In the Beginning

3/2/2007 9:26:00 AM

Well, I’ve quit my job in (supposedly) photojournalism. Now that I’m freelance, and not constricted by the policies of a newspaper, I can do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, which is start a blog for photos, comments on photojournalism and the issues that matter to me. I also am hoping to record/share my thoughts on what’s going on in my life.

This is a great time for beginning something, since that seems to be a general theme in my life right now. I have a new (16-day-old) baby, I’ve quit my job after seven long-suffering years, I’m trying to get started in my own freelance business, and it’s Spring.

I hope to eventually turn this into a sort of photo-a-day format, with a necessarily slow start at first, since I’m taking plenty of time out to care for the baby.

To my as-yet nonexistent audience: expect homey and personal photos at first, branching out into community-oriented photos as baby and I venture further from home, and as I take up freelance jobs in earnest. Later, expect very issue-oriented posts as I pursue two of my favorite projects: immigrant women and families, and mothers in prison, and as I look for other documentary projects that reflect the women’s and children’s issues that have always interested me. My hope is that all photos, regardless of their subject matter, will be beautiful, artistic, and worth looking at.

As for the issues I want to talk about, photography and photojournalism will be chief among them, including how photos help us interpret and deal with the world. I also want badly to talk about the place of women in photojournalism, which still to me seems limited. Women in photojournalism seem to feel, these days, that they have to act more like men than the men do. I know several women who have postponed marriage for a long time to get their photojournalism careers off the ground. Others have abandoned relationships in the name of photojournalism. Meanwhile, the men I’ve worked with have been busy getting married, starting families, and getting involved in the community and in their kid’s schools and clubs and sports teams. At the Women in Photojournalism Conference that I attended in 2006 in St. Louis, only one of the women speaking, Carol Daniel, talked about her family. Carol Daniel, though a gifted speaker and commentator, is not a photojournalist. She is a radio host at KMOX in St. Louis.

The only photojournalist speaking about integrating photojournalism and family life was St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer Robert Cohen, a wonderful and inspiring speaker both times I have heard him, and, (do I even need to point this out) not a woman.

Okay, I guarantee I’ll get back to this. Right now, I need to wind up this post before I go off on a tangent. Expect more. Next post, I promise: beautiful photos and some funnier stuff.