I was sitting in a dark theatre, entranced by the black and white portrait on the screen.

A freckle-faced Irish child with wonky teeth and a cloth cap crinkled his eyes as he looked into the lens of Dorothea Lange. It was 1954 and Lange had been on assignment for Time Life Magazine when she captured him on film. (This is her on the shoot in Ireland.)

That day in the theatre I became obsessed with this captivating series, brought to life in the 2002 film ‘Photos to Send‘, a documentary made by Canadian director Dierdre Lynch, who had gained access to the archives from the shoot.

In 2002 she flew to County Clare in Western Ireland to find and film some of the amazing characters Lange had photographed 44 years earlier.

And find them she did.

When Lynch met them, and showed them the original photographs, there were tears of joy and sadness as they recognised themselves, their brothers, mothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

In the years since the shots were made, many had passed away, some had gone missing, and some had never ever had a photograph to remember them by prior to that moment.

A case for documenting ‘ordinary’ people, places and their stories, through photography and motion gets no greater than that.

The effect of showing those images so many years later was heartbreaking and moving, and yet Dorothea Lange had no idea what she was doing, except her job.

In a previous post I said you are not a photographer. You’re a problem solver with a good personality who can translate a brief into stunning imagery and motion. (You can read that post here )

But you’re even more than that.

You’re a historian, an archivist, and a preserver of memories and stories, and you have an important part to play in how people in the future view and understand the past.

You may not ever know what you’ve done, but future generations will.

So please keep doing it.

March is Women’s Month, so we can keep celebrating women like Dorothea Lange and Diedre Lynch for a while yet, which is just as well, because there are so many incredible women photographers out there. To see some brilliant personal work by female photographers I’ve worked with please have a look at my Insta feed– I’m adding a new project almost every day.

I worked with another fabulous photographer recently who produces beautiful art photography and stunning editorials, all to worldwide acclaim, but who also seems to be struggling to figure out where she fits into the ad world. Not being the beer drinking, rugby watching type, she was wondering how she could connect with the majority of her potential clients- mostly men in the ad & design industry.

Admittedly if I were to generalise about advertising photographers I’ve worked with most are men, many are dxyslexic and they are more likely to be technically minded. (One day I will conduct a formal study on this as it’s positively fascinating). And the creative departments of ad agencies worldwide are most definitely populated by a large proportion of men.

My experience of working with mostly male photographers must have affected my perception of the unnamed entries I judged for the Lucies this year. Whilst looking at shots of war torn environments and devastation, of military compounds and soldiers staring menacingly into the camera., I had in most cases presumed that these were shot by men.

How wrong I was. Shame on me!

When I turned up at the Lucie Foundation Best of Show exhibition one of the first people I was introduced to was Alinka Echeverria– a delightful young woman from the UK. I was surprised to discover that she had shot the ‘Becoming South Sudan’ series, which a few days later won her International Photographer of the Year at the Lucie Awards. At the exhibition I also saw one of my favourite images from the awards, shot, I discovered, by New York based Japanese photographer Ayano Hisa, who I’d erroneously labelled in a previous post ‘The Make or Break Edit’ as a ‘he’.

A day later, I attended a lecture on Photography as an Instrument for Social Change featuring three amazing women; Sharon Cavanagh, Sara Terry and Nancy McGirr, and was in awe of their photographic and humanitarian achievements. Terry & McGirr were both war photographers prior to establishing highly successful, non profit humanitarian organisations, Fotokids and The Aftermath Project. When asked if they felt that being women affected how they were perceived/treated in war situations, they unanimously agreed that being a woman had enabled them access to places which would have been off limits to their male counterparts, and to people who perhaps would have felt more threatened or intimidated by a man. They felt it gave them advantages and they were happy to have that point of difference.

So with this in mind, in response to the photographer who asked me if it is worth it, and to any woman who wants to succeed as a photographer, I say, embrace your female side. Take shots of women in a way that that men can rarely achieve. Shoot men from a female perspective. Shoot everything with a female eye and stand out from the crowd. Be empowered by your ability to gain access to different people and places, to be perceived as less threatening, to share things with the world that many men can’t reach. Be proud of who you are and follow the lead of other women out there who didn’t give up.