This you? dispatches from the revolution, #2
Five years of incidents that made me want to leave my industry, pt. 1
This is a collection of five years worth of racism I've faced on sets, on assignment, negotiating budgets, bidding for commercial jobs, and pitching stories in the food, travel, and hospitality space across editorial magazines, daily newspapers and book publishers. This is what I could remember, either through written journal entries, email/text/phone exchanges, and recall of lived experiences.
Let’s take it from the top, shall we?
Less than a year into shooting editorial, I pitch a story to an online food publication about gentrification in Chinatown with a focus on Far East Plaza as I'd been working on photo series about the area. They turned it down, citing that the pitch was “too radical” for (this was said to me over the phone) for their readership. My pitch turns up, slightly modified as an online television show for a local television station a few months later. I confront the producer over the phone, he verifies that the pitch came to him shortly after I pitched to the publication. Upon this realization, he calls back to tell me actually the story was pitched months prior to cover their asses. Said show wins a James Beard award the following year.
I learn to never pitch too blindly.
In Culver City, on assignment for the New York Times, the address on my trax is incorrect so I knock on the wrong office door. I cheerfully tell the guy who opens the door that I’m on assignment for NYT to shoot such and such. He laughs at me and goes, “Wait, YOU?!” I turn around and walk away.
Speaking of NYT, I get sent on assignment to Baja California but I’m flat broke due to a series of late payments from, who else, but the New York Times. The accounts payable person berates me for leaving on assignment without money instead of explaining to me why I had to wait a month for payments that were supposed to have been processed within 3-4 business days.
For the same Baja trip, a friend (at the time) acts as a driver and fixer for me. She gets drunk on a half glass of red wine and begins to lament about how her white husband can’t find work in his industry because “Black people keep taking the jobs”. That’s the first night of a four-day trip. And that’s not even mentioning her jumping in front of my camera with her phone to take pictures while I’m shooting or her berating me whenever the opportunity presented itself. I haven’t spoken to her since.
Send an email to the editors I worked with regularly at NYT, (one of whom got me my contract) at the opening of 2017 telling them I want to shoot Black stories and Black people in response to our new “pReSiDEnT". I get one assignment, and then every portrait of a Black person in Arts & Leisure ends up going to the same white woman photographer. By the time Fall has rolled around, I criticize the hiring practices of the photo editor who contacted me, and she responds by shadow banning me from the section. It’s been four years.
I learn the New York Times operates in a culture of white supremacy.
I send constant emails to the photo editor at Saveur for four years straight. Radio silence outside of a very good associate photo editor. The former Saveur editor moves to another publication and suddenly is "a big fan of my work". Huh.
I've had multiple meetings at AFAR, over the course of a few years. Pitched consistently, sent in images to open call emails. Never got a single commission. Couldn’t tell you why.
Takes two years before I see a commission from a Meredith property after a meeting and years of consistent outreach. It seems to take my white colleagues less time between meetings and receiving assignments and some of them don't even prioritize meeting editors in person. It's supposed to be very important for your career, though, I'm told.
I learn that white people in positions of power communicate with Black people primarily through silence. We aren’t even worth the time of an explanation.
On a commercial job and the prop stylist’s assistant can’t be fucked to acknowledge me at any point, even upon me introducing myself to her. She turns her back and walks away from me before I can even extend my hand to shake. Fine. Everyone has a bad morning, except a few hours into the first day, I hear her shooting the shit with the ad group’s ADs, talmbout “If I was shooting right now, I’d do X Y and Z” while I'm actively shooting and within earshot of this conversation. I find out that evening, by way of my at the time agent, that this person is a photographer and our bid for this job beat hers. Suddenly, it all makes sense. For the next two days, she does not speak to me or acknowledge me in any way but seems to get along with the rest of the crew swimmingly.
