Over the years, Brent Lewis has stood out in media scrums on assignment or in the audience at conferences and workshops: He’s usually among the very few photographers of color — or the only one — around.
“We are easy to spot in a crowd at photo events,” said Mr. Lewis, the photo editor for ESPN’s The Undefeated. “Yet I personally know many black photographers.”
In fact, he credits his own career to a childhood moment of recognition one hot summer day in 1997 during the Bud Billiken parade, a celebration of African-American pride on Chicago’s South Side. He recalls seeing a black photographer — he thinks it was John White of The Sun Times — weaving through the marching bands of the seemingly endless parade.
“That opened my eyes,” he said. “First off it’s amazing he got paid to take pictures for a living, and second, he looks like me. That was a wake-up moment, I wanted to make pictures that matter for the rest of my life.”
He has now made it his mission to wake up photo editors who tell him they would like to hire photographers of color but don’t know any. Mr. Lewis knows that they are out there, but photo editors need to go outside their normal circles, and outside their comfort zone, to find them. Rather than just leave it at that — solid advice that gets repeated like a mantra but seldom goes further — Mr. Lewis, 27, has created a website with a searchable database of some 340 experienced photographers of color with details and contacts exclusively for photo editors.
The move is part of Diversify Photo, a new organization devoted to “creating a place where people can come and see photographers of color, to know they are out there and they exist, and to provide editors with the ability to find people not in their circles.”


Ghada, left, and Tasneem, originally from Gaza, on a beach in Florida. Kholood Eid
Earlier this year, Mr. Lewis and Andrea Wise, a freelance photo editor, put out an open call on social media to photographers who identify as “being of color.” One thousand five hundred people replied and filled out the questionnaire.
With the assistance of a team of editors including Elijah Sinclair Walker, Jennifer Samuel and Jehan Jillani of National Geographic; Jessie Wender and Elizabeth Krist, formerly of National Geographic; Dudley Brooks of The Washington Post; and Michael Wichita of AARP. They winnowed the list to about 340 who they had confidence would be consistent in fulfilling freelance assignment work.
Diversify Photo — whose website is sponsored by Visura, which itself was founded by Adriana Teresa Letorney, a Puerto Rican media entrepreneur — will create educational, career development and mentorship programs for photographers of color including college students, Mr. Lewis said. He also plans to work with like-minded groups like Women Photograph and Reclaim to push for more diverse perspectives in visual storytelling. Broadening perspectives on race, class and gender is a much-needed challenge to traditional approaches that reinforce “a monolithic point of view,” said Rhea Combs, curator of film and photography at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“When you have a very one-note perspective, then you’re pretty much determining what you think is beautiful, what you think is valuable and what you think is significant enough to record in history,” she said. “I think it’s really short-sighted and it limits our understanding of life and the world.”
DIVERSITY IN PHOTOJOURNALISM
A look back at Lens coverage of diversity in photography.
Even good intentions can backfire when editors make snap judgments on what people can or cannot shoot. Joe Rodriguez bristles at being labeled. By his account he is “a little mensch from Brooklyn who happens to be Puerto Rican and Venezuelan who grew up with everybody —black, brown, purple, green — in the mishegas of this place called New York City.”
Mr. Rodriguez grew up hard and did a couple of brief stints on Rikers Island before discovering a new way of life through photography. He was interested in nuanced stories from neighborhoods he knew growing up, stories that differed from that of many of his contemporaries, who just focused on dysfunction and drama. Mr. Rodriguez had his stories published in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and he even had a National Geographic cover story on East Harlem. But he rarely got any assignments, and when he did, they were always to photograph stories about poor blacks and Hispanics.
“I was branded as the ghetto photographer, or the gang photographer,” he said.
Sometimes first impressions are way off-base said Yunghi Kim, a veteran photographer and Pulitzer finalist. “People perceive me as a petite Asian woman and they don’t know my power,” she said. Despite those miscalculations about her abilities or determination, she was set on building her reputation, like when she walked into Iraq at the beginning of the U.S. invasion in 2003.


Prodigy. Anthony Geathers
“I’ve always found confidence and competitiveness in my photographs,” she said, “because once people saw my photographs my skin color and gender mattered less.”
Diversify is but the latest of several groups that have started in recent years to prod the industry into turning its high-minded talk of diversity and inclusion into concrete steps. Kholood Eid, a Palestinian-American freelance photographer in New York, belongs to both Diversify and Women Photograph, yet is sad there’s a need for both groups. As a recent graduate from a master’s program, she is keenly aware of the role class — and privilege — plays in limiting opportunities in the early stages of a career, noting how people with modest financial means simply cannot accept unpaid internships, at least not if they want to be able to pay the rent and eat.
