Photos © Meron Menghistab
A photographer, photo editor, and formerly incarcerated author discuss the power of words and photos to reclaim life and identity.
The United States has a larger prison population than any other country in the world, with over 2 million people living behind bars. But it’s also staggering to look at the state-by-state numbers. At the beginning of 2020, Washington State had nearly as many incarcerated individuals as Sudan, a developing country that has five times as many citizens. Despite Washington’s legislature being run by progressive-identifying Democrats, many deeply entrenched barriers face people after they leave prison, which contributes to joblessness, homelessness, and recidivism.
Washington has largely abolished parole, and like many U.S. states, the average length of a felony sentence has dramatically increased since the early 2000s. “Many prisoners are spending longer and longer periods of time in prison and a growing number of these prisoners will die behind bars,” according to the ACLU of Washington. In most democratic countries, a long sentence is considered to be one or two years, and a sentence beyond 10 years is extremely rare.
For those who get out of prison in Washington State, one route to avoid recidivism is the education system. A college degree can re-level the playing field for someone with a felony conviction, opening doors that might have seen permanently shut. This path often starts while still in prison: Students behind bars earn their GEDs and take university-level courses. In December, Congress struck a deal to reinstate federal Pell Grants to incarcerated college students, a tuition resource that had been prohibited since the 1994 crime bill.
Last summer, University of Washington Magazine's photo editor Quinn Russell Brown commissioned Meron Menghistab to photograph 10 men and women who earned college degrees from the University of Washington after getting out of prison. Menghistab, named one of 2020’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch, is an editorial and commercial photographer known for putting his subjects at ease and creating quiet, moving portraits. As project manager for the feature, Brown also hired Omari Amili, a formerly incarcerated author, to recruit and interview the 10 people featured in the story.
Following the feature for University of Washington Magazine, Brown, Menghistab, and Amili connected to discuss this intimate and empowering project from the perspective of the photo editor, photographer, and interviewer.
Quinn Russell Brown, Meron Menghistab, and Omari Amili in conversation.
Interviewer Omari Amili was charged with 30 felonies for financial crimes. The prosecutor wanted to put him away for decades, but the judge opted for leniency. After two years in prison, he re-entered society and earned three college degrees while raising a family, writing books and helping others who have been through the system. Photo by Meron Manghistab
Quinn Russell Brown: There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. I’m wondering, Omari, what is one thing that they all have in common?
Omari Amili: The main thing they have in common is that they're human beings who have a past and who have a future. They're not just people who are to be thrown away. They actually have a mom and a dad, and a lot of them have brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins—people who love them, people who care about them, and people who they love and care about. So, for me, when we ask what everyone who's incarcerated has in common, I like to look at the human side of it. They should be looked at for their potential, for the fact that they have a lot to contribute to society, no matter what they may have done. We’re human beings, and we deserve to be treated as such.
Brown: Something we had in mind from the start of this project is that people who have been incarcerated are often defined by other people, and defined by society. We wanted to center the idea of reclaiming the self through your own words, and with a picture that you were involved in shaping. They chose where to be photographed. It was a way to retake the narrative.
Amili: The narrative is largely shaped by the media. Crime is sensationalized through TV shows, video games, and popular culture. It’s always depicted as, “These people are really violent. These people are a threat. They are somebody to fear.” We are told to be scared of people who have been convicted of a crime, without looking at the trauma they've been through, without looking at the fact that a lot of incarcerated people went through the foster care system.
A lot of incarcerated people have a mental health diagnosis or were living in poverty with a perceived lack of options. When it comes to reclaiming the narrative, it’s about showing that there's a lot more to me than my conviction. I may have been convicted in one stage of my life, and that is something that I have been through, but it's not what should define me forever.
Brown: Meron, when I say reclaiming the self through image, what does that mean to you? And what did that mean in this project?
Menghistab: I've never been incarcerated, so this wasn't a situation where I directly had a mirror to the story. But I have dealt with this in my community, my family, and my friends. And I think that was a really important nuance, because like Omari was saying, often the narrative is that these are isolated people who don't have friends, cousins, neighbors, or people they see at the grocery store every week.