I met someone through volunteer work on an urban farm. A few weeks later she asks me, last minute, to shoot some work for a blog she works for. By last minute, I mean the day before I'm leaving for a trip to Oaxaca so I ask, verbally over the phone to be paid by check upon leaving the shoot, and she verbally agrees. When this doesn’t happen directly after the shoot and I’ve since arrived back in the States from my week-long trip, I remind this woman my payment is late and there is a late fee I charge when fees don't come on in time. She responds by telling me I am “threatening her” and informs me that she is going to make sure no one from the blog ever hires me again. All because I was asking about the payment that was late and owed to me.
I’m in Vietnam watching COVID-19 begin to ravage the States, so I reach out to my most recent client to see if I could get a one-time rush payment given the current crisis. I am told, in response to asking for a quicker payment on a fee I worked for, that the producer ...[is] not at all in a position to front money.” Who said anything about fronting me money? I hadn’t realized I was asking for a loan, so I point this out to the producer and the AD for the client by reminding her to be mindful of her language given the way freelancers are made to feel when they are chasing after payments but mostly for talking out of the side of her mouth to me. They both pull a Karen and tell me my response was "hurtful" and "unwarranted", but theirs wasn’t apparently. Noted.
Nat Geo Traveler commissions me for a story on the African influence in low country food in one of the Carolinas. While negotiating the budget, my agent and I left in a line item for lighting EQ rental cause I don't own lights. Nat Geo’s wack-ass policy is that by the time you’ve received an assignment from them you should have all the equipment necessary to shoot without needing rentals so you can't get that as a line item. Okay, fine. That would be great but I’m pulling myself out of generational poverty. By the time I’ve shot the story, which is some of the best work I’d shot to date, I get hit with an email from the photo editor which is just bullet points of every single thing she thinks I did wrong on the assignment, including not using strobes since she refused to give me the budget to rent the fucking strobes. She wraps the email by telling me she "barely had any images to work with". I handed over an archive of 2,000 images, so apparently all two-thousand of them were unusable in her eyes.
Send a promo to an agent. The agent tells me she doesn’t do this often but invites me in for a meeting. The meeting goes great (or so I thought), we start talking next steps to building a relationship towards representation. Feb 2019, I publicly criticize Esquire for dog-whistling to racists during Black History Month when they unveiled their cover for the Life of An American Boy via my Instagram stories. Said boy was white and was quoted in the piece as thinking it was "funny" to support Trump because “it makes people mad”. A smooth two or so days later, the agent reaches out to say the roster is overwhelmed with work and they cannot take on any new talent. I give up on seeking representation recognizing having a strong ethical backbone as a Black person is seen as a liability for agents instead of a strength.
I learn very quickly the people standing in the way of my success are too often white women. I learn that they recognize this and weld it to their advantage.
Through a friend, I find out about an informal food economy in South Central, and I start doing research for a year. After I pitch it to the California Sunday Magazine, the pitch gets picked up thanks to a thoughtful photo editor. When its time to turn in hi-res, I’m now dealing with the photo director because my contact is out of town. For a story I spent a year researching and shot over five days with a series of delays with some of the talent I was documenting, one of the primary stories in the issue, I get an order for 40 images and almost none of the images are portraits of the talent involved in the piece. For a feature. I hit up a friend who shot a feature just the month prior to ask how the process of ordering hi res went for her story. She tells me the image run was generous, just about every image she made ran. Armed with this, I send back a selection of 100 images. The designer crafts a fourteen-page stunner that sweeps the SPD design competition the following year. Probably would have swept the photo portion to had my images been submitted for consideration but they weren't for some reason. I later find out that there was an attempt to take the story I researched for a year and pitched to give it to another photographer whose work the director preferred over my photography.
