  March 7: Week in Photos   Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs.   📸For Your đź‘€ Only: A Love Letter to Harlem  Natalie Keyssar I highly recommend taking a look at the new exhibition on PHmuseum, The Other Side, which takes an insightful look at the complexities of migration from Central America to the United States. Danielle Villasana, who curated the overall show and worked as a photographer on some of the stories presented, was kind enough to answer some questions about why this photography and the grants that support it are so important. How did this get started? The exhibit is celebrating the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Adelante Latin American reporting initiative, which was a five-year-long program that started in 2016. The IWMF approached me to curate, help produce, and create promotional assets for the exhibit — I am an IWMF Adelante fellow myself, and I also co-led several reporting trips over the years.  I looked through every single publication that published work from the Adelante initiative. I had a session with PHmuseum curator and producer Rocco Venezia to discuss the flow of chapters, which definitely supported my initial brainstorming process.  Adelante was focused on migration but also the push and pull factors. The stories are a lot more nuanced and complex than just “this is the act of migrating." I wanted the exhibit to paint a portrait of migration from start to finish, so that is how the different chapters were sequenced.  Veronica Cardenas Can you talk about the Adelante program? The goals of Adelante are twofold: one is to highlight underrepresented narratives and to push mainstream narratives in the media with more layered reporting of Latin America, and the other goal is to equip women and nonbinary journalists with experience with in-country reporting trips and safety training. Most of the fellowships happened in Mexico, along the US-Mexico border, and in Colombia and Central America. Over the course of the fellowship program, there were around five fellowships every year. And these fellowships were happening at the same time as all these massive changes in terms of US immigration policy..  Was there a story that you felt really broke through, that would now be considered widely understood? One story that has stuck with me is by Nadia Shira Cohen on abortion rights in El Salvador. Instead of focusing solely on Zika, Cohen and her reporting partner, Nina Strochlic, looked at how Zika is impacting women in countries where abortion is illegal, and not only illegal but criminalized? Their story was published in National Geographic, and Nadia also published a piece in California Sunday Magazine. After that, it felt like everyone was looking at abortion in El Salvador, so I do think their story urged people to look at an issue that wasn’t being looked at so closely before in US publications and beyond.  Nadia Shira Cohen Any final takeaways? I hope that by taking a journey through the exhibition from start to finish, and seeing what is happening in people’s home countries to along their journeys to what happens in the quote-unquote “final destination,” viewers can understand how complex, and how difficult, the decision is to migrate. Oftentimes in mainstream media it’s a one-off story here, a one-off story there, and we don’t get the sense of how heavy a decision it is to flee your country, and how difficult the journey itself is, and how excruciatingly frustrating it can be for migrants when they finally do reach a border. Sometimes we’re like, “Oh, migration: someone goes from point A to point B and it’s done and [the person] gets asylum really easily,” but that’s not the case. It’s actually oftentimes a yearslong process and often takes someone years to decide to leave their home — although there are cases when people are forced to flee quickly due to violence. Something that many Adelante fellows talked about was that this could be anyone, you or me, or your neighbor or your friend. So, I hope that after exploring the exhibit, people walk away with a more complex understanding of migration, which might affect people’s thoughts about, for example, deportation. If people feel like deportation is the answer, do they know exactly what that person is being deported back to? Sometimes a book or an exhibition is going to serve a different purpose than a news article or magazine story. It’s hard to fit that much information into one news story. I think Adelante was successful in sharing more layered stories within the media through bits and pieces, but by putting it in one space and taking the reader from start to finish, the impact of Adelante becomes very clear. I am excited about it.  Almudena Toral   📸THE WEEK'S PHOTO STORIES FROM BUZZFEED NEWS 📸 This past week, we started Women's History Month, and the weather became tantalizingly warm in the Northeast US for a few brief moments.  As always, here are some of the best photo stories from around the internet, and what we loved from our desk. WHAT BLACK HISTORY MONTH MEANT TO ONE FAMILY  Richard Williams for BuzzFeed News THE IMAGES THAT MADE THE CAREER OF A MOMA CURATOR  Sarah Meister OTHER THINGS WORTH CHECKING OUT  Format Festival starts on March 11 CENTER Santa Fe has opened entries for grants   📸SOME HOPE 📸  Harpo Productions Embattled former royals and new fellow citizens Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex sit down for an interview with Oprah — and we are all hoping for good gossip to come of it.   “We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” — Ralph Hattersley That's it for this week! Kate + Pia Â
📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. Pia Peterson is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. You can always reach us here.  BuzzFeed, Inc. |
