing invaluable insights into photography, visual literacy and the role of imagery in shaping public memory.
Matt Jacob:We dive into her fascinating career, from curating photographic archives to addressing the mental health challenges faced by journalists. Lauren shares her thoughts on the evolving role of conflict photography in a world of instant news, the ethics of documenting human suffering and the emotional toll these stories have on both subjects and storytellers. We also talk about her books, such as Through the Lens, the Pandemic and Black Lives Matter, discovering how these dual crises were visually documented and what those images mean for future generations. This episode offers a profound look at the power of photography to illuminate, educate and connect, and I'm thrilled to share it with you. So now I bring you lauren walsh. Lauren walsh, welcome to the mood podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me thanks for having me when you're in new New York.
Matt Jacob:at the moment I'm over in Bali, so you know I'm really happy that we finally made this happen. Tell us a little bit about how you got to New York, your background in photography, photojournalism, NYU and all of that kind of good stuff.
Lauren Walsh:So I got to New York as a little kid, grew up in the suburbs and moved into the city where I've had my feet planted for many years. An expert in photojournalistic coverage of conflict and crisis, the director of the photojournalism intensive at NYU, gallatin journalism safety expert my background is photo had always been there, but not the primary thing. I haveangely I have a PhD in literature, so not the typical path towards photojournalism, but the PhD itself wound up focusing on novels that incorporated photographs of historical traumas. So there's always this interest in the role of the photo and its place in a record of history and in storytelling. And then I finished the PhD and seemed ready to go and get a job as a literature professor.
Lauren Walsh:But I had done so much work on photojournalism through those years, including becoming a kind of unofficial known quantity who kept getting recommended to work with photo journalists who wanted to put together books these photo books, but not just like here are my photos. They wanted them to be kind of books of documentation of bodies of work. And I kept getting partnered with people who had been covering wars, and so I was thinking more and more about how do you tell the story of a war through images and that's what I was doing, kind of alongside this PhD work on novels was, you know, working with people who were novels or fiction. And then I'm working with these photojournalists and it's anything but fiction and it's very real, dark, hard reality of conflict and crisis. And so I finished the PhD and realized that I was much better suited to working in a current events space. The transition, though it sounds strange, was fairly seamless for me, and that was the strange trajectory towards specialties in photojournalism and conflict.
Matt Jacob:Tell us about that specialty a little bit. What do you actually teach with the photojournalism lab in Gallatin NYU? What is it that you talk about, that you teach and profess over there?
Lauren Walsh:Okay. So I teach a number of things. The photojournalism intensive itself is for students who are really preparing to professionalize into photojournalism. So that is in some regards, I think of it kind of like a boot camp. So it's a very high intensity, very fast pace in some regards to mimic what students might have to do if they're getting jobs right. So you need to come up with your story idea. It has to be resonant, it has to be timely, you need to research, you need to go and get access, you need to do the documentation, you need to edit it, you need to do the production on it and then you need to pitch it for distribution. They're given a two week window to do all of that and so for an undergraduate who's never had to do that before, it's a very, very feels like a very big load on them. But it's great. It's like, in other sense it's kind of boot camp, because there's a tremendous amount of bonding, because you're so like frenetic and working really hard and so you just really it's usually a small group at once that gets kind of thrown through this process and along the way they're learning things like ethical and responsible documentary practice, business elements of it's one thing for my students to say I want to be a photojournalist. It's another thing for them to understand how to actually pay bills as a photojournalist, um, and so that's kind of the photojournalism intensive Um. There's also a strong emphasis on safety protocols for journalists, um, and I can elaborate on any of these topics.
Lauren Walsh:And then I also teach a bunch of courses for students who are interested in photography or interested in journalism but aren't necessarily going to become professionals in these spheres. They're undergraduates and they're exploring the world, um, and those courses will be like history of photography, or, um, I just finished up teaching a course called reporting on violence, um, finished up teaching a course called reporting on violence, um, and I have a course coming up called, uh, photographing peace. So I mean, as somebody who works a lot on conflict and crisis, the topics do tend to be heavy in my courses, but, um, usually, looking at what's the role of the camera, um, how has the camera intervened in history? What are the ways in which it has helped? What are the ways in which it has hurt? What are the ethics of thinking about documenting someone else's suffering, things like that.
Matt Jacob:Let's drill down on that a little bit. We're going to talk about, I think, ethics, responsibility and dignity, et cetera, later. But what do you see as the role of the photograph these days, Because it's changing so quickly and we could list the endless kind of externalities that photography has had to endure over the last five years, let alone 20. Is that something that you teach and talk about as well? I'm sure you think about it a lot. What do you think the role is of the photograph and image and how do we go about addressing those changes?
Lauren Walsh:I think someone could write an entire doctoral dissertation.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, sorry for that question.
Lauren Walsh:And then by the time the dissertation is published, it would be out of date, right, because things are changing so fast. Okay, so I guess a few ways to start tackling that is that I do believe that we live in a moment where photographic images are as dominant a mode of communication as the written word. I I don't think writing is now outpaces the image. I think the image is as important to what we see and understand and perceive about the world. So it's in that sense it's an extremely powerful medium because it communicates so vastly and also because it communicates faster than words does, right. So, like your, I'll scan a single photograph in under a second, as opposed to reading a news article. But there's pros and cons to that. So the photo can reach someone more quickly and the photo, in many regards, is an extremely limited amount of information, um, as opposed to reading a 20,000 word news article, right. So? But your question was more kind of the image today, and I guess the things that I'm thinking about are kind of the rise of cell phones in making everyone a photographer, not a photojournalist, but everyone can now be a documentarian, and I think that's great. Actually, I think it's great, provided that there's a kind of basic understanding, which I often do think is lacking, but a basic understanding that there are things that separate photojournalists from the average person with a cell phone, and I think sometimes we forget to consider those differences. But the differences, to me at least, matter a lot, because the photojournalistic image, if it is done correctly, should be accurate, it should be representative of what is going on, it shouldn't be manipulated in any regard, it should be contextualized properly, it should have accurate caption, information like all the things that kind of give it its validity, whereas the average person and their phone pics, they're not being asked to think through all of that. So I think that is one distinction between the kind of the many images that exist out there, a small subset are photojournalistic and I don't think we, the broad public, always remember to think through which one is which.
Lauren Walsh:The other major thing that seems to be on the landscape today is generative or generated images, completely synthetic images, and I think there's the, there's the kind of journalist side of me that could say, oh, it's like the death of everything because these are not real and they're only going to look realer and realer, and how are we ever going to distinguish between them. But that's not the approach that I tend to take. Just because it's, it's here and it's here to stay, and we can bury our head in the sand and complain about it or we can just work with it. So I like for me, again the.
