digitalphotopro.com July/August 2019 | 39and public defecation—and won a Pic-
tures of the Year International award
for the body of work she produced.
To all of her images, Bruce brings a
keen eye for light and human expres-
sion. Her poignant use of chiaroscuro
in many images is a reminder that in
photojournalism, aesthetic techniques
can be used not just to make striking
pictures but also to draw us in close to
people we'll never meet and illuminate
their experiences.
Everywhere Bruce traveled to cap-
ture those images, the inquisitive-
ness about democracy popped up like
a leitmotif.
“People kept asking this question—
in Egypt during the revolution, or in
Afghanistan and Mexico and Liberia,”
she says. “It seems like the definition of
this word overseas is very different from
place to place.” People appeared to think
that as an American, she’d have a ready
answer, but she was never satisfied with
the explanations she came up with. “I
wondered what people in the United
States think this word means,” she
recalls. So after more than a dozen years
covering conflicts, disasters and social
issues overseas, Bruce decided to come
home and find out.
She applied for a Nieman Fel-
lowship at Harvard to spend a year
studying political theory and ideas
of democracy. Her fellowship year
turned out to be one of the most con-
tentious in recent American politi-
cal life, 2016. Over the course of theyear, Bruce drew on her academic
work and discussions with scholars
to plan a collaborative multimedia
project called Our Democracy, with
the goal of exploring what democracy
means to people in the United States
through in-depth reporting on com-
munities across the country.
“And then [President Donald]
Trump was elected,” she says, “and I
was like, ‘Oh, well this is even more
interesting to me now.’” She kicked the
project off right after the election. “This
is what I think is needed right now,”
she says. “I want to show how people
are wrestling with ideas of democracy
and community and citizenship.”
Bruce spends two weeks at each
location she covers, accompanied by
two assistants, her mother and her
baby daughter. She and her assis-
tants hold community discussions,
take photographs, conduct inter-
views and invite community mem-
bers to contribute their own photos
to an Instagram feed called @ourde-
mocracy. They also host a “Democ-
racy Dinner” near the end of their
stay, inviting community members
they’ve met to join them for a meal
and some lively conversation.Gloucester, Massachusetts: How the local
community is fighting opioid addiction.The Looney family in Grundy, Virginia, has
suffered from the unemployment issues
of the county, which depends mostly on
the coal industry. They voted for Trump in
the last U.S. presidential election. They
are also "fearful" that many of the benefit
programs that exist in the county will
disappear for the poor.