Ryan Christopher Jones is a Mexican-American photojournalist and PhD student in Social Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. His research is at the intersection of political ecology and media studies, focusing on the politics of water in Central California. For ten years Ryan worked as a photojournalist for The New York Times, The Washington Post, ProPublica and others, reporting on migration, labor, and the environment across the United States and Mexico. In 2022 Ryan was awarded the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for his reporting on Mexican-American communities in California and New York, and from 2022-23 he served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prizes for Photojournalism.
Photojournalists use cameras to record and relay newsworthy events to the public. Whether it’s at someone’s home, a public sidewalk, a state capitol, or a conflict zone, photojournalists encounter a range of situations for which they must immediately decide what to include and exclude in a photograph. Every photo offers a multitude of details that can be investigated with a close read. How often do you make the effort to not just look at a photo, but rather look into it, asking yourself, “What is this photo doing, and how is it doing it?” This exhibition provides tools and questions to better understand photographs by engaging in this type of close reading.
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When it is the photojournalist’s job to document the world’s news events? What happens when a new, deadly disease spreads across the world and threatens nearly everyone and everything—including the photographer? Chris Hondros Fund posed these two questions to three photojournalists: In 2020, what did you see, and where do we go from here?
By questioning the main visual tropes in mainstream media of drug use and overdose, and challenging sensationalist coverage, this exhibit explores how photojournalism impacts public health.
A panel discussion on the physical, digital, and psychological risks for photographers covering political rallies, protests, and events in an increasingly polarised environment leading up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
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