Participants: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Vanessa Charlot, Veronica Sanchis Bencomo, Maggie Steber, and Daniella Zalcman
Moderator: Whitney Johnson
Laylah Amatullah-Barrayn. Minneapolis 2020, 2020. © Laylah Amatullah-Barrayn. Courtesy of the artist.
Preeminent women photographers working today, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Vanessa Charlot, Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, Maggie Steber, and Daniella Zalcman, meet in a conversation with Whitney Johnson. Building upon the concept of power and imagination, the discussion will address the photographers’ creative practice, the challenges they have faced, and the turning points in contemporary documentary photography.
About the Speakers
Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer, writer, and curator. She is the co-author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first anthology in nearly thirty years that highlights photography produced by women of African descent. Barrayn is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and has been published in National Geographic, Vogue, NPR, and VOX, among other publications.
Vanessa Charlot is a Haitian-American, award-winning photojournalist/documentary photographer, filmmaker, lecturer, and curator. Her work focuses on the intersectionality of race, spirituality, economics, and sexual/gender expression. She shoots primarily in black and white to disrupt compositional hierarchy and to explore the immutability of the collective human experience. The purpose of her work is to produce visual representations free of an oppressive gaze.
Veronica Sanchis Bencomo is a Spanish-Venezuelan photographer and curator. Her images have appeared in the South Wales Evening Post, YLE News, Helsinki Sano- mat, and Ventana Latina magazine. In 2014, she founded Foto Féminas, an online resource for promoting Latin American and Caribbean women photographers. In addition, she has curated and produced photo exhibitions in Argentina, China, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, and Peru.
Maggie Steber is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and documentary photographer who has worked in over seventy countries photographing stories concerning the human condition. She is a contributing photographer to National Geographic. Her work has been exhibited in festivals and galleries internationally and her photographs are included in the American Women Collection at the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Richter Library.
Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer based in New Orleans. She is a multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the founder of Women Photograph, a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists. Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonization.
Whitney Johnson is Director of Visuals and Immersive Experiences at National Geographic. From 2007 to 2015, Johnson was on the staff of The New Yorker, first as a picture editor and later as the director of photography. Her work has earned numerous awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the Society of Publication Designers, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (the Webbys).
Vanessa Charlot. Fire Next Time, 2020. © Vanessa Charlot. Courtesy of the artist.
Daniella Zalcman. Woodsfield, Ohio. Native Mascots, 2017. © Daniella Zalcman. Courtesy of the artist.
Maggie Steber. Haiti, 2014. © Maggie Steber. Courtesy of the artist.