Getting people to talk honestly about what you’ve done for them creates compelling content your audiences will share to build your movement.
As a journalist, I liked to get people to tell their stories as a way of challenging complacent popular narratives about white power and capitalism. When the police shot an unarmed black guy in the back, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up, I raced out and photographed him meeting the mayor of Portland with a skeptical look in his eye. During the BP oil spill I drove down to Louisiana’s coastal towns and talked to the people whose lives were being ruined, and their voices spoke out from the pages of newspapers around the world. As charter schools moved in to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I asked their white teachers: How did they feel about gentrifying the city?
I tell people I’m a “reformed journalist”, these days, because I’ve abandoned the pretense of false equivalence, but I still love to use my hard-won skills for just causes, whether that’s in writing, photography, film, or a combination of the three.
In California, when Harvard University started buying up water rights in a valley where groundwater was running out, I took a Greyhound bus down there and found the people whose livelihoods were threatened, making an 11-minute film that attracted the interest of the Wall Street Journal, who ran an investigative story on the issue prompting lawmakers to pay closer attention to the regulation of water rights in the state. Likewise, a million Californians lacked access to safe and affordable drinking water, so I went and found them. I made films in the Coachella Valley and Los Angeles, telling the stories of people who had spent their lives buying bottled water, or those who were worried about their children’s health. I filmed farmworkers taking their arsenic-laced drinking water to the state capitol in Sacramento, and bolstered efforts to create a $130 million annual fund to improve things.
Who’s affected by your work, and what do they have to say about it? What does that look like, and how does it feel?