These are real people with real lives and real ripples across society. And in the history of photojournalism, there has been a disconnect between the people who make the images that represent these stories, and what the world really looks like. So for me, being from Seattle, I wanted to make sure that this topic was seen in a way that these people, with real lives, see themselves. That’s why I thought it was important for it to be more of a conversation, instead of me just deciding what would be the best photo.
Ginny Burton grew up with parents who were addicted to drugs, and she spent time in prison alongside her mother. Her own son has also been incarcerated. “People function in patterns. If we don’t have any kind of perspective to look at beyond our own, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of teaching what we know. It’s almost like having blinders on.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Christopher Johnston: “I got arrested for a robbery case and I actually went to the hole for a staff assault. I got into it with the correctional officers and they put me in the hole for 30 days, and this is where I developed a passion for singing. I started singing and I heard the echo off the cell walls. It sounded beautiful. I was like, oh, snap, this is bringing me some joy right now, like I’m listening to music. I was on 23-hour lockdown and 99% of the time you’re by yourself. So all of a sudden, I started to imagine life differently. I started to imagine, what would it be like to be an author? What would it be like to be a fireman? What would it be like to do things that nobody I knew directly did. I started to imagine what it would be like to be a singer, an artist, a musician. And then I had this vision that I went to the University of Washington and graduated with a music degree.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Quinn Russell Brown: When you approach a portrait like this, are you thinking primarily about the person you're photographing? Or are you also thinking about your obligation to the reader who's going to see it, and your obligation to the larger idea of representing the “truth”? How do you balance those things?
Menghistab: I'll be honest, when I approach portraiture, particularly when you talk about people whose stories will be in a publication, I'm very much there to serve those people first. There is no story without them willing to share it. I will always prioritize their comfort in front of the camera and think about how they think they're being seen. It could be a somber story, but if they are someone who wants to be happy in-camera, then that's how they should be.
The way the medium works, they should be able to see themselves the way they want to. As a photographer, I don't think my job is to walk away with a picture that is exactly how I want to see them. That’s what's hard about this. You can get anyone to look any way, but that's not letting them approach the process with how they want to be seen. You have to use your language to figure out how the two of you can meet somewhere. That’s the ethos I operate with.
Brown: I think editors should hire photographers because they bring something specific to the project, just as Omari does as a writer. I want you to bring a little bit of yourself to the photoshoot—not only your ethos, but your ethics, and your opinions about how a system might be bad or destructive. That will always show up to some degree in the image or in the project.
Menghistab: Some of it is subconscious. I'll never realistically be able to hide what I think about what I'm photographing. I don't believe in objectivity – a photographer is never at a point of neutrality. I am very much a person with ideas and thoughts, and they will be implied in these images because that's who I am. You’re not going to get to separate that from me and my camera. If you want me to photograph something, you're getting what I believe in.
Brown: That builds on what Omari said: If the media distorts and misrepresents these issues in the first place, that's partially because the people doing the work bring their own bias. Photographers often approach the topic of incarceration as somber, heavy, intense—lit dramatically from one side, not smiling. They shoot it to fulfill an expectation. But at the same time, they do approach it as very important work, in the sense that they want to make something that seems important, so there’s an aspect of earnestness to it.
But what happens is they end up transforming real people into flawed, tragic characters in a sad saga. That can end up being not only manipulative but dehumanizing because it doesn’t make space for who someone actually is as a person. I wonder, Omari, what has been your experience seeing media representation of people who have been incarcerated?
Amili: A lot of the time the focus is on what's wrong with them, what's broken with them, what needs to be fixed. That’s a really negative perception. Even if it's about someone who's come out and done good, we often will dwell on their past, rather than focusing on the good that they've done. And that’s not only in magazine projects like this, but also when it comes to sharing our stories out in public, like when we’re at the Capitol trying to influence legislation. It’s always focused on the hardship, but you rarely get to hear about the people who are prospering.
