Is Photography Meeting the Moment?

Meeting the Moment is a phrase that has come to mean responding to a current challenge, opportunity, or significant situation by acting with courage, skill, and presence. The moment right now is the radically changed political, economic, and cultural landscape since a new administration took over in Washington in January 2025. In the nearly 250 years since the founding of the United States, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation where the world’s first democracy is now an autocracy. Democratic institutions have been laid to waste and the First Amendment is under attack. In a stated effort to abolish all programs advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion, the current administration has now created a regime where the only qualification for office is fealty to the chief and often without any qualifications required by the office. 

Photographers have always been at the front lines of documenting injustices and calamities in the world, whether war, famine, natural disasters, human rights abuses, and abuses of power. Since the launch of ZEKE magazine in 2015, photographers have submitted projects on the wars and aftermath in Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, the migration crisis in Europe, the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, the Rohingya crisis, maternal health in Africa, gender oppression in Iran, climate change, discrimination against Roma and LGBTQ+, the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, criminal justice, and so many other issues. 

There are limited situations where you can draw a direct connection between a published photograph and direct policy or action. But some significant examples do exists—such as photographs from Vietnam by Malcolm Brown, Eddie Adams, Nick Ut that changed public opinion, and ultimately policy, about the war. The 2015 photo of Alan Kurti, washed up on a beach in Turkey by Nilüfer Demir that opened Germany to accepting a million refugees fleeing war in the Middle East. Photographs by Lewis Hine of child labor in factories in the US in the early twentieth contributed significantly to the eventual passage of federal child labor laws, culminating in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. 

There is no greater example anywhere of a government committed to supporting documentary photographers to meet the moment and record the plight of working people than the Farm Security Administration. In 1935, during the height of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration, and two years later, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), to provide aid to rural Americans suffering from effects of acute unemployment. The task of the Historical Division was to document the hardship across rural America caused by the Great Depression. Some of the most renowned photographers of the 20th century— including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks among others-- established their careers with U.S. government support to work on one of the greatest documentary efforts ever created. 

In this case, the work of these photographers was directed to both educate the American public about the dire situations in rural America but also to demonstrate what the government was doing to alleviate the problems of poverty and hunger through the FSA. But it is should not be glossed over that after the US entered WWII, the focus of the FSA became government propaganda. 

Sometimes, or perhaps too often, in history, no matter the extent of documentary evidence, truth loses out and the abuses, massacres, and famines continue. Hundreds of photographers spent three years documenting the genocide in Bosnia but could not stop the slaughter of more than 8,000 mostly men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. Massive demonstrations and documentation could not stop the Chinese government takeover of Hong Kong in 2020. Today, with the limited video and photographic evidence that does exist, the genocide and famine continue in Gaza (not to mention the more than 270 journalists killed). And there is no greater evidence of the limited power of photography than the fact that after three and a half years of Russian aggression against Ukraine, and hundreds of photographers risking their lives, the war still grinds on. None of this detracts from the brave and Herculean task these journalists and documentarians have done and continue to do. 

Today, the United States is watching while a 250 year project in democracy that has inspired the world over comes to a grinding halt with the onslaught by the Trump Administration. We are not yet at the point of complete failure as in Hong Kong in 2020, Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Bosnia in 1992. But we rapidly sliding in that direction. 

On the following pages we present nine photographers who have submitted to a Call for Entries on Meeting the Moment. I hope these photographs do at least a little to move the needle forward in gaining greater understanding and recognition of the gravity of the problem and the wide spread sentiments opposing the destruction of the American experiment in democracy. 

As I write these words, it is only days after the assassination of conservative icon Charlie Kirk and the Trump Administration is now taking aim at left-wing and liberal groups. I have no doubt that SDN, ZEKE, (and me) will soon be in their crosshairs. 

One of the fundamental reasons we carry on is our firm belief in freedom of the press, freedom of expression, pursuit of the truth and a tangible historic record of the moment. In 1970, musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron famously said, “The revolution will not be televised.” Today it is and we hope to record it. Thank you to all the photographers who bravely speak truth to power with their camera. 

Onward!