Lauren Walsh:The response to the rise of synthetic imagery is going to be pretty much what I was saying just before, but without using the term media literacy. But like, the higher the media literacy, the more the average person will not necessarily be able to tell the difference between a synthetic image and a photograph, because I think they're going to look more and more and more like one another. But I think the average person will be able to ask the critical questions that can then provide the answers Is this an image I should be skeptical about, or who took this picture, or when was it taken? And if you can't answer some of those questions, maybe it's not actually a photograph, or maybe you need to ask some more questions before you immediately believe what you're seeing in the visual.
Matt Jacob:Isn't it down to also some form of regulation? I don't know, but my finger isn't on the pulse in that respect. How fast is any type of authentication regulation surrounding real versus fake or synthetic or adapted images out there? Because you talk about real photojournalism, creating real images, and the steps. It's journalistic, the steps you have to go to fact check, make sure the captions are correct, make sure it's depicting real life, et cetera, et cetera, those steps you talk about, which is the journalistic process itself. That can't keep up with social media, right? That can't keep up with AI. So surely there has to be some kind of influence of regulation coming in from governments, institutions that are able to take some of that off our plates. Am I dreaming in that respect? How do you see that?
Lauren Walsh:I mean, I think it's an ongoing conversation and there are certain countries and regions that are taking more steps to regulate. I'm not sure about the regulation of the creation and distribution of AI-generated imagery, but some of the technologies that have a kind of surveillance quality to them, like facial recognition technologies, which are connected, of course, to visuals you know, I'm not a legal scholar I think it's going to be tough and I think that even with regulatory practices, were they to come into place, but even with regulatory practices, were they to come into place, the technology is going to outpace the laws, right, so, and you're always going to, unfortunately, but you're always going to have bad actors who are trying to manipulate and use the visual to their advantage and often, maybe a kind of nefarious advantage often may be a kind of nefarious advantage. There are some. I mean, there are some initiatives out there working to help establish provenance for images, and one of them that I've worked fairly closely with is the Content Authenticity Initiative, which essentially helps you to track the provenance is the word that they always use but kind of helps you to track the origin of the image and any shifts or changes that have been made to it along the way, which means that if you have absolutely no kind of metadata, history or no they call it the CAI content authenticity initiative you don't have any of this kind of locked to the photograph.
Lauren Walsh:It may not even be a real photograph, right? So it's one step in helping to verify, like, what is this image? Where and how was it created? Is it real or not? You know, and this is a, it's a global initiative and it is rolling out. I still think it's an uphill battle and part of it is what I was saying before. That's like 1.4 trillion images are created on a yearly basis these days. So like that's that's a lot of images, um, and as I mean, how do you regulate 1.4 trillion images? It's, it's, it's impossible, um. But I think that's why you have these initiatives that are um, working on steps that will kind of embed a level of technology to help you identify um, and that's I mean, I again maybe it's the professor in me, but I tend to constantly want um or advocate for media literacy education um, tell us a little bit more about.
Matt Jacob:I want to go back to what you talked about in a minute, but you mentioned media literacy, visual literacy. Define that for us. What, why is that important?
Lauren Walsh:um, I mean it's it's being able to read and consume media critically, um, which I understand. That's a very basic definition, um, but you know, and depending on who I'm working with and teaching, um, some student populations are going to be savvier than others. But it's everything from thinking about, like, what questions do I need to actually ask of this and is there an agenda? What are the biases? I mean, when it comes to visuals, right, it can be, as it doesn't have to be like over in the Wild West, and some images are real and some are not. Like we we, frankly, I believe, should have been teaching visual, teach third graders. But if I were, and I asked them to look at a photograph, I'd say, like, what's in the picture? What do you think is outside of the picture? What else was going on when this photograph was taken? And just kind of raising the awareness of just because you look at a photo doesn't mean you actually understand everything.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, and isn't that the role of the photographer as well? To hopefully drive that curiosity in the viewer and try and spark some interest and wonder in the viewer right, to really drive that literacy that we're all trying to get out of people who are doom scrolling on social media every day. You talked about trying to stop people for that one second. How do you teach that in photojournalism? How do you teach that in photography? How do you teach? Because I ask this because it's really a question for myself but there's so much pressure on photographers to stop people scrolling and to capture people's attention right, and obviously different genres are different in that respect, but we're now we want the bangers every time, we want those one images are going to stop and just change the world and change people's, which is obviously not that realistic. A little bit more in photojournalism, because certainly in conflict photography. But do you, how do you go about even teaching that or thinking about it, or do you really advise to just stay away from that concept of thought?
Lauren Walsh:I mean, I do agree with your points. One that when the interaction with the image occurs through social media, and particularly like TikTok or Instagram, where you really are encouraged to scroll fast, it's extremely difficult to get people to stop and land on an image, and I think the good photojournalists should be aware of that. But I don't think their end goal is to beat the social media system, right, like their goal is to be a journalist who documents and does the work accurately and disseminates the information in some capacity, not to be like. I won Instagram today because everybody stopped and looked at my picture. You know, and it's a double-edged sword, that game, because sometimes the pictures that stop people are stopping people because they're horrifying and there's only so far. One wants to go in the real horrific category and you know that starts to get into some of the ethical questions of like how you document and how you present information.
Lauren Walsh:I think for me, though I wouldn't say none of this matters, right, because it does, like what's the point of doing the journalism if nobody's going to look at it? And so for photojournalism, I do teach an emphasis towards trying to take pictures that are aesthetically powerful. Not every single picture is going to be and that's fine, but I do think I mean I am trying to train my students to think more about composition or framing or lighting or color, because those things can enhance the photographic photo. And you know, let's say you don't win Instagram. But if you get a better placement of your image in a news outlet, like a higher placement on the website, you're going to get that many more people seeing the image and then, as you were saying, hopefully sparking the curiosity that drives them into the story of what you've documented.
Matt Jacob:Is photojournalism in a bit of crisis then at this stage. Maybe crisis is a wrong word this stage and maybe crisis is a wrong word, but how do you feel that what you teach is is impacting the outer world, and do people care? You know, do people still care about this type of thing? Do people still care about the stories that we want to tell as photographers, as photo journalists? How do you feel the landscape sits at the moment?
Lauren Walsh:I think people care. I mean, I do think people care. I think probably there's only so much I mean again, as somebody who specializes in a lot of terrible things, right, crises and conflicts there's only so much that the average person can take up in that capacity. And if you really do care about an issue, you probably are not just superficial about it. You're learning the context and the culture and the ins and outs of what's happening in a particular space, and that alone can occupy a lot of your bandwidth, right. So to try to stay on top of every conflict that's happening is too big of an ask for the average person and I think you know when it comes to do people care. Yeah, I think people do get fatigued sometimes, but I still believe in the average humanity as caring in the rest of the world, hopefully, you know. I think studies have shown that people tend to care more about things that are closer, like in physical proximity to them, because it's more likely to impact their lives or the lives of people who are not far from them, and that you know that's been a pretty constant through news studies for a years, right that the way we work tends to be more locally oriented.
