ZEKE Magazine: Fall 2022

ZEKEFALL 2022 VOL.8/NO.2 $15 US 

THE MAGAZINE OF GLOBAL DOCUMENTARY 

The America Issue 

Published by Social Documentary Network 

ZEKE FALL 2022/ 1


FALL 2022 VOL.8/ NO.2 

$15 US 


Photo by Jared Ragland from What Has Been 

Will Be Again 

Photo by Cheryl L. Guerrero from Low ‘n Slow: 

Cruising the Mission 

Photo by Raymond W Holman Jr from 

COVID-19 in Black America 

Photo by Lizzy Unger from Abortion Rights: 

We’re Not Backing Down 

Photo by Eric Chang from Has Godot Arrived? 

2 | THE AMERICA ISSUE 

4 | What Has Been Will Be Again | Jared Ragland 

8 | US of A Color | Ghada Khunji 

10 | Low ‘n Slow: Cruising the Mission | Cheryl L. Guerrero 

12 | COVID-19 in Black America | Raymond W Holman Jr 

16 | We Are the People |Kevin McKeon 

18 | Abortion Rights: We’re Not Backing Down | Lizzy Unger 

20 | This is What Democracy Looks Like | Jean Ross 

22 | Lost: A Portrait of Addiction | Virginia Allyn 

24 | Arming Teachers in America | Kate Way 

26 | White Nationalism | Anthony Karen 

28 | Has Godot Arrived? | Eric Chang 

30 | Sex Trafficking: An American Story | Matilde Simas 

34 | Working Ohio | Steve Cagan 

36 | Working the Harvest in California | David Bacon 

38 | An American Dance | Brian Branch-Price 

42 | American Punk | Daniel Hoffman 

44 | First Nations: Portraits of Dancers and 

Wisdom Keepers | Jeanny Tsai 

46 | Good Earth | Esha Chiocchio 

48 | WHO WE ARE 

Photography and the American Experience 

by Stephen Mayes 

54 | Interview with Donna Ferrato 

by Michelle Bogre 

58 | Book Reviews 

Edited by Michelle Bogre 

62 | Contributors 

ZEKESPRING 2022 VOL.8/NO.2 $15 US 



On the Cover 

Photo by Amber Bracken 

from Standing Rock. The 

Mohawk Warrior flag 

came to prominence during 

the 1990 Canadian 

Oka Crisis, when the 

military confronted Indigenous 

people in a major 

armed conflict for the first 

time in modern history.

ZEKE 

THE 

MAGAZINE OF 

GLOBAL DOCUMENTARY 


Dear ZEKE Readers: 

Each time I write this letter, I am completely exasperated by the current state of world 

affairs, and this time is no different. Since ZEKE is the magazine of global documentary, 

the greater global community is our community and the canvas on which we base 

most issues of the magazine. But unlike other issues of ZEKE, this is the first time that 

we have chosen to focus solely on the United States. And, coincidentally, it is also the 

first issue that is printed outside the U.S. Because of costs and supply chain issues, this 

issue of ZEKE was printed in Lithuania by KOPA, a printer that supplies many photo 

magazines for continental Europe. 

Barbara Ayotte 

While we call this The America Issue, we want to acknowledge our American neighbors 

to our north and south who are not included in this issue. We chose to use “America” to 

refer to only the United States because there is great currency in this term—especially in 

the photography community with the seminal body of work, The Americans, published 

by Robert Frank in 1959, that in many ways is the model for this issue of ZEKE. 

Unlike other issues of ZEKE, the photos presented here span a greater time period than 

is often the case. This is because America is not time-bound or a specific event. It is a 

process that has been unfolding since 1492. 

I am greatly indebted to the 18 photographers whom we feature in this issue, and 

to Stephen Mayes for his essay on Who We Are: Photography and the American 

Experience. I am also indebted to the dozens of other photographers who submitted 

outstanding work to this project but who we did not have the space to feature. And I 

want to thank Lisa DuBois and Barbara Ayotte for their invaluable insights while editing 

this issue. 

The power of ZEKE and SDN have always been to present the voice and knowledge 

of visual artists who provide an alternate means of understanding issues in our world— 

distinct from our own personal experience or by written or spoken language. I hope 

these photographs provide this nuanced perspective of both the challenges facing us 

today, and our strength to overcome them. 

America has always been a grand idea, if we can only keep our eyes on the prize of 

universal human value and dignity and the unbridled potential that can be achieved 

when we allow all humans to participate. No doubt our history is fraught with our 

exclusions of women, Black, Brown, Indigenous and other communities that do not 

conform to the mold of our “founding fathers”, but we do hope, and we will struggle, 

to get there one day. 

Please join me in taking in and appreciating the photographs on the following pages 

and the photographers who have made them. 

Glenn Ruga 

Executive Editor 


The 

AMERICA 

that in our industry and farms and schools 

and popular culture and the fine arts we 

have created. These achievements must 

be embraced while this nation also faces 

poverty, addiction, ignorance, and violence 

on a scale unknown in most of the 

developed world. 

As a nation, we are trying to find our 

center and regroup, rebuild, redefine 

our way finally into a new century that 

America. We endure because the was born on 9/11—an event that set 

land of the free and home of the brave us back a century, not because of what 

was an idea of its time, imperfect in its happened to us but because of how we 

exclusions, but a beacon for the modern 

world to embrace—a notion that The photographs on the next 46 

responded with hubris and arrogance. 

all people are endowed with inalienable pages give us a glimpse of who and 

rights. Inspiring as this concept may be, what we are today, what we must overcome, 

what we can achieve. Our current 

there has always been a heavy burden 

of detractors who never believed in the president is fond of saying that America 

ideal and only cherished their own privilege 

in this new land of opportunity. its mind to it. More important though in 

can achieve anything it wants if it puts 

Divided like this only once before, we reaching our potential is if we can agree 

are now walking a delicate path. 

on some basic principles and right now 

This is the America we seek to this nation is having a hard time doing 

describe in this issue of ZEKE. 

just that. 

While the term Black Lives Matter It is in this light that we are so proud 

was coined just nine years ago, there to present this body of work by 18 photographers 

on the theme of America. 

was always a deep sentiment of support 

for what it means. Yet the fact remained 

that Black lives did not matter to the vast 

majority of people who just went on in 

their (our) ways. 

There has always been a darker and 

visible underside to this nation as evidenced 

in the KKK, the American Nazi 

Party, anti-immigrant groups of all kinds, 

as well as a softer manifestation of racism 

and exclusion in local city councils, state 

legislatures, in our places of worship, and 

in the Supreme Court of the land. 

A nation founded in the idea of human 

potential was able to deliver and we see 

2 / ZEKE FALL 2022 

ISSUE 

Robin Fader 

Amber Bracken 

Cheryl L. Guerrero

Susan Ressler 

Kevin McKeon 

Anthony Karen 

Nick Gervin 


Childersburg, Talladega County, Ala. 

Sunshine turns soil in the Commons 

Community Workshop garden. 2020. 

As a response to national division and 

the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunshine 

and her husband created the Fearless 

Communities Initiative where they 

maintain a community garden, host 

trade days, and celebrate “solidarity 

and strength” while regularly vocalizing 

opposition to vaccines and promoting 

far-right conspiracy theories. 

What Has Been 

Will Be Again 

Jared Ragland 

From Indigenous genocide to 

slavery and secession, and 

from the fight for civil rights to 

the championing of MAGA ideology, 

the state of Alabama has 

stood at the nexus of American 

identity. Begun in fall 2020, the 

ongoing project, “What Has 

Been Will Be Again,” has led 

photographer Jared Ragland 

across historic colonial routes 

including the Old Federal Road 

and Hernando de Soto’s 1540 

expedition to bear witness to 

and connect with individuals 

and communities plagued by 

generational poverty, environmental 

exploitation, and social 

injustices. 

4 / ZEKE FALL 2022



What Has Been Will Be Again 

Jared Ragland 

Walker County, Ala. Toby. 2021. 

Cottonton, Russell County, Ala. 2022. 

Evergreen, Conecuh County, Ala. Antoine. 2021. 

Carrollton, Pickens County, Ala. 

Civil War Monument. 2020. 



In my “America” series, 

an ongoing project, I 

attempt to portray a 

cross-section of a country 

filled with overwhelming 

pride yet tinged with 

sadness and confusion. 

To me, the people I photograph 

are almost lost 

in their own fairy tale. I 

try to capture my subjects’ 

beauty and spirit, 

as well as the simplicity 

of their surroundings. 

After all, I have deep 

respect for them, for it is 

my fairy tale too, one that 

I strived to be a part of 

growing up in the Middle 

East. It reflects the 

movies I watched and 

yearned to be a part of … 

it is MY America. 

US of A Color 

Ghada Khunji 


Low ‘n Slow: 

Cruising the Mission 

Cheryl L. Guerrero 


Above: San Francisco Mission District, 2019. 

Top right: A woman carries a Selena Quintanilla 

boombox during the Selena Tribute Cruise 2021. 

Bottom right: Like lowrider cars, lowrider bicycles 

are customized and highly individualized. 

Since 2017, I have been documenting lowrider 

cruises in the Mission District of San Francisco, 

considered to be the center of the city’s Latino 

community. Throughout the Bay Area, lowrider 

cruises are an expression of pride, aesthetics, 

and Chicano culture. In many ways, cruises are 

not just about the car, but also about creativity, 

style, friendship, and family. Most importantly, 

they are about culture and community. Although 

not all lowriders are Chicano, the vibrant style 

and cultural expression are strongly linked to 

the Latino—and particularly the Chicano—community. 

This is especially relevant in the Mission 

District, where gentrification has contributed 

to the erosion of the historically Latino neighborhood 

and the displacement of its members. 

Audrey, who grew up in the Mission, explains 

that cruises are “our chance to take it back and 

to … show that we’re still here. Even if we can’t 

afford to live in the city that we were born and 

raised in, we’re still here.” 


In March 2020, I started working 

on a new personal project “COVID- 

19 in Black America.” From March 

until August 2020, I documented a 

group of Black doctors and nurses 

providing free COVID-19 tests in the 

Black communities of Philadelphia 

and surrounding areas. I am now 

creating environmental portraits of 

Black and brown-skinned people 

who have had first-hand experience 

with having COVID-19 and recovered, 

have lost family members who have 

died from the disease, have been 

mentally challenged by the year of 

being socially isolated, and finally 

Black and brown-skinned people who 

have figured out how to adjust to the 

challenge and made a new pathway. 


Raymond W Holman Jr 


Both of her parents spent time in the hospital after 

developing COVID-19, and her mother died from 

it. The entire family was in shock when she died, 

since she rarely experienced illness. The day we 

created this image, the intention was to also create 

images of her father, but because he was home still 

not feeling well, on oxygen and mourning the loss 

of his wife, I decided not to create those images. 