I know a lot of people who are becoming homeowners, who are earning doctorate degrees and law degrees, who are defying the odds. But often we’re not looking for someone who is going to change or challenge the narrative; we’re looking for someone to fit in with the story that they want to tell. For me, I want to keep being authentic and busting that up. If they invite us to the table, they might hear some things that challenge their perceptions.
An accidental shooting took the life of Kurt Myers’ friend, and changed his life forever in his youth. “I’m so used to being at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and now I have a suit and tie on, instructing these professionals to sit down, nudging them to stay on task, and even having to stop them in the middle of what they’re saying, and say, ‘That’s a great idea, but can we save it for later?’ It was something really helpful to me to start reimagining myself, not as a prisoner who’s trying to act like a free person or a working professional, but as a person who is a free, working professional out here in the world.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
LeShawn Gamble left the military after being attacked by fellow soldiers. Back home, he was incarcerated for marijuana charges. “I’m just glad I’m still alive, man. With everything that I’ve been through, I’m just happy to be alive because every day is a new adventure. And a lot of people don’t think of that as an accomplishment. Remember: Getting up out of bed, sometimes that’s harder than anything else. That’s the biggest accomplishment I got.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Brown: One decision we made is that we didn't really talk about the crimes. Sometimes they came up, but it wasn't in bold letters like, This person did X, and served Y amount of years. We didn't want to make it seem like these were people begging for forgiveness, or saying how much they screwed up.
At certain points, it may be implied that they feel remorse, but some of the people didn’t think they should have been incarcerated in the first place. In either case, the crime was kind of irrelevant to the way we approached the story. This wasn’t a sensationalist look at crime, nor was it a sentimental look at reform. It's just a story about people who needed a second chance and what they're doing with it.
Amili: There were reasons to do it either way. For example, when it comes to legislation, lawmakers often want to exclude people who have done certain crimes, and I feel like there can be a benefit to letting people know what someone was charged with if they have overcome those hurdles.
“This offense was something that took place in their life, but they made great contributions to society following that, and it didn't prevent them from being a positive person.” Some people have done things that can be pretty hard to forgive, but when you see them out here making amends every day, it gets easier to say, “OK, maybe we shouldn't give people life without parole. Maybe we shouldn’t give decades in prison to someone who is 16 or 17 years old.”
But what we focused on in this project was college, so that people can see that this is not just one exception, but a lot of different people are capable of doing this. We have someone who did 20-plus years, and we have people who did less time, but they've all made it to the same place, the University of Washington, where their life is being transformed, and they are able to transform the lives of others in the process.
Menghistab: In terms of the visual language, I never asked anybody what they did, and I didn't even care. To me, the bottom line is that what most people need is the opportunity to move forward. Even down to talking about wardrobe, Omari wanted to wear a nice jacket in his photo, but someone else would want to be more casual. A couple of people did bring outfit options, and they said, “Did you want me to look a certain way?” And I said, “Whatever you feel like your next step is, whether that be self-care, self-love, professionalism—those are all correct. I hate the idea of Black exceptionalism. We should be making space for people to simply be better for themselves.
Some people wanted to be photographed on their campus, other people had more personal space. Theron Taylor wanted to be photographed in front of the hospital he was born in. For him, that was about the idea of, “I started here, and I'm still here, and I'm doing great.” Someone else wanted to be photographed in front of the state capitol. I wanted to detach from the exceptionalist idea of looking at how great everyone is and make this more about how everyone has a right to live the life they deserve after making a mistake.
Theron Taylor chose to be photographed outside of the hospital he was born in. “I know there’s something that I have to do. I’m not just here to do nothing. And for all the things that I’ve done, up to this point, I pray that people have prospered because of me—that those who may come after me will see that it’s possible to be at a place where you never thought you would be. This is for our brothers and sisters that are locked away. For those who do not believe it is possible.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Christopher Beasley, a professor at the University of Washington’s Tacoma campus, was incarcerated for drug possession before finding a career in academia. He went on to start the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, which has a thousand members across 43 states. Photo © Meron Menghistab
Brown: That question they asked—“Did you want me to look a certain way?”—is so powerful in this context. It’s almost disturbing. It means, “How do you want me to present myself?”, and by extension, “Who do you want me to be for your camera?”