Lauren Walsh:I think, if we're asking about this landscape of, is photojournalism in crisis? I don't think it's in crisis in terms of viewership. People like photos, right, like the social media answers that question for us right, they're not all photojournalistic, but people like photos. But I do think there is a financial crisis in the news industry, which is there isn't enough money going into it, which has enormous consequences up and down the news industry. It means that there's fewer journalists, because if you can't earn a living wage, you can't stay in the industry, and that means that fewer journalists are in the industry, so more journalists are taking on greater workloads and burdens. We're seeing higher levels of burnout among journalists. Unless you're one of the top tier publications, you likely don't have the money to really really invest in the kinds of long form investigative stories that are phenomenal, but they take time and money.
Lauren Walsh:And all of this is I'm saying journalism broadly. This is all true for photojournalism as well. So I think there are some crises that the industry is facing, but I don't think it's a crisis of interest from the public. I do think sometimes there might be a crisis of trust. So you know, and that's if a journalist messes up, they kind of reflect badly on a whole industry. When you have leaders around the world referring to fake news media, they are undermining and undercutting and embellishing this crisis of trust. And then, yeah, we do live in a moment where people do fake images and there is a lot of propaganda and that also leads to a crisis of trust. So photojournalism I don't think it's going to lose its viewership, but I think there's other ways of thinking about the challenges that the industry is facing.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, as people become more and more independent, they have to search for their voices in different outlets. Right, certainly if the and it all snowballs as finances drop and investment drops, you get these you know echo chambers that we see today, where people have their you know, have their own platforms to say whatever they want and show whatever they want. But maybe that's getting a bit political. But how do you teach them now, in present day, how do you teach young people who want to be photojournalists to make a living? What is today's way of making a sustainable living as a photojournalist, or does it not exist?
Lauren Walsh:No, it's tough, it's a hustle, it's um, I mean, you know I have plenty of, uh, former students who have been very successful, but it takes a lot of hard work, um, and it's just a constant go, go, go, um, and a lot of small jobs. At first, probably a lot of rejection, or not just not rejection, maybe even worse, just getting ignored, right Like trying to contact editors and never hearing anything, which can be a little demoralizing. And I think a lot of my students want, very wonderfully and idealistically, to do these big projects on big issues and there isn't money for that, so they have to kind of figure out the balance on their own. I would say a lot of starting photojournalists work another job that's maybe not in photo, work another job that's maybe not in photo, and that's, of course, totally fine. The other thing is, you know, I'm based in New York City and there's a lot that goes on here in terms of news, so there's a lot for students to work on. But that means there's also a lot of photo journalists who are far more seasoned than they are based here, and some of my students who have had real success.
Lauren Walsh:Like you have, you leave the city, you go where the competition pool is smaller.
Lauren Walsh:You deliver steady work and then you move up the chain. But it is hard and I find myself being a mentor to students for years and years and years, and not just in the USS. I've worked in many, many countries and you wind up staying in touch with a lot of your former students and it's a lot of work. But I do feel like it's and maybe a lot of industries do this, maybe they don't, I don't know but I do feel like it's really important for me and for others in my role or at my point in my career to to like kind of give back right and to mentor and to help um, whether it's a rising generation or I'm often working with um photographers who are younger than me, but not that much younger, but they're breaking into the field or they're based in a country where there is really no support, and they're reaching out to colleagues, me or others, and I just think it's very important for me to foster those relationships and to help those photojournalists.
Matt Jacob:Do you feel that that's been an evolved purpose for you up until this point where you feel like, okay, this is where I belong in terms of my role in giving back? I mean, do you still do a lot of photography yourself? I know you have editing roles as well. As you know, wear many different hats. We've only really talked about your teaching role at the moment, but is that where you feel like your biggest purpose lies?
Lauren Walsh:I do. Yeah, I feel very strongly about that and I actually um have done very little, uh, in terms of being the professional photographer. I've always much more been the editor and the advisor and the educator, um, but I do feel that, um, you know, and not to like get on a soapbox, but it is undoubtedly the case that the history of this amazing industry called photojournalism has been extremely Western and white and quite male too, and I am an enormous advocate for diversifying that um and for working with and supporting phenomenal photographers from kind of underrepresented countries or communities. Um, and you know, gender, ethnicity, age, like all of it. I actually I think diversity makes for better journalism up and down.
Matt Jacob:What is journalism? Everything right.
Lauren Walsh:Yeah, exactly.
Matt Jacob:How do you see the things that you teach? I mean, I'm sorry I have so many questions. It's difficult for me to kind of really be efficient with them. But you know, I'm putting myself in your class and wondering what's going through your head and what's most important to you right now. What's the narrative and what's the real? You know moral obligations of you as a teacher, but you, as also a mentor and editor, photographer and a spokeswoman for you, know millions of people around the world, what is, on this day, what is the most important thing that you are wanting to give to the world or wanting to focus on in terms of conflicts, issues, topical areas, maybe something specific with photography itself?
Lauren Walsh:Like specific situations going on in the world.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, I mean it's changing rapidly. Uh, you know we could pick anything and I know we'll get onto your books in a minute because there are there are some really compelling stories in there, but is it is that? You know, do those big topics really still sit with you on a daily basis, or are there other things that you're really focused on, right?
Lauren Walsh:now I mean the big topics certainly do, because I'm depending on which big topic, and by big topic I'm saying like which war or which mass atrocity. I'm usually in touch with photographers in all of those spaces. So that's me kind of in my advising and safety role. So I care about these as topics, topics, and then I care about them because I literally will know people in all of these places, um, but I don't, I mean I. So I wind up, yes, teaching about um.
Lauren Walsh:If we're talking about, like, what's the most important thing that I'm bringing to students, I do end up teaching about all these the surface, but what I am always trying to do is sensitize them to the powers and limits of photos, the questions around ethics and the deep challenges that journalists face, and the challenges will be really different in different landscapes. But I mean I guess I'm going to go back to it in some sense. This is another form of media literacy, like just getting students to understand, like what does it actually take to do the journalism in this space? So that's, I mean those.
