In Part 2 of our conversation with the co-Founder of Houston’s internationally renowned FotoFest, Wendy Watriss, we discuss how the organization has evolved over the decades, developing its outreach and its breadth of experience. Wendy then discusses how the fields of photography and photojournalism have been used as instruments of social change.

A quick note to listeners: At the bottom of each interview, we include a glossary of terms and names referenced in the interview. 

Michael: In terms of cultivating this organization for the last 30 years, 40 years, what has that experience been like? Because creating an organization that is sustaining and that is growing, ‘cause I imagine it’s only grown over the years.

Wendy: Yeah.

Michael: What is that like? Can you just briefly describe some of that experience of just developing and sustaining this internationally known organization in such a way that it continues to be new and vital each year?

Wendy: The choice of exhibition theme of the exhibitions that we organize has always been stimulating and creative. For example, we did China and change from the cultural revolution to the most contemporary work, done contemporary Russian photography, in both cases, work that had never been seen before. We did video and media work from the Middle East. We did one was on the global environment. One was on water, celebrating water, looking at the global crisis way before—I mean in the early 2000s. And we did a four day forum with Rice University, where we had a hugely diverse group of speakers from architects that were developing projects in China related to environmental rehabilitation, to a physicist from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, to the head of the waterworks in Los Angeles, a minister whose ministry was devoted to the environmental, activists who were very well known and, three very important professors from Rice, including Edward Djerejian, who was the, had been the ambassador in Syria and Israel, and was head of the Baker Center Study For Global Affairs, one that they built in Rice in the 80s. early 80s. It’s become very important.

So, we’ve done most recently African cosmologies, I have the t-shirt on, which was a joint curatorial process between the current executive director and just a remarkable man, Afro-British curator and scholar Mark Sealy, who started an organization called Autograph in London in a very pre-gentrified part of London and brought work that the British had never seen either. So, we try to highlight both work but also the people that are helping the workers do the work, so to speak. The artist—Oh, we did American voices, Mexican American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American photography, quite early on in the 90’s actually, and that show went to the Smithsonian. And it was shown here for about three months, actually.

Michael: So you pick these topics that are currently on people’s minds, I guess, but then you’re ultimately showing them things about this topic that they haven’t experienced before.

Wendy: Yeah, there is that, there’s that interconnection. I, again, one thing that Fred and I brought to this is that we had worked at both as journalists and photographers and people involved in the art world and in various parts of the world. He had worked much more before we came together in Asia than I had, but I had worked much more in Latin America and Central Eastern Europe and, later, Russia that he had. So we brought together really a range of knowledge about the world. And it’s not, it wasn’t just a question of picking different geographical areas. It was understanding where the development, evolution of photography were in those countries and why it was an important moment there to show the work.

Michael: As a theater artist, the shows that I’ve seen from other places in the world have been some of the most stimulating for me, aesthetically and artistically because of some of the techniques they’re using. So this must have been an incredible learning experience. Not only for your audience, but maybe even for you?

Wendy: Absolutely. No, it was definitely for me, and it was very stimulating, and it made the other work—we traveled a lot, we raised the money for the travel. So we traveled a lot, we interacted a lot. One of the things that we started was this whole interconnection between festivals around the world, and we would invite the directors or major curators from different festivals to FotoFest. They would meet with each other, but and then have the experience of being in FotoFest, and they would invite us to their festival. So, there was this kind of interconnection that was started really across the world. And these, you would invite them for a week so that they really were subsumed in ideas and conversation.

So the head of IPC, International Photography Center in New York, Buzz Hartshorne said, I, one of the things is I make sure to come to FotoFest because it’s the way I meet my colleagues from all over the world. Now, that’s changed now. The economics of the world has changed. The world has internationalized itself. But we were absolutely a leader in doing that in our field. But I think that other fields built on that also, they looked at that as something that was valuable, to send their curators out to really see what was happening in the world. So we made careers for Mexican photographers, Brazilian photographers, a number of Malian photographers, quite a lot of Arab photographers in the process, and some went back and did work in their own cities and communities.

