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Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio

December 31, 2009

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 is an artist and writer based in New England. A former critic at Yale School of Art and one of the founding editors of Design Observer, she is the author of several books on visual culture including Self Reliance, Design: The Invention of Desire, and Face: A Visual Odyssey. jessicahelfand.com

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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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