De Cesare Accepts Cabot Prize

On Monday night, winners of the 75th Annual Maria Moors Cabot Prizes Ceremony were honored at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library. They included Jon Lee Anderson, Mauri König and Alejandro Santos Rubino, as well as documentary photographer and Dart Media Curator Donna De Cesare. Her acceptance speech is published below. Her new book is here.

Let me express thanks to President Bollinger, and Dean Coll--- as well as my deep appreciation to the Cabot family, for conceiving and sustaining an award which re-energizes journalists who work in Latin America, by recognizing the value of their courageous and insightful reporting. My thanks also to the Board of Judges for your belief in the contributions that visual reporting makes in furthering Inter-American understanding, press freedom and mutual respect.

The Maria Moors Cabot Award is an honor, and for me personally the most gratifying of recognitions. For decades Latin America has been my second home, a place where I have learned life’s greatest lessons. Central America in the 1980s was my journalism school. In war few of the norms we hold dearly apply. I learned there that it was important to get inside the story in order to understand.  It was impossible to do that without forming deep relationships of mutual trust. Central America taught me to stay true to my own moral compass, while understanding the ethical complexity and ambiguity inherent in the situations I faced. Ignacio Martin Baro—one of the six Jesuit priests later murdered by the Salvadoran army—taught me to pay attention to children and to think about the impact of trauma on their developing psyches. 

These lessons learned in Central America, I carried “home” with me as I began to document the toxic environments in our own country, that rob immigrant and American-born young people alike of “childhood innocence” through social neglect, intolerance and stigmatizing stereotypes. They served me again when I returned to Central America, to document the ways that gang deportees from the US were changing the region, and were also being changed.  

My courageous colleagues being honored here tonight have defied government censorship, outwitted organized criminals and in a world of unrelenting tweets and texts and they have cut through chatter to probe deeply and reflect on what they find. I am honored to stand here among them.

And I am also heartened that the power and potential of photojournalism is recognized by the Cabot judges. Photographers serve press freedom, by exposing the human consequences of corruption, violence and injustice. Photography practiced with time and attentive seeing, can defy the sensational, the slick or the glib. Images can help to build empathy, by creating a kind of family album--as meaningful to the protagonists in the images, as to distant viewers. When photojournalism achieves this it draws us closer, and helps us to see more clearly, that our experiences have points of connection, that our futures are interdependent.  

In the Epilogue of my recently published book Unsettled, I describe a photography workshop that I conducted for teenagers who live in some of the most abandoned and violent barrios in El Salvador.   Bryan, one those teenagers, said: “Just because I come from a barrio with a bad reputation doesn’t mean I share that reputation.”   

Bryan’s words remind us that any society that stigmatizes or criminalizes young people or reacts with reflexive fear, is a society that has not grappled fully with the meaning of a free press. Bryan’s images, filled with humor, and deep and spontaneous comfort with ordinary working people, show us that photography is not only a vehicle for expression but also a process of connecting—overcoming the fears that separate and silence.  

Photo: Ariel Ritchin