Lauren Walsh:That's a very important in this space, so that's a very important thing for me to communicate to my students, because I think it's easy for us to just like you know, I'd say many of my students get their news on TikTok, but some of them are going to newyorktimescom or washingtonpostcom, and even then I think the average person doesn't really understand all the steps that it takes to make journalism. And why would you right If you haven't studied it? That's fine. Like I don't know all the steps to I don't know, make a very fancy dish at a restaurant? But from my perspective, I want people to understand what it takes to make journalism and what kinds of risks and threats journalists are facing to do the important job of bringing this information to us.
Matt Jacob:Tell us what you know in a very high level, generic overview way. Tell us those steps you know. I mean I'm interested in kind in how all of the background work gets done and then, even more importantly, how best to tell that story through images. But yeah, give us an insight.
Lauren Walsh:So okay, so one of the this course that I taught that I mentioned to you reporting on violence. We kind of kind of start, or I structured it as case studies, um, and one of the case studies was reporting on sexual violence. So what I had my students do was study one specific body of work, um by a photographer named Smita Sharma, um who's's from based in India. She is Indian, and she was looking at young girls, or kind of documenting and telling the story of young girls who are trafficked as sexual slaves. And so the things that I wanted my students to understand was not just to look at the finished product, this book which is called we Cry in Silence, but to kind of start at the beginning and go through the whole process. So it was that Smita had to do an enormous amount of research, and then there's, of course, the business aspect. She had to get funding to do this project. She had to figure out how to safely move around the country, which has high levels of sexual violence and harassment, in addition to the really stark situations of trafficking, and she's a female photographer, so she had to figure out risk assessments for that. She had to work as an ethical documentarian, which means you don't just show up and say, hi, were you trafficked and raped? I'm here to teaching my students interview skills and this was an extremely different kind of discussion and then thinking about what's the safety and security of the survivors of trafficking. Can she take pictures that identify their faces? Can she take pictures that identify their families? Is this going to cause retribution or harassment for them later? How do you take pictures that identify their families? Is this going to cause retribution or harassment for them later? How do you take pictures of girls who've never come back home, like they're dead or they're never been rescued? How do you tell their story? How do you tell the story of somebody who's died in there and so she's thinking through all of these things, and this is what I'm trying to get my students to understand. And then, of all, right, once you finish the body of work and it gets published, then what is there a responsibility for the photographer like? Do you move to the next project? Do you continue to somehow harness this to advocate for change?
Lauren Walsh:Um, and in this particular case, um sharma did. It's published as a book, but then she had like a zine version of it made in order to hand out locally and was part of some law enforcement programs to help raise awareness for young girls. I mean, it's the really young girls who get targeted, you know like 13, 14 years old. So it was kind of a start to finish. I believe for Charm it was an eight year project. We did it in like two weeks in the classroom, but that's what I want my students to understand. Kind of there's many, many, many layers and levels to and this is a it's. You know it's an eight year project but in a sense, to an editor, you know, far away it's a single story, right, but it it takes eight years of someone's life and has to triangulate all these various things that, in my opinion, a good photojournalist is thinking through at once. And so, of course, one of the reasons I teach Sharma's work is that I really respect the way she did this body of work.
Matt Jacob:There is that responsibility. I mean, once there's one thing creating that work and then once that work is put out, wherever it's put out, there almost seems to especially an eight-year project wow, I mean it seems to feel that responsibility of, well, I need to do something with this now. And it's easy to get so pressured and so, you know, really feel that weight of that pressure when you've put so much work into something and sometimes I guess it's almost better to try and let that go and say, look, I've done this piece of work and let it sit there and marinate in the world and if it does make a difference, fantastic. But it's going to take me another 30% of my soul to actually drive this even more forward. I presume that's a conflict that a lot of photojournalists have.
Lauren Walsh:Yeah, and that's something. So, one of those specialties I keep saying going to be a safety specialist, but I really specialize in mental health tolls. But I really specialize in mental health tolls. So I'm not the person who's going to give them legal safety advice or even cybersecurity safety advice, but the mental health stuff absolutely not typical. And she was able to do eight years and do kind of follow up programs after.
Lauren Walsh:But if you're, let's say, a wire service photographer, your editor is putting you on an assignment and then maybe you're yanked off it three weeks later and you move to something else and you don't have that same luxury or that inability. And I, yeah, a lot of times I don't even think it has to be as grand as I want to follow through and give back by doing more. What I happen to see more often with photographers who are in spaces of you know something horrible is happening and they're documenting it and I will frequently hear I took pictures. This is so unjust, it shouldn't be happening. The pictures were disseminated and the injustice didn't stop. I've failed. The pictures were disseminated and the injustice didn't stop. I've failed. Right, this kind of burden of as long as I do my job and take the pictures, then whatever is going wrong should stop.
Lauren Walsh:Because now I've raised the awareness and, as we all know, that rarely happens and that can be an extremely emotionally difficult thing for photojournalists to deal with and often it gets framed as a sense of failure. And so when you're talking to a photographer who is grappling with that, what's very helpful is to remind what is your purpose here. You're not here as a tourist, you're not just gawking at somebody else's suffering. What is your job? Your job is to document and bear witness and create visual evidence so the rest of us can see what's happening. Have you achieved your job? Yes, you took the pictures, you got them out. That's your responsibility. And for every photographer it's going to be a slightly different endpoint, like where they will see their responsibility ending.
Lauren Walsh:But it's the photographers who tend to put this kind of open ended burden on themselves of what I need to do, and that's not only bad emotionally, it can also be bad physically, because it winds up where people stay in dangerous situations too long because they, but the next picture will make a difference. Um, and likely it it's. It's an important picture, but it's. You know, there's always this kind of scales of um, what is the risk level, whether it's emotional risk or physical risk or digital risk, and what is the goal? And they, it's a constant tension, um of balancing those when, when you're in spaces of of I mean we tend to call them hostile environments um, so that it's not just specific to war, any any environment where your risk profile is increased, um, you have to have these kind of conversations either with other people or with yourself yeah, and, and even, and we we're presuming that actually that a lot of this work does just get out in front of the right people, but a lot of the time it doesn't.
Matt Jacob:right, we talk about state-controlled media. Physical threats that might stop this from going through a number of human pairs of eyes to editors, curators, media CEOs, government institutions there's so much right that we don't even think about it can be just as demoralizing for the photographer and for the journalist.
Lauren Walsh:Yeah, I mean in this sense. I think this is why some people use social media. Right, you cut through all the editors and you go straight to your audience. And, as with everything, I think there's pros and cons to that and I think it's hard for most people to really reach a very sizable audience. That would do bring a lot of attention to conflicts but, as you're saying, even with huge audiences, it doesn't really stop the conflict on themselves.
