Shaminder Dulai: On troublemaking
In this episode we talk with Shaminder Dulai about troublemaking. He describes how he navigates ethical considerations, both as a photo editor and as a photojournalist. He defines the difference between a “picture taker” and a “picture maker,” he discusses media literacy, and he describes the responsibilities that come with image making. Shaminder advocates for a kind of “troublemaking” by speaking up when you have questions or concerns.
What does photography ethics mean to Shaminder?
“I think for me the answer is: at the end of the day are you proud to put your name on this? Do you feel like you did right that day? Ethics is like, kind of like objectivity, it’s not a binary and its always changing, it’s always evolving, it’s a living creature in a lot of ways. Ethics today are very different than what they were 20 years ago, same as objectivity, same as our norms in the newsroom. And I think ethics, it’s that higher purpose, like, okay: are you doing right by the responsibility of the journalism? Have you done your due diligence? Have you avoided perpetuating harm? Have you avoided stereotypes? Have you made time for the people you are working with to fully understand what the story is? Have you advocated when you felt like you should have? Did you not stay silent because you were afraid of making waves? I think ethics are all part of that. It’s like character. It’s like at the end of the day, all that comes together and your byline is on it.” (44:33)
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Shaminder Dulai is a 13-time Emmy-nominated, award-winning photo and video journalist, visual editor, writer, educator, curator, and creative technologist with over 20 years of experience producing stories for newspapers, magazines, TV, digital newsrooms, nonprofits and start-ups. He crafts journalistic narratives with intimacy, immediacy, and impact that live beyond the daily news cycle, empowering communities to make informed choices and understand complex issues with empathy. He is a Poynter Fellow, a International Center for Journalists Fellow, a Hearst Fellow, and was a finalist for the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, the JSK Stanford Fellowship and the Harvard Nieman Fellowship. He's led departments at NBC, Newsweek, PBS-Seattle, Amazon, YMCA and worked on teams at The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Hearst Newspapers and more. He was an instructor in New Media Narratives and a facility member with the International Center for Photography. He is a co-founder of StatelessVoices, co-founder of Reclaim Photo and founder of PhotoWalk.Cities.
You can see his work at https://www.shaminderdulai.com