Beyond the Outsider’s Gaze: Partnering With Communities in Visual Storytelling

Join the Pulitzer Center, photographer Justin Maxon, and writer Judith Surber for a conversation about platforming community voices in reporting. The pair will talk about their experience with collaborative, responsive, and consent-based visual storytelling. Their Center-supported project Youth, Fentanyl, Recovery was exhibited this summer at Photoville Festival in New York City.

Maxon and Surber will be joined by Jacqueline Bates, Photography Director of Opinion at The New York Times, and Brian Frank, photographer and educator. The panel will share examples of how reimagining the reporting process can rise above conventional and sometimes harmful narratives to tell stories with humanity and complexity.

The conversation will be moderated by Pulitzer Center Outreach Program Coordinator Mikaela Schmitt, followed by an audience Q&A. Registration is required.

This webinar is the first in a two-part series; join us on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024 at 2pm EDT for Reframing Media Narratives of Addiction, where panelists will discuss trauma-informed storytelling and how media depictions of addiction affect both the public’s perception of recovery and those featured in the photographs.

Panelists:

• Justin Maxon is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker. As a visual storyteller, educator, and socially engaged artist, he collaborates with communities, making design and ideation decisions with participants.
• Judith Surber is an author, mother and grandmother, and a Hoopa Tribal member. She is the manager for the Medication Assisted Treatment program at K’ima:w Medical Center. 
• Brian Frank has worked on social documentary projects across the Americas focusing on cultural identity, social inequality, violence, workers' rights, and the environment.
• Jacqueline Bates is the photography director of Opinion at The New York Times. She was the founding photography director at The California Sunday Magazine.

Images courtesy of the Pulitzer Center. United States, 2024.