Danielle Villasana

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Danielle Villasana is an independent photojournalist whose documentary work focuses on human rights, gender, displacement, and health with a focus on Latin America.

Her work has earned her widespread recognition. She is a National Geographic Explorer, Magnum Foundation awardee, Women Photograph grantee, and an International Women's Media Foundation fellow, and her photographs have been included in solo and group exhibits and have been published in National Geographic, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She is a member of Women Photograph and Ayün Fotógrafas, a collective of women photographers united by Latin America that is in partnership with NOOR, the global journalism collective.

Danielle is also an activist who strongly believes in the power photography can have when paired with education and community development. In 2017 she co-founded We, Women, an ongoing platform exploring crucial issues across the U.S. through photo-based community engagement projects by women and gender-nonconforming artists. In 2016 she joined The Everyday Project's Community Team, where she helps conceive and work on various initiatives and group photography projects. In 2018 she joined the Authority Collective as a board member. Most recently in 2020 she helped co-author the Photo Bill of Rights, which works to push for a more inclusive, diverse and equitable visual-media industry.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Danielle explains the journalistic, ethical and artistic forethought her role as a visual storyteller of others’ stories requires and describes the impact of both her images and her activism on communities she has profiled and more recently on the worldwide community of lens-based workers.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

Pier Carlo Talenti: You are not only our first photographer guest on the podcast but also are certainly our first photojournalist, so I feel like a have a steep learning curve! Do you consider yourself a journalist or photographer first? Is that distinction at all important?

Danielle Villasana: First of all, thank you for the invitation. I’m excited to be the first photojournalist on the podcast. No pressure. [She laughs.]

There is a quote that I live by. It’s something that my mentor, Donna DeCesare, said a long time ago that always stuck with me, which is, “You are a human being first and a journalist second.” I try to live by that and work by that and really think about my role as a storyteller, my impact as a storyteller, whether that’s positive or negative, what I can do beyond photography to create positive impact. That also helps me navigate difficult situations when I’m actually working. I try to guide myself with that sentiment and use that sentiment to help guide me through any ethical challenges or issues that I might face while working as a photographer.

Pier Carlo: Such as?

Danielle: One example would be, I was working on a story in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, a few years ago about how neighborhoods have changed due to gang violence and conflict between gangs. The reporter and I wanted to focus not only on the negative aspects of that. San Pedro Sula is infamously known as one of the most violent neighborhoods in the country. Of course, we didn’t want to omit that from the narrative, because that is a part of the truth of San Pedro Sula, but we also wanted to focus on people within the community, from youth activists to pastors who are working to create a better, safer environment for people who live in San Pedro Sula.

Part of that work, of course, had me photographing in neighborhoods that are controlled by gangs, and I had the opportunity to meet a gang or members of a gang and photograph them. I decided not to, because I felt that that wasn’t going to really add anything to the story. I felt that that could potentially set me up for photographing images that uphold stereotypes of the neighborhood. I really wanted to show images that challenge people’s ideas and perceptions of, again, this neighborhood that has been photographed over and over and over again with the stereotypical imagery of just gang members covered in tattoos.

Pier Carlo: Was this on assignment?

Danielle: Actually, we were there on a reporting trip with the International Women’s Media Foundation. But we did pitch the story and it eventually published in The Atlantic. I remember they ran 12 pictures. I was very happy about that.

Pier Carlo: Are your artist self and your journalist self basically both sides of the storyteller coin?

Danielle: I decided to be a photojournalist because I felt that a photograph can raise awareness about injustices and human rights abuses around the world. So I came at it from a very information-based point of view rather than an artistic point of view. I fell in love with photography because I felt it was a very powerful communications tool, and so when I look back at my work in college, I see that I have evolved in terms of how my eye has become more artistic and less information-driven, but now I try really hard to blend the two.

I try really hard to share information through aesthetically pleasing images that will attract a viewer and entice a viewer to the image so that they end up learning more about the issue.

I try really hard to share information through aesthetically pleasing images that will attract a viewer and entice a viewer to the image so that they end up learning more about the issue. I really try to pair both of those really important aspects of photojournalism, which is information and aesthetics, into one frame.

When I started in photojournalism, it was very much just, “What is the story? What is the information? Photograph it.” Much less, “How do I photograph this in a way that is aesthetically pleasing?” Now I try to do that a little bit more, which I guess makes me artistic. [She laughs.] But yeah, I came at it with a much more bland, “Information, communication. This is my tool.”

Pier Carlo: At what point in your career did you come to understand this particular responsibility that you have as a visual teller of others’ stories?

