Click top image to view larger and caption Lost: A Portrait of Addiction United States by Virginia Allyn Published November 2024 Addiction could be called a plague. It blights the land. It ravages lives. Flyers for the missing ask, “Have You Seen Me?” The toll it takes is devastating. lt is visible night and day. In Philadelphia, the poorest of our nation’s largest cities, the plague has worsened. It is more out of control now. Ten years ago, one man on Kensington Avenue remarked, “I would call this the suffering, the suffering. The only hope I see is that people get to Heaven when they die.” Virginia Allyn Virginia Allyn spent most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area where she started in the mid 1990’s telling stories with her camera. She worked in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and later moved to New York City where she continues doing street photography, looking for stories she wishes to tell. < Previous Next > comments debug Comments Write a comment. End comment with your name (optional) Write a comment. End comment with your name (optional) Share Your Thoughts Be the first to write a comment.

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THE AMERICA ISSUE Fall 2022 Published by the Social Documentary Network PREVIOUS | NEXT ZEKE home page Subscribe VIEW CONTENTS or PREVIOUS | NEXT ZEKE home page | Subscribe The American Issue Letter Dear ZEKE Readers: Each time I write this letter, I am completely exasperated by the current state of world affairs, and this time is no different. Since ZEKE is the magazine of global documentary, the greater global community is our community and the canvas on which we base most issues of the magazine. But unlike other issues of ZEKE, this is the first time that we have chosen to focus solely on the United States. And, coincidentally, it is also the first issue that is printed outside the U.S. Because of costs and supply chain issues, this issue of ZEKE was printed in Lithuania by KOPA, a printer that supplies many photo magazines for continental Europe. While we call this The America Issue , we want to acknowledge our American neighbors to our north and south who are not included in this issue. We chose to use “America” to refer to only the United States because there is great currency in this term—especially in the photography community with the seminal body of work, The Americans, published by Robert Frank in 1959, that in many ways is the model for this issue of ZEKE. Unlike other issues of ZEKE, the photos presented here span a greater time period than is often the case. This is because America is not time-bound or a specific event. It is a process that has been unfolding since 1492. I am greatly indebted to the 18 photographers whom we feature in this issue, and to Stephen Mayes for his essay on Who We Are: Photography and the American Experience . I am also indebted to the dozens of other photographers who submitted outstanding work to this project but who we did not have the space to feature. And I want to thank Lisa DuBois and Barbara Ayotte for their invaluable insights while editing this issue. The power of ZEKE and SDN have always been to present the voice and knowledge of visual artists who provide an alternate means of understanding issues in our world—distinct from our own personal experience or by written or spoken language. I hope these photographs provide this nuanced perspective of both the challenges facing us today, and our strength to overcome them. America has always been a grand idea, if we can only keep our eyes on the prize of universal human value and dignity and the unbridled potential that can be achieved when we allow all humans to participate. No doubt our history is fraught with our exclusions of women, Black, Brown, Indigenous and other communities that do not conform to the mold of our “founding fathers”, but we do hope, and we will struggle, to get there one day. Please join me in taking in and appreciating the photographs on the following pages and the photographers who have made them. Glenn Ruga Executive Editor NEXT » ZEKE magazine is published by the Social Documentary Network (SDN) info@socialdocumentary.net | www.socialdocumentary.net SDN and ZEKE magazine are projects of Reportage International Inc., a nonprofit organization incorporated in Massachusetts in 2020.

Interview with Adriana Zehbrauskas Adriana Zehbrauskas is a Brazilian documentary photographer who has worked for over 20 years, showcasing the stories of seldom-heard people in diverse places, including Haiti, Sudan, and Mexico. Graduation day at Taffari Community School in the Taffari IDP camp, South Kordofan, Sudan. Learners enrolled under the Accelerated Learning Programme supported by UNICEF under the Educate A Child program will receive certificates before transitioning to formal schools. Photo by Adriana Zehbrauskas for Unicef. By Daniela Cohen Pub lis hed June 2024 Daniela Cohen: How did your journey into photography start? Adriana Zehbrauskas: My father was a journalist back in Brazil. He was a writer, but he always had a camera with him. When I was 10, he would send me to buy the Sunday paper at the kiosk outside. I would read the stories and was fascinated by the possibility of knowing things happening in places so far away from me that had absolutely nothing to do with my life. My parents gave me a little camera when I was growing up but when I was 14, I wanted a nicer camera, and I was really happy when my father gave me one. I didn’t want to be a professional photographer, nor did I know there was such a thing as being a photojournalist. In journalism school, I realized that my path is photography. One of my friends said this newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo was hiring freelancers to help with the election coverage. I put my portfolio together and the editor was like, “Oh my God, this is so bad.” He said, “Train a bit more, get yourself a flash, and come back in a few months.” I did just that, showed him some work, and he started giving me very soft assignments. After school, I went to France and studied for another year. I started freelancing with the Brazilian newspaper as a correspondent. Then I went back to Brazil and started working at the same newspaper until I became a staff photographer. My greatest education was the newspaper. How has your journey evolved since then? The newspaper would send us on international and domestic trips. We would do a lot of interesting stories. It was sometimes very busy, and I had to do five assignments a day, including business portraits and other boring assignments. I had an editor my age, she was more of an artist, and she said, “I don’t want photos of people sitting behind a desk. Think David Lynch.” We had the time and incentive to do something different and it was life-changing. At one point, I was working as an editor, and we decided to bring an important photographer to do a particular story. I suggested my role model, James Nachtwey. When he called me back, I couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t do the assignment, but we stayed in contact as I went to New York and he went to Brazil to work on another story. It was then that he asked me to work for him as his assistant and I spent a month with him. When the story was ready, he sent the story to be published for free at La Folha de S. Paulo . Afterward, he asked me to be his full-time assistant, but I wanted to work as a photographer. He suggested I come for a month while he found someone else. And so I went to New York and started meeting a lot of people at events with Time magazine and Magnum. One thing led to another and from there I went to France for Perpignan, the big photography festival. All I wanted was to meet an editor to show my work. But people would walk around just looking at name tags, and if you were nobody important, they wouldn’t even look at you. I was sitting at one of those cafés outside with my portfolio feeling horrible when suddenly another photographer walked by. I had just met him in New York while working with James. As he asked to see my portfolio, a New York Times editor walked past. She knew him because he’d just won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for a story for the New York Times Magazine. He said, “This is Adriana, a Brazilian photographer based in Brazil.” She’s like, “Really? I’m looking for a photographer in Brazil. Can I see your portfolio?” I went back to Brazil, and two weeks later, the phone rings and it’s her. That was 20 years ago, and I’m still working for The New York Times. What an amazing story! I live with a lot of serendipity. But at the same time, photojournalism is something I really wanted to do, and I’m always pushing myself to be better, be brave enough to carve out my own little place. I consider myself very shy but at the same time, you have to be a bit pushy and ambitious in certain ways because this industry is brutal. It’s been two years and I haven’t taken a day off. What’s the part you most enjoy and what’s most challenging for you? I enjoy it when I’m out there photographing the stories and being with people. When I was a kid, I was super curious. I was walking on the street and would see other houses and wonder what was inside. And this job for me was like, “Oh my God, I got into so many different houses!” For me, it was always about telling the stories of anonymous people who don’t have the opportunity to be heard or be seen. I feel that that is my job. It’s a privilege to be able to witness life in this way and that people trust you to tell their stories. I feel a great responsibility. The hardest part of being a freelancer is working in an industry where there are no guarantees. It filters a lot of people out – if I didn’t have a private car, for example, I could not work, the geography of the place makes it impossible. Your website states your work is aimed at moving, challenging, and connecting people. I’d love to hear more about those aspects and specific assignments focused on those areas. The connection part is the core of why I decided to be a photojournalist. We are so busy, and people don’t really know what’s happening, sometimes even with their own neighbor. Susan Meiselas says we are the ones who perceive the bridge that will connect people to situations which in turn will create some impact. Maybe it’s just someone waking up and saying, “Oh my God, I didn’t even know this existed,” and feeling empathy or maybe it’s a politician who will see what’s going on and change a policy. A concrete example is the Family Matters project. It was born out of a story I covered for two years on the disappearance of the 43 students in Mexico in 2014. I was approached by the bureau chief of Buzzfeed News in Mexico City to partner on a project to follow the life of one of the families. You have to put a face to the news because it’s really hard for people to connect with an abstract concept or a number. We spent six months going there once a month to spend time with them. I was asking for photos of the students. And they kept saying, “No, I don’t have it. I had it on my phone and I lost my phone. I changed my phone.” I kept thinking that the students were not just missing from life, they were going to be missing also from the memory of their families because they didn’t have photos or anything to remember them by. I kept thinking about the importance of photography just to prove someone’s existence. When we finished the project, I went back and gave them a lot of prints. The one Adán Abraján de la Cruz’s family liked the most was the portrait I took after the first communion of one of his sons. It made me decide to start a project on portraits of families living on the brink of disappearance in Guerrero, one of the poorest states in Mexico where people are forced to work for the drug cartels. I used my iPhone, the same instrument responsible for them not having photos in the first place. It was also a way of giving back because we go to places and photograph people when they’re at the most horrible and vulnerable moments of their lives and we can never promise them anything. They ask, “Will this impact my life personally?” That is always the hope and the dream, but you can’t promise people there’s going to be change in their lives. So then I said, “I can promise you a photograph.” Your photos are very visually compelling. For example, the use of color in this photo of young girls in Sudan. I’d love to hear more about how you’re playing with colors. Something that I learned working for the newspaper is you have to be very fast and creative. My editor would say, “You don’t publish excuses.” That photo was taken before the graduation ceremony, the students were already in the school and I had arrived early. It was around midday and the light outside was brutal, so I was walking around and looking for a different place to photograph and I saw that classroom. This is the blackboard, and this wall also tells a lot about the condition of education because that was part of the story. There were some students there and as I started to photograph, others kept coming and soon enough there was a long line of them wanting to have their portraits taken. The fact that they were all dressed up for the graduation made it more special, as they were feeling so proud! I understand you recently joined the VII photo agency. I’m curious if that has had any effect on your work? It’s really recent, the last week of December. It’s great to be with this community because it can be lonely out there. I’ve known some of the photographers from VII for a long time and some I’ve never met, but I feel it’s a new home for me, that we’re in sync about how we see photojournalism education. What would you say is the unique aspect of your work compared to other photographers who might be focusing on similar issues? I don’t like to compare myself with other photographers, but for me, what is first and foremost is to portray people with dignity even in the most horrible situations.