I go to Oaxaca by way of a residency program. The first night we’re introducing ourselves to each other and I happily share that my community helped me to raise funds to get on the trip because I wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise. One woman, audibly shocked, says “oh” and everyone looks at me like I’m poor — I am, I’ve gotten used to it over the last decade. The trip is supposed to be an exchange between us and indigenous women who have graciously opened their homes to us, but it ends up feeling like a sham because the women are too busy taking iPhone pictures to listen or just outright walking away from the families hosting us to look at god knows what. I watch the photographer (famed for her travel and food photography. I was a fan prior to the trip) on the trip use brown people like props, even shooting an impromptu photo shoot on the property of a mezcal distillery. She kept looking to make sure the owner, who was in the middle of giving us a tour, didn’t see what was happening so I’m just gonna assume she didn’t ask permission nor did she pay this woman a location fee. On top of that, I think I was the only person on that trip who didn’t personally know the photographer attached to it so I ended up crashing a glorified girl’s trip. I was also the only Black person on the trip! The! Only! One!
I learned alienation would a fact of my career as a Black photographer.
Was commissioned by Bon Appetit to shoot some dishes around LA. Was told a few things by the assigning editor: 1) She didn’t go to school for photography, 2) Reiterates she doesn’t know anything about photography, 3) Tell me the photographers they always work with were out of town so I was second fiddle, 4) tells me the work is for a web feature. I shoot over two days after having wrapped a six-day food shoot out of the country so I’m WRECKED but I’ve been hoping for this so I push myself anyway. Three to four months later, I pick up the Best New Restaurants 2018 issue and the first few pages after advertising are the dishes and places I was sent to shoot, re-shot by the photographers they wanted to work with, in the first place. I would have liked to reshoot but I wasn't even given the opportunity to do so.
Approached by one of those brands that rules the entirety of our lives and told an/the AD handpicked me for a gig that would require me to go out into rural and small-town America. I was down but this was a few weeks to a month after the Charlottesville vehicular attack, so naturally, I asked what sort of protection measures were in place given the fact that I am Black and the midwest loves a sundown town and Nazi’s were roaming around. I get a message saying the company hadn’t even considered that safety would be an issue and that they would circle back with a plan. A few weeks later, I’m told they decided to go with another photographer for the bid.
Said company comes back around a year later, the same energy of urgency, so I expend labor building a deck and estimating. I submit and get radio silence for three days. I check in to see if there is any movement only to be told that others were actually bidding as well and the bid went elsewhere. I lost out on a billboard campaign. I circled back and told them to approach me when they have work they want me specifically to shoot, instead of tossing my name in the pile to hit the/a quota for diversity. They send a Black employee to explain to me. I save her the trouble of having to be the one and tell her we don't have anything further to discuss.
I learned the higher your ambition, the higher the fee becomes for you to be in the room. The cost is always emotional and psychological harm.
Approached to shoot a group of women travelers for a travel company in association with Conde Nast. The trip is to Colombia. I started the trip dehydrated, and that includes making pictures after projectile vomiting each morning for four days straight so these women were getting the coverage they paid for. One woman and I have a series of interactions initiated by her, first. None of them good: 1) she tells me to take a picture of the food we are eating, by pointing and telling me, “Take a picture of that” and as much as I would like to, I tell her that I can’t due to the editorial guidelines I’ve been given for documenting the trip. She walks away in a huff. 2) During a history lesson given by our tour guide regarding class and wealth, she muses to me why there isn’t a similar system in the US and I offer that there is but its hard to fix things when we think being poor is associated with being immoral (and thus deserving of poverty/being poor). She goes from 0 to Karen immediately, starts telling me "no nono no" in a huff, while shaking her head. I put my headphones on and mind my business. By the time we get to the lake house which marks the last few days of the trip, I get to take a little break and relax so I disappear for a half hour to read in a hammock. By the time I’ve come back up to the travelers, said Karen has reported me to our tour guide because I made her "uncomfortable". She’s also roped in a Becky. She cites its something I’ve posted on Instagram but she can’t specify the post at all. I think about how I’ve been wearing a ‘Make America Gay Again’ shirt and that this woman is from Wisconsin, and having lived in the Midwest for a decade I know what flavor white I’m dealing with. The trip sucks from that point on, I don’t even want to be around these people but I have a job to do so I do it. I come home with two weeks to rest before my next project and I spend that two weeks on the phone in some capacity with Conde Nast and the travel agency because now I’m pissed and I want acknowledgment that I had to deal with racist behavior from two guests and I wanted an apology from those grown-ass women who were acting like high school students. Conde Nast listens but tells me I gotta take it up with the travel agency since they commissioned me.