Elizabeth: This is so fascinating, Wendy. You, my sense is that in photography, like in literature, where there’s the intimate object, the intimate detail, photography has, there’s an intimacy to it. The photographer focuses on, on a focal object or a focal scene and from that very specific, granular entry point, there is this much larger story that’s being told, a much larger universe that both the photographer and the viewer can enter and understand a very complex and nuanced situation through this very intimate detail.

I want to pursue that history that you’ve had as a photographer about the effect, the impact that photography has had in global affairs. I’m thinking of your work specifically on the devastation caused by Agent Orange out of the Vietnam War and the images of the consequences that particular situation perpetuated, other images of war, of famines, of displacement, et cetera. So my sense is that there have been many times in history where those photographic images have changed the body politic. It has changed, they have affected global politics in the geopolitical world. Do you think that the power of the photographic image continues? Has it diminished in our larger, very, overwhelming image—we are surrounded by photographic images as consumers now. And as practitioners. So can you talk a little bit about the effect, the power of the photographic image on larger issues?

Wendy: I did a piece it’s at the Nieman School of Journalism at Harvard about this question of the power of photography to make change. I think it’s very rare that a photograph unassisted by political activism makes change. Certainly, the famous picture of the young girl being napalmed—

Elizabeth: In the Vietnam War, yeah.

Wendy: —it strengthened and built an anti-war. I think today, the pictures of Gaza, if you didn’t have those pictures, your reaction to somebody saying about the devastation of Gaza would be very different, would be much less visceral.

But those are rare incidences, actually. And my feeling is that if you are doing work that needs social change, you have to be willing to go beyond photography. The photographer needs to be willing to go beyond the photography and to find ways to utilize photography as a tool in a larger context of political activism. So, the Ancient Orange work, it’s the best example that I have of this, Vietnam veterans were trying to get this issue to the fore. They were not getting very far. Neither—the Defense Department has all kinds of understandable of things that can be seen and not seen and information you can get and can’t get. So, veterans were essentially getting nowhere because the press who didn’t necessarily understand the history and nature of the chemical and issue itself—I did this story because my anger about the Vietnam War and why we were using herbicide like that in the first place, for why we were doing it. But most importantly, why we were doing it so fecklessly in relationship to our own troops, who had absolutely no training and no precautions, really, taken, whether it was the pilots or whether it was the people using Agent Orange to build runways. So I did that work, and in the process, I did work with a lot of veterans groups.

The work got many awards. It was very nice for me. But it hadn’t done anything to change the issue. They couldn’t get medical treatment. It wasn’t recognized as a combat related health problem. And nobody believed the genetic effects. So I had a meeting with two veterans groups, and I said, “Look, you need legislation passed. You need it passed at the state level, and you need it passed at the federal level. And we need to do something about it. And I can’t do it without you, and you probably could do it without me, but the pictures would help.” I did have good contacts in the Texas state legislature because I had done work for the Texas Observer and, various kinds of contacts and things at Texas. So, we found—Jim Hightower was the Commissioner of Agriculture at that time. Of course, he was very sympathetic about the issue. And we found four young legislators who were very moved by the issue. But I needed those groups. They weren’t just going to do it on the basis of photographs. And so we got state legislation passed to do research, to do have medical research done and to have it treated as a as a war related health problem.

And then Bob Eckhardt, who is a very interesting, you might remember him, very interesting, progressive, deeply southern legislator, was head of a key committee in Congress, and we made him aware of the issue. He created a series of committee hearings. We did an exhibition in the Rotunda. And two years later, the first federal legislation was passed. And that legislation that made it recognize, at first, specific illnesses, recognizes combat related illnesses as a result of the use of the herbicide. That has been very instrumental in getting the toxic burn legislation out of the first Iraq war and then later and two or three other pieces of legislation for subsequent wars. And it also showed veterans groups what they could do. If it wasn’t just me, it was a sort of collective effort.

So, there are a few photographers I know that operate that way, but not very many. And to think that the photograph does it by itself is an illusion and a fantasy.

Elizabeth: If only that was enough.

Michael: This, the focus on the aesthetics and thinking about the rise of, sort of, digital photography—and I’m certain you were in the, you spent many hours in the dark room.

Wendy: Oh yeah. Definitely.

Michael: With chemicals and everything. But now almost no one uses the dark room anymore. It’s all digital.