Lauren Walsh:Of saying, like I'm going to stop this war because I took a certain picture, or I took a whole bunch of pictures. But I do think um photographers can play a role in um, pushing a public to outrage, right, like I'm so outraged by what I'm seeing. And from there, I think some of the burden then shifts to the public, right, right, like vote in different people or contact policymakers I mean, I know that that's also very idealistic and in the real world like there's so many stakeholders that control these things. But I think what I'm saying is some of the burden should shift to the audience as opposed to the photographer trying to carry all of it.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs that actually that you know, the biggest influence are the people at the top and very immovable subjects that we we have to try and influence and but you know it does, it can work, like you said once, once a big enough audience gets behind a big enough tribe, then these, these things can change policy. But totally agree, you know, the photographer's role is to to really create awareness right and hopefully that awareness can can drive, change and drive. You know, real movements, um, like as we've seen before no, sorry to.
Lauren Walsh:I would say like the create awareness. And then also, I mean one of the things I didn't say but which I feel very strongly about with photojournalism is that it provides you literally a visual record of history. Yeah, I mean, history can be manipulated full stop, even with visual records, but it's harder to rewrite history when you do have these records. And even if you're in a state-controlled space and the records aren't coming out in the present moment, the creation of the evidence I think is very important. Yeah, that's.
Matt Jacob:That's a good point, which I didn't really think about. But when it comes to those records and people going through so much to create these records and to create narratives, I guess how have you seen it impact people's mental health? Why is that such an important part that you want to teach and mentor and and approach?
Lauren Walsh:I mean, I think it. It started for me, um, you know, I've been working with photographers globally who cover conflict for a long time, um, and then I started working on a book called Conversations on Conflict Photography and it's a series of interviews with photographers from around the world and with some photo editors and photographers. Essentially, the premise of the book was kind of like what's the point? Like, what is the point of conflict photography? And I really wanted to answer that question, not because I think there's no point, but because I wanted to just kind of open the question up and think through what is the work that it does? Is it successful? When does it fail? What are the challenges? And in conducting the interviews for that book, one of the things that really jumped out at me as the author was almost every person I spoke to, without them necessarily always being aware of it, would tell me things that essentially suggested like you have really dealt with some emotional tolls here. And some people were were more aware and would say like, oh, I experienced X and had PTSD, right, like it kind of cause and effect thing. And then other people were much less aware and would tell me stories like and like one person was saying how, for the longest time, anytime, somebody would just light a 17 or 18 and he's, he's dead and it's. It's one of those photographs that editors would say like, oh, this is a good composition. It's a strange thing to say when you're talking about a young man who's been killed, but it's a powerful photo and the photographer and the photographer is also quite young. So this young man was probably not that much younger than her a bit, but not more than maybe 10 years, and she was telling me about how she didn't understand it. But every single day for weeks she would open her laptop and look at the picture of this boy and start crying, and that to me was a very clear signal of like you're, you're processing something but not processing it effectively, and you're still kind of stuck in this trauma. But she didn't see it like that Right. So I was kind of doing these interviews and hearing all of this and the book is not specifically about mental health, although that is winds up becoming a thread through the book.
Lauren Walsh:But the more I was in, that book took me four years to do and in that process I started realizing like mental health tolls for photojournalists in hostile environments are real, and I was doing research on the side about that and learning more about like what's is there any published literature on this? And there's, there was a bit on was focused specifically on PTSD, which is a very clinical condition, and there there wasn't the kind of looser categories of anxiety or burnout or depression. And so I just kind of started more and more work on that and did another book a few years later. That was essentially about kind of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movements. But at this point I was already aware that journalists working in hostile environments are facing these kinds of risks, and so I knew that was going to show up in my research and interviews.
Lauren Walsh:And, lo and behold, it did right the kind of mental health tolls of covering a pandemic which is kind of inescapable. It's this invisible enemy that seems to be lurking everywhere. And then you know the Black Lives Matter movement were some of the most physically dangerous for American journalists, in a way that the United States had not seen physical attacks on journalists before. So I mean it was just kind of it's there and it's creeping up, and so I've just been researching and writing publications on it, but then also started advocating for more mental health training as part of safety initiatives.
Lauren Walsh:And I'm not the only one, I have a coterie of colleagues who are doing this as well, and so at this point, I'm now co-leading this nationwide initiative for Ukraine. Off to Ukraine in a few days to go work on that one, but it's on mental health for Ukrainian media workers, and so, like the mental health tolls, there are some of the expected tolls, but some is very specific to their situation, and if I were to do a similar initiative for Palestinian photographers or Sudanese photographers some of it there'd be some overlap and then there'd be differences based on the specifics of what's happening locally for these journalists.
Matt Jacob:How can they, if they don't have Dr Lauren Walsh to go over and help them and talk to them about how? How can they help themselves? How can they become aware of this and start processing a better um care for their, for their mental health?
Lauren Walsh:I mean. So it's a. It's a an excellent question, um, and the one of the best things to do which is also impossible for many local photographers and 100% impossible for Palestinian photographers who can't leave one of the best things is actually to take a break. But you can't say that to someone for whom there's no break. The war is engulfing you, not you've chosen to go and cover the war engulfing you, not you've chosen to go and cover the war. So, barring the ability to say, like, step back for a bit, take a break, you have to try to find other strategies. So there are online resources for photojournalists and for journalists at large. Some make use of that, others don't. It also can be culturally specific. If it's a culture that is more open to mental health discussions versus less open to mental health discussions, it can wind up being a really practical resource thing, like if you, if your wi-fi is limited, are you going to read a bunch of articles about mental health or are you going to, you know, make like it. There's also kind of thinking through priorities in that sense.
Lauren Walsh:So there are a few situations around the world where I think that it's really, really difficult. I mean the basic, basic tips, even if you like can't get away, is find some kind of self-care practice that can help ground you a little bit right. So, even if it's like for some people it's a little bit of exercise, for other people it's an activity like cooking or knitting, for other people it's just meditation or yoga, and I know that these, like in the middle of a war zone, these it can sound silly to say this, but it doesn't change the war, but if it helps keep you a little or a little calmer, a little less with these stresses, you know, the reality is it's impossible to remove all these stresses. And even for the photo journalists where you can say, like you need to now take a break, you still are not going to remove all the stresses. Like, the stresses are there and that's part of um, this kind of work. You just have to find the productive ways of dealing with it.
