S7E7: Daniella Zalcman

Daniella Zalcman is a documentary photographer and the founder of Women Photograph.

Zalcman’s project “Signs of Your Identity,” about boarding schools for indigenous communities in North America, began as a traditional photojournalism project, with straightforward portraits of individuals who had endured that abusive system:

But I realized pretty quickly that the images themselves, the photos that I was taking, they did a very poor job … they weren’t going to allow my audience a glimpse into that history. They weren’t going to encourage my audience to think more deeply about these systemic things … And so I realized that pure photojournalism was kind of failing me in that moment and that I needed to come up with a new visual language.

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.

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