Wendy: No. No, the dark, the digital printer is a dark room. This is a dark room. And contemporary photographers doing good digital prints, either they do it with a very good printer, a lab printer, and everybody knows just because inter-professionally and then you exchange that information, who they are, or you learn how to do those prints yourself and you can, it will take as much time with a digital printer as it will in the darkroom.

Michael: Okay, so aesthetically, there’s really no reason to go back to the darkroom if you spend as much time on the digital print methodology, the photograph—is there a difference between really well-done dark room photography and a really well done digital?

Wendy: I can often tell the difference, but if you were not in the profession, you wouldn’t necessarily see the difference. There’s an advantage to the digital process now because most of the good papers are being developed for digital printers, not for old analog darkroom work. You’re much more limited in what’s available to you in terms of the tools now. Although, photographers are making their own tools, going back to older processes. Both are going on at the same time. I think you have to be a really good digital printer to get a good print, particularly with black and white, and to some extent with color too. It’s just as difficult a craft as it is working in the darkroom, but people don’t realize that.

Michael: And another question to do with contemporary changes: Clearly, I mean, everyone I know with a smart phone takes photographs. And a lot of, I see people using, even sometimes, even professional photographers will pull out a smartphone—

Wendy: Oh, absolutely.

Michael: And what impact had the smartphone and its high-quality camera had on the world of photography?

Wendy: It has made immediacy more accessible to the photographer and to the viewer. And it has made it easier for photographers to, in a sense, capture more images at an event, for example. Because even the good cell phone cameras in very low light, can work very well. And so, you don’t need to have the kind of light paraphernalia that you used to have. But if photographers have the time, many will go back to using a negative and then you scan the negative and then you make the print. And particularly if you’re using large format like two and a quarter or five by seven or eight by ten, I don’t think you can get that kind of quality with digital work yet.

Elizabeth: So it’s the resolution.

Wendy: Yeah. Yes. But that’s a little bit different than working as a photojournalist. Now you’ve got so much more equipment because you’re carrying equipment that can, you can instantaneously send it back to the publication or something. So, it’s, in a way, it’s freed things and also made things more cumbersome that just the amount of equipment that a war correspondent or a journalist in the field has to carry with him or her.

Elizabeth: To elaborate on this kind of physical experience with the photographic equipment, I’m remembering—I’m not a photographer, I’m very much not a photographer—but I do remember—I’ve taken a few photos over the years—and I remember back in the early 1970s I bought a Praktica, which was a 35-millimeter camera that was East German made when there was still an East Germany. And then I went to London by myself to visit a friend and I had this camera for the first time, and it was a profound feeling of companionship. There was walking around London by myself, but I felt so incredibly comforted by this camera. So I wonder if you can talk about that sense of the camera as companion, as a sort of life partner. I’m wondering if that’s a common—?

Wendy: I would describe it as “license” as opposed to “companion” per se, because I just remember how heavy it all was. And that, and there were senses in which it was a very difficult companion, but it was a license to go anywhere. Now, not so much anymore, but certainly, in most of my lifetime, it permitted you to go to places, gave you a reason to be there and to make other friends and other kinds of companions. And it opened up the world. I think that’s the way I look at a camera rather than just a companion. 

Elizabeth: A very high maintenance companion.

Wendy: As a matter of fact, I think it was in the late ‘80s and I had only really been photographing per se for about ten years, I went to a back doctor here in Washington, and he took one look at me and he said, I bet you’re a photographer. So part of my mobility problems now are from carrying, the way I was carrying those cameras, those companions.

Elizabeth: Those companions. Oh, interesting.

Michael: Let me ask you another sort of aesthetic question, or I guess technique question. Much like the, sort of, cultural anthropologist who’s observing another culture, you’re trying to minimize the effects your presence will have on the subject, and I’m certain that the same thing applies to the photographer. So, can you maybe just describe maybe some of the techniques that you employed or used to minimize your effect on the subject?

Wendy: It depends on the situation. If you’re going to an event or a protest or something like that you essentially want to become invisible. And one way to do it is not look at people, not have eye contact. And just move around not looking at people, not directly. And they’ll forget about you, even if you’re carrying three cameras. They will, they’ll forget. You don’t become interesting necessarily anymore. So, you figure out ways that you make yourself invisible. And also, the practical clothes of photographing are relatively invisible. The khakis or jeans or, you’re not dressing in a way that would bring attention to you. It’s the equipment that does that at first, but you just, you no longer become interesting after a while, if you are just quietly moving around and not, and avoiding eye contact.