Raymond W Holman Jr 


He attends Princeton 

University. Due to COVID-19, 

all of his classes for the past 

year were online. That, along 

with the isolation he experienced, 

made for a very challenging 

year. On the positive 

side, the challenge gave him 

the opportunity to get to know 

himself better and become a 

stronger human being. 

He is a college professor at Spellman College 

in Atlanta, GA. Teaching online this past year 

was a big challenge. Knowing how important 

face-to-face communication is, as the college 

year was moving forward, he experienced 

some of his students zoning out during classroom 

Zoom sessions. 

On April 20, I was dying from 

Covid. I screamed out to God for 

relief. My kids need me, just give 

me a date that this room is gonna 

stop spinning. The next day, my 

sister called and said, “Hang in 

there, champion. Relief is coming 

on Tuesday.” On Tuesday, I was 

relieved, I got up out of my sick 

bed and celebrated down by the 

river. GOD MY FATHER IS REAL! 

May 5, 2021 


We Are the People 

Kevin McKeon 


Seeming to tower over her surroundings, 

activist and organizer Kimberly Bernard 

commands a march through the West 

Village in New York. 

The broad stroke view documenting 

large crowds at Black Lives 

Matter protest marches is only 

a small representation of what 

occurred and, as such, a misrepresentation. 

We Are the People is 

not merely a “documentation” of 

the events, but seeks to tap into 

the deeply personal, very human 

side of what has transpired since 

the killing of George Floyd. Every 

movement is made up of thousands 

of individuals and individual 

moments. Marching with fellow 

protesters, I witnessed anger and 

frustration, but also moments of 

joy, love, community, heroism, 

and beauty. Black Lives Matter is 

the movement, but these are the 

people. 

Top: A burst of sheer righteous 

joy while marching up 

Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. 

Under the banner of Black 

Lives Matter, there are a 

number of diverse groups with 

sometimes varying goals. This 

organization, Refuse Fascism, 

was calling for the removal of 

“the fascist regime” of Donald 

Trump and Mike Pence. 

Bottom: On this day, an outraged 

organizer must shout 

through her own tears to get 

her message across at a rally 

in Union Square in Manhattan. 


Abortion Rights: We’re Not 

Backing Down 

Lizzy Unger 


Savannah Staubs in front of the 

Supreme Court. Banning abortion 

has been shown to increase the 

risk of pregnancy-related deaths. 

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court 

overturned Roe v. Wade, ending 50 

years of constitutional protection of 

the right to an abortion. Thousands 

of people gathered outside of the 

Supreme Court to protest the decision 

and the devastating consequences it 

will have. The anger and frustration 

were palpable. As an American 

woman, it felt meaningful to join the 

protests and capture the defiant 

energy of the crowd. The Bans Off 

Our Bodies protest was organized 

by a mix of local and national 

organizations. 

Top: Protester Peachy 

pauses for a moment 

between leading chants. 

She led a series of chants 

in the middle of the pulsing 

crowd that turned into a 

communal scream of rage. 

Bottom: Thousands of 

protesters gathered in 

front of the Supreme Court 

on the day of the decision. 


This is What Democracy 

Looks Like 

Jean Ross 


Pro-impeachment rally at the Office of 

Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, Bay 

Ridge, Brooklyn, NY (January 2021). 

The 2020 presidential election felt 

consequential to a degree unmatched 

by any other in my lifetime. As the 

election grew near, I set out to 

document the determination of my 

Brooklyn neighbors to exercise their 

right to vote. These images begin 

on the first day of early voting at 

the Brooklyn Museum, continue at 

Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza on the 

day the election was finally called for 

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and at 

a January demonstration outside the 

Bay Ridge office of Congresswoman 

Nicole Malliotakis, who voted to overturn 

election results in Arizona and 

Pennsylvania. 

Top: First day of early voting, 

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY 

(October 2020). 

Bottom: First day of early voting, 

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY 

(October 2020). 


Lost: A Portrait of 

Addiction 

Virginia Allyn 


Addiction could be called a plague. It 

blights the land. It ravages lives. Flyers for 

the missing ask, “Have You Seen Me?” The 

toll it takes is devastating. lt is visible night 

and day. In Philadelphia, the poorest of our 

nation’s largest cities, the plague has worsened. 

It is more out of control now. Ten 

years ago, one man on Kensington Avenue 

remarked, “I would call this the suffering, 

the suffering. The only hope I see is that 

people get to Heaven when they die.” 

Top: She is transgender. “My aunt’s 

favorite movie was Pretty Woman. It 

portrayed such an amazing lifestyle. 

She gets picked up in the street and 

ends up with a handsome man and 

money and love. But it’s not true in 

real life ... I come to the realization 

sometimes that I’m never gonna 

make it out of here. That’s what 

frightens me ... I regret doing heroin, 

but I keep coming back to it ... I 

want to stay [here]. I can help so 

many people that are stuck like how 

I’m stuck.” 

Bottom: “I’m a registered nurse. I 

got radiation poisoning at work and 

lost my job ... Everybody’s here for a 

different reason.” She has been out 

here for two years. “The street got 

worse. It’s a horrible place. It’s ugly. 

It’s your worst nightmare. People are 

just killing people now for nothing. 

People forget that this is a neighborhood 

and people worked hard to 

live in it ... I sleep on the pavement. 

Wherever I pass out. I’ve been trying 

to get into a shelter, but they closed 

two shelters down here. I prostitute. 

I hate it. I’m scared all the time ... 

I’m either going to go to rehab or I’m 

going to die.” 


Arming 

Teachers 

in America 

Kate Way 


“I think it’s good to educate our kids in the 

same way....We’ve talked about it in our 

home, you know we have plans…I mean 

some people do fire drills. What happens 

if the smoke alarm goes off, where do you 

go? [My husband] and I have said what 

happens if an intruder comes in? [In one 

room of our house] we put in a steel door 

with a peephole. So we kind of have a safe 

room where we can go.” 

— Christin Forbes, suburban elementary 

school teacher and mother, attending day 

one of the FASTER training. 

This photo accompanies an essay 

that explores the highly controversial 

trend of K-12 schools arming 

teachers and other school staff 

in the United States. Since the 

Sandy Hook Elementary School 

massacre in 2012—and the 

more recent school shootings in 

Parkland, FL and Uvalde, TX—well 

over a dozen states have begun 

arming teachers. Shockingly, no 

one official federal or state body 

has been keeping count of how 

many schools across the nation 

have armed staff, and in many 

communities, even the parents 

and the general public remained 

uninformed. Often without public 

knowledge, there are teachers, 

administrators, custodians, 

nurses, and bus drivers carrying 

guns in America’s schools. This 

photograph was taken at an Ohio 

gun-training program designed 

for school staff in a community 

divided over arming its teachers. 


White Nationalism 

Anthony Karen 


Top: Charles (36), a Lieutenant 

in the NSM (National Socialist 

Movement), addresses the crowd 

shortly before a swastika lighting 

ceremony at the Hated and Proud 

concert, which was held on a 

small farm in America’s heartland, 

Iowa. 

While documenting an ongoing project on 

the Ku Klux Klan, I came in contact with 

several organizations within the White 

nationalist movement. I’ve had the unique 

opportunity to photograph many of these 

groups without restriction over the past 

thirteen years and I will continue to do so 

for the long-term. The following images are 

a look into their private and social lives. 

Middle: A Ku Klux Klan cross 

lighting ceremony and swastika 

lighting — according to Klan ideology, 

the fiery cross signifies the 

light of Christ and is also meant to 

bring spiritual truth to a world that 

is blinded by misinformation and 

darkness. 

Bottom: A female skinhead, 

known as a Skinbyrd. 


Has Godot Arrived? 

Eric Chang 


“I’ve loved Trump for a long time. I 

thought he was cool. He was a playboy 

and everything he touched turned to 

fucking gold.” 

In Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting 

for Godot, the main characters 

wait endlessly by the side of a 

road for Godot to arrive. Perhaps 

they are waiting because his 

presence will give meaning to 

their lives? Has Godot arrived 

in the form of Trump for many 

of his followers? This personal 

project was undertaken in an 

attempt to answer this question 

by creating a relationship with 

one of Trump’s passionate 

followers, Tommy Smith from 

Edinburg, Virginia, and thereby 

understanding more broadly 

what motivates his followers to 

believe Trump’s lies. 

Top: “I’ve created my own little 

world out here. Otherwise, I would 

go fucking insane.” 

Bottom: Upstairs bedroom in the 

main house. 


Sex Trafficking: 

An American Story 

Matilde Simas 


When people hear that someone 

was trafficked, it’s often 

assumed they were kidnapped 

and forced into labor against 

their will. Trafficking can be 

much more insidious. People 

are often exploited by someone 

they already know. 

In this photo documentary, 

we listen to the story of Cary 

Stuart, an American survivor 

of forced commercial sexual 

exploitation, who was lured 

into the world of trafficking by 

a romantic partner or “Romeo 

Pimp.” In the series, she 

reflects on her experience, the 

way it has impacted her mental 

state, and the ongoing challenges 

of working through drug 

addiction. Addiction to drugs 

can be both a vulnerability to 

trafficking, and a common tactic 

used by traffickers to make 

victims more compliant. 

While the prevalence of sex 

trafficking in the U.S. is still 

unknown, we do know that 

women, children, and men are 

being sold for sex against their 

will in all 50 states. In 2014, 

the Urban Institute studied the 

underground commercial sex 

economy in eight U.S. cities 

and estimated that this illicit 

activity generated between 

$39.9 million and $290 million in 

revenue depending on the city. 


Sex Trafficking: 

An American Story 

Matilde Simas 


Top: Cary says, “I go to trauma 

therapy, women’s group and drug 

counseling [weekly]. It’s a lot of work 

but I make the time because I need 

to be healthy for my kids. I struggle 

with mental illness, night terrors, 

post-traumatic stress disorder and 

dissociative personality disorder. In 

the life, I was torn apart and stripped 

of everything.” 

Previous Page: Cary at home 

trying to dress herself while under 

the influence of illegal substance, 

Biddeford, Maine. “I ended up 

getting really heavy into drugs when 

I was being exploited by my pimps. 

They would either dose or withhold 

to keep me coming back.” 

Above: Cary with her 14-month-old son, Jay, 

saying goodbye to his father before going to 

daycare, Biddeford, Maine.Trafficked into ‘the life’ 

at age 23, Cary emerged seven years later from 

the horrors of trafficking strong and determined to 

rewrite her story. Her goal is to model confidence 

and self-worth, teaching her two sons to respect 

and defend girls and women. 

Bottom: Cary stands in the doorway 

of her childhood home in Kennedy 

Park in Portland, Maine. After an 

18-month prison sentence, Cary 

participated in an 8-month recovery 

program at Hope Rising in Maine, 

where it becomes clear what has 

happened to her is human trafficking. 

