CatchLight has announced three new Fellows joining its Local Fellowship program:
- Hiram Durán, CatchLight Local California Fellow and Report for America photo corps member, will join El Tímpano (Oakland, California and Greater Bay Area).
- Pablo Unzueta, CatchLight Local California Fellow and Report for America photo corps member, will work at El Tecolote (San Francisco, California and Greater Bay Area).
- Andrea Bruce, Senior Local Fellow, will develop the hyperlocal newsletter Down in the County (Pamlico County, North Carolina).
CatchLight Local is a collaborative model for visual journalism designed to advance trust and representation in local media and ultimately help inform the public about local issues and policies. The program pairs its Fellows with community-based news organizations in underrepresented markets and provides them with training and services to produce inclusive, in-depth, accurate, and locally contextualized visual reporting.
CatchLight subsidizes a portion of the salary of the Local Fellows working as full-time staff visual journalists. Report for America, a partner of the CatchLight Local California Visual Desk, offers financial support to cover a portion of the salaries for CatchLight Local Fellows who are also photo corps members.
By adding two bilingual Spanish-English newspapers, El Tecolote and El Tímpano, to the six existing California Local Visual Desk newsroom partners, CatchLight addresses the need for high-quality visual representation in underrepresented communities.
Hiram Alejandro Durán
Local Fellow at El Tímpano (Oakland, CA)
Major change is coming to The People’s Beach in Queens’ Jacob Riis Park, an LGBTQ-favorite. While some beachgoers celebrate the end of summer, others gather at an alter to celebrate the life of Ms. Colombia. Friends of Ms. Colombia, also known as Oswaldo Gomez, dressed in her tulle and technicolor fashion to honor the late queer icon who is believed to have drowned at Bay 1 in 2018. Photographed for THE CITY with reporting by Annie Iezzi. © Hiram Alejandro Durán 
Rosario-Megibow’s pendant contains a small amount of Michael David Lopez’ ashes, photographed on Friday, July 29, 2022. Photographed for THE CITY with reporting by Reuven Blau. © Hiram Alejandro Durán 
Matthew LaBanca, 46, and his husband Rowan Meyer, 36, watch old “The Great British Bake Off” episodes from their living room in Woodside, Queens on Tuesday, October. 13, 2021. LaBanca was fired from both his jobs as the music director at Corpus Christi Church and music teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic Academy, by the Brooklyn Diocese after a private committee decided his marriage to Meyer violated a contractual obligation. Photographed for The New York Times with reporting by Liam Stack. © Hiram Alejandro Durán 
Jeff Wolford in his hotel room, April 6, 2021. Mayor Bill de Blasio has set July 1 as the day the city is expected to fully reopen amid rising vaccination rates and decreasing infections. That’s also the day the city has suggested it will complete its transition of people from hotels back to the homeless shelter system, where people were 61% more likely to die of COVID than anywhere else at the height of the pandemic last spring. Photographed for THE CITY with reporting by Claudia Irizarry Aponte. © Hiram Alejandro Durán 
A picture of Pearl Tytell and her husband in their vacant living room on October 25, 2021. Photographed for The Riverdale Press with reporting by Ethan Stark-Miller. © Hiram Alejandro Durán
For Hiram Durán, a Chicano visual journalist from El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, “the freedom to form visuals led by the interests of Latino and Mayan communities, makes the CatchLight/Report for America fellowship at El Tímpano stand out as one of the most inspiring opportunities in photojournalism.”
Pablo Unzueta
Local Fellow at El Tecolote (San Francisco, CA)
A demonstration for Trayvon Martin, a day after George Zimmerman, the man who fatally killed the teenager, was found not guilty for second-degree murder and acquitted of manslaughter. This was the first demonstration I covered during my early years as a young photographer. Unfortunately, there have been far too many since then. (Los Angeles, California, 2013). © Pablo Unzueta 
Jose Fernandez, 76, a flower vendor from Jalisco, Mexico, stands for a portrait with the tools that he uses for work in downtown Los Angeles’s Flower District. When I asked Mr. Fernandez if I could take his portrait, he grabbed his tools and posed just like this, which was a very beautiful moment shared between Mr. Fernandez and I, and it felt like he was proud of who he was and wanted to demonstrate it through this portrait. Photography can spark moments like this. (Los Angeles, California, 2023) © Pablo Unzueta 
A young girl looks into the crowded street from inside a dress store in the Santee Alley outdoor markets in downtown, as COVID-19 restrictions eased. (Los Angeles, California, 2021). © Pablo Unzueta 
A couple embracing each other as they step into the El Faro Plaza, one of Los Angeles’s most bustling indoor swap meets since the 1970s. This is from a personal project of almost 10 years that documents the city’s cultural outdoor and indoor swap meets. (Los Angeles, California, 2018). © Pablo Unzueta 
A game of pick-up fútbol during an event honoring political prisoners in La Victoria, Chile, a settlement in Santiago with a rooted history in organized urban land occupations. La Victoria is one of the first organized urban occupations of land in all of South America that was established in 1957, independent from the country’s government. During the 1973 coup d’état funded by the U.S., La Victoria’s residents endured brutal killings, disappearances, and imprisonments, illustrating some of Chile’s most violent and oppressive eras at the start of the neoliberal system under Augusto Pinochet. Today, La Victoria honors the politically oppressed by hosting community events such as this one, and murals, despite the neighborhood being riddled with drug trafficking and a high crime rate. (Santiago, Chile, 2018) © Pablo Unzueta
Pablo Unzueta, a first-generation Chilean-American documentary photographer says, “I have dedicated nearly 10 years of my life documenting the local communities all around me. This Fellowship will help me discover new ways to visually communicate stories that can inspire a change in the world.”
