Ryan Christopher Jones is an award-winning photojournalist and regular contributor to The New York Times, ProPublica, and The Washington Post. His work often centers stories of labor, migration, and identity across the United States and Mexico. Much of his work explores the complex relationship between Mexican and American identities, and how those issues manifest in the cultural and political relationships between the two countries. Jones’ recent work includes in-depth stories during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, the opioid epidemic, economic mobility, and family separations. He is a fierce advocate of compassionate photojournalism and has written about this theme in two 2018 essays for The New York Times: “How Photography Exploits the Vulnerable” and “The Deja Vu of Mass Shootings.” Jones was recently announced as a recipient of the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Harvard Political Review: As a photojournalist, what do you view your role to be in our political ecosystem?
Ryan Christopher Jones: It’s easy to fall into the tropes of truth and reality when talking about the role and importance of journalism. But, as we’ve seen, there’s definitely a disconnect between truth and facts and reality. And that makes it hard to communicate what’s actually happening in the world. That being said, I still think journalism is one of the deeply foundational and important institutions that tell people what’s going on in the world.
I do think that journalism is going through a reckoning right now about what it means to be objective and neutral, if neutrality and objectivity are even goals. Why is it a goal for someone who has no stakes in the game to go to a place and say, “I am the one that is an objective observer?” I don’t know. I’ve been wrestling a lot with these questions. I think it’s important, but I think it’s complicated. I think that, as the world changes, as the digital medium changes, we need to constantly renegotiate how journalism informs the public of the world’s events.
HPR: Some might say, “You’re just taking a photo. What’s subjective about that? You’re just capturing a moment for what it is.” How would you react to that? And what elements of your work do you view as more objective? What role does subjectivity play?
RCJ: From a very quantitative perspective, the act of taking a picture is mostly exclusive. Photographers are constantly making decisions about what to include and what not to include. So it’s reductive just to say, “Oh, this is just you taking a picture.” You only have this amount of information to pack into a picture. A different story can be told if you move it here, or over there, up or down. What you decide to not put into a picture is a very intentional act. Photographers are constantly making decisions about what bits of information are and aren’t important.
There are two different layers of objectivity. There’s big-picture objectivity, but then there’s also objectivity down to the facts about what’s happening in a particular scene. I think it’s far easier to be objective about the things that are being presented to people right in front of them. It’s a little more complicated once you start dealing with the objectivity of the social forces that allow these things to happen.
As a journalist, I will always be objective about what’s being presented in the scene. But I know how I feel about migration. I know how I feel about labor policies. I know how I feel about economic systems. But I will say that I think most people can look at a reporter’s work and a journalist’s work and understand where the humanity is introduced in the situation.
HPR: One big trend, especially recently, is the rise of identity in politics — as we see with protests following George Floyd’s murder, the rise of anti-Asian hate and violence, continued issues related to Islamophobia, and immigration at the border. These are pieces or topics that you’ve covered a lot in your work. What role has identity played in how you approach your work?
RCJ: My identity as a Mexican American has greatly influenced the work I do. I feel lucky to let the questions that I have of who I am as a Mexican American influence the kinds of stories I want to tell and participate in.
I will say that I actively do not go to the border with the crisis that’s going on right now. I’m choosing not to go there because I think immigration is more complex and nuanced than simply seeing what’s happening when migrants are getting off the boats. Most journalists aren’t even getting the names of people that are getting off of these rafts. But that’s not the kind of work I want to do. Immigration is a huge part of my work, but I am more interested in those social forces. The ones that force people to leave their homes to come to the United States. The social forces that exist when people actually are in the United States and the political systems that make it harder for migrants to live a decent life. I’m approaching all of my work with the kind of sensitivity and nuance that I would like to bring to all of my stories.
HPR: Given people’s short attention spans, how do you reconcile reducing a complex story into a digestible narrative with your desire to explore those deeper nuances?
RCJ: You know, you’re catching me at a really interesting time in my own life and in my own career because I’ve been wrestling with these questions for a long time. And there are inherent limitations as a freelancer. I can’t just go to The New York Times and say, “Hey, I want to write a 5,000 word nuanced longform piece about X or Y.” Realistically, I’m going to have a really limited amount of space for it.
This is where my own social media profiles give me the latitude to dig more into the poetics of the work that doesn’t necessarily get published. I’m in a very tense place between the daily churning of the news and narratives that happen in journalism with the longform meditations on a body of academic work that I’m digging into. I’m trying to find a healthy balance between those two. But I don’t quite have the answer right now about how to make meaningful work in a social system designed for impermanence.