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Click large image to view caption Drowned History Turkey By Mustafa Bilge Satkın Published April 2023 The construction of the Ilısu Dam in Turkey had devastating impacts on the local community and environment in the Dicle Valley, a 100 km-long area along the Tigris River. The project resulted in the displacement of over 10,000 people, most of whom are Kurdish and Arabic, and the submergence of 198 villages, including the ancient city of Hasankeyf, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements. Despite this, the dam was constructed as part of the state’s water policies, with little regard for the consequences it would have on the local community and environment. The inhabitants of villages were forced to abandon their ancestral homes, sell their livestock, and move to a hastily built new town. The process of moving was emotionally distressing, as people had to exhume the graves of their loved ones and carry their remains to the new town so future generations could visit their ancestors. Mustafa Bilge Satkın Istanbul-based Mustafa Bilge Satkın is an independent award-winning documentary photographer with a doctorate in photography from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Primarily focused on the Middle East, his work has been published by Anadolu Agency and others, and he has participated in national and international solo and group exhibitions. With the hope for a better world, he focuses on social injustice, climate change, and migration issues. Subscribe to print edition

Photo by Daro Sulakauri How to get your work featured in ZEKE The answer is quite simple. You need to start with an exhibit of your work on the Social Documentary Network (SDN) website . When we begin to plan for the next issue of ZEKE, we do a few things. We scan recent work on the website for stories we feel are the strongest, and we then look how we can combine some of this work into themes that are timely and would be of interest to a broad range of our audience interested in global issues. But the strength of the work comes first. The unique strength of SDN is that we encourage work from photographers from all over the world. Your resume is not what is important. It is only the strength of your visual imagery and ability to tell a story that matters to us. If you have not yet submitted a project to SDN, follow these steps. You will need to have the following to create an exhibit A minimum of six images (no maximum for a standard exhibit) An exhibit title An abstract explaining in words (in English) the context of the project. This can be up to 180 words Captions for each image. Captions can be very simple, or you can make them detailed Images must be a minimum of 1500 pixels in one dimension A free membership with SDN Four steps to create and submit an exhibit Login to your account and follow the prompts to create and submit an exhibit You will need to also select a country where the photographs were taken, a date range, and select up to six categories that are used to search exhibits on SDN. After submitting, we will review your project within three business days (usually much sooner) and either approve or get back to you with comments. Greater than 90% of all exhibits do get approved. After the exhibit is approved, you make the exhibit live when you are ready. The exhibit will be live on the SDN website for one year at no cost. After a year, you can choose to pay to renew. Either way, you receive the full benefits of submitting a project to SDN. You do not pay anything if your exhibit is not accepted. Other optional features While you must include an abstract and captions, you may submit other information such as a photographer's statement, contact information, additional credits, and any other information you feel is relevant to your project. While the abstract is limited to 180 words, these other fields have no limit. Once you have a live exhibit on SDN, you can create a profile page which includes your bio, a head shot (if you choose), a featured photo, and a list of all your exhibits on SDN. This is an example of an SDN profile page. At any time you can hide the exhibit, hide individual photos, or edit the text. Benefits of submitting your work to SDN Your work is eligible to be featured in ZEKE magazine Your are eligible to be awarded Featured Photographer of the Month Most work gets featured on the SDN home page Each month we send out an email Spotlight to our nearly 9,000 global contacts featuring the strongest work submitted each month. Among these 9,000 contacts are leading picture editors, curators, publishers, and others who provide other opportunities for photographers We highlight projects in our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds You become part of a global community of documentary photographers. If you do not yet have a free membership with SDN (the first step in creating an exhibit), click here.