Danielle: I grew up in the United States. I grew up not rich, but privileged. I’m a white Hispanic woman, and when I found myself in college at the University of Texas taking a class on race and ethnicity in the media, my eyes were really opened to the many ways that the visual-media industry and the media industry at large have a long legacy of problematic practices of power being held and maintained by only a small fraction of society and how the media has even been used as a tool to sustain those power structures, to sustain racism, sexism, etc.

When I took this course on race and ethnicity in the media, it was a huge eye-opener, despite the fact that, as I mentioned, I’m a white Hispanic woman and of course faced my own challenges growing up. But even then when I learned about privilege and when I learned about, again, how the media has been used as a tool over the decades to perpetuate these issues, it changed my life. It was probably one of the most important courses I took in college.

Pier Carlo: Were you already a photographer by then?

Danielle: Well, I started photography when I was in high school, so it depends on your definition of photographer. I started making pictures in high school and then took a four-year hiatus between high school and college until I discovered that I wanted to be a photojournalist. When I finally started studying photojournalism is when I took this course on race and ethnicity in the media. I was in my mid-20s. I was already grappling with issues such as disparities and injustice and what I could do as a photographer to address those issues in my work. But I would say that I entered college with a much more naive perspective or innocent perspective about photography’s role and historical role.

When I started my work photographing LGBTQIA communities in Texas as a college student, I was very aware of the stereotypes that can negatively harm the LGBTQIA community. So I started a project about LGBTQIA families in Texas. Now this was many years ago now, but I would be curious to see if it’s still the same: Despite the fact that the LGBTQIA community is more restricted in terms of protections and even societal acceptance in the Southern United States, [the South] has the highest number of LGBTQIA families. I felt that was a really interesting dichotomy and wanted to explore that, and so I photographed different LGBTQIA families in Texas and really tried to focus on their daily life as families and not necessarily their day-to-day struggles.

In that project, I met a transgender woman named Nikki Araguz, who was an accidental activist. I learned so much from her about the particular issues that trans people face, trans women in particular, and that kickstarted a now decades-long project photographing transgender communities throughout primarily Latin America. When I started that project, I was very aware of the stereotype types, again, that negatively harm trans women. They’re stereotypes in the sense that they’re stereotypes that have been perpetuated by storytellers who tend to focus on only one aspect of their lives, as opposed to the wide range of what trans women face and encounter and go through in their day-to-day lives.

I really wanted to strive for a balance in my work, to show not only the challenges that trans women in Latin America face — because there are many, many challenges — but also their daily lives with friends and family and partners as a way to paint a more balanced complex picture of trans women to push against those stereotypes.

That project, that personal project, really helped me also take that sentiment to my work in general. Whether I was on assignment or working on a different personal project, I’ve always tried really hard to show the full picture and the larger picture and not just focus on one aspect of an issue, which again typically can sensationalize a particular community or geographic location or issue if we’re only focusing on one aspect of the story.

That’s how I have evolved in my thinking, in terms of trying my hardest not to perpetuate stereotypes in my work.

Pier Carlo: What goes into that type of work? You say you want give kind of a multiplicity of perspectives. You possibly don’t want to insert your own story too much into the stories you’re photographing. What do you have to be careful of?

Danielle: I think even as a photographer, it’s really important to do your research, so not only researching the issue or the topic by reading about it but also looking at other work that has been created on the topic so you can make sure that you’re actually adding something to the conversation, that you’re not just perpetuating potentially harmful stereotypes or replicating powerful work that has already been done.

When I approach a topic that I want to take on as a personal project, I try to really question myself and ask myself, 'Do I have anything new to add? Do I have any authority to photograph this issue? Who am I to photograph this issue? What can I bring to photographing this issue?'

When I approach a topic that I want to take on as a personal project, I try to really question myself and ask myself, “Do I have anything new to add? Do I have any authority to photograph this issue? Who am I to photograph this issue? What can I bring to photographing this issue?” Of course, those answers can be found in researching what’s out there. I do a lot of research leading up to personal projects.

Now, with one-off assignments it’s not always possible, and you take the assignments that you can get because we all have to pay our bills. But in terms of my own personal work, I try to make sure that I’m actually offering something different and new to the conversation.

Pier Carlo: How are you and photojournalists like you working to hone the average viewer’s visual literacy? In the same way that we really should be able to read between the lines of a piece of written journalism, how should we read between the pixels, I guess, of a piece of a photo of photojournalism?

Danielle: Of course, there’s the issue or the problem of, you create something — even if it is rooted in journalism and truth-telling — and you put it out there into the world and at that point you can’t really control how people are going to react or think about the work that you’ve put out there. For that reason, within photojournalism, it’s really important to make sure that you are also, again, to the best of your ability sharing accurate captions with the images that you are publishing. For example, even on Instagram, I would never publish a photo without a caption or on Facebook or wherever. Even on something as innocent as a social media platform it’s really important to pair information with imagery. That’s one way.

