“Building Your Career” with Sarahbeth Maney and Sarah Waiswa
Careers in photography have no roadmap, and a common question is, how do I get started? How do I make my first contacts in the industry, get my first assignment, work on my first projects? Photographers Sarahbeth Maney and Sarah Waiswa will use their own passion projects and reporting projects to walk you through the start of their careers and highlight some of their most important learnings along the way. Coming from different points of their career and different backgrounds, Sarabeth and Sarah will showcase what they were able to do with limited support and discuss what it was truly like to get their careers off the ground.
Sarahbeth Maney is a 2021-22 photography fellow at The New York Times' Washington bureau. Her personal work focuses on topics related to housing insecurity, disability, and inequalities that disproportionately impact Black and brown communities. Most recently, she has documented immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the California wildfire season. In addition, she filmed a short documentary following Ahmet Ustunel, the first blind person to kayak independently from Asia to Europe using navigational prototype technology. Maney graduated from San Francisco State University in 2019 with a degree in photojournalism and has interned at the San Francisco Chronicle and The Flint Journal in Michigan. Her photography has been published by TIME, Vanity Fair, Apple, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Maney is a member of Diversify Photo, the National Association of Black Journalists, Authority Collective, and Black Women Photographers. You can follow her @sbmaneyphoto.
Sarah Waiswa is Ugandan-born, Kenya-based documentary and portrait photographer with an interest in exploring the New African Identity on the continent. With degrees in sociology and psychology, Sarah’s work explores social issues in Africa in a contemporary and non-traditional way. In 2015, she was awarded first place in the story and creative categories in the Uganda Press Photo Awards and second place in the Daily Life and portrait categories. In 2016 she was awarded the Discovery Award in Arles, France and in 2017 she was awarded the Gerald Kraak Award in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2018, she was named a Canon Brand Ambassador and was selected for the World Press Photo 6x6 Africa Program. Her work has been exhibited around the world, most recently at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. Her work is currently on display at the Bristol Photo Festival 2021 in collaboration with the Bristol Archives. Her photographs have been published in the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the New York Times, among other publications, and she has worked with brands such as Christian Dior and Chloe. Earlier this year, she founded African Women in Photography, a non profit organization dedicated to elevating and celebrating the work of women and non binary photographers from Africa. She is a contributing photographer to Everyday Africa. You can follow her @lafrohemien.