THE AMERICA ISSUE Fall 2022 Published by the Social Documentary Network PREVIOUS | NEXT ZEKE home page Subscribe VIEW CONTENTS or PREVIOUS | NEXT ZEKE home page | Subscribe Photography and the American Experience by Stephen Mayes "The American Dream” has always been an aspirational phrase, founded on the promise of economic opportunity (think white picket-fenced homes) and an idea that all people who live here are free and equal. For over a hundred years, photography has tried to document this ideal: showing who we are, demonstrating our achievements, marking our failures and inspiring our hopes, making visible for all to see across divisions of geography, class and political persuasion. But, today in the 21st century, the meaning of the American Dream has been obfuscated, reduced to hollow political messaging from both sides of the aisle, making it even harder to have a clear picture of what America really is and what it looks like. In the 20th century, America was a story told with the simplicity of single images in an age when the nation’s eyes could be focused collectively and simultaneously on one front page, a national story that was led by the unified drum beat of mass media that drove the news agenda. One story followed another in a more or less choreographed progression as the media gathered itself around each new issue and gave it shape in the public eye. This was the age of the iconic image, when a single photograph would find itself exposed to everyone at the same moment, and in feeling the moment, the viewers would imbue meaning in the image beyond the simple facts represented. This was America. Photograph by Susan Ressler Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange. Florence Thompson, 32, a pea picker and mother of seven children. Nipomo, CA. 1936. Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Now, as we look back, some of these images have withstood time and still stand as symbols of the national will for progress, the celebration of achievement as well as moments of unified national despair. A migrant mother, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, a Saigon street execution, a video grab of a Black motorist being assaulted by a group of LA police officers and a flag raising at Ground Zero. Each of these widely known images evokes not just an American story but also conjures a host of references and associated emotions representing the spirit of the times. While speaking truths there is also a danger that such icons compress the narrative too much, simplifying complex stories and reducing the rich weave of history to clichés, assumptions and stereotypes. For a nation that’s still less than 250 years old, one could think of 20th century America as still an adolescent culture, disguising its insecurities in consistent dress codes: the U.S. flag was (and still is) everywhere, marking everything and everybody as members of a new and strong nation. In this context the iconic images were appropriately powerful and told a simplified story, as would be appropriate for an adolescent sensibility. This broad-stroke overview of America’s cultural bones is of course itself greatly simplified and takes no account of the many amazing internecine interventions by the likes of Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, Gordon Parks and Susan Meiselas to name just a few of the hundreds of extraordinary 20th century photographers, each of whom contributed era-identifying imagery to our history. * * * But the American experience was never a homogenous unity and while the 20th century icons told a truth, it was only a partial truth and the shortcomings became clearer. Although the number of photographs made and published expanded enormously towards the end of the century, the emergence of popular tropes and approved narratives that were often defined by the proclivities of mass media and their advertisers continued to simplify the story. Broadly speaking, society was represented visually into two categories: winners and losers, shown visually as symbols of achievement or broken hopes, the doers and the done-to, the haves and have-nots. This narrowed field of visual references appeared to present a complete landscape of American life but actually served to limit expectations of what American life might be. We now understand the visual representation of the American Dream to be grievously lacking in the expression of the experiences of women, LGBTQ+, Indigenous peoples and that of people of color, all historically excluded groups in the national visual culture. Photograph by Lori Grinker. Firefighters raise the flag at Ground Zero. New York City, September 11, 2001. It’s important here to distinguish between the representation of, and the representation by “we, the people” in the American story. There are many images of women through the 20th century as there are of people of color, but if we’re honest, the dominant visual story is of exploitation, deprivation and pain, falling far short of the rich, full reality of life. Some pictures have acquired deeper truth simply with the passage of time. For example many images of Jim Crow lynchings were produced as postcards celebrating the acts of violence (one extreme of the American gestalt) but they have recently reemerged as the first signs of a remorseful acknowledgement of past wrongs, demonstrating the possibility that photographs (even the same photographs) can embrace the contradictions and complexities of American life. But there is much further to go. * * * In reflecting on the alarming schism that currently separates red and blue America, I share the bafflement and dismay of the many Americans who wonder how such deep divisions can be healed. But the situation also reminds us that this fractured reality is not a new situation and for many it’s merely the continuation of the norm. BIPOC citizens have long experienced the brutal heel of democracy’s indifference to the reality of their lives. Black photographers have rarely shared an equal voice and still offer a relative novel perspective in the photographic oligarchy, yet they have a uniquely clear perspective of the US zeitgeist. They have been living the complexities of the American reality for a long time and as such they have a breadth of vision that encompasses highs and lows that are beyond the direct experience of many in the White population. Black, Latinx, Native, LGBTQ+ photographers have dreamed the American dream, they hear the call for individual achievement and community advancement, yet they have also experienced systemic exclusion from its fulfillment, not as individual failure but from the systemic injustice of White supremacy. If the American character is defined by ambition, it is all too often marked instead as frustration in so-called “minority” communities. This has been evident in the writings of many Black authors such as Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Cornell West, Toni Morrison and others but it is only recently that wider culture is seeing the equivalent imagery. Photographers like Alexandra Bell, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ruddy Roye, Sheila Pree Bright and others are stretching the bounds of documentary to bring us thoughtful and inclusive studies of American identity that actively embrace the complexities and contradictions, rather than trying to simplify and rationalize, as has been the editorial tradition. Andrea Ellen Reed, for example, looked inward to reveal exterior reality in her heartbreaking project Unseen which simply presented a video self- portrait as she reacted