“It was during this time I could finally 

see myself,ˮshe says. 


Working Ohio 

Steve Cagan 


Clockwise starting above. 

Electrical maintenance worker 

Living in Cleveland, I’ve 

witnessed the dramatic 

decline of what was a 

major industrial center, 

where thousands of people 

worked in good-paying, 

secure jobs, creating, 

building, and producing 

through physical and mental 

strength. That is largely— 

but not entirely—gone. 

Today, the media talks 

about trying to recover jobs 

lost during the pandemic. 

Jobs lost between the 1970s 

and early 21st century aren’t 

even discussed any more. 

And those people who 

still work in Cleveland in 

union jobs—in what remains 

of our industry—are unseen 

and unappreciated by the 

media and the art world. 

We documentarians 

must present people not 

only as victims of social 

problems, but also as 

strong, creative, resistant— 

which in fact they are. 

Chicken plant workers 

Hotel housekeeper 

Ironworkers 


Working the Harvest in 

California 

David Bacon 


Above: Cien Palmas, CA. Meregildo Ortiz (L) 

is the president of the Purepecha community 

in the Coachella Valley. Purepechas are the 

main Indigenous group in the Mexican state of 

Michoacan, and many live in the trailer camps 

in the desert near the Salton Sea. They work as 

farm workers in the fields of the Coachella Valley. 

Next to him are Max Ortiz and Julian Benito. 

A multi-level portrait of a 

working-class community, 

Yakima, in central Washington 

state, revealing its human face 

of work and poverty. Images 

explore the geography of its 

barrios and workplaces, both 

the closed factory of Yakima’s 

past and the agricultural fields 

of its present. 

Originally intending to photograph 

farm workers, I wanted 

to show other dimensions of 

the Latino community, including 

houses and trailers, a closed plywood 

mill, a homeless encampment, 

and guest worker camps. 

One older man who came 

to the U.S. as a bracero and 

worked as a farm worker for 

many years was collecting cans 

for recycling to have enough 

money to eat. Photographing his 

hands is a tribute to all the work 

reflected there, and to the working 

people of Yakima. 

Top: Juan Infante thins fruit on red delicious 

apple trees, so that the remaining 

apples will grow to a large size. 

Bottom: Manuel Ortiz came to the 

U.S. from Mexico as a bracero in the 

late 1950s and early 1960s and spent 

decades working as a farm worker in 

California and Washington. He is 85 

years old and can no longer work in the 

fields. His hands show a life of work. 


Dancing in the Black experience 

transcends across the 

world from Duke Ellington’s 

swing to break dancing in the 

upcoming 2024 Olympics. 

The images displayed are 

an ongoing project from my 

“Blacana” project. The opening 

set is from a stoop in 

Harlem, followed by New 

Jersey House Music, followed 

by a Juneteenth Celebration 

at American Dream and Hartz 

Plaza in Detroit. I invite all my 

photo friends to explore our 

dance culture. If you’re nearby 

one of the places, stop and 

make a story of it. 

An American Dance 

Brian Branch-Price 

New York, NY: Dancers from the 

SoapBox Presents “Stoop Sessions” 

dance during a live performance at 

120 St. and Malcolm X Blvd (or Lenox 

Ave) before a live 10-piece band and 

two vocalists during one of Harlem’s 

Juneteenth celebrations in New York on 

Saturday, June 18, 2022. 



An American Dance 

Brian Branch-Price 

Two steppers and line dancers dance Ebony 

at Hartz Plaza in Detroit, MI. 


New York, NY: Dancers celebrated a 

swing dance during “Stoop Sessions” 

The Funk of July at 120 St. and Malcolm 

X Blvd. on Sunday, July 3, 2022. The 

Soapbox Presents “Stoop Sessions” is a 

series of outdoor musical concerts that 

started during the pandemic with professional 

performing artists. 

Jersey City, NJ: Dancers at the Jersey 

City House Music Festival at Lincoln 

Park, in Jersey City, NJ. On Saturday, 

July 24, 2021. 


American Punk 

Daniel Hoffman 


The idea of “America” has 

evolved and changed since 

1959 when Robert Frank 

published his seminal work. 

While America is less homogeneous 

now than ever 

before, it is no less fraught 

with social challenges to 

understand what it means 

to be “American.” However, 

sitting on the margins of 

our society is a group of 

Americans who form a community 

that celebrates ideals 

central to being “American,” 

the American Punks. 

In their music and dance, 

punks celebrate life, mutual 

trust and support, and 

freedom to express themselves 

about social injustice 

and the government. 

Indeed, American Punks 

form a dynamic example 

of the “American Mosaic.” 

American Punks come from 

all sectors of society and 

often include immigrants, all 

are welcome provided you 

are free of bias and judgement. 

E Pluribus Unum. 

This project explores the 

idea of American Punks 

as a social movement that 

embodies what it means to 

be American. 

Clockwise from left: 

Punk singer in underground show in 

New Jersey. 

Punk band and fans, Brooklyn, NY. 

Mosh band in backyard underground 

show, Brooklyn, NY. 



First 

Nations 

Portraits of Dancers 

and Wisdom 

Keepers 

Jeanny Tsai 

Clockwise from left: 

Historically, Indigenous Americans have 

largely been portrayed in unfavorable stereotypes 

in the media and their presence 

has been mostly invisible in education, 

pop culture, and politics in the U.S. 

Currently, there are 574 federally 

recognized Indigenous American Nations. 

I estimate I have photographed individuals 

from over 60 Nations from the U.S. and 

Canada so far. I have traveled to numerous 

intertribal gatherings around the U.S. 

to meet and photograph First Nations 

dancers and wisdom keepers. Through 

this photo series, I seek to illuminate these 

contemporary Indigenous Americans 

who are simultaneously preserving and 

evolving their traditions. 

I was inspired to start this portrait 

series during the Standing Rock 

Reservation protests against the Dakota 

Access Pipeline in 2016 because I wanted 

to know more about the Indigenous traditions 

in the U.S. As a young person attending 

public school, I feel I received a limited 

education about the history of Indigenous 

Americans. As I worked on this series, I 

heard many personal stories told to me 

by the people I photographed. In turn, I 

captured their stories that are not spoken 

but are told through the radiance of their 

eyes and spirit. 

Ira, Laokta, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations 

Young Red-Tailed Hummingbird Woman, Tlingit Nation 

Lakeisha, Plain Cree Nation 


Good Earth 

Esha Chiocchio 

Good Earth celebrates New 

Mexican agrarians who are 

revitalizing land through 

regenerative practices—building 

soil, sequestering carbon, 

reducing toxins, and improving 

the health of people, 

plants and animals. 

To better understand the 

range of regenerative techniques 

being employed, 

podcast host Mary-Charlotte 

Domandi and photographer 

Esha Chiocchio used interviews 

and photography to 

document the techniques of 

Native American land managers, 

farmers, composters, 

ranchers, goat herders, 

orchardists, and soil scientists 

to improve the foundation 

of society: soil. This series 

provides a window into regenerative 

land stewardship and 

demonstrates how we can all 

play a role in rehabilitating the 

good earth. 


Above: Tommy Casados inspects the 

grass as he flood-irrigates one of his 

pastures at C4 Farms in Tierra Amarilla, 

New Mexico. Tommy grazes fewer 

cattle than his land could technically 

accommodate with the goal of growing 

an abundance of healthy, deeply 

rooted pasture. Such practices encourage 

the soil to absorb more carbon, 

thereby reducing greenhouse gases and 

increasing resilience to both flooding and 

drought. 

Above: Gordon Tooley hand cuts 

grasses to harvest the seeds and 

spread them to new areas of his 

orchard, Tooley’s Trees. Keeping 

the ground covered with diverse 

vegetation is an important aspect 

of creating a regenerative orchard 

that absorbs carbon and builds rich, 

biologically active soil. 

Left: Josh Bowman with his sons, 

Ephraim and Emerson, at their pecan 

farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Most 

pecan farmers in the region clear the 

floor beneath their trees of any vegetation. 

Consulting with soil scientist Dr. 

David C. Johnson, Josh has grown 

cover crops, used compost teas, and 

incorporated a flock of sheep into his soil 

management strategies to build organic 

matter and encourage a healthy microbiome. 

Josh and his sons have an evening 

practice of digging for earthworms, 

which have steadily increased as the soil 

has improved. 


Who 

“ 

WEARE 

Photography 

and the 

American 

Experience 

by Stephen Mayes 

The American Dream” has 

always been an aspirational 

phrase, founded on the 

promise of economic opportunity 

(think white picket-fenced 

homes) and an idea that all people 

who live here are free and equal. For 

over a hundred years, photography 

has tried to document this ideal: showing 

who we are, demonstrating our 

achievements, marking our failures and 

inspiring our hopes, making 

visible for all to see 

across divisions of geography, 

class and political 

persuasion. But, today in 

the 21st century, the meaning 

of the American Dream 

has been obfuscated, 

reduced to hollow political 

messaging from both sides 

of the aisle, making it even harder to 

have a clear picture of what America 

really is and what it looks like. 

In the 20th century, America was a 

story told with the simplicity of single 

images in an age when the nation’s 

eyes could be focused collectively and 

simultaneously on one front page, 

a national story that was led by the 

unified drum beat of mass media that 

drove the news agenda. 

One story followed another in a 

more or less choreographed progression 

as the media gathered itself 

around each new issue and gave it 

shape in the public eye. This was the 

age of the iconic image, when a single 

photograph would find itself exposed 

to everyone at the same moment, and 

in feeling the moment, the viewers 

would imbue meaning in the image 

beyond the simple facts represented. 

This was America. 

Now, as we look back, some of 

these images have withstood time and 

still stand as symbols of the national 

will for progress, the celebration of 

achievement as well as moments of 

unified national despair. A migrant 

mother, the raising of the flag at Iwo 

Jima, a Saigon street execution, a 

video grab of a Black motorist being 

assaulted by a group of LA police 

officers and a flag raising at Ground 

Zero. Each of these widely known 

images evokes not just an American 

story but also conjures a host of references 

and associated emotions representing 

the spirit of the times. While 

speaking truths there is also a danger 

that such icons compress the narrative 

too much, simplifying complex stories 

and reducing the rich weave of history 

to clichés, assumptions and stereotypes. 

For a nation that’s still less than 

250 years old, one could think of 20th 

century America as still an adolescent 

culture, disguising its insecurities in 

consistent dress codes: the U.S. flag 

was (and still is) everywhere, marking 

everything and everybody as members 

of a new and strong nation. In this 

context the iconic images were appropriately 

powerful and told a simplified 

Right: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange. 

Florence Thompson, 32, a pea picker and 

mother of seven children. Nipomo, CA. 

