It was early Sunday morning when I heard this: 85 to 90 percent of the news imagery we see is created by men. Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Emma Bowman, Weekend Edition Sunday, (WES), at NPR, are reporting that even at The New York Times, 90 percent of last year’s images run on the front page were created by men. And they mention a Kainaz Amaria, a visual editor at Vox, who thinks photojournalism needs to “face it’s #Me Too moment” (WES).

I’m thinking back, to some 41 years ago, 1977.

I graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 1977, with a BA in English and a minor in film, (film production and writing). I hadn’t thought about teaching, at any level. There were no teachers, writers, filmmakers, film writers, journalists or photojournalists in my family. And the women, my mother and my aunt, had been nurses of sorts, back in the 1950s, before they were pressured into giving up careers outside the house by older women. “Settling down.” Do your duty to community! There will be husbands who’ll need you. Children to raise and to educate—as good Catholics. And as good Catholic women, neither could serve as advisers. Neither would never think to encourage a young black woman to “go for it.” And they didn’t! And I’m still “recovering”!

A month after I graduated, however, Columbia College sent me a notification. A copy clerk position has opened up at the Chicago Sun-times. Jump to it! And, in a few weeks, I’m in the newsroom of an influential newspaper, looking to take advantage of this opportunity to train as a photojournalist.

I had seen the work of Gordon Parks, both his photos and his cinematography, yet, it never occurred to me, a 22-year old black women, in 1977, that I had not seen the work of any women photographers. No black women photographers. Or cinematographers. I had read the early works of Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni and others. Fiction and poetry.

In the newsroom at the Sun-Times, I think I was the only black woman. And I was a copy clerk! I remember one or two young black male journalists. No black editors. Siskel and Ebert sat in back seats, some rows behind the copy clerk hub. Irv Kucinet was still the premiere film critic, and his office was on the same floor as the newsroom—but not in the newsroom. Kucinet was still an idol of my mother’s generation. And she was able to meet him, too.

So Siskel and Ebert, in prep for their moment, were film critics in the newsroom with everyone else.

There were women. Journalists. Pam Zekman would transition from the newsroom at the Sun-Times for an anchor seat at CBS news in 1981.

But women photojournalists. Not a one!

Down the hall from the Sun-Times newsroom, a portion of a glass partition is visible. Beyond that glass was the newsroom of the Chicago Daily News. That paper had a female photojournalist, and I met her in this hallway. Why, I wanted to know, was she the only female photojournalist in the building. Two newspapers, but only one woman photographer. A white woman. Her response, the guys, the editors, think the job is too dangerous for women.

At home, I had not recourse. For my grandmother, mother, and aunt, I was the “child,” still, “born with a heart condition.” Of course it would be dangerous! Of course, you’re a woman! And black—in case you hadn’t noticed!

It was quite noticeable—in the newsroom! Yes!

And getting the attention of older white men who happened to be the editors and had been the editors for eons and all editors had been white—was impossible. The head middle-aged white women in charge of us copy clerks was about the jeopardize her position by having a black woman charge in on the editors. That pathway had a partition, too. I would go before she would allow me to be a brazenly violate the hierarchical structure in that newsroom.

And then I was blindsided by the presence of two black male photojournalists.

Prior to 1968, Bob Black worked for the Chicago Defender. John H. White would receive a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. In 1977, both men are photojournalist, Black for the Sun-Times and White for the Daily News. (He joins the Sun-Times the following year).

I don’t remember if I asked these guys about women working in their territory at the paper. But I made arraignments with another photographer to accompany him on his assignments, on my off time, to see just what was deemed so dangerous for women with cameras in their hands. I remember White didn’t hesitate when I asked to learn how to develop images in the darkroom. I learned a great deal about shooting and developing in just a few months. I have to say too these guys were busy but they were patient with a woman, a black woman, who, at the time, just had a manual 35 mm. I enroll for a year of photography and darkroom at Columbia College sometime later. In the meantime, you, ultimately, to do the best you can do under the circumstances. Even if that’s not enough.

I wanted to shoot images that were not quite typical of the black photography I had seen up to then. To be the photographer and not the object of the image - that in itself would be different! To show that black women see too!

Amaria worries that women photographers today are afraid to speak out. They huddle in conference rooms telling stories to each other. She listened as a woman photographer spoke of being raped in the field. (That “danger” that always falls back on the victim—until the #MeToo Movement began calling out the mindset that leads to the offensive behavior of men). Women fear losing what little bit of thread still connects them to what they love to do. (I can sympathize, having been blacklisted by academia for my subject matter and my insistence on transformation of the American mindset that so innocently lives with dangerous ideology of white supremacy).

Yet, in her article at Vox, she insist that the “‘toxic culture’” (Weekend Edition Sunday, online) that has as its foundation the active silencing of women, must be reckoned with in order to change the hostile environment women are forced to work in. The photojournalism industry needs to be held accountable, she tells Garcia-Navarro and Bowman.

And I hear! I hear! But I’m old enough to know that “women,” in general, may not necessarily refer to black women. Women usually means white and, if there’s inclusion, my experience has been it’s usually not black women. It’s not black women talking among themselves, about themselves and their work and their opportunities to work in a newsroom or as a freelance photojournalists. It’s not “identity politics.” Rather it’s making sure younger black women and girls here themselves being welcome among women to the discussion about exclusion. A subject and experience black women know all too well.

So when Amaria recognizes how photography helps humans see the world, and she wonders, “‘what does it mean for us to see our world mostly from the point of view of white men?,’” I want to echo Sojourner Truth: Aren’t black women women too?

Check with ones at the bottom of the racial totem pole here in the US. The idea of black women behind the camera is still (in 2018) an anomaly. I would want a discussion tackling the experiences of black, brown, and Indigenous women in the photojournalism industry.

In May, 1977, after a day on my shift, running around the newsroom, and then spending time with the photographers on a night shoot, I returned to the newsroom feeling sick. It was my heart. A minor episode that landed me in the hospital for a few days. But the insurance company (a pretty notable one) became suspicious about the “incident” and subsequent hospital stay. Could there be a “preexisting” health issue here?

That, we know, is another American story!

In the meantime, it was time to leave—for California. Hollywood. And it’s still 1977. And Hollywood was, as is now, so white! What’s that saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same!

Nonetheless, Amaria calls attention to a July 2018 report published in the Columbia Journalism Review in which Kristen Chick has documented allegations of “assault” and “harassment” “against prominent men in the field” (WES). https://www.cjr.org/special_report/photojournalism-sexual-harassment.php/

There is so much to be done, by women of color, for whom hostile environments are often the norm in any conference room or hallway, any office or work space. And, yes, any newsroom.

It’s a long read. But have a look. Then pick up a camera!