to the documentary reporting of pundits, politicians and others describing the world we live in. Bayeté Ross Smith in his history series co-produced with the New York Times blends archival documentary images of historic moments with contemporary imagery of the same locations combined in augmented reality formats that demonstrate social developments and inertia. Photograph by Ruddy Roye. Keisha, at the Roger Williams Housing Projects, Mobile, Alabama, 2006. This tension is evident almost everywhere we look. In the mid- 20th century, Robert Frank, in his seminal work The Americans , began to examine this dichotomy with his brutally honest images of racism in the U.S. accompanied by images of beauty in the every day. As Jack Kerouac said in the opening essay, “Frank sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.” In this issue of ZEKE, inspired by Frank’s epic journey across America, despair is represented in Virginia Allyn’s Lost: A Portrait of Addiction although in typical American style it is despair tinged with the hope of recovery. But this bleak outlook is most strongly evident in the essays depicting the rise today of social movements of White nationalism told by Anthony Karen and the implicit violence of a prevalent gun culture, such that teachers are now taking up arms, as shown by Kate Way. Brian Branch-Price brings joy to the story with his essay An American Dance. Enthusiastic crowds gather to watch performers dance in the streets celebrating the legacy of Black performance from Duke Ellington’s swing to contemporary break dancing and we see beginners and masters giving inspiration to new generations. That these two realities still exist in America is what makes it so difficult to represent our visual identity. * * * Some practitioners whose work is rooted in documentary photography have, by embracing the opportunity of digital representation, utterly released themselves from the constraints of conventional photography. It’s been 40 years since David Hockney broke the photographic mold with his “joiners” (intricate photo collages creating abstract representations of the scenes he photographed) and now we can look to Clement Valla, Josh Begley, Trevor Paglen, Mickalene Thomas and many others. Their work emerges from documentary. We think we know how to receive it. Yet, it transcends the factual and temporal limitations of photography without deceit and without even requiring the re-education of the viewer. They set a different frame and the willing viewer intuitively inhabits their world, stepping through disbelief into a universe of photographic truth beyond photography. Photography has always done more than merely record the evidence and memories of history. Driven by imagination as much as by facts, the photograph leads the viewer to places we have never actually visited. This includes the future. Photography, as a technology-based communication tool, is still at the center of the process. Geo tagging is now a banality, as is facial recognition and to some extent we also recognize (and fear) deep fakes as a new reality in visual communication, but strange new processes with unfamiliar names such as GAN imagery and volumetric image-making are starting to emerge. The issues thrown up by these new processes will confound us and force us to new understanding of the image in an increasingly complex world. As early as 1846, Frederick Douglass recognized this in his speech Pictures & Progress in which he described pictures as essential to progress because of the possibilities they conjure in our imagination. Words might be necessary to describe the factual content of an image (the Who, What, Where and When) but the photograph can also harness the imagination to substitute for words in exploring the intangible aspects of human experience. This is where we turn to imagery to reveal the American Dream in all its complexities. And then, perhaps, we will truly see a nation of the free and the home of the brave. Stephen Mayes is Executive Director of the Tim Hetherington Trust with 30 years experience managing photography in the areas of fashion, art, commerce, and journalism. Barbara Ayotte made editorial contributions to this article. NEXT > ZEKE magazine is published by the Social Documentary Network (SDN) info@socialdocumentary.net | www.socialdocumentary.net SDN and ZEKE magazine are projects of Reportage International Inc., a nonprofit organization incorporated in Massachusetts in 2020.

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BOOK REVIEW Chris Killip Thames and Hudson, 2023 256 pages / $75 By Michelle Bogre Published April 2023 The book opens with two softly lit, full bleed head and shoulder portraits of a young brother and sister. The faces stare back at us, one (four-year old Chris), with a slight smile, a hint of rascal, open with possibility. The other, (five-year old Anthean) is already set, tinged with sadness, maybe a bit of anger, resigned to a life without possibilities. It is impossible not to wonder what happened to them. This begins our journey through Chris Killip , the aptly titled monograph of one of Britain’s most important, but least well known, documentary photographers. Killip’s black and white images, a mix of portraiture and candid reportage, are an empathetic rendering of working class life in 1970s and 1980s Britain when jobs disappeared and communities were destroyed by gentrification and then a spiral into poverty. The book is divided into four chapters that roughly mirror Killip’s main projects: work from the Isle of Man; the Edgelands, which included projects from Askam, Skinninggrove and the seacoalers from Lynemouth; the North Country; and The Last Stories, a hodgepodge of work made later in Killip’s life. Each section features an essay either about Killip or his work. Killip’s images do what traditional documentary photography does best: create an origami of time as past present and future converge and unfold like warped spacetime. He describes photographs as “a chronicle of a death foretold’ and that awareness is clear in his photographs. It is not only the death of the person, but the death of a way of life. These are people to whom history happened. Cookie in the snow, Seacoal Camp, Northumbria, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos Killip photographed with a large format camera, not the traditional 35mm of his peers. The detail and expanded tonality from a large negative, while not so apparent in the book, is on display in the amazing retrospective and traveling exhibit at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, curated by Ken Grant and Tracy Marshall-Grant. (The book is an expanded exhibition catalogue.) The prints are exquisite and proof that whenever possible we need to see photographs on the wall. In part because Killip was not shooting with a 35mm camera, his work is quintessential slow documentary. The simple act of setting up a bulky camera on a tripod creates a performative space for the subject and photographer. Often, we characterize portraits as either mirroring the subject or revealing the photographer. His do both. Also, these are not extractive images. Killip knows the people and places and because of that we know them and him. The photographs are familiar and intimate, and you sense that Killip would return to visit these people without his camera. A lot of current debate in the documentary world swirls around the idea of insider versus outsider or who should be allowed to photograph whom. Killip’s images tilt towards the value of being an insider or being willing to stay long