I take it up with the travel agency. I’m then told almost everyone on the trip gave me a bad review or felt "uncomfortable" around me. I’m also told in so many words that I won’t be getting an apology because white women’s feelings and money are more important than taking accountability for the harm I was forced to experience while on the job. They reach out to some of my homies, I tell the homies to stay away given my experience. After a Venmo gaffe last week, the owner is moving towards accountability for her lack of inaction on my behalf with an attempt at an apology. I’m still owed apologies from the women on the trip, however. I’m not letting that go.
I also end up spending the remainder of that two weeks "off" looking for crew for a job I signed onto a year prior because the CD of the project never reads her emails or does anything really that has to do with her job. Finding that final crew member turns into a shit show: she won’t give me a hard yes or no on my suggestions but tells me we’re down to the wire for the book shoot. No shit. By the skin of my fucking teeth, I find a stylist who can work with our budget because we were over budget by damn near 5k. When I bring this up to the CD, I’m told to lower my rate below editorial standard to make it work and I'd already dropped my rate once to make sure crew was being paid fairly. So far, to make the production work I’ve got a short term rental to convert into a live workspace but I’m short on necessary EQ and grip because we couldn’t find a fucking studio (and I said we wouldn't) — we could have shot at my home studio but noooo, had to be on location. CD spends five days with us, by day two she’s made one team member cry. By day three, she’s suggesting I not pay the only Black woman on our team and minutes prior to that tells me to tell my brown lighting tech to “know her place” in references to a fucking cake getting smashed on set. By day four I’ve had an eczema break out from stress, the other stylist thinks I’m an incompetent child and I’m watching my career possibly fade down the drain. By the fifth day, CD stops communicating with me entirely and communicates with another team member. Cool. I work over 100+ in nine days with no actual day off because my well being wasn’t a priority. Somehow, I still end up delivering images for the book. On my flight back home, I bump into a friend of the chef who is in town for an art show. She introduces me to a friend of hers who hands me her business card and tells me I should shoot at her 1200sq studio for my next book in her city. I almost burst a vein. By the time I get home, my immune system has been so shot from stress on set I end up contracting Coronavirus somewhere between the two airports I’m traveling between. I only realize the very strange debilitating “fatigue-related illness” I had months ago that took me months to recover from was the fucking plague after new confirmation that the virus had been present in the country but not yet detected when I fell ill. I decide I'm not doing this shit no more.
I decided to tell the industry to go fuck itself. Once and for all.
A week into being home, I shoot an assignment for Food + Wine in a proper studio with necessary grip and EQ for the creation of the images. I’m wearing a mask on set because I’m not sure what the fuck I’ve come down with but it's so bad I don’t want anyone else to catch it. In two days of work, I recognize I was being purposefully hampered on a set and had I been given the necessary support and help, it would have gone differently. I am seething at this point. Food + Wine feature comes out after months of being quiet about it. The feature is sixteen pages and is the cover feature of the month but my team and I don’t get the actual cover. I write a newsletter about Meredith and specifically about Food + Wine.
Before I leave for Vietnam, the EIC reaches out to me because he wants to talk to me about the newsletter I wrote explaining how the magazine fucked up and the racist behavior it's tied to, including monopolizing the cover assignments for the benefit white, male photographers. He instead scolds me for almost a half-hour, repeating over and over that I should have ‘come to him’ — I didn’t know who he was until he emailed me the few days prior to us speaking. When I ask him to explain why the cover went down the way it did, he basically told me in so many words that they didn’t want to piss off their subscriber base. Then he hit me with the “Good Luck” upon ended the scolding so I knew I wouldn’t be getting any more F+W jobs as long as he’s there.
