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JACKIE MOLLOY

What does the American family look like today? That question has underpinned much of the work of New York City-based photojournalist Jackie Molloy. It guided her searingly personal story on home birth during the pandemic, published by National Geographic; her at-home portrait of a family with quadruplets born via intrauterine insemination, published by the New York Times Lens Blog, Washington Post, and CNN; and her documentation of the lives of four mothers who chose to have children on their own, published by The New York Times. “A lot of the work that I do is very sensitive,” Molloy says. “And so I think I go into it from a very basic human level, where I'm a person before I'm a journalist before I'm a photographer. “I'm a big advocate for like, ‘You're telling me your story. So you have every right to know mine and ask as many questions as you'd like to,’’ she adds. “And I think bonding on that personal level is really important.” Molloy was a Women Photograph mentee in 2018 and recently completed a three-year mentorship with James Estrin of The New York Times and photographer Ed Kashi. Estrin commended her talent for forming close relationships with the people she photographs. “There is an immediacy to her work that is rare among photographers of any age,” he says, adding “her storytelling is always nuanced and deeply soulful.” Molloy believes that photographing different types of projects, from daily assignments to long-form stories, is important to her career because photojournalists need to have that range of abilities. But she says that despite freelancing’s uncertainty, she considers deeply which projects she takes on. “A question I’ve asked myself a lot is…’Why are you the right person to be telling this story?’” she offers, explaining that some stories would be better told by someone who is a part of a given community being depicted, or who has more relevant lived experiences. “I think that that's a really great question that everyone should be asking themselves.”

JACKIE MOLLOY

KEY LESSON: “It's really great to build relationships with your editors beyond just trying to get work from them...I really like working with editors who know me, know what I want to work on, and know about my life. And I like to think that I know something about theirs as well.”

—Jacqueline Palumbo

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