Menghistab: We're all conditioned to it. We’re told what to look like professionally, what to look like to not be in trouble. And if you grew up in a certain environment, as well, you're told what is the right and wrong way. For this story to work, everyone needed to be allowed to show themselves the way they felt comfortable. There was no visual wrong answer, because there is no life wrong answer. By that I mean, there’s no wrong answer as long as you're growing and developing as a person.
Brown: This was not a traditional journalistic project in which a reporter interviews people. Omari spent years building the relationships that led to being able to recruit people for this story. It took a lot of trust for them to commit to this. What do you think was on their minds when thinking about being photographed? This was a vulnerable situation, and they knew the photos would go far and wide.
Amili: When I was being photographed, I wanted to make sure it was actually me. If somebody tells you how to show up, where to show up, when to show up—then that's not really your authentic self. When I see these pictures, this is me that I'm seeing. It's actually a representation of me.
I don't have to be someone else to be in this magazine. And I think that that's what was accomplished. With LeShawn, for example, he wore an “America Was Never Great” shirt, and he was painting in front of a canvas. That’s who I know LeShawn to be. For Chris, he wanted to be photographed at the park he was arrested at, with his friends next to him. That’s Chris right there.
Menghistab: I think that should be the goal of the photographer, to make people feel like that’s them on the other side. Especially when we're talking about people who are not in publications every week like celebrities. I think the process needs to be a conversation.
Cynthia Brady went to prison for drug charges. Now she works with people dealing with addiction. “It is not just talking about abstinence. That is the focus people keep talking about. But no, you want to really teach them about how to live, how to learn, how to love, how to have compassion—and not just for other people, but for themselves. A lot of the time, the biggest issue with addiction is that we have lost the capacity to have compassion in most instances for ourselves.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Michelle Brownlee has dreams for a future in policymaking. “I figured I just needed to go as far as I can with education. I never thought I'd get a master's degree.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Brown: I want to go back to the topic of charges. There are many people who are open to the idea of reform but are challenged by certain charges. They may be more willing to forgive nonviolent crimes than violent crimes, for example. And I wonder, Omari, do you ever find yourself challenged by certain charges? And if so, what do you try to remind yourself of when faced with that internal conflict?
Amili: If we’re talking about whether someone who is released from prison should have an opportunity to have a roof over their head, if they should have an opportunity to make an honest living, if they should have resources at their disposal that everyone else has, I don't feel like the charge matters. In that sense, I don't care what a person is charged with, or what they did in their past.
If we don't provide those things, if they're not coming back to welcoming society, all we’re doing is setting them up to re-offend—to go commit that crime all over again. So, the crimes that I personally have the biggest problem with, are probably the people I feel should receive the biggest opportunities to turn their lives around. If the government has limited programming and opportunities available, then they should provide it to people at the highest risk.
One of the crimes that will come up in this situation is child molestation or sex offenses. But I promise you, for me personally, if someone has ever done an act like that, the thing that I want to see most is that they do not do it again. They need help, treatment, resources. Homelessness among that population is huge: When you’re released after crimes like that, you often can’t rent—it’s very hard to find a place to live. Some of these guys have the temptation to re-offend just to go back to prison to have three meals a day. So when you ask am I challenged by it? Not at all, When it comes to offering an education, jobs, and housing. My response 100% of the time is, “Do not exclude anyone, or else you’re going to have to suffer the consequences of that.”
Menghistab: When we talk about prison reform or abolition, people always jump to those extremes—sexual assault, molestation, pedophilia—this stuff that's so destructive that we all hate. But how many people are nonviolent offenders? How many people need psychological help, or even just a therapist? If half the people got a therapist at 17, would they have done what they did?