1936. Farm Security Administration— 

Office of War Information Photograph 

Collection, Library of Congress. 

Susan Ressler 

48 / ZEKE SPRING 2022



Carla Fiorina 

story, as would be appropriate for an 

adolescent sensibility. This broad-stroke 

overview of America’s cultural bones 

is of course itself greatly simplified and 

takes no account of the many amazing 

internecine interventions by the likes 

of Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, 

Gordon Parks and Susan Meiselas to 

name just a few of the hundreds of 

extraordinary 20th century photographers, 

each of whom contributed eraidentifying 

imagery to our history. 

★ ★ ★ 

But the American experience was 

never a homogenous unity and while 

the 20th century icons told a truth, it 

was only a partial truth and the shortcomings 

became clearer. Although the 

number of photographs made and published 

expanded enormously towards 

the end of the century, the emergence of 

popular tropes and approved narratives 

that were often defined by the proclivities 

of mass media and their advertisers 

continued to simplify the story. Broadly 

speaking, society was represented 

visually into two categories: winners 

and losers, shown visually as symbols 

Left: Photograph by Lori Grinker. Firefighters 

raise the flag at Ground Zero. New York 

City, September 11, 2001. 

of achievement or broken hopes, the 

doers and the done-to, the haves and 

have-nots. This narrowed field of visual 

references appeared to present a complete 

landscape of American life but 

actually served to limit expectations of 

what American life might be. We now 

understand the visual representation of 

the American Dream to be grievously 

lacking in the expression of the experiences 

of women, LGBTQ+, Indigenous 

peoples and that of people of color, 

all historically excluded groups in the 

national visual culture. 

It’s important here to distinguish 

between the representation of, and the 

representation by “we, the people” in 

the American story. There are many 

images of women through the 20th 

century as there are of people of color, 

but if we’re honest, the dominant visual 

story is of exploitation, deprivation 

and pain, falling far short of the rich, 

full reality of life. Some pictures have 

acquired deeper truth simply with the 

passage of time. For example many 

images of Jim Crow lynchings were 

produced as postcards celebrating 

the acts of violence (one extreme of 

the American gestalt) but they have 

recently reemerged as the first signs of 

a remorseful acknowledgement of past 

wrongs, demonstrating the possibility 

that photographs (even the same 

photographs) can embrace the contradictions 

and complexities of American 

life. But there is much further to go. 

★ ★ ★ 

In reflecting on the alarming schism 

that currently separates red and blue 

America, I share the bafflement and 

dismay of the many Americans who 

wonder how such deep divisions 

can be healed. But the situation also 

reminds us that this fractured reality is 

not a new situation and for many it’s 

merely the continuation of the norm. 

BIPOC citizens have long experienced 

the brutal heel of democracy’s indifference 

to the reality of their lives. 

Black photographers have rarely 

shared an equal voice and still offer 

a relative novel perspective in the 

photographic oligarchy, yet they have 

a uniquely clear perspective of the US 

zeitgeist. They have been living the 

complexities of the American reality 

for a long time and as such they have 

a breadth of vision that encompasses 

highs and lows that are beyond the 

direct experience of many in the White 

population. Black, Latinx, Native, 

LGBTQ+ photographers have dreamed 

the American dream, they hear the call 

for individual achievement and community 

advancement, yet they have also 

experienced systemic exclusion from 

its fulfillment, not as individual failure 

but from the systemic injustice of White 

supremacy. If the American character 

is defined by ambition, it is all too 

often marked instead as frustration in 

so-called “minority” communities. This 

has been evident in the writings of 

many Black authors such as Frederick 

Douglass, James Baldwin, Cornell 

West, Toni Morrison and others but it is 

only recently that wider culture is seeing 

the equivalent imagery. 

Photographers like Alexandra Bell, 

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ruddy Roye, 

Sheila Pree Bright and others are 

stretching the bounds of documentary 

to bring us thoughtful and inclusive 

studies of American identity that 

actively embrace the complexities 

and contradictions, rather than trying 

to simplify and rationalize, as has 

been the editorial tradition. Andrea 

Ellen Reed, for example, looked 

inward to reveal exterior reality in her 

heartbreaking project Unseen which 

simply presented a video self- portrait 



as she reacted to the documentary 

reporting of pundits, politicians and 

others describing the world we live in. 

Bayeté Ross Smith in his history series 

co-produced with the New York Times 

blends archival documentary images 

of historic moments with contemporary 

imagery of the same locations combined 

in augmented reality formats that 

demonstrate social developments and 

inertia. 

This tension is evident almost everywhere 

we look. In the mid- 20th century, 

Robert Frank, in his seminal work 

The Americans, began to examine 

this dichotomy with his brutally honest 

images of racism in the U.S. accompanied 

by images of beauty in the every 

day. As Jack Kerouac said in the opening 

essay, “Frank sucked a sad poem 

right out of America onto film.” In this 

issue of ZEKE, inspired by Frank’s epic 

journey across America, despair is 

represented in Virginia Allyn’s Lost: A 

Portrait of Addiction although in typical 

American style it is despair tinged with 

the hope of recovery. But this bleak 

outlook is most strongly evident in 

the essays depicting the rise today of 

social movements of White nationalism 

told by Anthony Karen and the 

implicit violence of a prevalent gun 

culture, such that teachers are now 

taking up arms, as shown by Kate 

Way. Brian Branch-Price brings joy to 

the story with his essay An American 

Dance. Enthusiastic crowds gather to 

watch performers dance in the streets 

celebrating the legacy of Black performance 

from Duke Ellington’s swing 

to contemporary break dancing and 

we see beginners and masters giving 

inspiration to new generations. That 

these two realities still exist in America 

Left: Photograph by Ruddy Roye. Keisha, 

at the Roger Williams Housing Projects, 

Mobile, Alabama, 2006. 

Mariette Pathy Allen 

is what makes it so difficult to represent 

our visual identity. 

★ ★ ★ 

Some practitioners whose work is 

rooted in documentary photography 

have, by embracing the opportunity of 

digital representation, utterly released 

themselves from the constraints of 

conventional photography. It’s been 

40 years since David Hockney broke 

the photographic mold with his “joiners” 

(intricate photo collages creating 

abstract representations of the scenes 

he photographed) and now we can 

look to Clement Valla, Josh Begley, 

Trevor Paglen, Mickalene Thomas 

and many others. Their work emerges 

from documentary. We think we know 

how to receive it. Yet, it transcends the 

factual and temporal limitations of photography 

without deceit and without 

even requiring the re-education of the 

viewer. They set a different frame and 

the willing viewer intuitively inhabits 

their world, stepping through disbelief 

into a universe of photographic truth 

beyond photography. 

Photography has always done 

more than merely record the evidence 

and memories of history. Driven by 

imagination as much as by facts, the 

photograph leads the viewer to places 

we have never actually visited. This 

includes the future. Photography, as a 

technology-based communication tool, 

is still at the center of the process. Geo 

tagging is now a banality, as is facial 

recognition and to some extent we also 

recognize (and fear) deep fakes as a 

new reality in visual communication, but 

strange new processes with unfamiliar 

names such as GAN imagery and 

volumetric image-making are starting 

to emerge. The issues thrown up by 

these new processes will confound us 

and force us to new understanding of 

the image in an increasingly complex 

world. 

As early as 1846, Frederick 

Douglass recognized this in his 

speech Pictures & Progress in which 

he described pictures as essential 

to progress because of the possibilities 

they conjure in our imagination. 

Words might be necessary to describe 

the factual content of an image (the 

Who, What, Where and When) but 

the photograph can also harness the 

imagination to substitute for words in 

exploring the intangible aspects of 

human experience. This is where we 

turn to imagery to reveal the American 

Dream in all its complexities. And then, 

perhaps, we will truly see a nation of 

the free and the home of the brave. 

Stephen Mayes is Executive Director 

of the Tim Hetherington Trust with 30 

years experience managing photography 

in the areas of fashion, art, commerce, 

and journalism. 

Barbara Ayotte made editorial contributions 

to this article. 


Elyse Blennerhassett 

Interview 

DONNA FERRATO 

Donna Ferrato, an internationally acclaimed and 

award-winning photojournalist, is known for her 

groundbreaking documentation of the hidden 

world of domestic violence, an issue she spent 

years photographing. These images were published 

in her seminal book Living With the Enemy 

(Aperture, 1991) which, alongside worldwide 

exhibitions and lectures, sparked an international 

discussion on sexual violence and women’s rights. 

A longtime activist, in 2014 Ferrato launched the 

I Am Unbeatable campaign to expose, document, 

and prevent domestic violence against women 

and children through real stories of real people. In 

her new award-winning book, Holy, published in 

2020 by powerHouse Books, Ferrato repurposes 

her images, that combined with handwritten text, 

proclaim the sacredness of women’s rights and 

their power to be masters of their own destiny. For 

more information, see www.donnaferrato.com 

By Michelle Bogre 

Michelle Bogre interviewed Donna Ferrato 

at her Tribeca loft on July 29, 2022. 

Michelle Bogre: When did you realize 

you were an activist photographer, not 

just a photojournalist? 

Donna Ferrato: In 1993. I was in 

Bruce, Mississippi covering the funeral of 

seven children who were burned alive in 

a house fire because there were bars on 

the windows that locked from outside the 

house. The family—children and grandmother— 

were trapped inside, as if in a 

prison. No magazines were interested so 

I went on my own. As soon as I arrived, 

I saw people gathered around someone 

who had collapsed. Women in white 

dresses surrounded her. I figured it was 

the mother who was incarcerated but 

received a day pass to attend the funerals 

of her mother and her seven children. I got 

down on my knees and crawled between 

women’s legs to get the picture of a mother 

with a broken heart. Nobody tried to stop 

me. Sometimes I feel invisible. Perhaps 

people didn’t stop me because they could 

see at that moment I was upset, having 

trouble focusing through my tears. People 

saw I was not dispassionate. 

My activism evolved trying to make 

sense of that story. I saw what I had to 

do—investigate as well as photograph 

and find ways to publish stories about 

the crimes against women, domestic 

violence, and criminalized survivors of 

domestic violence. 

MB: Crawling between someone’s legs 

to get a picture seems a bit aggressive. 

DF: I don’t think people realize how 

invasive I am. To get a photograph, I will 

go to hell and back. It was hard to get 

access to battered women’s shelters when 

they were completely off-limits to the 

press. I had to get inside to convince the 

shelter directors, the residents, the police, 

the prison superintendents, hospital 

administrators, even the violent abusers 

being arrested. I lived it with people, 

whatever they were going through, even 

in prison or in their homes. 

MB: Was the story published? 

