Ep #85 Photography Through An Ethnographer’s Lens: Image Making with Jason De León

The Familiar Strange

This week Carolyn sits down with Jason De León, anthropologist, photographer and author. He is currently the director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) and his research interests revolve around violence, materiality, Latin American migration, photoethnography, forensic science, and archaeology of the contemporary. Throughout this conversation, Carolyn asks questions around photography, doing ethnography and photography together and how cameras can be used in ethnographic settings. Jason then discusses his work “The Land of Open Graves Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail” and the various processes and decisions he made in collaboration with his co-creator, Michael Wells. It was an enlightening and very honest conversation about what goes into doing photography for fieldwork and we hope you enjoy! head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!