Even if you try to make a case that there's a type of offender who needs to be imprisoned, the amount of people who simply need resources to be rehabilitated is so high that you can't tell me this system doesn’t need to be reconstructed. The movies make it seem like there's this spiraling that happens to get you into prison—like you're this exaggerated member of society—but a lot of people were just hungry, or they had anger issues. That doesn’t mean they should be in jail for 10 to 15 years. There's so much stuff that can be done before a crime happens, and there's so much stuff that needs to be done after, that I just can’t comprehend the argument of saying imprisonment is simply the way to solve it.
Kelly Olsen: “If we don’t deal with our trauma, it’s going to come out one way or another. You can’t live an authentic life if you are trying to silence parts of your life.” Photo © Meron Menghistab
Brown: Some people want to split hairs and say, “This one group of people is really bad, so let's lock them up and throw away the key, but I am OK with everybody else receiving more lenient sentences.” But as long as “lock them up and throw away the key” exists as a solution, it will be used for way more people than you originally intended it to be used for. We have seen this in every state and at every level of government. That is why our system has swelled to such a cruel and unsustainable level.
Angela Davis summed it up pretty well: “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.” And the statistics are clear: There are trends by race, class and education. We know this is a calibrated system that targets people. Because of that, I’m finding it harder to see the case for reform, versus a complete restructuring or even abolition. Omari, I'd be curious where you fall on this, as somebody who's been through the system. Where are you at when it comes to reform, defunding or abolishing?
Amili: I'm not for punishment at all. I don't think punishment produces any positive outcomes. You're stripped from your normal way of life, thrown in solitary confinement, serving these really long sentences with no programming available to you that can actually make things better—and then you have a release date. Even if the judge didn't give you life in prison, society wants to. Society wants you to suffer. For me, it's all about making sure that we address the temptation for this crime to begin with. Was it poverty? Mental health? Was it that you grew up with a lack of positive role models? Because you have never seen a male from your bloodline who didn't gangbang or sell dope?
It’s often about exposure: introducing people to the new possibilities, things that they can have, and things that they can accomplish in their life if they want to take another path. Punishment plays no part in that. This needs to be about education. What's being corrected if all you're doing is sitting and serving time, with no access to education or new ways of seeing things? Sometimes crime leads to someone getting hurt, or losing their property. But that doesn't mean that sitting for an outrageous amount of time is somehow going to solve that problem.
There is big talk about restorative justice right now. But I think it has to be more than just restorative justice that is restoring people back to the way things were. It needs to be transformative justice. It needs to be justice that is not just reproducing the same circumstances that led to the crime in the first place. Am I being restored back to poverty? Am I being restored back to my perceived deficits? Or am I going to be transformed with new types of skills and abilities that will allow me to never again do what I did.
Amanda Henritze: “(College) started to make me see different things in the world, rather than having one scope. This has been my life for so long: crime, drugs, and money. And now prison, I felt defined by that. But I met a lot of good professors. There was one the first quarter who said, ‘Don’t ever sell yourself short. Who cares if you have a felony? Be the first person that gets hired at someplace. Be the exception.’”
Photo © Meron Menghistab
Brown: In one of the interviews, you said that before you enrolled in college, you identified as a felon—as somebody who had been in prison—as a primary way of thinking about who you were. But as soon as you enrolled, you identified primarily as a college student.
Amili: I had a lot of different labels—I was a father, I was a brother—but the fact that I was a felon pretty much dominated my life when it came to the jobs that I could get and the opportunities that I had. When you're on probation, you have people who just pop about your house and walk through your kitchen, your living room, your bedrooms or bathrooms at any given time. So it dominated my life. I had 30 felony convictions. But going to college allowed me to say, “I’m making progress on something positive in my life.” That was a major turning point for how I identified.
Now, I want to get stories out there that challenge these popular narratives and break down negative perceptions. Maybe there are landlords who read these stories and are like, “Maybe I'll be a little bit more willing to rent to someone who has something on their record.” There might be some employers who read this and say, “Man, these people are really resilient. They've been through a lot. A lot of my employees haven't quite shown that same resiliency.” We need to get these stories out and use people-first language, not referring to them as felons or offenders—but just as people. They're human beings who have been through some hardship, like we all have.