But if you’re in a situation, like the way I chose to photograph much of the Agent Orange work, where you had to create a relationship because you really wanted things, you wanted the suffering to be seen in somebody’s face, or the way they used their hands, or the way children use deformed limbs, for example. The first, you have to, you have, there you have to have the eye contact and you have to spend time developing a relationship so that they are comfortable enough with you or trust you enough to do the kinds of things that allow you to show what happens.

So, I remember one of the first assignments I did from—I was making those assignments, there was no assignment editor when I was doing the Agent Orange story—a family of a Vietnam veteran leader, and he had problems himself in Austin, and they, and he had two boys, I mean there were a history of miscarriages and so forth, but he had two boys, they were quite beautiful boys, but who had arms that had missing bones, and then they had missing fingers, and so forth. And I spent about an hour and a half in the backyard with Chad and Michael and I was getting, taking pictures. I was getting nowhere with the pictures because they had learned to hide their arms and they had, so I thought, we sat, I said, “Let’s sit down for a minute and let me tell you what I’m trying to do, that I hope will help other veterans, and you will help me with that process, and you will help other veterans. So I need to see your hands that are missing fingers and where there is no wrist bone and, you know, where there’s no elbow. And if we can move around so that you’re doing things with your arms and hands that I can capture, that will be a big help to me.” And they did.

Elizabeth: So in a situation like that, obviously, you would have had the permission of the adults and their parents and such.

Wendy: Yes.

Elizabeth: And protests and other kinds of public events, you don’t necessarily get photo permissions of everybody you’ve photographed.

Wendy: No. Oh, no.

Elizabeth: And I guess there’s a protocol within the journalistic world where that’s okay.

Wendy: Yeah. There are protocols.

Elizabeth: But it does lead me to talk about this, in a larger sense, we live in a world that is filled, increasingly it seems, with astronomical levels of mistrust between people and between factions. And clearly you and your late husband, Fred, and your many fellow photographers have been able to cultivate a measure of trust or of some kind of synergy between you and the individuals or the settings that you’ve photographed. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve been able to bridge some of these divides through photography over the many years of your career?

Wendy:  It’s just behavior. It’s just your instincts of what you can say and what you can do and how you present yourself in a way that will in some way soften or mollify that distrust. It has gotten much, much more difficult now than in the past. And I think in places where, particularly in places like Africa, the politicalization of everything, which is good in some senses and made things more difficult in other senses. I could not have, I could not do some of the work that I did in Africa in the 1960s and ‘70s anymore. Just ‘cause they’ve gotten too smart to the situation.

Elizabeth: Sure.

Wendy: But there have been, there’s enormous amount of assistance that immigrants, those long crossings from Ethiopia to Spain, if they get across the Mediterranean, or places from Zambia, north, where immigrants have allowed photographers enormous access to what they’re doing. So I think people like attention. And if you’re able to present yourself in the right way—not all the time and not with all people—but usually people will let you work actually. But there was a time, which I think I mentioned to you earlier, when I’d convinced Life to do a story on the US Sanctuary Movement as regards El Salvadoran dissidents. And there was a couple, he was a union leader, and she was a teacher, and teachers were often, in El Salvador during the conflict, as mistrusted as union activists were. And the Sanctuary Movement for several reasons would always have the Salvadoran people that they were shepherding through the system in the US wear bandanas. And so they—

Elizabeth: This would be over their nose and mouth.

Wendy: Yes. And both for the sort of dramatic visual sense of it as well as protecting. So there was a lot of trust between the two of them and myself and while they didn’t take the bandanas off very often, there were sort of small ways in which we could move them slightly. So you had a sense of the face. And so, when they were developed at Life the picture editor said, “No, we won’t just run pictures with bandanas on because that’s just acceeding to the sort of political promotion of the group’s ideas and so forth.” In the meantime, they had called the two of them from Philadelphia at a church, a Sanctuary church, and said, could they please review with me all the pictures that had been taken? And I knew what that was likely to be, what would happen. But I decided the only ethical thing to do was to do that. Convince the lab at Life to let me have the contacts and negatives, went down, and of course, all the best pictures, they scratched with a knife.

