by Meagan Gitelman
Nov. 1, 2017
Photojournalist Daniella Zalcman told student journalists the importance of giving voices to the voiceless through journalism when she spoke to Professor Janna Anderson’s “Reporting for the Public Good” class on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
Zalcman’s work is funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and she has focused her reporting on human rights issues in underrepresented populations. While Zalcman first started her career as a tabloid photojournalist for the New York Daily News, she knew she wanted to work on more in-depth projects.
“I really wanted to be able to start creating long term connections to the stories I was working on,” Zalcman said.
While Zalcman is only in her thirties, she already calls her award-winning project, “Signs of Your Identity,” her life’s work. “Signs of Your Identity” is Zalcman’s photojournalism project documenting the stories of survivors of Indian residential schools in Canada that was published as an award-winning book.
According to Zalcman, in 1870 indigenous children were kidnapped from their communities and forced to assimilate at schools by the Canadian government, subject to sexual abuse, medical testing and forced sterilization.
“It is this completely undiscussed part of our history as Americans, as people who live on land that was stolen, and it’s important for us to be retraining the way we think about this country and our legacy,” Zalcman said.
Zalcman says that Canadians destroyed about 50 percent of these records, and got rid of most physical traces of a lot of the buildings. She says she feels that its her duty as a reporter to make sure that these stories are told, and often takes her work into middle and high school classrooms to teach about Native American history.
“We don’t include that in our history books in high school, we don’t include this in the narratives we tell,” Zalcman said. “Trying to think about how to tell stories about those who are marginalized and neglected is very important to me.”
Zalcman discounted the stories she says most people know about Native Americans– Pocahontas, Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving–as mythologized tales from hundreds of years ago that don’t capture the true situation of Native Americans, both in the past and today.
“Sparking outrage is my main goal.” -Daniella Zalcman
“Sparking outrage is my main goal,” she said.
Through a series of interviews, Zalcman collected the stories and photographs of victims of Indian residential schools, both in Canada and the United States. She took photos of the individuals and superimposed pictures that captured what they went through, such as the remains of their old school, over their portrait. Zalcman says she thinks these multilayered pictures were important in engaging her audience.
“We often look at images in the newspaper without looking at the caption, so we don’t always make sure our audience is getting the full context of the story,” she said.
As for captions, Zalcman chose to use direct quotations from her subjects in order to let them give voice to their stories.
“You sort of become a de facto expert on someone else’s life, but they’re the real expert. They are part of crafting that narrative,” she said. “We need to learn how to empower people to tell their own stories.”
Advice for future journalists
Zalcman says that reporting on an issue as traumatic as the Indian residential schools was for those affected, took a toll on her personally.
“After three weeks of talking to people who had almost all been raped as kids, you end up in a really dark space,” she said.
She stressed the importance of reporters prioritizing their own mental health.
“I think journalists are becoming better at talking about the need for self care and how journalists are also susceptible to PTSD,” Zalcman said.
She says that while journalists must take breaks and prioritize their mental health, they also have to always be on the lookout for stories that need to be told.
“Always read. Always be looking. Always be open to figuring out these things that don’t seem they’ve been investigated or explained.” -Daniella Zalcman
“Always read. Always be looking. Always be open to figuring out these things that don’t seem they’ve been investigated or explained,” Zalcman said. “It comes down to just questioning what stories we hear and why some things are left out.”
Beyond the work of individual journalists, Zalcman emphasized the need for more diverse newsrooms at large.
“We need to do better. We need to make sure that we are cultivating newsrooms that are diverse as the communities we are trying to represent,” she said. “If we don’t, we’re not going to be doing good, nuanced, impactful work.”
Zalcman is an award-winning photojournalist whose reporting on underrepresented populations is funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Based in London and New York, Zalcman focuses her work on underrepresented peoples such as the LGBT+ community, and has reported extensively on the LGBT community in former British colonies. Zalcman has also reported on survivors of Indian residential schools in Canada, and in 2016 published a book on her reporting called “Signs of Your Identity,” which won the FotoEvidence Book Award that year for documenting social injustice.
Among other awards, Zalcman has received the Magnum Foundation’s Inge Morath Award and the Magenta Foundation’s Bright Spark Award for her work. Her work has been published in many notable publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair. Her work is displayed in exhibits across the country and in Europe.
To see more of her work, you can visit Zalcman’s website here.
Meagan Gitelman 