Menghistab: Like Omari said, these are people in your community, and people who should be in your community. I think from a professional standpoint, I've always felt like my job in photography—whether as a Black male photographer or in general—is helping spread these narratives that are honest and that are in line with the social critiques that I have had my whole life. It’s important to me to take my personal ideas, ideologies and opinions I’ve created through the life I've lived, and to make sure that I'm using my voice as a photographer to speak on them.
These are stories I think about when the camera is down, when I’m not working. The privilege and the responsibility of being able to do this professionally is to bring these stories out.
I referred to this project as a series of conversations, more than photoshoots, because in a project like this all of the subjective decisions you make as a photographer are going to come from what the people say and do. I always joke that photography is a way for me to be nosy: I want to hear about people. I let people tell me about themselves, but I also interject and talk to them about me, too. I want to talk about our lives together, about what we've seen and not seen.
Brown: During these conversations, are you at the point where you are less concerned about “getting the shot”? From a practical standpoint, in the back of your head, are you worried that you haven’t gotten a good picture yet? I wonder how you balance that urgency with making them comfortable.
Menghistab: I think it's kind of the other way around: If I know that they were truly comfortable, there will be a picture. If the person felt good being there, I highly doubt there isn't a good frame in there. That comes with time and experience in terms of the craft of photography, you know, trusting yourself to make the frame in a literal sense. But whether I have an hour with someone or a whole day, if I felt they were comfortable with me being there with them, then the frame is in there.
Brown: There are a lot of factors that go into who gets policed, arrested, sentenced, and imprisoned. But you two are both Black men who worked on this project, and this is a system that disproportionately affects Black people, and men.
My instinct is always to follow the critical race theory approach, which considers race to be the central part of the legal system in America, but I don’t want to oversimplify the issue. Omari, when you think about the incarceration system, do you think about race first and foremost? Or is race just part of a bigger, messier problem?
Amili: You can see the racial disproportionality nationwide and throughout the system. It’s not just who's in prison, it’s about who’s being over-policed, who's having charges filed against them, how long the sentences are, how much probation is involved, and how long you stay trapped in the system. But we also live in a very white state of Washington.
Only 4% of the population in our state is Black but 18% of our incarcerated individuals are Black, and 28% of those serving life sentences are Black. We’re exposed to the fact that, while race is a huge piece of the puzzle, so is socioeconomic status. People who come from resources can afford big-money lawyers and $50,000 bail, and their family will get that $50,000 returned to them, as opposed to someone whose family has to fight for crumbs to put together $5,000 that will never be returned to them. You can see that this system is not broken, but it's working as designed. It's meant to keep certain people down.
You definitely have to lead with race, but you also don't want to get tunnel vision and only focus on race, because you can lose people. and you're not going to get the full picture. My own story was about growing up in poverty and having drug-addicted parents and a lack of positive role models that led me into a life of crime. There are a lot of white guys who have that same story. There are Asian guys who have that story. People from different ethnic backgrounds can share a story, but where you might see differences is in the interaction with the system: How many chances did they get?
Menghistab: The simplest way I can explain it to myself as well as others is that we have a system that was built—pointed at, by design, from its very beginning—for the oppression of Black people. But it's so insidious and destructive and corrosive that it has also brought in other people who are positioned similarly. Like Omari said, we don’t want to lose people, because we are talking about collective pain. But I do think it's important to understand the history.
Photographer Meron Menghistab photographed by Quinn Russell Brown
Brown: This is one of the tightropes we walk on in the media, or at least in race-conscious media. We know by the government's own data that 1 in 3 Black men will be in some way involved in this system. But at the same time, we don't want to fundamentally associate Blackness with this system—with victimhood, with incarceration.
So how do we balance those two ideas in our coverage of the issue? How do we acknowledge that this is race-based while not making Black Americans seem inevitably tied to this system?