enough to become one. While clearly an insider for the photographs he took on the Isle of Man (where he grew up), he became an insider for his other projects through persistence. For example, in his project on the seacoalers, (men who make their living by driving horse-drawn carts to collect and sell coal washed up on beaches when the tide recedes), he was chased off several times until a serendipitous meeting at a local pub with a man he had previously photographed gave him a slight inside edge. Still he didn’t feel he understood the seacoalers well enough, so he bought a caravan and parked it on the beach at Lynemouth so he would have a sense of the rhythm of the place, and to better understand these men, he often invited them into his warm caravan for tea. This is very slow photography indeed and because of that he makes the random, accidental, and fragmentary details of everyday existence meaningful while preserving the actual details of the scene. Killip’s image, “Cookie in the snow, 1984” —only possible because he was living in the caravan—features “Cookie” looking like a black apparition, leaning into the wind and snow carrying a bag (maybe of coal). The image is so visceral we feel what a bone-weary job Cookie has. If the book has a weakness, it is the editing and design. Less is more, but not in this book. Trying to include too many photographs, while understandable for a retrospective, forces a design of often cramming too many small images on a page, which doesn’t do any of them justice, or the odd choice of always staggering two vertical images per page, which creates a checkboard pattern. The design works best with one image per page, large enough for us to get lost in the details of a large negative. —Michelle Bogre Subscribe to print edition

< Incarceration Issue Index PROFILE: COVER PHOTOGRAPHER Photographer Michele Zousmer visits with an elderly Romanian woman preparing for the harsh winter while foraging for mushrooms. M ichele Zousmer Changing the Perception of Women Prisoners By Daniela Cohen Published Septe mber 2023 Michele Zousmer learned how to use the camera by photographing her son’s professional basketball games, leading her to become the school’s sports photographer. After her son left for college, she participated in a photo tour to Peru with a photojournalist. There, she developed a love for using her camera to tell a story. When Zousmer returned home to San Diego, she decided to volunteer her time photographing for organizations close to her heart. While photographing at a foster care agency, she met Sheriff Bill Gore, who told her about a new reentry program at the Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility. He asked her to help change the perception of the female convicts through her lens. Although she had no idea what she would encounter, Zousmer was always ready to embrace a creative challenge and immediately agreed. Aware of the stigma the women in the re-entry program faced because of incarceration as well as the shame they felt, she aimed to capture “their vulnerability, their spirit, their beauty.” She said people who saw the images were surprised, commenting, “They look just like you and me.” Over the four years she spent photographing at Las Colinas, Zousmer built many relationships with the women she met. She discovered that, before entering Las Colinas, these women been through very difficult experiences without much support. “All of them were broken in some way,” Zousmer said. “Some as young people and some as teens and it just continued into their adult life.” Her own experience of being a young widow helped Zousmer empathize with the women’s pain and the unexpected turns life could take. “I really was so amazed that they let me in, and they trusted me because they said I showed up, I was there,” she said. “Sometimes I’d come two or three times a week. I would go at night, and it was like we were having a pajama party.” On one of these visits, Zousmer was interrogated by the deputy sheriff about photographing in the prison, and her cameras were locked up. During this experience, she felt firsthand the treatment the women experienced on a daily basis. “They just made me feel like nothing. It was the most demeaning thing,” she said. After reading April Harris’s article in this issue of ZEKE magazine, Zousmer realized nothing has changed. Through her photographs at Las Colinas, Zousmer aims to raise awareness of the punitive nature of the women’s prison system. “I feel very strongly about restorative justice,” she said. “I believe many of these women didn’t belong in jail at all. I feel that these women deserve a second chance.” In her view, the Future Achievers In Reentry program at Las Colinas is an important avenue towards that. Subscribe to print edition

Photo by Matthew Lomanno People Glenn Ruga Executive Editor Glenn is the founder and director of the Social Documentary Network. From 2010-2013, he was the Executive Director of the Photographic Resource Center. From 1995-2007 he was the Director, and then President, of the Center for Balkan Development. Barbara Ayotte Senior Editor Barbara Ayotte is a communications and media strategist for leading nonprofit organizations and a writer, editor and life-long human rights activist. She was the Senior Director of Strategic Communications for Management Sciences for Health, an international non-profit development organization working on global health issues in over 30 countries. Prior to that, Barbara was Director of Communications for Physicians for Human Rights and served as Communications Coordinator for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. Barbara has a B.A. in English from Boston College. Lisa DuBois Photo Editor and Diversity Advisor Lisa DuBois is a New York-based ethnographic photojournalist and curator. Her work focuses on subcultures within mainstream society. Her widely collected work on Black subculture in New Orleans is a demonstration of her deep love for history and tradition. She has exhibited her work both internationally and domestically, including at the Schomburg Cultural Center for Research in Black Culture, and at the Gordon Parks Museum in Fort Kansas. She has been interviewed on BronxNet, Nola TV, and Singleshot about her work. Lisa received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and a degree in Metaphysical Science at the University of Metaphysics. As a freelance photographer, she has contributed to several major news publications and stock photo agencies including Getty, Post, and the Daily News. Lisa has been recognized by the Guardian and the New York Times for her work as a photographer and curator for X Gallery. Her most recent project as creative consultant and curator for ArtontheAve helped to launch the first socially distanced outdoor exhibition along Columbus Avenue in New York City. Lisa is a member of Enfoco and a contributor to Social Documentary Network and Edge of Humanity magazine. Photo of Lisa DuBois by Eduardo Duarte. Alice Currey Editorial Assistant Alice Currey is currently a student at New York University studying photojournalism with a specific concentration in conflict resolution and collective security. Having spent her childhood in Kenya and her teen years in Uzbekistan, she has adopted a cultural insight and empathy that uniquely understands the power of visual storytelling in implementing meaningful change. As both a writer and photographer, she hopes to contribute to the reconfiguration of photojournalism as a method of global change, transcending borders, and bridging the gap between distances.