Elizabeth: The ones without the bandanas.

Wendy: So I had to call the picture editor, obviously, and tell him what happened. I told him what happened. And there’s this pause and he said, “I’ll see that you never work for Life magazine again.”

Elizabeth: He would not show those more revealing photographs, but at the—

Wendy: Well, the fact that I as a photojournalist in a sense stepped over the boundaries of photojournalism professionalism. That was one thing. To do it, to allow them that liberty—

Elizabeth: The subjects of the photographs, yeah.

Wendy: And then actually do it. So, yes, from his standpoint, it was an infraction of the unstated laws of being a journalist, being a photojournalist.

Michael: Continuing on that line, in our Theatre in Community series that we’re finishing up this month, actually, we talked to Teatro de la Luna, Nucky Walder and Marcela Ferlito who sort of run that theater, but they had an international theater festival of Latin American theaters and a lot of the people they brought to DC were from countries where there were dictators and they were doing theater that was against, in some kind of way, against the dictatorship. And so there was a lot of political turmoil, there was a lot of secrecy. And I’m certain if you’re bringing people to FotoFest that are from these more oppressive places you, some of the journalists, photojournalists you brought in were probably doing things that the government didn’t like.

Wendy: Oh, no, definitely.

Michael: And so just and I try to keep track of journalists, photojournalists, and just regular written page journalists, they’re still being murdered all over the world.

Wendy: Definitely.

Michael: And so have you had any encounters with those kinds of very tense and difficult situations with the people you brought to FotoFest and their political situation at home?

Wendy: Yeah, we had two Palestinian journalists who we brought to FotoFest during, as part of the Arab show. First of all, in selecting the work, there was work that they just didn’t want to show for that reason. One had done some very strong work in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and so forth. And to not include the work didn’t really compromise. So I acceded to that. But then during the show there was their work and a woman’s, Rula Halwani’s work on, I think it was a West Bank work, actually. Quite strong, but conceptual work. It wasn’t showing people suffering. It was the way she photographed the wall and the sky and so forth. And she had some Jewish followers of FotoFest who’d come and want to take that work down because we weren’t quite showing the other side of the issue.

But as I reminded the people that were complaining about it, this was a show of what Arabs were saying, not a show about what Israelis or Jewish people were saying about it. And we had done four or five biennials earlier, a show from Israel. Very good photography. Obviously not dealing with some of the issues that the Arabs were dealing with, but yes.

Then we had a number of incidences where, in a show of Russian pictorialism, there was just this really beautiful nude done by a very famous Russian pictorialist. Pictorialism, until we showed it, Russian pictorialism wasn’t even known. They didn’t even know, most people, that Russia ever had pictorialist photographers. And certainly, Stalin did his best to, in a sense, obscure it all after he got in power. So what we did was find other places to show this. We didn’t remove the work. We removed the work from the site because they were corporate spaces sometimes that we used and it was there, there was nothing we could do about that, basically. Because that was private property. But we found other places for that.

And in some cases, in a couple of cases we called the press to discuss what was happening and very often it was somebody’s secretary or somebody, some person that was not at the high level that was complaining about this work being there, for example. So we would get usually an editorial in the paper that would be critical of that kind of self, just people censorship essentially.

Elizabeth: Provocative image or something, yeah.

Wendy: Yeah. We did have some problems—I did a show called Letters from Home, Guantanamo. And the habeas corpus process of volunteer lawyers around the country, this is a good part of the United States, there were tens, dozens of individual lawyers in top law firms in this country that volunteered to do the work, of the habeas corpus work for the Guantanamo prisoners. It didn’t help them very much, but it did provide a link with the outside world. And the correspondence that they had with their lawyers was to most of the time privileged, but we were able to get access to those letters. And the lawyers in the process, in their process of the habeas corpus work, had gone, often, to the homes or the birthplace or where the families lived of Guantanamo prisoners and photographed in their homes and with the permission of their parents and so forth in order to convince the prisoners that they were serious about the work, that they could, the prisoners could trust them. And so, they were able to make, it was a really very moving show, we used the letters and the pictures that had been taken by the lawyers to discuss the whole question of Guantanamo and what was happening there. And that had repercussions, particularly when we showed the redacted court testimonies, quite, at the federal officials, the FBI came and looked.