“Photojournalism has felt pretty monochromatic for the longest time,” she said. “Older white men for sure have dominated the industry since its inception, but I think that things are beginning to get better, especially as far as gender.”
She has benefited from getting assignments because of her background and is grateful for the work. But she also fears typecasting. “Being an Arab, Muslim, woman photographer informs the way I shoot and plays a part in the type of stories I am drawn to,” she said. “But I’m not exclusively interested in stories relating to Muslims or Arabs or even women for that matter. I would like to be assigned all kinds of stories.”
While being an insider can help photographers steer clear of stereotypes, she feels there is also an important place for an outsider viewpoint that offers a perspective that can only be achieved with distance, like Robert Frank did with “The Americans.”
The desire to have their voices heard — and the issues that mattered covered — has long been of concern in the African-American community, said Richard Prince, the editor of Journal-isms, a website devoted to diversity in journalism. He dates it to the country’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, whose editors declared in 1827: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” While a similar impulse led to the creation of influential, black-owned newspapers like The Chicago Defender, it was not enough to influence mainstream media. Indeed, among the sobering findings of the Kerner Commission report after urban unrest in the 1960s was a call for more diversity in mainstream media.
The industry began to stir itself out of complacency in 1978, when the American Society of News Editors started a staff census of newspapers around the country. When the group found that the percentage of minority journalists in American newsrooms was just 3.95 percent in 1978, it set an industry goal to match the percentage of journalists to the percentage of people of color in the general population by the year 2000.
The goal was not met, with the percentage of minorities in newsrooms hovering at between 12 to 17 percent for the last decade. Instead, 2025 was set as the new target. This does not surprise Mr. Prince, who had been an editor at The Washington Post. Despite improvements in some newsrooms during the 1980s and 1990s, progress has stalled as the industry faced economic and structural upheaval.
“The rise of the internet, and the precariousness of the financial condition of newspapers, caused a lot of the owners to forget all about diversity and say, ‘We have to worry about own bottom line and survival,’ not realizing that what also was happening at the same time were demographic changes in the population that made diversity even more important because the consumer base was changing,” he said. “It’s supposed to be a majority minority country by 2050, I believe.”
In addition to bringing about a cultural shift within companies, there needs to be accountability, too. Mr. Prince echoed the sentiment of many when he said that hiring needs to reflect diversity goals, which may come only through the recognition of the power of one particular color: green. “If you don’t produce diversity among the section that you are responsible for, then your salary is affected,” Mr. Prince said. “That gets people’s attention.”
With shrinking staffs and budgets, most editorial photographers now work on a freelance basis. And photographers of color are facing stronger headwinds in getting started in the industry, Mr. Lewis said. Few of them are coming through the pipeline at photojournalism schools like Ohio University, Missouri or Western Kentucky, so most don’t have the networks or resources to land coveted internships or find mentors. People tend to hire and mentor people like themselves, he said, and there are very few photo editors who are not white. It can be even more daunting for minority women photographers, who have to confront issues of race and class on top of the all-too-common obstacles of gender prejudice, strains on personal lives and sexual harassment.
Well-placed minority editors or photographers know that an unspoken job requirement is to mentor and nurture the next generation, who come to them seeking advice — and a familiar face — in a tough and changing industry. Eli Reed, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, has been a devoted mentor who has counseled legions of photographers of all backgrounds, including Darcy Padilla and Meridith Kohut.
He remembers how early in his career he was treated rudely, “as if I didn’t exist,” which is really saying something, since he is a big man with a personality to match. He always responded politely, because that’s “the way I was raised” — but it was wearying.
Mr. Reed has seen a lot of changes in the industry, but not enough. About 40 years ago he became the first black member of Magnum. Today he is still the only black member of the storied cooperative.
It’s a distinction he’d rather not have.
“In some ways Magnum is no different from the rest of society, as far as how they view other people and their work,” he said. “I think a lot of blacks and people of color are not submitting portfolios there because they think it’s a white boys’ club and that they will not feel comfortable there.”
This disappoints him, considering his belief that having a more diverse membership is not difficult — if you have the commitment. He cited “the really great work that Susan Meiselas has done as far as diversity at the ramana tv,” which routinely supports a broad range of photographers and projects. And while he is grateful that there is more discussion of the need for diversity, he knows that is only the first step.
“Talk is cheap.”