THE AMERICA ISSUE Fall 2022 Published by the Social Documentary Network PREVIOUS | NEXT ZEKE home page Subscribe VIEW CONTENTS or PREVIOUS | NEXT ZEKE home page | Subscribe Letter from Editor The America Issue Introduction The America Issue Portfolios Who We Are: Photography and the American Experience by Stephen Mayes Interview with Donna Ferrato by Michelle Bogre Book Review: The Verdict by Jan Banning Book Review: The Drake by Tamara Reynolds Book Reviews: Briefly Noted Contributors Profile on Cover Photographer: Amber Bracken Masthead Top: Photo by Amber Bracken from Standing Rock. The Mohawk Warrior flag came to prominence during the 1990 Canadian Oka Crisis, when the military confronted Indigenous people in a major armed conflict for the first time in modern history. ZEKE magazine is published by the Social Documentary Network (SDN) info@socialdocumentary.net | www.socialdocumentary.net SDN and ZEKE magazine are projects of Reportage International Inc., a nonprofit organization incorporated in Massachusetts in 2020.

Chester Higgins at Karnak Temple, Egypt, 2023. Photo by Betsy Kissam. Interview with Chester Higgins By Daniela Cohen Published April 2023 Chester Higgins, Jr. has spent over five decades documenting the African American experience, past and present. Born in Fairhope, Alabama, Higgins worked as a photographer at the New York Times for nearly forty years. Published collections of his photography include Black Woman; Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa; Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging; Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey; and his latest book, Sacred Nile. Daniela Cohen: I’d love to hear more about how your journey into photography started? Chester Higgins: My beginning of photography was accidental or just fortuitous. I was a business management major at Tuskegee and needed a photographer for display ads in the newspaper. This photographer had missed a deadline, so I drove to his house. Some photographs on his wall struck me because they were photographs of poor people, very dignified people. They reminded me of the dignity of people from my hometown. It ma de me think wow, the image validates whatever is showing. Most people of color did not have money to go for a formal sitting, so I thought, what if I could give my great aunt and uncle a picture of themselves to hang on their wall? But I didn’t know how to make photographs, so I asked this man to teach me. A year later, I started making pictures. I had them framed and took them down to my great aunt and uncle and placed them on their wall. My reward was seeing their faces light up when they recognized that they themselves were worthy enough to be on their walls. Not that they felt any inadequacy about being themselves, it’s just something they never thought about. Essentially, validation is what I’ve always done with my camera. I started out with a love for my immediate family. But it’s been consistently a love for people who look like me and who experience the same experience. I didn’t try to show how badly Black people are suffering. That sort of photography sacrificed the humanity of the people on the altars of racism, and I refuse to be a party to that sort of sacrifice. I want my images to be good food for the mind. It’s very important you balance out your imagery by using both the head and the heart. And that’s what I’ve always done. “There is no one like you” a couple’s passionate embrace. Brooklyn, New York 1987. © Chester Higgins. All Rights Reserved. DC: It sounds like you’ve been consciously shifting the narrative that’s being put out there by the choices that you’re making. CH: I cannot do away with the racist images that everybody has been producing. What I can do is add another perspective, so that people will notice another view as well. So, the spirit that allowed me t o be at the New York Times for almost 40 years and to apply change in that paper. I was not the only photographer there, but I was one who consistently felt it was my duty to broaden the view for New York Times readers of people who look like me. And it being a paper for decision makers, that was a very important place to be. DC: I’m curious about the idea of your photography giving visual expression to your personal and collective memories. Could you talk more about that and how your photos are connected to themes of place and identity? CH: Living is very ethereal—like smoke from a cigarette. We certainly produce it, but as smoke, it disappears. So, on a very personal level, my photographs are another aspect of keeping a journal. I keep a journal to unload what has happened during the day and to have that as a record that today actually happened and then as another record of how I internally process today. I also tried to get the smoke of the reality of people in a time before me. This was a 10-year project looking at historical photographs made of my people by other photographers, 99% White. I spent years going back and forth to the Library of Congress, going to see the FSA photographs, going through the archives of Black colleges or universities and public libraries. And then doing more primary research by trying to locate the family historian in different communities to see what they had in their shoeboxes underneath the bed. I looked for the pictures that I would have made. That had the same sensitivity that I would have had, had I been on-site. I didn’t want to take anybody else’s pictures though, so I came up with an idea that I needed a nice, big negative. I started shooting four by fives with a light stand that I took with me. I would have pictures that I fell in love with and copied. Those copies gradually grew to many hundreds of contact sheets. And eventually I