DF: Yes. I took a set of photographs 

to People magazine. The editors were 

interested and sent me back with a 

great writer, Bill Shaw. We met with the 

landlord, Mr. Chandler. While Bill was 

interviewing him, I had a chance to get 

the proof that Chandler was responsible 

for their deaths. He could have saved the 

family because he had the keys to the 

bars on the window. I saw the photo: he 

was lying on a couch under a window 

where the ring full of keys was hanging. 

Click. One Sunday at church, I spoke 

to the congregation. I told them I didn’t 

believe that God called the children to 

Heaven; it was human negligence. I 

suggested they form a committee, attend 

monthly town meetings, and see what the 

fire codes were. I wanted them to understand 

that they had rights and the more 

they knew, the better chance they had 

to change the law—maybe outlaw those 

dangerous metal bars that killed people. 

The committee was led by one armed 

woman, Minnie, the deceased children’s 

aunt. They eventually changed the law in 

Jackson, Mississippi and when I saw how 

successful they were, I decided I would 

never be a quiet photographer. From that 

point, I’ve always spoken my truth to the 

people I photographed. 

MB: How can you be so invasive, to use 

your word, and still get intimate photographs? 

DF: People may see some madness in 

how I do what I do so they don’t stop me. 

I don’t care how strange I look. I’ll crawl 

on my belly. It’s about being there. My 

size works in my favor. I am small, agile, 

and fast. Most of the time, I prefer being 

lower than the people I’m photographing. 

I don’t ever want people to feel like I am 

towering over them. 

MB: That’s visible in your pictures. You 

bring the viewer into what feels like an 

intimate moment. 

DF: When I teach, I try to help photographers 

see that they don’t have to stand 

in a corner to be unobtrusive. Often 

the view is right in front of our eyes. 

Wherever the photographer stands it’s 

important to be in the moment, to absorb 

everything, sorrow, pain, anger, love. Let 

emotion enter the images through us. 

MB: You use a 35 mm or wider lens? 

Leica rangefinder? 

DF: I use a Leica M10. Leica has been 

my weapon of choice since 1976 when 

I had a Leica M4. Most often I work 

with a 35 mm lens. It’s one camera, one 

lens, one woman. I am never without my 

camera. 

MB: Never? 

DF: Why in the world would I go 

anywhere without my beloved camera? 

The camera is me. Photography is a 

calling. Often, we have no choice. As a 

young woman, I realized that I had an 

instinct to frame and extract what matters 

from that moment, the good, the bad, the 

ugly. I would lose my mind if I couldn’t 

photograph. 

MB: You do have an extraordinary 

instinct for the perfect moment. One of 

the images in your book, Holy, titled 

Diamond, Minneapolis, is almost perfect. 


The eight-year-old boy called 9-1-1 to report his father. When the police arrived to arrest his father, Diamond 

said, “I hate you for hitting my mother. Don’t come back to this house.” This photograph was awarded one of the 

most influential 50 photographs. © 1987 Donna Ferrato/ LIFE Magazine 

You captured the moment when the boy is 

shaking his finger at his father, and there 

are three cops, and the battered women’s 

face is framed in a “V” between two of the 

cops, the television is on, but the perfection 

is the White cop’s hand in the Black 

man’s pocket. 

DF: White and Black…mmm, yes, well, 

when I entered the house tagging behind 

the cops that morning, it was early, and 

the curtains were drawn. Everything 

happened fast, hard core drama. I had a 

flash, and was fumbling trying to get it on 

the camera, to bounce it off the ceiling. 

As the cops brought the father into the 

living room, I was ready but every time 

the flash popped I couldn’t see what was 

happening. I heard what the boy was 

saying because I was next to him. The 

police were going through the father’s 

pockets, to make sure there were no 

weapons. The boy was angry with his 

dad, he was angry with everyone. Later, 

when the film was developed I saw it was 

the picture as I imagined it would be. But 

honestly, it’s all instinct. It’s Jedi Warrior 

photography. But I didn’t have a signed 

release. I went back a month later to meet 

the parents and they signed a release, 

which was necessary to be published in 

LIFE Magazine. 

DF: There is no detachment. Injustice is 

always gut-wrenching. A photographer 

sees right through everything. We have 

to get the best photograph whatever happens, 

but it’s complicated. I can’t say that 

I don’t absorb their feelings, but clearly, 

I don’t suffer the consequences like the 

people in the photographs. Some of the 

people were thankful that I was there. 

Not everybody. Many people would 

like to forget these things happened. 

Photographs make it hard to forget. I 

too become trapped in the frame of that 

moment. We all suffer from collective 

trauma. Every time I relive these incidents, 

I relive them and become anxious, 

depressed, especially now as things are 

worse than ever. Domestic violence is 

more difficult to predict, to contain, to 

prevent. My purpose now as a human 

being is to keep these photographs in the 

forefront of human consciousness, as an 

activist and a witness 

MB: What is your new project, Wall of 

Silence? 

DF: The Wall of Silence was my response 

to an open call from the NYC Mayor’s 

Office to end gender-based violence, a 

chance to create art that would inspire 

activism about the criminalization of survivors 

of gender-based violence. My idea 

was to build a prison wall with a stainless 

steel mirror, to create a portal by which 

people would see themselves and hopefully 

relate to the horror of being unjustly 

incarcerated. I chose the Collect Pond 

Park in lower Manhattan as the location 

because of its proximity to the criminal 

and family courthouses, where too often 

survivors —especially Black,Brown, and 

LGBTQIA+ people—lose their rights 

because they defended themselves and 

their children. On the day we unveiled it 

in the park, a survivor, Tracy McCarter, 

currently facing incarceration, appeared 

almost as if she was transported through 

the Wall of Silence. The project brought 

Tracy into my life and now I am working 

on telling her story as it unfolds in one 

of the courthouses facing the sculpture. 

Through this project, I hope to not only 

educate society, but to be a witness and 

put pressure on the court system to feel 

compassion for survivors of gender-based 

violence. I am using the installation to 

disrupt the silence by engaging the public 

and the media to support Tracy’s case. Her 

story is another example of how society 

and the courts are stripping women of 

their rights: their reproductive rights, their 

rights to bodily autonomy, to the basic 

human right of self-defense, and their right 

to the pursuit of happiness to live as free 

and equal human beings. 

MB: In the profession we talk about 

secondary trauma. You’ve seen a conflict, 

violence and injustice. How do you 

absorb the violence or does the camera 

provide detachment? 

Mississippi Fire, 1993. Ether Ree Hall Gaston, mother of six of the dead children, collapses in the gymnasium 

where the funeral is being held. Doing time for drug trafficking, she was let out of prison for the day. 

©1993 Donna Ferrato 


Agave Hemp Bamboo Sugar Cane 

56 / ZEKE FALL 2022 

www.Hahnemuehle.com • usasales@Hahnemuehle.com

A Home for Global Documentary 

ZEKESPRING 2022 VOL.8/NO.2 $15 US 



Photo by Cheryl L. Guerrero from Low ‘n Slow: Cruising the Mission. 

Social Documentary Network 


SDN Website: A web portal for 

documentary photographers to 

create online galleries and make 

them available to anyone with an 

internet connection. Since 2008, 

we have presented more than 

4,000 documentary stories from 

all parts of the world. 

www.socialdocumentary.net 

ZEKE Magazine: This bi-annual 

publication allows us to present 

visual stories in print form with indepth 

writing about the themes 

of the photography projects. 

www.zekemagazine.com 

SDN Salon: An informal gathering 

of SDN photographers to 

share and discuss work online. 

Documentary Matters: 

A place for photographers to 

meet with others involved with 

or interested in documentary 

photography and discuss ongoing 

or completed projects. 

SDN Education: Leading 

documentary photographers and 

educators provide online learning 

opportunities for photographers 

interested in advancing their 

knowledge and skills in the field 

of documentary photography. 

ZEKE Award for Documentary 

Photography: A award 

program juried by a distinguished 

panel of international media 

professionals. Award winners are 

exhibited at Photoville in Brooklyn 

and featured in ZEKE. 

SDN Reviews: Started in April 

2021, this annual program brings 

together industry leaders from 

media, publishing, and the fine 

art community to review work of 

documentary photographers. 

Join us! 



BOOK 

REVIEWS 

EDITOR: MICHELLE BOGRE 

THE VERDICT: The Christina 

Boyer Case 

by Jan Banning 

Schilt Publishing, 2022 | 200 pages 

$50.00 

In 1992, Christina Boyer’s toddler 

daughter Amber died from blunt head 

trauma that occurred while Amber was 

with Boyer’s boyfriend. Even though the 

evidence against her was mostly circumstantial, 

Boyer was charged and faced 

the death penalty. Her lawyer convinced 

her to take an Alford plea to spare her 

life. (An Alford plea allows the defendant 

to maintain her innocence while agreeing 

that the prosecution has enough 

evidence to find her guilty at trial.) She 

was the victim of a grossly inadequate 

defense, shoddy police work, and a 

zealous District Attorney in an election 

year. She remains in jail 30 years later 

and still maintains her innocence. 

Jan Banning’s book, The Verdict: 

The Christina Boyer Case, tells 

the story of a mother, Christina 

Boyer, accused of, and incarcerated for, 

her daughter Amber’s murder. What 

started as a single interaction between 

photographer and subject, became a 

years-long investigation. The result is a 

carefully crafted book that paints a vivid 

picture of Christina’s case, elucidates 

the faults of the U.S. justice system, 

and meditates on the impartiality of 

photography. It is also a simulacrum for 

Christina’s parole application. 

The book is reminiscent of a dusty 

Bishopville, SC, 2019. Photo by Jan Banning 

family album found in an attic. The cover 

image – a dark wooded scene punctuated 

by a child’s discarded red tricycle 

– could illustrate a Grimm’s fairy tale. This 

darkness is contrasted by the pink spine, 

Amber’s favorite color. Amber, now fossilized 

in dance, graces the back cover. The 

covers create an atmosphere based on 

these associations, and the reader enters 

with an expectation of what is to come. 

Neither words nor images make up 

a truth, and Banning works with this 

awareness to structure the book. It’s 

separated into disparate chapters, each 

addressing an element of a singular 

story. The book begins in Banning’s own 

words, as he presents the case history. 

He lingers on Christina’s background 

and her character, as he follows the 

timeline from her childhood to present, 

incarcerated day. He gives the reader 

insight into what may have occurred the 

day Amber died, as well as an overview 

of the legal processes that ultimately 

led to Christina’s life sentence. The 

proceeding sections include Christina’s 

diary entries and photographs taken 

by Banning in the South, paired with 

Christina’s interpretations of Banning’s 

photographs. Words, photographs, and 

interpretations, slowly build up a vibrant 

idea of the truth. 

Reading through The Verdict, a comparison 

materializes between judicial and 

photographic representation. Both in court 

and in a photographic frame, people may 

be represented – and often misrepresented 

– in a variety of ways, outside of their 

control. Leading up to her plea agreement, 

Christina is told that the autopsy photographs 

of Amber’s body will undoubtedly 

lead the jury to convict and sentence her 

to death. The feeling that these photographs 

would evoke becomes the main 

reason Boyer took a plea. 