Lauren Walsh:Um, and yeah, so it's, it's, it's not a simple answer. Um, I think also being in contact with people who understand your situation can be very helpful. So I tend to find sometimes that photojournalists, you know, come back from covering something awful and they're like I don't know how to interact with, like I can't talk to people right now because they're worried about the subway being delayed, and I'm freaking out and having nightmares because of what I saw two days ago. So I think, just kind of surrounding yourself with people who you don't necessarily need to talk it through if you're not that kind of person, but who are not going to ask you questions that feel really off to you.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, a community that can understand without saying anything. Right, you know because they've been there, they've done it before, they've been in similar situations. I think we undervalue sometimes the power of community, even if it's a silent community. And I think as photographers we can be so isolated in our own head because it's an individual pursuit essentially. Essentially, I mean, I'm interested to hear what the community is like in terms of photojournalism and the agencies that all kind of cross-pollinate. But it's a natural course of action that we become these individual idealists and warriors. And especially when then you're put into that type of environment, it's like you talked about earlier. It's a form of PTSD. You come back from those types of environments if you're able to get out of it intact and you're like well, what do I do with myself now? No one understands what I went through, no one gets it. So I think that's why community can be so important and can be lacking sometimes.
Lauren Walsh:If I'm honest, what I see, yeah, I mean, I will say that, you know, therapy can be phenomenal for some people and I feel like the US maybe has a tendency towards like oh, if you have an issue, go to therapy.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, yeah, therapy is everything.
Lauren Walsh:But the exactly, but the studies, the clinical studies that are thinking about kind of journalism and mental health, are repeatedly showing exactly what you said that the best or most successful and in some ways simplest form of the word that's always used as resilience kind of getting through something, is by having a support network or community, and it actually doesn't need to be Kali, it can be a social community, but having isolation is not good. That is kind of repeated through all the literature. Trying to do it on your own is going to be significantly more difficult than just surrounding yourself with people who make you feel okay.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, and that kind of brings me on to ethics, and when I think about ethics in photography, I think about the ethics of the situation, the environment, the people that we're photographing, but I don't really think about the ethics of ourselves as well. Is this good for me? Is this going to be keeping me in a safe space? Is this going to be keeping me in a decent level of mental health, et cetera? Is this going to be good for my family and those types of more moral obligations, I guess, than ethics? But tell me about a 30,000 foot overview of ethical considerations when documenting such things as conflicts, violence, suffering and the survivors or non-survivors of those things. What are photojournalists really battling it with when it comes to ethical considerations?
Lauren Walsh:So I think, like the outside viewer and I'll kind of just go with the symbolic like American viewer sometimes will ask questions like why did you take such a graphic image? Or why did you take a picture of that mother crying, like that's so invasive? And I think a lot of times viewers incorrectly think that a photojournalist has kind of violated someone by taking their pictures. And obviously if a photojournalist were told by someone who's grieving, like don't take my picture, and then they go and take it, I do think that's problematic. But a lot of times they will have the permission or the tacit consent to take the pictures and the outside viewer doesn't understand that. So that's kind of an ethical thing that I wind up having conversations about a lot. And I think it stems from, you know, photographs from spaces of conflict are are terrible. Terrible insofar as they show us terrible things that happen in the world. And the normal person doesn't feel good when you are reminded that terrible things happen in the world. And I think it's sometimes easy to blame the messenger. You know, it's just kind of a quick emotional reaction of this makes me feel so horrible, so how could you have done that? And it gets directed at the photographer, sometimes incorrectly. I do think, though, that photographers do 100% need to be mindful. I do think, though, that photographers do 100% need to be mindful. If you are in the space where someone is at their worst and they're most vulnerable frontline first responders you can't take the picture that gets in the way at all, like you can't risk someone else's life to get a picture things are.
Lauren Walsh:I worked with this photographer, who was a long time wire service photographer, based in a few locations in Africa and is from Africa himself he's from Mozambique and he he told me that he would frequently get assigned. He was like I was the Africa conflict guy and he's like they would send me to wars and they would send me to famines, back to back to back. And he said that at one point he went to a feeding center and there were emaciated people. And there were emaciated people and he walked in and he saw a picture of a kid who is extremely malnourished, and you've probably seen that, like the way it impacts the body is, at a certain point your belly gets kind of like distended and swollen. It doesn't mean you've eaten food, it's like a process of malnourishment.
Lauren Walsh:And he said he saw this little boy or little girl like that and went in and took the picture and then stopped himself and kind of left the immediate space and said he had this real kind of reckoning because he was like I'm taking the picture that I know that the Western audience wants, right, like this is a typical African starving victim, and this is the kind of pictures that we take all the time. And he said he had this horrible moment. He is a Black man and he was like what if that was my child? I don't want them to be just another cliched image. So I think that's another ethical consideration, right, like, are you playing into stereotypes or cliches? And and I'm I'm really grateful to the photographer for talking me through that anecdote, because of course, he had this terrible moment of saying, like I was about to play into the cliche and maybe he had prior played into the cliche, um, and had to force himself to kind of stop doing this.
Lauren Walsh:You know the ethics of documenting crisis. Like I think it's really important, as I was saying before, creating the visual documentation matters and then thinking through how is this image going to be received? Is it a stereotypical image? What does it mean for something to be a stereotype? What are the ramifications for that? Is it possible that, like I was saying with the survivors of sexual trafficking, is it possible that they would be in a very bad position if their faces and identities were revealed?
Lauren Walsh:So the book that I was talking about before shields the identities of almost everyone in the book, and you have to be really thoughtful then about how you're framing the picture.
Lauren Walsh:If you're taking a picture and can't show a face, right. So I think there's a lot of ethics and the good photographer is thinking through all of this all of the time and has enough knowledge that it doesn't need to be like I'm going to stop and have a 10-minute conversation in my head. You're just kind of fluid and fluent in this and thinking it through. The other thing that photographers can do is if you are taking and of course everybody's shooting digital now, so you're taking hundreds or thousands of images, not all of them need to go out into the world, right? So if you've taken a bunch of pictures and then feel a little bit hesitant about this one versus that one, there's time to sit on it, right? You can hold it and think it through longer, even a breaking news story, okay, maybe that one image won't go out at that moment, but you still have the image. You have the visual record. But if you're worried about harm coming to someone in the picture, it's better to think it through.
Matt Jacob:So much to go on there. I think ethics is such a huge topic, isn't it? That can take years to really, I mean, not solve, but battle with, and I think it's important as photographers too. I love that you talked about that emotional space between taking images, because sometimes in the moment I'm not a photojournalist, but I imagine I mean even just me doing normal photographs in the moment you think, oh, this is great, you know I'm getting the shot right, I'm getting the shot, and you forget, okay, what's more important here?
Matt Jacob:The encounter, or the photograph, or what that photograph is going to be used for, or the dignity of the person that I'm photographing, et cetera, et cetera. That clarity can sometimes come after the event and, like you said, these images don't have to be used. There's time usually to sit on them, unless you're working for a very quick deadline. And then, certainly in the photojournalist space, I imagine the role of the editor has a huge part to play in that, which I'm sure you've had a lot of experience with yeah, I mean the editor is, um, you know, again, it depends, that's, on a kind of assignment by assignment, but the editor might be giving you your assignment.