Amili: Well, with me being who I am, I would have loved to have recruited 10 Black men for this project, just to highlight the stories of Black men and give us a little bit of shine. But thinking about the larger picture, if it was all Black folks, then all we do is reinforce the dominant narrative. Even if the stories are positive, we're still in some way promoting the narrative that Black people commit crimes and end up incarcerated.
We aimed for a diverse mix of people that is representative of the population here in the state of Washington. It’s good to be aware of the numbers and what's really happening in your specific location because you can— accidentally —confirm dominant narratives and help the oppressors, and not even be aware of it.
Menghistab: Honestly, when Quinn brought up that there was a conscious effort to show a wider demographic, my first thought was if it was up to me, I would just have 10 Black people. But I think being in a very neoliberal city like Seattle and a region like the Pacific Northwest, what service are we doing for our community if we're not showing how violent and extensive this system is?
People need to see themselves in this. This affects all walks of life and all types of people. That’s the only way we are going to get to a collective understanding of this. This part of the country is so fundamentally rooted in thinking it's progressive, and if we just did a story on Black people, how easy would it be for somebody who is white to look at it and say, “Oh, well that's their story. That's not my neighbor.”
Brown: That makes me think of an old white lady reading the version of the magazine with 10 Black men in it, and her well-intentioned response ends up being, “These poor Black men! What Black men go through is so terrible!” But what we want her to realize is that this system is so terrible.
And we can do that by showing, as Meron said, how far it reaches. To finish up, I want to ask you each a final question. Omari, you do this work every single day, and it’s very heavy work against an entrenched system. How do you stay energized and motivated?
Amili: When I see these stories being shared on Facebook and getting hundreds of reactions and comments, I can see these people feeling good about how far they’ve come. They are doing their part in normalizing hardship and adversity. It’s important that we note that you are not an exceptional person—you are not another—just because you’ve been through this. You’re one of us.
Also, seeing the changes in policy, like Pell Grants being reinstated for incarcerated college students, means a lot, because I know that I actually played a role in this at the federal level. I shared my story and my experience was a part of that. It was a collective win for all of us who have ever been to D.C. and talked about it. You talk to lawmakers and hear that their perspective has changed. They might share with you, “I used to think this way, but now I see it this way,” based on being part of a discussion.
Whenever I give a presentation, there's always somebody in the audience who has never been exposed to a person who's been to prison before, and I'm just shaking up all of their preconceived notions. I’ve had probation officers tell me that they read my children’s book to their kids. These are people who work with youth in the system, and so now they might do something a little bit different: rather than punishing this kid, they might provide an opportunity or a resource.
Brown: We did this project during Covid-19, and Meron had no crew. It was a big logistical feat. But we had institutional support. The University of Washington Magazine gave us time, resources, and a platform—and I'm not just saying that to market my employer. I’m saying that to encourage other institutions to think creatively about the kind of stories they can do, and to commit energy and resources to them, and to approach them with a lens that is critical about race and class.
These stories should not only be told by newspapers and national magazines. They are regional and local, too, and it’s really important to do them right. Meron, what is a lesson from this project that you're going to take with you going forward, either in your career or in your life?
Menghistab: The level of commitment both of you have shown in having conversations and bringing together thoughts is an overall process that I haven't gotten to experience too much in this industry. We had a phone call together before we took any pictures, and I got to learn about the writer and his relationship to the story. If we’re talking about professional gains here, it's that ability to think about what the writer wants to tell.
But also, this put me in a position where I’m thinking more about what kind of commissions I want to take on. This is the type of work that I want to be doing. Moving forward, it makes me really think critically about questions like, “What narrative are you involved in as a photographer?”
And as a Black photographer and Black narratives, it’s OK to completely inject yourself, your opinions, and your politics into the work you are doing.
Meron Menghistab is a photographer based in Seattle and New York. He has been featured in The 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch (formerly PDN30) and the Authority Collective’s Lit List.
Omari Amili is an author and activist who works with youth affected by the criminal justice system at Choose 180 in the Seattle area. He formerly worked as a juvenile justice researcher for the ACLU of Washington.
Quinn Russell Brown is a photographer, writer, and photo editor based in Seattle.