The emotional entanglement inherent 

in photography is particularly poignant 

in the section dedicated to Christina’s 

diary. A journal is splayed out over a 

two-page spread. It lays on a royal blue 

background that bleeds to the edge of the 

pages. The reader’s eyes have nowhere 

to run. Page by page, entry after entry, 

I read Christina’s thoughts in the years 

following Amber’s death. The writing feels 

both legible and incomprehensible, as I 

struggle to let her words in, to experience 

her pain. My eye follows the curve of the 

letter, and I feel her hand writing these 

words. It’s overwhelming. I skip ahead to 

the last page. Her diary appears again, 

this time typed up in a sort of transliteration. 

Christina’s words disconnect from 

her script, which allows the reader to 

disconnect from her body, her pain. The 

text is a colder, more sober entry into 

Christina’s mind, while the images are far 

more entangled with emotion. 

By presenting both versions of her 

diary, Banning offers a multifaceted 

representation of Christina. As expressed 

in the book, America’s public defender 

system is teeming with problems, such 

as underpay and overexertion, and 


Christina is only one individual who 

has lost decades of her life partially 

due to a lack of adequate representation. 

Banning’s collection of images is 

an attempt at rectification. Every year 

Christina applies for parole. Her supporters 

send a packet boasting of her 

work and achievements, in the hopes of 

her release. Every year she is denied. 

While this book is an important read for 

the public, it is also, to a certain extent, 

Christina’s appeal for parole. 

This humanity is also what separates 

The Verdict from the influx of true crime 

published in the last years. The book is delicately 

crafted, with both an awareness of 

the medium’s shortcomings and a complex 

representation of the subject. Banning’s 

empathetic hand differentiates The Verdict 

as a work of art and a piece of activism, 

or — as Banning would put it — artivism. 

—Dana Melaver 

THE DRAKE 

by Tamara Reynolds 

Dewi Lewis, 2022 | 80 pages | £30.00 

Dear Tamara. 

Your book, The Drake, recently arrived 

by post, and finally I sat down on a 

sweltering Sunday afternoon to read it 

for a book review for ZEKE Magazine, 

published by the Social Documentary 

Network. Looking twice at the 25 plus 

images and reading the three page essay 

didn’t really take much time. 

I almost put your book down and 

emailed the ZEKE book review editor to 

inquire why we would consider a book 

so devoid of context because at SDN we 

believe that context matters in documentary. 

Who are these people? No names, 

no captions, no testimony. Was it you or 

your editor who insisted on no captions? 

I like to think that in the age of postcolonial 

photography, we want to dignify 

our subjects by at least identifying who 

they are. But I still liked the photos and 

the sentiment of the book. 

The interview with you by Deborah 

Artman was engaging and very personal, 

obliquely mentioning how you 

also suffered from addiction, but unlike 

the subjects in The Drake, you were able 

to overcome it because of a supportive 

family structure and upbringing. (At 

another time, it might have been said 

that you were from a good family.) But 

you only dropped crumbs of references 

to your subjects. So when you refer to 

Strawberry, am I to surmise that she is 

the attractive subject with red hair, hence 

the name? You mention Amanda “in full 

scrubs,” who was just released from the 

hospital with a swollen eye socket. She 

must be the one wearing hospital booties. 

With SDN, we always say that one 

difference between documentary and fine 

art is that with documentary, the work 

needs to be more about the subject than 

the photographer. Maybe the point of this 

work is really about your own journey, 

not Strawberry’s or Amanda’s or Tim’s or 

KayKay’s. You even say it in your essay, 

“I am processing my own grief in the act 

of photographing it…I am there to learn 

about life.” What about their grief? What 

about learning about the lives of your 

subjects? 

But I keep coming back to the photos. 

Without page numbers of captions, I can 

only describe them. I really like the image 

of a hand pouring what appears to be 

red wine from a gallon plastic water jug 

wrapped in a thin plastic bag. A Black 

hand with long painted finger nails and 

bracelets is holding a plastic cup receiving 

the wine while another Black hand is 

raised and stylishly holding a cigarette. 

The table is red, the liquid is red, the 

plastic bag has red writing on it, there 

are some red flowers, and the hand with 

Photo by Tamara Reynolds 

the cigarette is wearing a sweater with 

red cuffs. A lot is going on here about an 

otherwise questionable situation. Bravo. 

Eight spreads later there is the photo of 

maybe Strawberry, but hard to know. This 

is a stunning portrait: her legs are crossed 

and one arm rests casually on one leg and 

her whole body comfortably twists towards 

you. She would be beautiful with her red 

hair, blue eyes, mirthful expression, were 

it not for the signs of addiction—sores on 

her body and her disheveled hair. Her 

overt sexuality combined with the theme 

of the book, can only suggest she has 

chosen prostitution as a way to fund her 

addiction. The lingering question remains: 

what if she had the opportunities you 

had, perhaps she would not have been a 

subject in The Drake, but perhaps instead 

a successful photographer, or doctor, or 

actress? We don’t know because we don’t 

hear from Strawberry. 

The marginalized need our attention 

and they need to be seen by us as 

humans who have taken wrong turns or 

have been pushed by poverty, racism, 

neglect or other societal forces into addiction 

and prostitution, through no fault of 

their own. You help us see them. Thank 

you. But next time, let’s have captions that 

include a name and a bit of information 

about these subjects. 


BRIEFLY 

NOTED 

EDITED BY MICHELLE BOGRE 

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY 

MARISSA FIORUCCI 

ABANDONED MOMENTS: 

A Love Letter to 

Photography 

By Ed Kashi 

Kehrer Verlag, 2021 | 136 pages | $58 

METRO: 

New York/London/Paris 

By Herb Robinson 

Schiffer Publishing, 2022 

224 pages | $60 

MY BROTHER’S WAR 

By Jessica Hines 

Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2021 

184 pages | $49 

Abandoned Moments is Ed Kashi’s 

version of combing through 30 plus 

years of archives and outtakes to select 

and lay out 68 “imperfect” photographs—those 

side glances that caught 

his attention but didn’t make the magazine 

or client edit. What’s imperfect for 

Kashi, an award-winning photojournalist 

and filmmaker, is still close to perfect. 

His layout, combined with a small 

amount of personal text, reframes each 

captionless photograph (captions are in 

the back of the book) as a poetic interlude. 

The book continually asks us to 

reconsider the photograph as something 

more than fact or information. Kashi’s 

choice to separate captions from photographs 

unroots the image from time 

and space and allows it to float untethered. 

But even more than reconsider 

the photograph, we reconsider this icon 

of documentary photography, this man 

who has spent most of his life on the 

road photographing. We see his humor, 

his passion, his eccentricity, his intelligence, 

and his love of life and people 

in these interstices where he found the 

serendipity of geometry, mood, emotion, 

and possibility uniting. This book is a 

celebration of photography and humanity’s 

potential. —MB 

In METRO, renowned photographer 

Herb Robinson gives us a modern 

view of the human ecosystem of underground 

public transportation—subway, 

metro, underground—in three global 

cities. Subways fascinate photographers 

because human drama and visual 

performances materialize when social 

barriers dissipate and people are bound 

together with nowhere to go. Robinson’s 

keen observation shows us the duality 

of the daily metro ride –people are 

both interconnected and alienated even 

when packed shoulder to shoulder. 

Robinson, one of the founders of the 

legendary African American collective, 

the Kamoinge Workshop, literally shoots 

from the hip. The color images— close, 

tight, odd or low angles—feel claustrophobic; 

we are as squeezed in as the 

subway riders, and as viscerally tired as 

the weary travelers. His saturated color 

images also pulsate with the energy of 

a city because he is a master of reflections, 

blur and improvisation, and he 

has a cinematic understanding of edge 

tension. Eve Sandler’s design has a jazz 

aesthetic that fits the photographs. The 

book is rounded out with a selection of 

eclectic quotes that provide historical 

and cultural context, and essays from 

curators Sarah L. Eckhardt and LeRonn 

P. Brooks. —MB 

My Brother’s War is a personal 

aftermath book of memory and 

remembrance, lost time and lost lives, 

unspoken trauma, and the undeniable 

psychological destruction of war. Trying 

to reconcile why her Vietnam vet brother 

Gary—diagnosed with a version of 

PTSD—killed himself ten years post 

discharge from the Army, photographer 

Jessica Hines embarks on a forensic 

photographic exploration of old books, 

notebooks, and ephemera found in a 

small box, combined with visits to his 

war buddies and two trips to Vietnam. 

Trying to create images that suggest 

what we can’t see, she combines his 

personal documents with her original 

photographs, some documentary, some 

constructed in camera using techniques 

such as shadows, magnification, and 

reflections to reveal past and present 

as layers of memory. Among the more 

poignant are the images in which she 

combines a child’s toy soldiers (that he 

might have played with) with images of 

Gary or superimposed over documents. 

In the final chapter, “The Transmutation 

of Memory,” Hines photographs cherry 

blossoms as a metaphor for the cycle of 

her brother’s short life in remembrance 

of veterans of all wars and innocent 

civilians who suffer war’s consequences. 

—MB 


A BETTER LIFE FOR THEIR 

CHILDREN 

By Andrew Feiler 

University of Georgia Press, 2022 

144 pages | $35 

ALIVE AND DESTROYED 

By Jason Francisco 

Daylight Books, 2021 

144 pages | $40 

LIKE A RIVER 

By Daniel Jack Lyons 

Loose Joints, 2022 

112 pages | $44 

In 1912, Julius Rosenwald and Booker 

T. Washington launched an ambitious 

program to build public schools 

for African American children across 

the segregated South, creating some of 

the first African American educational 

opportunities that fortified the generation 

who became the leaders and foot 

soldiers of the civil rights movement. 

Andrew Feiler’s, A Better Life for Their 

Children, documents these landmark 

schools and some of the people whose 

lives they’ve touched. 

The book features eighty-five of Feiler’s 

exquisitely detailed duotone images of 

school interiors and exteriors, locations 

where some schools were, and portraits 

of people who have unique, compelling 

connection to each school. Feiler also 

wrote brief narratives for the photographs 

that tell us the inspiring stories about 

these schools, and how they connect to 

important African American historical 

events. 

The book also includes an introduction 

from Congressman John Lewis, 

who attended a Rosenwald school in 

Alabama; and essays from preservationist 

Jeanne Cyriaque and Brent Leggs, 

director of African American Cultural 

Heritage at the National Trust for Historic 

Preservation, who writes a poignant plea 

to preserve these historic landmarks for 

future generations. 

