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God goes through all the trouble to fill fields with purple flowers, but we often pass by without noticing. That’s a serious offense against the Almighty, according to novelist Alice Walker in The Color Purple. Photojournalists notice the flowers, purple and otherwise. Did photographs of the World Trade Center stir you emotionally the day after 9/11? What about the snapshots from inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison? A wordsmith, Allan Ginsberg, the 1960s Beat-era poet, famously said: “Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.” New technology, from cell-phone cameras to internet photo galleries, has given still photography a fresh boost. Christians in Photojournalism, begun 20 years ago as a support group, believes Christians should develop visual literacy. Photojournalists gather each year at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to fellowship, swap stories, and debate professional issues. Denise McGill interviewed five of the top Christian photographers to ask them about their work. Each day this week we will feature a photojournalist and his/her work.
Joanna Pinneo started traveling early in her career and incorporated her worldview into a signature photographic style. “What I became known for was intimacy,” she explains. She documented Palestinians during one major assignment. At the time, an editor told her, “Just be fair and cover everyday life.” The result, published in 1992, put a human face on an explosive issue.
Pinneo says photojournalists are privileged to be allowed into people’s lives. “God has chosen us to be communicators,” she says. “If we see people, or even touch them, it’s kind of like touching the hem of Jesus’ robe.”
Based in Longmont, Colorado, Pinneo is one of the nation’s top magazine photographers. She has won third place in the Magazine Photographer of the Year competition and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
A poignant example of her style is the photo on the cover of the book Women Photographers at National Geographic. A woman and her children nap in Mali, covered in warm golden dust. It invites the viewer to open the book in hushed tones, as though peeking in on a sleeping baby.
Pinneo started her career in the photo lab of the Southern Baptist’s International Mission Board in Richmond, Virginia. This nurturing environment strongly influenced her as a young Christian and an early-career photojournalist. “I was struggling with my own identity and how my faith fit into it,” Pinneo says.
The lessons she learned on assignment burned in her heart long after she’d clicked the shutter. “You meet people who risk their lives to be Christians,” she recalls. “That’ll keep you up a few nights.”
In recent years, Pinneo’s passion has focused on the lives of teen girls. That effort got a big uplift when she was awarded the prestigious Nikon Documentary Sabbatical Grant. Her website, www.grrlstories.org, showcases photo galleries of Pinneo’s images.
“Grrlstories is a step in faith,” Pinneo says. “God really gives me patience, the determination to stick in there.”
For Pinneo, communicating Christian conviction may mean causing her audience to become uncomfortable. “We as Christian communicators are the ones who have to be responsible for telling these stories,” she explains. “Even if it’s not overt, it’s still important that we come from the [Christian] perspective. We have to tell and keep telling tough stories.” Pinneo believes photographers have a prophetic role and are “chosen to shine a light into the darkness of the world; that darkness is the absence of God; that darkness is why Jesus weeps.”
Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:
More of Joanna Pinneo’s photographs are available Grrlstories and her website.
More about Christians in Photojournalism, including more pictures, is available on their website.
Other Christianity Today photo essays include:
Saving Strangers | The journey of one Somali Bantu family in the largest group resettlement of African refugees in U.S. history. (July 02, 2004)
River Deep Mercy Wide | A medical journey on the Rio Negro in Brazil’s Amazon Basin (Feb. 06, 2004)
