Anastasia Taylor-Lind: On being slow, kind, and gentle
In this episode, we talk with Anastasia Taylor-Lind about being slow, kind, and gentle. She shares her experiences of telling delicate stories about people struggling with trauma, and she describes how she works to include their input in order to craft more authentic photographs. She goes on to talk about the differences between her roles as a photojournalist and poet, and how she decides which medium is more fitting for the stories she tells.
What does photography ethics mean to Anastasia?
“Nothing. I don’t mean that it’s not important, but it’s impossible to define ethics because it’s something that’s personal to each person. And that’s one of the challenges...when we talk about ethical photography or ethical war reporting. It’s impossible to define ethics, but, for me, if I were to boil it all down to one rule for myself, it is do no harm. To the best of my ability, don’t hurt anyone with my reporting.” (40:31)
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Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a photojournalist who has been reporting on women, war and violence for the last 20 years. She is a National Geographic Society Explorer, a TED fellow and a 2016 Harvard Nieman fellow. Anastasia has been photographing the war in Ukraine since it started in 2014. An overview of this work was exhibited at Imperial War Museums in the UK in 2022. Her monograph Maidan: Portraits from the Black Square, which documented the Revolution of Dignity, was published by GOST books in 2014. Her first poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Anastasia holds Master's degrees in Documentary Photography and Poetry. She is the 2024 World Press Photo Contest Europe jury chair.
You can see her work at https://www.anastasiataylorlind.com