Lauren Walsh:Um, if you're in a hostile environment, you're going to be in fairly close contact with the editor just to monitor your own safety, um, and if it's a really tough assignment, the editors also should be there monitoring your emotional safety. Like, how are you doing three weeks on this story? But then, yeah, so you're submitting your images and you're not sitting in the newsroom if you're off covering something. So, you know, depending on your relationship with the editor and your seniority or not, you may be able to say, like, file a small number of images and give your wishes as to which are the most important, but in many cases you may not like you're. You're submitting a wider edit and it's your editor, or editors, who are going to make decisions about which images and how. And it's it's not unheard of, but it's not common for photojournalists to also write the text. So someone else is using your images with their words, someone else is writing the headline that fronts the entire thing. So, yeah, the editor will play a very big role.
Lauren Walsh:I think, in an ideal scenario, an editor and a photojournalist should have a good working relationship and a kind of dialogue with each other so that you get to know each other's style. And in this sense, you know, editors often will prefer to work with photojournalists they've worked with before because they know the working patterns and they know when you work well together and in some regards that means the same person may keep getting assignments that you wish you could get, but on the other hand it means like there's this good, strong working relationship that is in play. But yes, I think that I mean the editors to. You know another word for them. They're also referred to as gatekeepers. Right, like they open and close the gate. That is the flow of information. And you know, as far as being a gatekeeper in the digital age, they're not nearly as in control of information as they used to be, but they're still. If you're working for a news outlet, they're still kind of in the chain up towards management. They're above the photo journalist.
Matt Jacob:Right? Does censorship ever kind of? I mean, censorship is probably a strong word, but it's certainly in the legacy media sense, but that must form part of conversations and and how you want a narrative to be told through images and through through the written word. It constant battle with that, or or am I overthinking? I?
Lauren Walsh:and there's lots of forms of censorship, um, so, yes, I I guess a few ways of thinking about it. Let's say, you're, um, covering a conflict, are you? Um? Is there censorship coming because you are embedded or working with a military which does not want sensitive information out, and so it is a form of censorship? Um, and I'll you know, you can't. You can take this picture, or you can't take this picture, or you can take this picture, but it cannot be published before a certain date, or you cannot have access to these frontline troops. And this happens a lot. Journalists don't like it and at the same time, the reality is, if you want access with military, you sometimes have to do this dance of um, what am I? What's the limit that I'm willing to kind of abide by other people's rules? Um, and there's cases.
Lauren Walsh:You know, there was a case in iraq where a photojournalist for getty images was embedded and watched. I don't know if it was officially determined a war crime, probably not because it was American soldiers, but essentially a war crime. American soldiers shot up a family, a civilian family, and the photographer documented it and was told by the unit like don't, don't submit those. And he submitted it because he said, the news value is higher than the rules and was kind of summarily kicked out of the unit. So you know, photojournals have this ability to kind of make decisions and if you go against those kinds of censorship rules you're probably out within an hour or two. But you can, you know, if you're saying to yourself the news value is so high, I'm willing to risk it, then I will disseminate pictures.
Lauren Walsh:I mean, there's other forms of censorship. I would say there's a lot of self-censorship, like this picture is never going to publish anyway, so why should I take it? There's unspoken censorship Again if we go back to kind of American media. It there's unspoken censorship Again if we go back to kind of American media. The legacy media here will not publish the most graphic images. And even within that we have kind of differing standards for, like, graphic images of, you know, black and brown bodies versus graphic images of white or Western victims.
Lauren Walsh:And I mean this stuff is all fairly well documented that there is has been historically kind of a double standard on this kind of graphic images. But I think it is the case that legacy media in the United States just kind of full stop will not show you. You're never going to get a photograph of a beheading right. So there's that kind of censorship. And then I yeah, I mean I think in Western media those are going to be the primary forms of censorship a kind of unthinking bias, considered too graphic, a censorship that might have military information connected to it. Um, I'm trying to think, were there other forms of censorship you were thinking of?
Matt Jacob:no, I think, uh, you know, censorship is probably a a broad, too broad a definition. I mean that we, we edit what we put out there and we see edited versions of things all the time, right? So if there was true 100% freedom of speech, the world would be in chaos. So we have to bring some order to that and to protect many things protect institutional values, protect people's feelings and safety, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I was just interested. It's like kind of what battles you've run against before in terms of wanting to get stories out there, but maybe higher powers not wanting you to, and maybe some stories about ethics as well, and where ethics have really stopped stories being told, or or the other way around, right?
Lauren Walsh:I mean, I can give you two um censorship stories, um, and both come from the my pandemic, black lives matter book. On, one is just like so over the top, um, this, this uh photojournalist I worked with um, and this this photojournalist I worked with and he's a Reuters photographer and was sent to Wuhan, kind of starting point of COVID-19 pandemic, and he's there and he's in a COVID facility treatment and he's with the Reuters team. There's three of them and they had the permission of the doctors to go in and they're all like suited up and taking pictures and I he doesn't know how, but word gets out to local law enforcement that there's this journalist team at the covid facility and so law enforcement shows up and like surrounds the facility, detains him and his colleagues for I think he said like 10 hours and in the end, um, they wiped his sd. The sd card was reformatted, um, so they destroyed the evidence, um, and that to me is like a kind of really crazy over the top like censorship by actually destroying the visual evidence.
Lauren Walsh:And then this other person I worked with was based in Peru, photographer for the Associated Press, and he was talking about a totally different kind of censorship which I found fascinating. And so he's covering the death tolls every day. And he was doing work both in Lima, the capital of Peru, and then kind of in some of the outlying sectors, and he'd also been working in the rural jungle populations which were being decimated by COVID. And so he's like he tells this anecdote in my book and he's like the government every day. You know they'd be like kind of press release or a statement and they were like the number of deaths are hovering at 100. And he's, like I absolutely know for a fact that's not true, like it's way, way, way higher, know that they are not telling the truth, they're underreporting it.
Lauren Walsh:But he's working for the Associated Press international outlet and Peru has a very tight state controlled media, so his journalism is not appearing in Peru.
Lauren Walsh:It's like going out to the rest of the world and Peru's not seeing it. It's like going out to the rest of the world and Peru's not seeing it. And then so I had the highest per capita COVID mortality rate in the entire world and like what I find fascinating about this story is that the state controlled narrative basically led to the deaths of so many people. Because if you, if you are the government and you say it's fine, our health infrastructure is fine, and if you are not telling the truth you are putting your population at risk. And it had the impact of kind of killing more and more and more people and leading to the worst mortality rate on the face of the earth. And I, in some regards, it's maybe the more fascinating of the two censorship stories because it's not as straightforward. It's just, you know, he created the documentation, he has the photos, they were published, they were just never acknowledged inside of Peru, where it mattered most.