I think also for me, personally, I think really deeply about what images I’m sharing on social media because I would never want somebody to take one picture out of context. If I feel that a particular image on its own could be taken out of context, I’ll often share a gallery of images and couch that maybe one image that could be taken out of context as the second or the third image, as opposed to the first image. Same with my website.

Or even when I submit to photo grants or contests — not assuming that I win but in the event that I do win, which doesn’t happen all the time [she laughs] — I ask myself, “How would you feel if they took this one picture from your series of 12 and it was the image that they use to promote the contest or to promote the winners? How would you feel?” If it makes me feel icky, I don’t submit it in the series, even though it’s very unlikely that I would even win that contest. But I’m very, very conscientious of the way in which images can be taken out of context and I try really hard to curate what pictures I share and how I share those images based on that concern.

Pier Carlo: Oftentimes, I think, in print journalism editors write captions. Do you make it clear that your captions should remain with images?

Danielle: When I or any photographer submits images for a publication, we embed our own captions, and if there’s a particular caption or information that’s really important that it not be omitted or that it lead or whatever, I just make sure to let the editor know that. There have been times where a story or a photo essay has been published and I’ve written to the editor asking if the headline or the subtext could be tweaked slightly. Sometimes they change it and sometimes they don’t. I think that that’s just a risk that we all run in this industry. I try my best to avoid that situation where I’m asking for a change or a correction, but sometimes it’s simply unavoidable because [laughing] you’re the one who was hired, you know?

Pier Carlo: Right. Well, since you brought up the industry, I want to talk a little bit about it since I know so little about it. When the pandemic started, one of the things you did is you co-wrote the Photo Bill of Rights. Can you tell me about it and what kind of abuses and inequities it seeks to redress?

Danielle: The Photo Bill of Rights was a group effort by more than 10 lens-based workers within the visual-media industry. We came together at the encouragement of Oriana Koren to work on this living document called the Photo Bill of Rights that addresses the many issues and problems facing the visual-media industry that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that really brought to the surface these ongoing inequities within the visual-media industry, everything from racism, to sexism, harassment, low pay, bias. We really outlined as much as we could in terms of the issues that our industry is still facing.

After the protests protesting the murder of George Floyd, it became even more urgent and more important for us to publish the Photo Bill of Rights and put it out there into the world, because again those series of atrocious events really highlighted the fact that we are still facing a lot of issues within not only society but within the visual-media industry.

One thing that is really great about the Photo Bill of Rights is that it doesn’t only outline issues around health and safety, finance, abuse and sexual misconduct but also provides information about what those issues are and why they’re issues as well as action steps that you can take as a lens-based worker or as a hiring party, such as an editor, to address those issues within your own practice. Beyond that, we also created toolkits so that people can take these actionable steps and really put them into practice. We have toolkits for lens-based workers, as well as hiring parties, so basically toolkits for photographers, videographers, etc., as well as for editors. We even created a section of the website called “Beyond the Bill,” which goes even deeper and further into issues such as working in community, fostering community between one another, implicit bias, language and how important the language is that we use as creators within the visual-media industry.

It was a really, really, really massive project and again was written by more than 10 people within the visual-media industry, from a lot of different grassroots photo organizations, such as The Everyday Projects, Women Photograph, the Authority Collective, Indigenous Photograph. Then of course we invited people to sign the Photo Bill of Rights. We have over 2,000 signatures to the Photo Bill of Rights.

Pier Carlo: How would a young Danielle Villasana coming up through college, starting to dream about her career, make sure that her rights were respected as she entered the industry?

Danielle: Well, I mean, if I was looking at the Photo Bill of Rights, I would definitely make sure to check out the lens-based-worker toolkit because in that toolkit there are a lot of resources and templates of how to respond, for example, when you are approached for labor and there’s no compensation. In the toolkit there’s a template where you can copy-and-paste, almost, the language to respond to someone seeking labor without compensation.

Pier Carlo: That is amazing. I can tell you, having come from the world of theater — and I’m sure a lot of artists would say this — that I wish there were more of this taking place in all of the arts, a template to respond to unjust situations.

Danielle: Yeah. I mean, there’s not a template for everything, but we tried our best to include resources, for example, such as risk assessments or digital-security checklists for keeping your health and safety in check; information about contracts and what certain contract terms mean; in terms of abuse and sexual misconduct, including information about common gaslighting tactics or abuse on the job. What abuse on the job looks like, what to do if you’re passing on an assignment or what to watch out for.