For 25 years, photographer Jason 

Francisco has wrestled with the 

afterlife of the Holocaust, creating 

a large number of photo works and 

essays, including extensive work with 

the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, 

Poland. His book, Alive and Destroyed, 

documentary in spirit and conceptualist 

in method, captures the haunting 

timelessness of the locations where the 

events we collectively call the Holocaust 

occurred. 

His photographs don’t reduce the 

Holocaust to only the notorious places 

such as concentration camps or ghettos. 

He also shows us small and forgotten 

localities where the genocide occurred, 

such as slave labor camps, transit and 

subcamps, prisons and escape routes. He 

chose the combination of a large format 

camera and antique lenses because 

that allowed him to produce fragile and 

unresolved photographs that play with 

the zone of focus. The resulting images 

have a differentially blurred visual field, 

punctuated by some sharpness usually 

in the center, to replicate the differences 

between memory and remembrance. 

Collectively the images attempt to release 

the volatile mixture of incomprehension, 

argument, reclamation, and loss that 

constitute the Holocaust as an inheritance 

for the living. 

D 

aniel Jack Lyons’ debut monograph, 

Like a River, continues the 

American artist and anthropologist’s 

long-term commitment to visually document 

the social and political rights of 

under-represented communities and to 

use images as a tool for social change. 

Lyons, whose background is in social 

and medical anthropology, began working 

in the Amazon in an artist residency 

at Casa do Rio, a community-based 

organization that celebrates and supports 

the cultural lives of teenagers and 

young people who live in the heart of 

the Amazon rainforest. 

His lush, deeply saturated and poetic 

color photographs, shot over three years, 

include candid portraits and well-seen 

small details that reveal the complexity of 

trying to reconcile Indigenous traditions 

and modern identity politics. The images, 

remarkably devoid of all clichés, visualize 

and empower the trans and queer communities 

of the region, elucidating their 

generational struggle to come of age and 

affirm their individuality amid the lush 

canopies and vegetation of the rainforest. 

The book also asks us to imagine what 

world these teenagers will inhabit if we 

don’t stop the toxic mix of environmental 

degradation, violence, and discrimination 

that permeates their communities. 


Contributors 

Virginia Allyn spent most of her life in the 

San Francisco Bay Area where she started in 

the mid 1990’s telling stories with her camera. 

She worked in San Francisco’s Tenderloin 

and later moved to New York City where she 

continues doing street photography, looking for 

stories she wishes to tell. 

Barbara Ayotte is the editor of ZEKE magazine 

and the Communications Director of the 

Social Documentary Network. She has served 

as a senior strategic communications strategist, 

writer and activist for leading global health, 

human rights and media nonprofit organizations, 

including the Nobel Peace Prize- winning 

Physicians for Human Rights and International 

Campaign to Ban Landmines. 

David Bacon has been photographing the 

social movements of workers and migrants for 

three decades. His most recent book, about the 

U.S./Mexico border, is More Than a Wall/Mas 

que un muro. 

Michelle Bogre currently holds the title of 

Professor Emerita from Parsons School of Design 

in New York after a 25-year career teaching 

almost every type of photography class. She 

is also a copyright lawyer, documentary 

photographer and author of four books, with 

work published in various other books. She is 

currently trying to finish a long-term documentary 

project on family farms – @thefarmstories on 

Instagram – among other projects. 

Brian Branch-Price began his career as 

a freelancer for The Washington Post, then 

staffing with The News Journal in Wilmington, 

DE and The Associated Press in Trenton, NJ. 

He focuses on portraiture, reportage, and fine 

art photography. Brian has worked with Ebony 

magazine, GM, and others, and had several 

art exhibits at the Plainfield Public Library on 

his legendary Black gospel artists and veterans, 

including over 20,000 visitors. He holds 

degrees in Environmental Geology and Fine 

Arts from Howard University. 

Steve Cagan has been practicing activist 

photography since the mid-1970s. He is 

most concerned with exploring strength and 

dignity in everyday struggles of grassroots 

people resisting their pressures and problems. 

Major projects include “Working Ohio,” 

an extended portrait of working people; as 

well as Indochina; Nicaragua; El Salvador; 

and Cuba. His current major project is “El 

Chocó, Colombia: Struggle for Cultural and 

Environmental Survival.” He has exhibited and 

published on four continents, has won numerous 

awards, and co-authored two books. 

Proudly from New York City, where he grew 

up in the 1970s, Eric Chang currently lives in 

Washington, DC. His interest in photography 

started as a student at The High School of 

Art and Design and exploded years later on 

a trip to Nepal. Planning on taking photos 

of Mount Everest, he discovered he enjoyed 

photographing the Nepalese people and their 

culture more. His photography is motivated by 

curiosity about the world we live in and having 

compassion for others. 

Esha Chiocchio is a photographer and 

filmmaker using her combined knowledge of 

visual storytelling and sustainable communities 

to inspire social change. An optimistic 

realist, she focuses on solutions to social 

and environmental challenges. Her current 

project, “Good Earth,” highlights agrarians 

from diverse sectors who are revitalizing land 

and drawing carbon into the soil through 

regenerative practices. She has photographed 

around the world for publications, non-profits, 

and commercial clients, including National 

Geographic, High Country News, Jardins du 

Monde, and Bonefish Grill. 

Daniela Cohen is a freelance journalist and 

non-fiction writer of South African origin currently 

based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has been 

published in New Canadian Media, Canadian 

Immigrant, The Source Newspaper, and is 

upcoming in Living Hyphen. Daniela’s work 

focuses on themes of displacement and belonging, 

justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. She 

is also the co-founder of Identity Pages, a youth 

writing mentorship program. 

Robin Fader has won numerous Emmy 

awards for her television and photography 

work. Her most rewarding work was 

documenting life on the streets of Washington, 

DC in 2020, including issues of racial and 

social injustice, rising fascism and the assault on 

reproductive rights. That work became part of 

a co-authored documentary photography book, 

2020 UNMASKED. Her wish is that beyond 

her life, her photographs will help us remember, 

recover from, and ultimately repair, the wrongs 

of these troubled times. 

Nick Gervin is a documentary and fine art 

photographer from Portland, Maine and is the 

Executive Director of the Bakery Photographic 

Collective. Nick has had two traumatic brain 

injuries and now suffers from Post-Concussion 

Syndrome. As a disabled artist, all of his work is 

a direct result from his injuries. Nick’s work has 

been published in many local and international 

magazines, as well as in several photo books. 

He is currently working with Martin Amis and 

Tom Booth Woodger of Photo Editions on his 

forthcoming monograph, Portlanders. 

Lori Grinker is an award-winning documentary 

photographer and author. Her work has garnered 

many awards including an Ernst Haas Award, 

a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, and an Open 

Society Community Engagement Grant. She has 

published three books: The Invisible Thread: A 

Portrait of Jewish American Women, Afterwar: 

Veterans from a World in Conflict, and Mike 

Tyson. She is an Assistant Professor of Journalism & 

Design at The New School, and teaches part time 

at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Graduate 

School of Journalism. Grinker is a senior member 

of Contact Press Images and is represented by 

ClampArt Gallery in New York City. 

Cheryl L. Guerrero is a San Francisco-based 

photographer. Locally, she contributes to online 

media publications, chronicling life in the San 

Francisco Bay Area. Photography is a way for 

her to create and explore, while documenting 

life and relaying important stories. Her work 

revolves around people and the underlying 

themes of community, culture, and tradition. 

Daniel Hoffman is a professor and 

photographer. Over the past 30 years, he has 

completed a number of photo documentaries 

in numerous countries including the U.S., 

Japan, Kenya, Brazil, and Bulgaria on topics 

ranging from the lives of Roma as refugees, 

underground music clubs, religion and worship 

in marginal communities, and the changing face 

of Times Square. 

Raymond W Holman Jr is a corporate and 

documentary photographer with over twenty 

years’ experience located in Philadelphia, PA. 

His client list includes The Washington Post, 

Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, Politico, 

Philadelphia Health Department. Since March 

2020, he has been working on a personal 

project titled “COVID-19 in Black America,” 

which focuses on how the pandemic has affected 

Black and Brown communities in Philadelphia, its 

surrounding area and Atlanta, GA. 

Anthony Karen is a documentary 

photographer based in New York. His passion for 

photography began in Haiti, where he continues 

to document Vodou rituals and pilgrimages. Longterm 

projects include extensive documentation 

of White separatists, leading to two books, 

exhibitions in Bulgaria, Italy, the annual 

Noorderlicht Festival and two screenings at Visa 

Pour I’Image international photojournalism festival 

in France. He associate produced Ku Klux Klan en 

pasaporte Pampliega for Cuerdos de Atar TV in 

Madrid and has collaborated on other similarlythemed 

documentaries. 

Born in the Kingdom of Bahrain, Ghada 

Khunji is a graduate of the Parsons School 

of Design and the International Center of 

Photography’s Documentary Program in New 

York. Khunji’s photographs are known for 

documenting both landscapes and people from 

all over the world and the inherent dignity of 

the human element. The recipient of several 

awards, including the Lucie Discovery of the 

Year, she has exhibited widely in the U.S., 

Europe, and the Middle East. 

Stephen Mayes is Executive Director of 

the Tim Hetherington Trust with 30 years’ 

experience managing photography in the areas 

of fashion, art, commerce, and journalism. 

As creative director and as CEO, he has 

written successful business plans and reshaped 

operations for American, Asian, and European 

imaging companies. Stephen acted as secretary 

to the World Press Photo competition 2004– 

2012. Often described as a “futurist,” Stephen 

has broadcast, taught and written extensively 

about the ethics and practice of photography. 


After three decades as an award-winning 

advertising creative director and writer in 

New York, Kevin McKeon turned his deep 

curiosity and love for compelling stories to 

documentary photography full-time in 2018. 

Kevin seeks projects that can open minds 

and have a positive impact. Projects include 

exploring unexpected interactions between 

strangers sharing benches along Coney Island’s 

boardwalk, marching with and documenting 

the Black Lives Matter marches throughout NYC 

and Washington DC, and capturing the working 

lives and strong community of Black rodeo 

cowboys in Southeast Texas. 

Dana Melaver is a writer and artist. Her work 

is rooted in the belief that everything is interesting, 

and often acts as a bridge among art, 

thought, and the sciences. Dana’s most recent 

projects include an experimental documentary 

about sustainable aquaculture, and an ode to the 

mischievous qualities of light. 

Jared Ragland is a fine art and documentary 

photographer and former White House photo 

editor. His collaborative, socially-conscious 

work critically confronts issues of identity, 

marginalization, and the history of place. 

He currently serves as Assistant Professor of 

Photography at Utah State University in Logan, UT. 

Susan Ressler is an artist, author, and 

educator who has been making social 

documentary photographs for nearly fifty years. 

Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art 

Museum, the Library and Archives Canada, the 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 

and many other collections. Her first monograph, 

Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate 

America, was published by Daylight Books in 

2018. Dreaming California: High End, Low End, 

No End in Sight, will be released by Daylight in 

2023. Ressler lives in Taos, New Mexico. 

Jean Ross is a California-born photographer 

currently based in Brooklyn. She photographs 

places and the people who live in them. Jean 

has studied at the International Center of 

Photography and her work has been featured in 

solo shows at Viewpoint Gallery in Sacramento, 

California and Gallery 1855 in Davis, California 

and in group shows at the International Center 

of Photography and other galleries in Oaxaca, 

New York, and Los Angeles. 

A native of Jamaica, Radcliffe “Ruddy” 

Roye has crisscrossed the country engaging 

on a personal level with the African-American 

experience, combining deep research, writing, 

and self-reflection to contextualize what he sees 

for his viewers. As one of the premier innovators 

and artist-activists on the Instagram platform, 

he has amassed 300,000 followers and was 

Time’s 2016 Instagram Photographer of the 

year. Widely exhibited and published, he has 

received assignments and been featured in such 

publications as The New York Times Magazine, 

National Geographic and Time. 

Boston-based Matilde Simas is a visual 

journalist who has a BS in Psychology and 

Women’s Studies and attended Rhode Island 

School of Design to study photography. Her 

images have been published in the Trafficking in 

Persons Report, an annual U.S. State Department 

report, and in Kenyan research publications 

to advance anti-trafficking efforts. With 

photography exhibited by various United Nations 

agencies, Matilde founded Capture Humanity, an 

organization supporting grassroots community 

initiatives with storytelling media. 

Jeanny Tsai is a photographer, storyteller, 

and lover of life specializing in documentary, 

ethnographic, and portrait photography. Jeanny 

has a passion for photographing people and 

cultures that express their devotion to the divine 

through rituals and celebrations and for those 

facing environmental or social challenges 

threatening established culturally rich ways of life, 

including in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nepal, and 

the U.S. She desires that her photos convey a 

positive, uplifting testimony of people and places 

despite the existing external circumstances. 

Lizzy Unger is a photographer, storyteller 

and communications consultant based in the DC 

area. She uses photography to document and 

elevate the work of local activists and everyday 

people working for change. 

Kate Way is a critical educator, photographer, 

and documentary filmmaker based in 

western Massachusetts. Her interests lie in the 

intersection of media literacy, public education 

and policy, and social and economic justice. 

With a doctorate in Language, Literacy, and 

Culture, Kate is a Lecturer in the College of 

Education at the University of Massachusetts 

Amherst, and director of the Visual Literacy 

Project, a secondary school documentary 

photography program. Her photography has 

been published on numerous platforms. 



FALL 



SDN would like to thank the following donors to the 

2022 Campaign for the SDN Website. Support from 

private individuals is essential for SDN and ZEKE to 

continue publishing. 

To support SDN and all our programs, please visit 

www.socialdocumentary.net/cms/support 

Donors to the Campaign for the SDN Website 

Anonymous 

Leah Abrahams 

Angela Atamas 

Julien Ayotte 

Edward S. Barnas 

Emily Belz 

Kevin Bernard Jones 

Sally Bubier 

Eric Chang 

Elizabeth Cheng 

Esha Chiocchio 

Enos Cozier 

Catherine Davies 

Susan Eggenberger 

Vennie Eline White 

Michael Ensdorf 

Deborah Espinosa 

Mary Farmilant 

Morrie Gasser 

Ezio Gianni Murzi 

Deborah Fisher Goldstein 

Ivy Gordon 

Audrey Gottleib 

Paul Gottlieb 

David Greenfield 

John Greiner-Ferris 

Iain Guest 

Robert Hansen 

Janet Jarman 

Clara Maxwell 

Susan Mazer-Smith 

Mary Beth Meehan 

Elisa Merlo 

Jorge Monteagudo 

Roger Mummert 

Christiaan Partridge 

Andrea Reese 

Susan Ressler 

Tony Schwartz 

Mark Silverberg 

John Simpson 

Stephanie Solomon 

David Spink 

Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano 

Jamey Stillings 

David Thomas 

Elizabeth Unger 

Benita VanWinkle 

Chad Wyatt 

Amy Yenkin 

2022 Vol. 8/No. 2 

$15 US 

ZEKE is published by Social Documentary Network (SDN), 

a nonprofit organization promoting visual storytelling about 

global themes. Started as a website in 2008, today SDN 

works with thousands of photographers around the world to tell 

important stories through the visual medium of photography. 

Since 2008, SDN has featured more than 4,000 exhibits on its 

website and has had gallery exhibitions in major cities around 

the world. All the work featured in ZEKE first appeared on the 

SDN website, www.socialdocumentary.net. 


Executive Editor: Glenn Ruga 

Editor: Barbara Ayotte 

Photo Editor and Diversity Advisor: 

Lisa DuBois 

Book Review Editor: Michelle Bogre 

Writer: Daniela Cohen 

Reportage International, 

Inc. Board of Directors 

Glenn Ruga, President 

Eric Luden, Treasurer 

Barbara Ayotte, Secretary 

Michelle Bogre 

Lisa DuBois 

John Heffernan 

SDN and ZEKE magazine 

are projects of Reportage 

International, Inc., a nonprofit 

organization founded in 2020. 

To Subscribe: 


ZEKE does not accept unsolicited 

submissions. To be considered for 

publication in ZEKE, submit your 

photographs to the SDN website 

either as a standard exhibit or a 

submission to a Call for Entries. 

61 Potter Street 

Concord, MA 01742 USA 

info@socialdocumentary.net 



socdoctweets 

SDN Advisory Committee 

Catherine Edelman, Chicago, IL 

Director, Catherine Edelman 

Gallery 

Lori Grinker, New York, NY 

Independent Photographer and 

Educator 

Catherine Karnow, 

San Francisco, CA 

Independent Photographer and 

Educator 

Ed Kashi, Montclair, NJ 

Member of VII photo agency 

Photographer, Filmmaker, 

Educator 

Eric Luden, Cambridge, MA 

Founder/Owner 

Digital Silver Imaging 

Lekgetho Makola, Johanesburg, 

South Africa 

Head, Market Photo Workshop 

Molly Roberts, Washington, DC 

Independent Visual Storyteller and 

Producer 

Jamel Shabazz, New York, NY 

Independent Fine Art, Fashion and 

Documentary Photographer 

Jeffrey D. Smith, New York NY 

Director, Contact Press Images 

Jamey Stillings, Sante Fe, NM 

Independent Photographer 

Steve Walker, Danbury, CT 

Consultant and Educator 

Frank Ward, Williamsburg, MA 

Photographer and Educator 

Amy Yenkin, New York, NY 

Independent Producer and Editor 

socialdocumentarynet 

socialdocumentary 

ZEKE is published twice a year by 


Copyright © 2022 


ISSN 2381-1390 


PROFILE: COVER PHOTOGRAPHER 

Amber Bracken 

Showcasing Indigenous Resistance 

and Resilience in North America 

By Daniela Cohen 

Amber Bracken decided to become a 

photographer at age 15 after rejecting 

the office jobs proposed by an 

aptitude test as too boring. Born and 

raised in Alberta, Canada, Bracken enjoyed 

sketching and painting but struggled to 

complete pieces, so photography was 

appealing as an art form she could finish 

faster. Her simultaneous choice to pursue 

photojournalism stemmed from the 

intersection of her passion for creativity and 

doing good in the world. 

Bracken has since adjusted her aspirations 

to the reality of working for change in 

this context. “If you’re talking about social 

change, it’s slow, it’s difficult, and it requires 

investment,” she says. “It very rarely is do this 

and you’ll get that – like if you share your 

migration story, we’ll open all the borders.” 

A substantial focus of her work has been 

on Indigenous communities. This grew out 

of a long-term project with Indigenous 

youth who are living with intergenerational 

trauma. The experience led her on a learning 

journey. 

“I see so clearly now that it’s not an issue 

only in Indigenous communities. It’s an 

issue of contemporary society, those unaddressed 

colonial impacts,” says Bracken. “We 

are really looking at a shared history.” 

In 2015, Bracken first visited the 

Unist’ot’en Camp of the Wet’suwet’en people 

in northern British Columbia, Canada, 

resisting the development of their land by a 

pipeline company, where she saw the same 

historical pattern of Indigenous people 

being criminalized for such resistance. 

News coverage in the Canadian media 

also highlighted the ongoing issue of 

Indigenous consultation versus consent. 

“I’m always thinking about how 

authorities say one thing, like, we’re going 

to consult with you, but ultimately we are 

going to build it no matter what you say,” 

says Bracken. 

In Canada, she witnessed “a lonely fight” 

with small groups and sparse resources, so 

seeing 4,000 people standing in solidarity 

against the Dakota Access Pipeline at 

the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 

September 2016 was monumental. 

Bracken captured the cover photo of 

this issue of ZEKE during a blizzard when 

war veterans came to the camp to show 

their support. Seeing the Kanien’kehà:ka 

(Mohawk) flag, which has come to be a 

significant symbol of Indigenous resistance, 

was profoundly symbolic. 

“The Canadian American border is 

not particularly meaningful in terms of the 

experience of Indigenous people in North 

America,” said Bracken. “The people are 

Amber Bracken at Lac Ste Anne, Alberta, Canada. 

Photo by Joey Podlubney 

much more closely related to one another 

than the boundaries that we put between 

them …. The foundational impacts of colonization 

really do echo across the border.” 

Although Bracken’s work includes 

documenting the militarized force that 

continues to be used against Indigenous 

land defenders, she hopes people will take 

time to discover the “reconnection to the 

land, community and culture” that occurred 

at Standing Rock, and learn about “the 

rich cultures around us as well as our shared 

colonial history.” 

As a descendant of Danish settlers to 

Canada, Bracken is clear that documentation 

cannot be the end goal. “I’m wrestling 

with how to look at this colonial history 

from a new perspective, that truly acknowledges 

the impacts for both colonizer and 

colonized. And asks, what are some of the 

paths to repairing some of the harms in 

both directions?” 


SUBSCRIBE 

WWW.ZEKEMAGAZINE.COM

documentary 

SDNsocial 

network 

PUBLISHER OF ZEKE MAGAZINE 

61 Potter Street 

Concord, MA 01742 

USA 

©2022 Herb Greene “American Beauty” (Jerry Garcia, San Francisco 1967) 

Real Silver Gelatin Prints DIRECTLY from your Digital File 

DSI Digital Silver Print ® Fiber • DSI Digital Silver Print ® RC 

Color Pigment Prints • Complete Mounting & Matting Services • Custom Framing 

Digitization Services • Shipping World Wide 

digitalsilverimaging.com • 617 489-0035

ZEKE Magazine: Fall 2022

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?