I thoroughly enjoyed Gabriela’s lecture when she came as part of the Women in Warfare series. I had taken Gabriela’s photojournalism class and seen a lot of her work previously, but what was great about the lecture in addition to merely seeing new work was hearing Gabriela’s stories behind the projects. One part of this was the description of the projects in general, which included where she got the idea for the projects and the planning/logistics of it. It was interesting that several of her projects came out of work she had been doing with NGOs, which I hadn’t expected but seems like a good concept in terms of creating photographic work that works with and is potentially beneficial for the subjects. I was also fascinated by her talk of the “fixers,” her contacts in foreign countries like Syria who helped translate and helped her find willing subjects, a position in the photojournalistic process I hadn’t really thought about before.
However what I was most intrigued by was her very personal stories she related about the lives of those in her photographs. While on her own I think the photographs, especially when sequenced together, tell a narrative about her subjects, hearing the full extend of their stories really drew me in emotionally to what they had gone through. This made me think about the best way I could use this in my own photojournalistic work, perhaps in the way Gabriela used a kind of collective voice over in the sequence on Iraqi refugees in america or perhaps more extended voice over narratives telling the story of one subject.
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