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like that when you go to a community
that you've never been to before.”
Unfortunately, that kind of commit-
ment to avoiding preconceptions can
make a project like Our Democracy
hard to sell to media outlets that want
to know what they’ll be getting when
they sign a contract.
“It really is something that's defined
by each community, and you can't pre-
visualize it,” says Bruce. The project
also loses media marketability because
it doesn’t fit neatly into a content cat-
egory. “It's audience engagement and
education and media literacy and
reporting and photography,” says
Bruce, “and so when I try to explain
this project to magazines and newspa-
pers, they just can't get there.”
She ended up finding support for the
project through grants from the National
Geographic Society and the visual sto-
rytelling funder CatchLight instead.
Bruce and her team are planning to go
to a new location each month until the
grant money runs out. In between trips,
they’re editing the work into a book, a
traveling exhibit, content for the ourde-
mocracyproject.com website and a cur-
riculum that schools can use when they’re
teaching about de Tocqueville or ideas
of democracy, especially during the 2020
election year.
But Bruce stresses the nonpartisan
nature of Our Democracy. “We really
are trying not to take political sides,”
she says. “This is actually trying to
bridge the divide in our country.”
If she’s on the side of anything, it’s
the power of community journal-
ism to help us get closer to the truth.
In a documentary project like Our
Democracy, she says, that means lis-
tening to and giving an honest por-
trayal of people with all kinds of dif-
ferent perspectives.
“It comes down to the same thing it
comes down to when I'm covering inter-
national news,” she says, “which is every-
one has a shared humanity. Most peoplego to school. Most people have jobs. Most
people have dinner, at some point, some-
how. And where you have your power in
your daily life in this shared humanity is
the main starting point of photograph-
ing people and not just showing how
messed up people are or what makes
people different than other people. And
that's hard, because it's also kind of
making life more boring, not exoticiz-
ing people, which is sometimes hard to
sell when you're a freelance photogra-
pher. I'm showing daily life and daily
struggles, and sometimes that's not sexy,
and sometimes it's not the answer that
people are looking for. But it's the reality,
as close as I can get there.” DPPHalla Hameed receives a kiss from her son,
Iaad Hameed, 4, while her 2-year-old drinks
from a bottle. Halla’s husband, Walid Hameed,
the father of her two children, was shot and
killed in the violence surrounding Baghdad
during the war. She became a prostitute to
provide for her children. A customer sits
behind her. ©The Washington Post