Matt Jacob:Wow, that's incredible. I'm sure doing this book through the lens. I didn't get my hands on a copy, but I will endeavor to do so. How did that book reshape your understanding of either subject in terms of Black Lives Matter or the pandemic, and did it really you know what came out of it in the end for you personally in creating this book?
Lauren Walsh:I think you know I work with a lot of newsrooms and, of course, I support journalism very, very much, but doing this book made it really clear that newsrooms were really unprepared. I mean, ok, fine, maybe it's not fair to say like, have you prepared for the once in a century global pandemic, but they were really unprepared on a number of levels. A number of levels, basic safety measures were missing. It was also, as I was mentioning before, 2020 was the worst year in American history for attacks on journalists, and that was interesting to me because we tend to we Americans tend to be like oh, we're a democracy, we have freedom of the press, we protect journalism and I think right now in the world, we're ranked 55 on the in the better half of things. But this idealistic notion that journalism is so fine and awesome here it needs to be rethought, and so that was that was interesting to me, just to hear how difficult it was for journalists working and how dangerous it was for journalists working in the US landscape that year. It was dangerous globally, but it was a real, significant shift for American journalists, and so you know, in the end, the book is kind of a snapshot of one year in photojournalistic history and what these images did and what they recorded, and it's really kind of the story of many of the challenges that kind of all collided at once in a single year. I mean the interesting thing for me.
Lauren Walsh:Just going back to your earlier point about kind of maybe the power of the images, the Black Lives Matter movement all started with a video, basically A video by a teenage girl on her cell phone, and so in some regards it's also this kind of like images have power and of course it's an awful video. It's the murder, it's a videoed murder of a man and I think it you know it, just it touched it's that has the problem of racism in the united states is so endemic, um, and then we'd already been in covid lockdown for a few months when this happens, and I think it was just kind of like taking the lit match and throwing it into kind of a dry haystack, um, and it happened because of a visual and like, as, as the kind of scholar of visuals, I can't ignore the role that that visual played in setting off a kind of global movement yeah, and and and how?
Matt Jacob:how do we see that role of images moving on? And we? We kind of started the conversation talking about this and I kind of want to end it as well on a similar subject, because I want to feel like, certainly in conflict photography, that photographs can help heal communities as well as drive the news story right. You know, I want to touch upon that and hopefully that's as important to photojournalists and you teaching these photojournalists and you editing with these photographers out there and understanding that it's not just take. You want to be able to leave something behind and help these communities be better off in some small way or another.
Lauren Walsh:Yeah, I mean I can give you a few examples. So one of the ways of thinking about kind of post-conflict settings, there's two ways of talking about peace, right, so there's negative peace and positive peace, and negative peace is the absence of violence. Positive peace is when you have justice and you have education and you have reform and you have actually kind of society functioning, as opposed to society just not being killed. And so I think photos can serve a very important role in getting towards positive peace. One of them is, let's say you are talking about war crimes. If you have visual evidence, it can lead to the prosecution, right, and it doesn't bring back whoever was killed. But achieving justice can be very, very important for post-conflict identity and post-conflict reconciliation, post-conflict healing.
Lauren Walsh:I've also worked on some initiatives in Bosnia where they use images to bring together young students, like high school age students, from across the different ethnicities that had been fighting when the Balkans was breaking up and the Bosnian war was particularly a bloody war and there were different ethnic populations, essentially kind of the fighting split along ethnic lines. And so the photos are now part of these reconciliation processes that ask the students to kind of what are you looking at, what does it mean? How does it resonate for you? What would you like to say, like, how do you think we should move forward? And it's really just allowing them to kind of reflect on their parents' past. That doesn't judge them Right, like this is you're too young, this is not your doing, but how do we move forward? Is not your doing, but how do we move forward? And then I guess the other thing I would say is and I mentioned to you, I'm teaching a class called Photographing Peace this spring I do feel that media spends too much of its time and attention or gives too much of the balance to the sensation of war.
Lauren Walsh:I mean, it's war can be very visual, there's a lot of spectacle and spectacularity to it and you know, I've said it many times I think it should be documented, we need to have the record. But I also think it is incumbent upon media to do a much better job of staying with places once the war concludes and recognizing the value in documenting peace processes and peace initiatives and, exactly as you were saying, like the efforts at moving forward and I don't think media has been very good about that and I do think they should I think we should basically teach the public that, like, looking at images of peace should actually be so much better than looking at images of war, like, why can't we try to change the diet of what's going on in terms of? You know, we tend to prioritize images of war over images of peace, and I don't think we necessarily should.
Matt Jacob:Well, we shouldn't. I totally agree, but it's, it's. It plays into the human nature of wanting to the audience, wanting to see something dramatic, right, wanting to see. It's like they want to see something that drives their fuel for hating something, rather than just something nice.
Lauren Walsh:I mean, you know it, it probably is. It probably is a kind of human nature thing. But also we've been trained to look at for the history of the camera. That's what we've found more important to documents. We've kind of trained ourselves to do that too.
Matt Jacob:What a final question. Now, what can we give back to people watching this who want to go into photojournalism or just want to pick up a camera and tell stories? How do you see the type of skill set that they need to have, moving forward, with the rise of AI, but technology, shifting audience habits and just such such an ever-changing world, what are the core kind of skills that photographers and photojournalists should have, moving forward as they do?
Lauren Walsh:I mean I guess it's um. Well, one thing that I always recommend to my students is, if you see press photography that you like, look at who took the picture and then go look them up, because you can start to learn their style and learn the things about the aesthetics that are appealing to you, and you can start to mimic it in your own photography or play with it and use it kind of as a guide, a visual guide, you know, for somebody who's picking up their camera and says I'm interested in doing journalistic work. They have to follow the ethical tenets of journalism and you know, I don't think it's a simple process, but I do think there are published codes of ethics that people can read and think about and think about, and I think it'd be handy for everybody to read these codes of ethics so that you have an understanding of, like, what is good, responsible work and also, if you're again being the critical thinker and consuming media, you know when to ask questions like was this created ethically or not?
Matt Jacob:Love it. What a great piece of advice, Lauren. Thank you so much for joining me. I feel like I could pick your brains for hours and hours, but hopefully one day I can do that in person when I visit New York next time.
Lauren Walsh:Sounds good. I appreciate you having me here, Matt.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, thank you so much. Safe trip to Ukraine and speak soon.
Lauren Walsh:Thank you.
