ENTER/EXIT


Trauma-Informed Praxis for Visual Journalism and Beyond

What if journalists centered survivors as the experts on care-driven visual storytelling?

✶

Buy   E-Book (Spanish)  E-Book (English)



Through interviews with more than 40 individuals who had been photographed or interviewed by a journalist after experiencing trauma or hardship, Enter/Exit imagines collaborative models of working co-created by people with lived experience on both sides of the lens, recognizing that care-driven storytelling is not a checklist, but a relationship.

Enter/Exit is a resource and educational initiative rooted in questions that often go unasked; a space the brings into conversation perspectives typically kept apart. It originated from questioning our own work in visual journalism:
When is it helping, when is it harming? What does collaboration mean in the act of image-making itself? What is it like for someone when the most difficult moments of their life are shared on the front pages of print publications, websites, and television news? What are we missing? How might shared decision-making shift the ethics and aesthetics of visual storytelling? And what is lost when the pursuit of the final product eclipses care for the process?

Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all set of rules, Enter/Exit invites journalists, media makers, educators, and practitioners into an ongoing practice of unlearning, listening, and reshaping the ways they work.

Available in print and as a free, open-source digital toolkit, it offers frameworks, dialogues, workshops, and creative activations, with the long-term goal of supporting a more compassionate and collaborative media landscape.

 




Co-conceptualized and written by
Jennifer Jacklin Stratton
Sarah Blesener
L.J. Granered

Photography by
Jennifer Jacklin Stratton
Sarah Blesener

Graphic design by
Serena Gramaglia

Copy editing by
Holly Patton

Published in partnership with
Little Oak Press
The Reynolds Journalism Institute

Spanish translation by 
J. David González-Iglesias González


ARTICLES & ACTIVATIONS: 
Past Events
⏾   Community Launch at Plena Productions
☽   “Through the Light of Hope” A Symposium on Photography’s Role in Healing Trauma. International Center of Photography
⏾   Click Photography Festival 2025 
☽     ICP Photobook Fest, 2026
Articles ✶    Photo Spa Interview
✶    Listening, loss, and what we might miss (and learn) from each other
✶    Before entering a space
✶    Anonymous Portraiture: the absence in presence
✶    Aftercare (is not an aftertought) 
✶    Participatory ways of working: Part I & Part II
✶    Care-centered resource building for visual journalists & newsrooms


DISTRIBUTION:

Enter/Exit has been distributed at the following institutions & organizations:

↘   University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute 
↘   USC Annenberg
↘   Columbia Journalism School
↘   The International Center of Photography
↘   Syracuse University
↘   Ohio University
↘   Portland State University
↘   California Partnership to End Domestic Violence/Rally