S7E7: Daniella Zalcman

Daniella Zalcman is a documentary photographer and the founder of Women Photograph.

Zalcman’s project “Signs of Your Identity,” about boarding schools for indigenous communities in North America, began as a traditional photojournalism project, with straightforward portraits of individuals who had endured that abusive system:

But I realized pretty quickly that the images themselves, the photos that I was taking, they did a very poor job … they weren’t going to allow my audience a glimpse into that history. They weren’t going to encourage my audience to think more deeply about these systemic things … And so I realized that pure photojournalism was kind of failing me in that moment and that I needed to come up with a new visual language.

Subscribe to The Design of Business | The Business of Design on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

A big thanks to our sponsor, Mailchimp.

Observed

View all

Jobs

View all

Share on Social

By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

View more from this author

Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.