Michael: You had a visit from the FBI?

Wendy: Yeah, we’ve had a number of times. Because when we first showed Cuban work—

Michael: Sure

Wendy: —the FBI came and so forth.

Elizabeth: Let me pull the camera lens back a bit and ask you one of our kind of final questions. And we’ve been talking clearly with a lot of theater folk and a lot of artists from different realms of the creative landscape as well as people from many different walks of life, but something that has reoccurred in many of our conversations is the crisis that the art world in the US and doubtless in other parts of the world are experiencing, both pre- and especially post-pandemic in terms of audience participation, fall-off of funding and other kinds of funding streams. Clearly the newspaper world is experiencing a real crisis in terms of readership and subscriptions. There are many factors that play into that, but do you have any kind of overarching thoughts about the sage advice you would give to your colleagues and brethren in the arts sector on just how to weather this difficult time?

Wendy: I think the people that, that I know that are finding their way through this morass is, are people, A, that are willing to experiment with new technologies? I’m very behind in that area, but I know how to find people. The question of audience is a perplexing one because there’s just so much competition for people’s attention now and it’s competition in which you can be sitting at home and much more comfortable viewing something than maybe going out, finding a parking space, and all those kind of things. However, I think that just the getting out itself is part of a potentially stimulating experience that is different than sitting at home on a couch and looking at it on a screen. So I think part of it is waiting it out and continuing to do work, to continuing to do relevant work, also, and to understand, cultivate, and communicate with your audience. It takes a lot of time to do it well, actually. And so very often people in the arts who are having too many other things to do anyway, don’t do that. So I think we’re at this kind of most difficult in between period right now, which we’ll probably be in for another 10 or 15 years. Certain parts of the world survive.

Elizabeth: Yeah. How to weather the storm. Let me tweak that—

Wendy: I’m not really being very helpful in answering your question.

Elizabeth: Well, it’s a struggle for sure.

Wendy: I think there, the thing is though, there are some good things, that art has its own “MAGA” base. There are people that deeply believe in the arts and they’re opening their wallets.

Elizabeth: Yeah, that’s encouraging. So let me tweak that question to the individual. So we ask all of our interviewees what really tangible practical advice they can give to our listeners about how to sustain and nurture their own creativity. So do you have any kind of standalone practical advice to listeners?

Wendy: Yes. My standalone practical advice: challenge yourself. Get out there. See what’s going on. Communicate in one way or another. It doesn’t mean necessarily you have to engage in a conversation but engage in life itself. And put yourself in situations that are not comfortable for yourself, so you’re challenging your mind to work, to understand those things.

Elizabeth: I love that. Put yourself in situations that are not comfortable. And therein lies a sort of journey of creativity.

Wendy: Yes, because that… in order to interconnect or associate with that you have to figure out what to do. How to do it.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Wendy Watriss, this has been so fantastic. Thank you, thank you, thank you for so generously sharing your time and amazing stories with us.

Wendy: Oh, thank you! You know how much we all like to talk about what we do and what we’ve done. And I feel fortunate. It has been a lot of work and as you can imagine, just a despairing time. Sometimes we had to pay staff just because there just wasn’t enough money in the bank. And it’s not as if Fred and I were in any way rich people. We had been privileged people. We had a very good education. We had a remarkable upbringing and all that sort of thing. And there’s just times where you think you’ve done this extraordinary show, or panel, or forum, or book, or and it doesn’t seem to catch on. And those are despairing moments.

Michael: Oh, those are very despairing. Yeah.

Wendy: Yeah, but you just have to keep—you don’t really have an alternative. You have to keep going.

Elizabeth: Yeah, you have to keep going. On that happy note—

Wendy: Yes.

Elizabeth: —we have been the happy recipients of this lovely conversation. Thank you again. Thank you everyone for listening. This has been the Innovators, Artists, and Solutions series of Creativists in Dialogue.

Wendy: And I hope some of your listeners will come to FotoFest.

Elizabeth: There we go! Road trip!

Wendy: It has generated a lot of festivals around the world and the portfolio review has been extraordinarily important.

Elizabeth: Sounds amazing.​

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