This is a community, and it’s really important that we uplift one another, that we create space for one another. Because there’s plenty of work and every person is different, every person’s perspective is different and important.

And then guidelines that you yourself can consider as a practitioner to foster community among your colleagues and your peers. For example, even something as simple as, “Is there somebody I know who is working on a project that would be really great for this particular grant or contest?” Or, for example, I have a Google Calendar where I post photo and contest deadlines, and I share that with hundreds of people. Sort of changing our perspective of every person for themselves and approaching the industry as, “This is a community, and it’s really important that we uplift one another, that we create space for one another.” Because there’s plenty of work and every person is different, every person’s perspective is different and important.

We are going to create a more truthful and honest visual-media industry the more inclusive we are and the more supportive of one another we are, as opposed to being gatekeepers or keeping the access and power within the hands of a few.

Pier Carlo: What kind of impact do you feel your work has had out in the world?

Danielle: What I have tried to do in my personal work, and it’s not always possible with every single personal project because we are one person, we’re one individual, which is why I love also collaborating with others because [laughing] you can share the labor of trying to create social change, which is a big task … . When possible, I try to use my photography beyond just the realm of photojournalism or photography. For example, whether that’s publishing a photo book that’s then used as an educational tool. To give a specific example, my long-term work that I did in Peru, photographing communities of trans women. was published as a photo book in 2018, but the intention was to use it as an educational tool. I did not make it for the photo community. I wanted to make it for people within Peru who really needed to see this work, such as healthcare workers or people within the educational spaces, because those are sectors where trans women face a lot of discrimination.

Thankfully because the book was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, I didn’t need to sell the books to make the money back. Most of the books were donated to healthcare facilities and hospitals and universities throughout Lima. We also gave presentations in conjunction with the distribution. I partnered with Leyla Huerta, who is a very prominent trans activist in Lima. We partnered with Amnesty International and a university in Peru.

When we can partner and collaborate and use our tools, all of our different variety of tools to work together to try to achieve that goal, I mean, that’s ideal because then you’re coming at an issue from all angles.

I think that there are objectives that are shared among different disciplines, right? We’re all using our particular tools to try to chip away at that goal. When we can partner and collaborate and use our tools, all of our different variety of tools to work together to try to achieve that goal, I mean, that’s ideal because then you’re coming at an issue from all angles. That was one way that I tried to use my photography beyond just creating an image.

Just to wrap that one example up, the hospital where two of the women I had photographed — who unfortunately both passed away from AIDS and pneumonia, tuberculosis — that hospital, the same year that I published this photo book, opened up the country’s first consultation area specifically for trans women. So now when trans women go to the hospital, there’s a sector of the hospital that’s specifically for trans women where they don’t have to worry about running into other patients who might say something discriminatory, where they know that they will be greeted by a fellow trans woman to help them check in and figure out where they need to go, where they will feel confident that the healthcare professionals who will be working with them are educated about the particular issues that trans women face, because discrimination within the healthcare sector is a really, really, really big problem, which of course affects the health of trans women and is this snowball effect.

The doctor who spearheaded this consultation area said that ... I was blown away when he told me this. I mean, Peru is a very conservative country; it’s very unusual for something like this to happen. Of course, it’s a huge positive step in ensuring that trans women have access to healthcare. I said, “Wow. Thank you so much.” Of course, it was bittersweet because, like I said, two of the women who I had photographed had received care in that hospital and had passed away. And he said, “No, thank you. Had it not been for your work as a photographer I would’ve never known that this issue was literally happening in the backyard of this hospital.”

The same day that they opened up the consultation area, we also had a photo exhibition within the hospital. It was really cool seeing nurses and patients and family members of patients checking out this photo exhibition within the hospital. It wasn’t in some museum or gallery space, but to me that was so much more impactful.

Pier Carlo: Well, it speaks to the building community that you want to achieve through your work.

Danielle: Yeah, and just creating impact beyond our insular world of photojournalism. Trying to think about how we can get these stories out into the public, because so often it can be very insular.

Pier Carlo: Finally, can you talk about an upcoming personal project that you’re particularly excited about?

Danielle: I’m part of a collective called Ayün Fotógrafas; we’re a collective of eight women photographers united by Latin America. We ran a print sale this year to raise funds for a project that we want to start together, looking at access to maternal healthcare within Latin America. That is definitely on the horizon.

I’m hoping to look at how climate change is affecting women’s access to maternal healthcare within Central America, probably specifically Nicaragua, but I’m still in the research phase of it. Hopefully that’ll be another group project. Again, I love working with other people. I love working in collaboration. I love all of the perspectives that each individual can bring to a certain issue or project. We all have a lot to learn from each other.

November 15, 2021