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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