After my first year at The Dallas Morning News, I went through their employee assessment paperwork. It was a standard form that tried to put quantified numbers on a creative job, so I found just the fact that I had to do it was an absurd task. Towards the end of the form it asked a question that, at the time, I found particularly insulting. It asked the about kind of effort I put forth to include BIPOC people as I worked in the field. It went on to ask whether or not my photos had a good representation of the Dallas population.
My feeling at the time was “how dare they!”
I took it as an insult because I truly believed that I was beyond reproach and personally lived in a post-racial world, to question this of me was accusing me and everyone else at the paper of racism. I felt that since I didn’t decide what stories I was covering, the topics themselves would be race-specific. I would always just take the picture of whomever it was that helped me tell the story the best, so how could I possibly be biased in those decisions. It turns out I was just very naïve about how the world works.
As the years went by this question stopped hitting me as hard for a few different reasons. I started seeing the world through a very wide lens. I got very used to going into bad neighborhoods and learning how to talk with people of different races and classes. This accumulation of knowledge broke down what I thought to be positive stereotypes and allowed me to not assume anything about anyone.
For instance, I once believed that our homeless population was specifically homeless because of mental health problems. From years of experience, I now see while mental health is a major contributing factor, there are a lot of homeless people who have a very low tolerance for authority and even some who are enjoying drifting. This and other moments added to the fact that you can really never assume anything about race, you are better off with using shoes as a starter when it comes to trying to figure out what their personality is. That, at least, is a conscious choice they made for expression for the world to see.
Year after year this question became more important to me. The growth that I had as an individual made me realize that this question was meant to inspire me to make inclusion a goal of mine. This goal was for the entire paper to be better able to talk to all of their readers, not just the ones that filtered through my world as I saw it. Toward the end of my career, I saw it as a powerful thing to have this question on our evaluation.
It taught me that when shooting stories that were not tied to locations I should seek out unrepresented neighborhoods. I learned rudimentary Spanish to allow me to shoot photos of the Latinx community that previously avoided because I couldn’t get their names before.
The realization that I had any kind of choice in this manner came to me when I was shooting a job fair. I would make sure I got a representative sample of all the people rather than just the most dramatic photo of assumed stereotypes that I would have shot earlier in my career. I understood at that moment that most job fair photos I had seen up to that point in my life showed Black or Hispanic people looking woeful, I broke my own mold and then began seeing the world as though I had more cause to affect people on a massive scale.