HPR: You’re a very big advocate of compassionate journalism. How does your work as a photojournalist foster empathy and connection in your viewers? How do you try to integrate compassion into your work process?
RCJ: The history of photojournalism has not been kind to how photographers represent “the other.” Photojournalism has a deep and long history in conflict photography. And that has set up the kind of social interpretations for how our work gets seen, how our work gets produced, how it gets interpreted.
A few years ago, I was assigned to photograph the opioid crisis in New York. Knowing how much the industry has slouched towards sensationalism, going into these barrios and the inner city and photographing these people who were just living lives full of despair and suffering, I know what those pictures look like. They’re usually black and white. They’re usually very gritty. Sometimes they’re anonymous. But it is always predicated on pain. And that’s how, I think, many viewers and audiences have come to expect those pictures. So we go into these imaginings of these scenes with a preconceived cultural understanding of what we think addiction looks like.
All that I’m trying to do is to show that suffering is not the only dimension of these complex issues. In these very complicated spaces, there are also moments of joy. There are moments of connection. There are moments of humanity. So, when I’m photographing addiction or harm reduction agencies, or people struggling with drug abuse, I’m still trying to find ways to show that they’re people and not just caricatures of addicts.
I hope and strive for my work to be connective, to show the connection between people, even amidst pain and suffering.
HPR: Is there a particularly powerful experience or piece in your career that has really stuck out with you?
RCJ: There have been a couple pieces. Four years ago, I was working on a story about methadone and suboxone treatment for people dealing with addiction. I was telling this woman about why I was trying to introduce more humanity in my work and that I didn’t want to photograph people just shooting up. And she said, “Thank you. Thank you for doing that.” I thought that she was just thanking me from a humane perspective. But she went on to elaborate that whenever she saw pictures of people using drugs, the visual stimulus of seeing people shoot up heroin was a trigger for her and it made her want to go out and do heroin. That blew me away. It blew me away that actually having this type of conversation with someone would be able to give me such a powerful metaphor of why those pictures are not just culturally harmful but actually interpersonally harmful. That gave me a framework to think of the more unpredictable social interpretations of how pictures are made and how they’re seen by the public.
Another one, in 2019, was when I worked on a story about illegal housing in Queens. I followed one man, primarily. He was documented; he had a green card. He’s been in the United States for 25 years. I followed him back to Mexico. In the United States, he lives in this illegal, underground house with five, six, seven other people, none of whom he knows. There are very few windows, there’s no open air — it’s like a hostel. I followed him back to Mexico just to see what his life was in Mexico. When I got there, I met his family, and I stayed in this little town called Coatzingo in the state of Puebla. What I found was that his family owned property, and his family owned corn crops. His wife is there. His stepkids are there. All of his friends and family are there. And he just felt like a different man. He had space, he had sun, he had connection, he had family, he had love, he had intimacy. And it completely fractured the usual immigration trope that we like to play of these other countries being shitholes, and the United States being this utopia. His home was actually this beautiful place and it was filled with connection and family and everything else.
That whole story let me really meditate on this idea that we are constantly fed these social stereotypes of not only immigration, but also these imaginaries of how we make sense of ourselves and the world and that, when we’re confronted with stories and narratives that run counter to the way we imagine the world and how it usually operates, that is jarring. But as a journalist who is constantly asking questions, and as a photographer who has to visualize these conflict scenes, it was very sobering and humbling to have to correct myself, to have to correct these cultural assumptions. That helped me see a bigger picture of why journalists are trained to ask questions and challenge their own assumptions, and ultimately it’s really nice to be proven wrong once in a while.
HPR: You’ve touched on a lot of critiques of issues that you see with how photojournalism currently operates. Where do you see the photojournalism industry headed moving forward?
RCJ: I think that a lot of the things the industry has been forced to reckon with still is how it thinks about “the other” and increasing its representation of journalists. Journalism has long been a colonial construct. It has long been a tool of predominantly White men who have no stakes in the issues that they’re covering to go in and report objectively and neutrally. Having a better representation of the people doing the stories will create a better understanding of the larger world, the larger social forces.
That’s a structural change. It can’t happen right now. What we need to change is the bigger structural reasons for why those communities weren’t represented in the first place, and that’s not going to happen with a handful of assignments. That’s going to happen when journalism renegotiates the way it understands how objectivity lives in the world and how those stories are reported.
Honestly, it’s going to take a long time. I think it’s going to take at least a generation for those changes to start to take root. The handful of assignments, that’s fine — that’s a great start. But let’s take a bigger look. Let’s take a 10,000 foot look at how journalism can better cover the communities they cover.
Image courtesy of Ryan Christopher Jones.