Andrea Bruce
Senior Local Fellow in Pamlico County, NC
Loblolly pine trees, 100 feet tall, stand in rows that appear endless, making me feel very small. One by one, each tree is controlled like a marionette, but with machines from below instead of strings from above. A man nicknamed Cool drives the equipment called a cutter that cuts the tree at its base, lifts it in place and moves it like a flag pole to then fall in a perfect pile with three others. The sound as it hits the ground is a deep and cracking thud, like thunder. © Andrea Bruce/Down in the County. Read more » 
Jeremy Hudson duck hunts in Pamlico County, North Carolina. © Andrea Bruce/Down in the County 
Pamlico County is a long drive from everywhere. It’s a remote North Carolina peninsula surrounded by creeks that look like rivers and a river that is vast like the sea. It’s not difficult to find people who have never left the county. The favored way to leave, free and easy on the gas tank, is by ferry—across the Neuse River, from Pamlico County to Cherry Branch. © Andrea Bruce/Down in the County. Read more » 
From afar, the bright colors in fashion this year—red, white and blue—look patriotic. Young men wear formal pant legs that are short and tapered, many with slipper-like shoes and no socks. Bedecked with rhinestones and tiaras and eyelids bedazzled, the young women wear elegant dresses that are long and straight, often off one shoulder. There is permed hair, styled hair, straightened hair, blown hair, extensions and up-dos. Ariana Cox, a senior, has colored her hair brilliant red. © Andrea Bruce/Down in the County. Read more » 
Pamlico County Public School lunchroom workers and bus drivers volunteered to to work to provide and deliver food to students during the pandemic. © Andrea Bruce/Down in the County
After decades covering war zones around the world, photojournalist and 2018 CatchLight Global Fellow, Andrea Bruce, came home to Pamlico County, North Carolina, and launched the newsletter, Down in the County. With nearly 5,000 subscribers, the publication fills an informational void locally, focusing on stories often ignored by mainstream outlets. As a Senior Local Fellow, Bruce will continue building a model for ethical, visual, and journalistic local news.
Notes from the Newsrooms:
“As a trusted messenger for over five decades, we are excited to strengthen El Tecolote’s visual legacy by welcoming a dedicated photojournalist to our newsroom,” says Fátima Ramírez, Executive Director of Acción Latina, the publisher of El Tecolote Newspaper. “Through our collaboration with Catchlight, we seek to complement our award-winning bilingual journalism with photographs that represent the nuances of the Bay Area’s Latinx community.”
“Photojournalism is a powerful tool for helping community members to be seen as an active part of shared narratives and to foster a sense of belonging. Yet just like the information deserts that low-income immigrants face, there is an ‘image desert’ that contributes to their erasure in the media and civic narratives,” says Madeleine Bair, Founding Director, El Tímpano. “We are thrilled to have the partnership of Catchlight Local and Report for America to address this gap while fostering the growth of a talented photojournalist.”
About CatchLight
CatchLight, a nonprofit media organization borrowing from the practices of art, journalism, and social justice, believes in the power of visual storytelling to foster a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the world. It serves as a transformational force, urgently bringing resources and organizations together to support leaders in a thriving visual ecosystem. Its goal is to discover, develop, and amplify visual storytellers at all levels.
About Report for America
Report for America is a national service program that places talented emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics and communities across the United States and its territories. By creating a new, sustainable model for journalism, Report for America provides people with the information they need to improve their communities, hold powerful institutions accountable, and restore trust in the media. Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to rebuilding journalism from the ground up.