was able to do a book called Some Time Ago: A Historical Portrait of Black Americans from 1850–1950. DC: Can you tell me about what first took you to Africa? CH: In America, as a Black person, you are convinced that you’re not American because you’re not accepted. Your sense of history comes from people who despise you, which means that it can only be warped. As a student with a minor in sociology, I understood that if I was going to find out about the multiplicity of who I and we are as a people, I had to create my own sources. And those sources had to be in Africa because the American academy had already proven inadequate to that task. I started spending summers in Africa hanging out with my ‘cousins’ to learn from their side. I learned Asante culture in Ghana, Islamic and Wallof culture in Senegal, Amharic culture in Ethiopia. I had a job that took me to Egypt in 1973, but then the October war broke out, and I was stuck for another four weeks. It would turn out to be great for me because I got a chance to spend more time at the museum and antiquity sites and interrogate these things in front of me that I had had no idea existed, that no history book told me about. All that interrogation is part of the memories, the memories coming back alive only because there is physical evidence that remains of those previous lives that make up the experience of the African people. Solar Aksumite Obelisk in Ethiopian highlands stands as a Royal tomb marker. 2016. © Chester Higgins. All Rights Reserved. DC: Tell me about the inspiration behind your latest book, Sacred Nile. CH: It’s a product of five decades of work that looks at how the Nile as a migratory bridge connected Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt and how it shares its cultures back and forth. It’s looking at the earliest remnants of culture, that belief in the sun and the sky that was developed by Ethiopians migrating down the river into Sudan and then further migrating into ancient Egypt. And then over time, after 7,000 years, it reversed. The ancient nature religion of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan bifurcated and became the patriarch religions of the Old Testament, the New Testament and Islam. So 7,000 years earlier, what went downstream, 7,000 years later something else comes back upstream. In Feeling the Spirit, I’m trying to show that we all have similarities. We have our differences, but the differences are usually nationalistic, not cultural. And the cultural differences hold us together. So, in the book, I’ll have a picture of something that you recognize, say a mother. She could be in Alabama and in the next picture, she’s in Ghana. The next picture, she may be in Nigeria. With Sacred Nile, my hope is that we recognize our history. Because it’s not something that we have been taught…. I tell people, slavery is not the beginning of our history. Slavery is an interruption of our history. DC: It seems one of your main goals is capturing the spirit that’s present in all things, that transcends the labels that we put on ourselves and each other. Could you tell me more about why that’s so important to you and the techniques you use to bring that out in your work? CH: I had an out-of-body death experience when I was nine years old. Early in the morning, I hear this sound in my room and it’s in my head not in the air and I open my eyes and see this big circle of white light on the wall. And this Black man standing in the middle with his hands raised, wearing a toga. He begins to walk toward me and says, “I come for you,” and I’m scared but I’m pissed. I’ve heard about this angel of death, but I’m only nine years old. And what the fuck, I gotta die? So, I scream. My parents and grandparents came in. My mother was at the foot of the bed holding my hands and I began to feel I was ascending and she was getting smaller. She kept rubbing my hands so viciously that at some point, it must have worked because I came back down. But when I was seeing her getting smaller, it made me realize this is what dying is like. Then I begin to intuitively realize there’s a parallel thing going on here. Because I’m dying and she’s there living and I’m beginning to get a feel for a whole other kind of reality. So, I put that away, but I’ve always benefited from that. Whenever I see something, I know that there is something else behind it. What it appears to be is only one dimension of it. But the other dimensions that are really pulling the strings going on behind it are a lot more interesting. DC: So, when you’re making the photographs, it’s in the multi-dimensional reality and you’re allowing that which is beyond the surface to emerge and that’s what you’re capturing. CH: At that moment when the shutter is pressed, I have to make that decision. Every photographer has to make that decision based on whatever their reality is about. My reality is the same as yours on one level, but there’s something underneath that speaks to me. There’s a certain timeless quality to my imagery, and it cannot be arrested. The simplest arrested photograph is a fashion photograph. It gets arrested in time. I’m always trying to create an image that does not get arrested in time. I’m surfing on the spirit. Daniela Cohen Daniela Cohen is a freelance journalist and non-fiction writer of South African origin based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has been published in New Canadian Media, Canadian Immigrant, eJewish Philanthropy, The Source Newspaper, and Living Hyphen . Daniela’s work focuses on themes of displacement and belonging, justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. She is also the co-founder of Identity Pages, a youth writing mentorship program. 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