What If Journalism as We Know It Has Reached Its limits?

For photojournalist and Columbia professor Nina Berman, this isn’t a theoretical question. After decades behind the lens capturing war, injustice, and resistance, she began to wonder whether her images were creating the change she once believed they could. “Earlier in my career I was confident that my work could help,” she says. “Now, I’m not sure.”

Her doubts carry weight. A Guggenheim Fellow whose work has chronicled the psychic costs of war and the militarization of American life, Berman has been celebrated around the world. Yet the very success of her career sharpened her unease: If documenting individual stories of harm and resistance isn’t creating the meaningful change hoped for, what comes next? And how, as a photojournalist, do you tell stories about collective solutions when your medium is built on individual authorship?

One clue came not on a battlefield but in a Bronx community garden. There, Berman discovered that viewers responded to her images with joy — a first in her career. That small project sharpened questions already pressing on her: “I can always find the story of someone who’s been hurt and is seeking justice,” she says. “But what else is there? Who are the people imagining a different world?”

Beyond Individual Stories

These questions strike at journalism's core assumptions. If documenting individual stories of harm and resistance isn't creating the meaningful change hoped for, what comes next? And how, as a photojournalist, do you tell stories about collective solutions when your medium is built on individual authorship?

Berman's answer is unexpected: This September, she’ll begin research as part of her Fellowship at Columbia Global’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination at Reid Hall in Paris into emerging communities in France organized around collective living, cooperative economics, and sustainable alternatives to what she calls "the alienating capitalist system."

These aren't fringe experiments. France has over 1,200 such intentional communities, ranging from 10 to 70 people, organized around principles of self-governance, collective property ownership, and aiming towards self-sufficiency in energy and food production. For Berman, they represent "potentially crucial laboratories" for answering her questions about living together and collaborative storytelling.

Reimagining the Camera

The photographic challenge matches the social one. Instead of traditional photojournalistic approaches—individual portraits representing larger stories—Berman wants to develop "a photographic composition that prioritizes cooperation and collective work." She's exploring everything from older processes like pinhole photography, where the sun develops pictures over time, to collaborative image-making where community members help compose and create photographs together. The goal is to move away from the extractive model of traditional photojournalism—where a photographer takes images and leaves—toward something more reciprocal and shared.

The technical shift mirrors her philosophical one. If individual authorship has limits, what happens when the community becomes the photographer?

As she begins her time in France, Berman doesn't know what her project will become. That uncertainty is precisely the point. "I don't know if this will work," she says. "But the beauty of this fellowship is that it gives me the time and freedom to take that risk."

Instead of arriving with predetermined narratives about collective living, she's preparing to live within these communities, to let their ways of being together shape both her work and her understanding. Along the way, she hopes to create work that expands the way journalists, artists, and the public imagine life together—and to show that alternative communities are not fringe, but vital spaces for rethinking the future.

As part of her fellowship, Berman will present at an event called Beyond Extraction at Reid Hall on October 2nd. For information and registration, visit here.

Think journalism is just about reporting? We think it can be more. Nina Berman’s Paris-based exploration of collective image-making is one chapter in Columbia Global’s evolving journalism story — one rooted in inquiry, community, and transformation. From our “Faultlines and Deadlines” event in Amman on rebuilding trust in the age of misinformation to the Santiago Center’s workshop empowering investigative journalists across Latin America — and this summer’s climate-and-data “winter school” in Santiago that reimagined storytelling through video, data, and innovation — our journalism work pushes beyond the headlines into new terrain.