I made peace with the fact that I’d opened my mouth probably for the last time and started getting real about leaving photography, for good. And then a global civil rights movement sparked and has sustained itself over the last two weeks, allowing so many of us to purge the poisons we’ve had to quietly carry for so long.
The above incidents have contributed to worsening my PTSD, which I already have quite a lot of as a childhood sexual abuse survivor, and I found myself dreading being at work, especially if I wasn’t working with the people who make me feel safe and respected. I did everything within my power to make work feel safe — I started an action-based collective, I started a new photo award, I wrote about my experiences with racism in the industry, I talked openly to photo editors about how they could do better, I talked openly to my colleague about how they could do better, but it fell on deaf ears because it wasn’t “professional".
Professionalism is one of the most insidious functions of white supremacy in the workplace because this professionalism has no basis in ethical behavior -- it is simply about how powerful people can subdue and repressed their employees while siphoning their labor, knowing the risk of being seen as unprofessional can mean career death if you are Black or non-Black POC in a majority white industry.
How is it un-professional to make known the specific challenges that come for me while navigating my work, when those challenges affect my capability to show up in my full capacity and make the level of work that YOU expect of me. How is it un-professional to expect to be treated with basic respect? Or un-professional to suggest that actively upholding systems of harm against Black employees is wrong?
I wasn’t about to continue to let y’all gaslight me out of my greatness.
All of the above is what makes this job more trouble than its worth a good majority of the time and I’m a fucking optimist! White supremacy doesn’t believe in optimism or fairness, nor respect or accountability. Supremacy serves as a distraction to the real work I am capable of doing: a four-month hiatus from working on assignment has provided me time to work on a book proposal and for the last three and half months, I’ve been engaged in an organizing project with other photographers and freelancers. I turned down an assignment with the New York Times in protest. I’ve been writing a newsletter consistently with new writing for months now. My wrists, which are typically plagued with over inflamed ganglion cysts, have been completely useable (that is to say I can use my hands without ANY PAIN) for the first time in five years.
It’s like Toni Morrison said, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” and equally, I am reminded of what Maya Angelou said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
Keep purging the filth you’ve had to carry because some racist gets off on being the most base, vile version of themselves just because they know they can do it and get away with it. Wipe off the doubt, the alienation, the feelings of frustration, and deep sadness. The more you shed, the more you get back what is yours. The more you are able to rise in the fullness of your power. Too many generations of Black people working with and under white people have had to swallow this shit and hold on to it, and I’ve witnessed how that turns people inside out — we don’t have to carry burdens and projections and insecurities and the miscellaneous bullshit that comes from internalized self-loathing of racists.
It’s not our shit.
It's not yours. It's not mine.
Those of you who have shown us all who you are the first time, you must now be accountable for your behavior and for your action and inaction. You made decisions that you now have to explain to those around you. That is what accountability looks like: it is being responsible for what you do or do not do while being able to explain those decisions when they are questioned. Know that this accountability will inevitably come with loss because you abused your power, and in order for you to stop abusing power, it has to be taken away from you. Without your abusive, exploitive, racist power, and a space in which to enact that harm, you are faced with the truth of you are and have always been. And you are tasked with making something of your humanity after years of depravity and diminished empathy.
You will be better for the work because, as you see, this time you have no choice but to do the work. In order for us to move forward together, you must acknowledge and be accountable for your harm.
It's the first step toward anti-racist consciousness.
Achievement Unlocked: Accountability
If, for whatever reason, you read this and think a suit is in order, let me just tell you I have: no savings, over 35k in student loans, and no familial wealth. I am generationally poor, so I'd suggest you not waste your time. Take that energy and go read a fucking book on how to be anti-racist or write me the apology you owe me. Thaaaaanks.