216 - Corinne Dufka

Corinne Dufka is an American photojournalist, human rights researcher, criminal investigator, and psychiatric social worker.

Following completion of her master's degree in social work, Corinne worked as a humanitarian volunteer and social worker in Latin America. She volunteered with Nicaraguan refugees during the country's revolution, and with victims of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. She then moved to El Salvador as a social worker with the Lutheran church. While in El Salvador, Corinne became close with local photojournalists, and was asked by the director of a local human rights organization to launch a program to document human rights abuses through photography.

Over the course of her subsequent twelve year career as a photojournalist she covered more than a dozen of the world’s bloodiest armed conflicts across three continents and was honored with the Robert Capa gold medal; a World Press Club Award; a Pulitzer nomination; and the Courage in Journalism Award.

In 1998 Corinne went to Nairobi, Kenya to cover the bombing of the American Embassy. She arrived hours after the blast, and was deeply frustrated by 'missing the scoop.' Later, upon watching the news coverage of the attack, Corinne realized that she had lost “compassion” for the subjects of her work, and resolved to end her career as a photojournalist.

After leaving photojournalism, Corinne joined Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization. In 2003, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, alternatively known as a ‘genius grant’, for her journalistic and documentary work documenting the 'devastation' of Sierra Leone and the conflict's toll on human rights.

Corinne left HRW in 2022 and is now an independent researcher and advisor, focusing on helping countries mitigate the risk of armed conflict. Corinne has a daughter and a foster son and lives in Maryland with her four dogs. Corinne’s new book This Is War: Photographs from a Decade of Conflict is out now, published by G Editions.

In episode 216 Corinne discusses, among other things:

• Her reasons for publishing a book of her photograhs
• The experience of revisiting her archive
• Her transition from psychiatric social worker to photojournalist
• How she learnt the basics of photography in El Salvador
• How her family history and a challenges in childhood formed her independence
• Getting badly injured in Bosnia
• The relative dangers of different types of conflict
• Her experiences of violence in Liberia
• The epiphany that led her to walk away from photojournalism
• Her work with Human Rights Watch
• ‘Curiosity and compassion’
• Making an impact

“I just don’t do ‘hopeless’. I constantly try to find a way of having impact. And photography has so much impact. Using people’s voices through testimony has so much impact. And one has to believe that people are inherently good and they inherently care and that they can be moved when presented with these images. People in positions of influence. So that is a given in everything I’ve done. That this work will have an impact. It may have to be repeated again and again and again, multiplied by other practitioners in photography or human rights, but it will have an impact.”

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