Ashley Gilbertson

The career arc of Ashley Gilbertson can be considered enviable — regular assignments with The New York Times, a distinguished body of work from the Iraq war, and a reputation for creative, compassionate approaches to tricky social topics. That said, he freely acknowledges that the support of his editors is paramount, and not all projects go to plan.

HM: What’s the three sentence version of your career?

AG: I got into photography because I was a narcissistic teenager, like most of them, and I wanted to take pictures of myself skateboarding. I couldn't photograph myself on a self timer at the same time as doing a trick and so I photographed my friends. By the time I was 16, I was the lead photographer and editor for one of the Australian skateboarding magazines.

As I matured, I started recognizing that I lived in one of the most racist countries on the planet. I didn't understand how we could treat other people that way. So I started photographing the stories of refugees and migrants as a reaction to this racism that we are surrounded by. Every single place that I've worked since then is based around that — every conflict, every social unrest situation, every story of refugees or migrants.

HM: Do you think the way that people are portrayed, and the way that pictures of especially vulnerable people are portrayed, has helped lend to a greater understanding?

AG: No, I don't. I look at my career, and it's 25 years long now, and things have gotten worse. I don't know where the failure is. I look around us, I look at the media landscape, I look at our readers, and I see that people have become increasingly polarized, which is exactly the opposite reaction to what I think a lot of my colleagues in the press have tried to do.

I don't understand why that is. I wish I did, because I would have been successful. I've tried everything that I know how to do, I only know how to use a camera. So no, I don't think it's helped or had any effect.

I spent eight years working in Iraq, and I don't feel like any of that work really reached anybody. I hate to say this, because it just sort of felt like a reinforced opinion about the war.

I documented the history, and I thought I needed to do it, but that failure of that work led to a different way of thinking about conflict, and that eventually led to the Bedroom for the Fallen [series]. It was almost like eight years of school in order to find a way to tell the story of war. I think that work did reach people. It is a hard series of work to look at, it's hard to really sit with.

HM: I remember seeing that book, and really being impressed by how you had brought something that felt very far away and very foreign home into something that was extremely relatable, but also, it was such a simple concept, which made it so effective.

AG: See, what you just said, is exactly what I want all of the work I do to achieve. I want something that is far away, that one doesn't feel connected to or even responsible, and all of a sudden to feel like it's ours, that we share in this. The bedrooms did do that.

As for collaborating with editors: at the very beginning of that project, I felt there was one person on this planet that could get this straight off the bat, and that was Kathy Ryan. She totally supported the project. It was amazing. I couldn't do it without someone to listen to me, and help me synthesize all of these things that I was hearing and feeling.

That's what gives you, in my opinion, the ability to keep going and to get to the next level.

HM: Do you feel that level of collaboration is something that has shifted over the years as newsrooms have shifted?

AG: I'm not sure. I work with a really small group of people that I really trust. When the work is good, it's hard, so I have these really tight relationships, and I know if shit goes down, if I get really freaked out, or something bad happens, then they're going to have my back.

I still don't really know how to deal with all the work that I do. I've been trained to look at stories that I'm not directly connected to, and try to create a connection between us and them, to try to create this bond. That's done with a level of professional attempted objectivity. There's always a level of separation there, whether it's a different culture, or a plane ticket out, there's always this level of disconnect.

In 2020, when I started working very closely with Renee Melides. She's been awesome, she's at the Times. I had this idea in February 2020, to start photographing this new economy that was developing around the pandemic.

This had never happened to me before, but in the middle of the pitch, she's like, you're going now. I walked outside, got on my bicycle and started shooting. That story turned into a second story. I shot and I wrote, and I ran every day through 2020.

As it evolved, it became impossible to execute as a traditional journalistic story. I couldn't talk to people, I couldn't even get proper captioning. Nobody knew anything. Everyone was scared of each other. So it turned into this really different approach to journalism, which was I started telling my own story by accident, my own responses to the city that I fell in love with.

The people that I showed the resulting book to are freaked out in a totally different sense to any work that I've ever done before. They look at the work, and they start talking about their own pandemic. This is my story of New York at this very particular time in history, but everybody I've shown it to connects it to themselves. That's exactly what we need in journalism. As soon as I made it personal, against these journalistic conventions, it fit.

