Women Photograph is an online directory of female photographers. What started as a spreadsheet has grown to a database over 500 members strong thanks to its creator Daniella Zalcman, a freelance documentary photographer. We asked her a few questions about her experiences, the directory and its origins.
What has your own experience been like as a female photographer in a male dominated field?
At the beginning, it was definitely tough. I started stringing as a news photographer in New York when I was 19, and it was very much a boy`s club back then. Getting anyone to take me seriously was always a challenge, and I can`t tell you the number of times I had a male photographer try to adjust the settings on my camera for me or make a joke about the size of my lens. There was a lot of casual sexual harassment that I think I and many of my female colleagues normalized for a long time - sometimes it`s just easier to shrug and move on. But I`ve done enough shrugging.
Now, I`m a relatively established photographer and I spend most of my time working on long form documentary projects on my own. I rarely interact with news photographer scrums, or even assigning editors, so I`m able to avoid the more frustrating interactions. But I see young women coming up in the field, and I see the attrition rates between photojournalism school and photographers in the first 3-5 years of their careers, and I know what they`re going through. And something needs to change.
What inspired you to create Women Photograph? How did it start?
It started with a Google Form last July. I was frustrated by the number of photo editors who were telling me they didn`t know where to find women photographers, so I wanted to have a resource on hand that would render that excuse invalid.
How many photographers are included now?
Right now, the private database (which includes more complete information like e-mails, phone numbers, languages spoken, geographical areas of experti ...
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