HM: Is there an instructive failure that you'd be willing to share — a project that didn't go well or didn't go as planned?

AG: This is such an amazing exercise. There's an ongoing conversation in the New York Times about opinions. So some years ago, I spoke with my editor and was like, “I've got really strong opinions about our veterans coming home and killing themselves”. We’re not doing enough. So I pitched a story about suicide, like a young man who didn't have to die, but who was failed by the VA.

So I went out and shot this essay, photographing scenes where this man had been. I went to his dealer's house, I photographed where he bought heroin, I went to the bar where he got drunk and took pills and died. I went to the graveyard where he was buried with his mom, it was all happening. I made this reportage type narrative.

In the end, when we put it together, it was just a story. At that point, I was like, “I don't actually know what people are talking about. What is this opinion photography thing?”

I set out with this really clear, confident idea and I just came back with this theory. The original idea of creating an opinion photography essay was a failure.

I've failed on this idea of creating an opinion photo essay. But what do I do that is not opinionated? It's a really confusing sort of territory. I try to be fair, but my idea of fair is different from your idea of fair is different from the guy down the street walking his dogs.

I rarely do politics. But when I do, I find it really difficult to edit, because I feel like there is something polarized just in the picture that you choose. Give me 10 seconds with the President, I can give you 50 different expressions. Depending on what I send, I'm somewhat editorializing that image.

HM: I think photojournalism sometimes veers too far to the milquetoast — where it almost flattens an idea.

AG: Yeah, I agree. It's fun to live in this gray area. Nothing's really clear. There are some things that are becoming clearer, and that in itself is almost the reckoning.

Just within the industry with gender and race. We've made leaps and strides over the last decade but I feel like we've got a long way to go.

HM: I'm shifting to neutral ground. Are there different cameras that you use? Are there those that separate you from the scene? Can you talk a little bit about that relationship with your gear?

AG: I used to have a different system for everything. I used to take the system for a really big fancy Canon with pretty lenses for commercial jobs, because it was fast and reliable. I had a small Fuji system for my overseas jobs because everything was so heavy. I had a medium format system when I was shooting stuff that I really love at home.

Then I realized I just needed one kit for everything, and I ended up changing everything to Sony. Within that, my son is 14, and there's water based markers that he uses to decorate my cameras.

It's a little bit rough when you buy a $7,000 body and then give it to your kid who just paints all over the thing, except it softens it a little bit. I just love it. They're like works of art, and it feels like it's a conversation piece when you start meeting with people. It's such a reflection of who he is, and then who I am as a photographer.

Hopefully, it's an indication of, “here's a guy with a son that he loves very much, and we're here with you as the person who has agreed to be photographed. We collaborate on this. I'm not here to steal your soul. We're here to create something together.” It's a crazy looking camera, but it's so beautiful.

HM: Can you talk about your editing process?

AG: I love the pre and post production, because it feels like something that can be controlled a little bit. When you're actually getting on to the assignment, everything goes out the window, and you try your very best to meet the brief. It’s like a plan on the battlefield, always failing once it comes into contact. There's no enemies, it's just really complex.

The editing process I find just as complex. I look at every frame, and I try to look at it as though my images are being looked at by a stranger. I try to divorce myself emotionally from the shoots, and look at it from a more rational spectrum.

I would have an existential crisis every hour if I was an editor. Do I dumb it down for the readers? Do I assume, do I hope they're more sophisticated? Do I try to educate them with the most sophisticated look ? We have to educate everyone on their language and how to do that in the pages of a national newspaper or a major magazine is a hard question.

There's certain emotional moments that I can't get away from. My favorite picture from 2020 is a man and a woman dancing on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a beautiful moment, but it was also this moment where I saw something in them that I had never had in my life, that I needed. I realized that was my future, and I realized that I'd be okay.

It's not the greatest picture in the book, but it's my favorite picture. To me, that is what editing is, is recognizing that you have favorites, and then you have the strongest images. Those two things are very different pictures.