Cornell Watson on Justice Through Photography

BROKEN GROUND Season 6, Episode 4: CORNELL WATSON

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Host: This is Broken Ground, a podcast digging up environmental stories in the South. I’m Leanna First-Arai, your host. In this season of Broken Ground, we’ve been talking about the critical role of environmental news in our region. We’ve also introduced you to a few of the talented Southern journalists who are helping to fill gaps in coverage. 

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Host: In our last episode, we met Paola Jaramillo and Victoria Bouloubasis, two journalists finding unique ways to reach Spanish speakers in North Carolina through a publication called Enlace Latino NC. 

Victoria Bouloubasis: So, when this comic came out, I was blown away because it really showed me a more, like, empowering version which is what I hear in my interviews and try so hard but with words you can only do so much in print.

Host: If you missed that episode, I hope you’ll go back and listen. On this episode, I want to introduce you to someone whose craft makes visible the often invisible aspects of environmental justice issues. Here’s  photojournalist Cornell Watson, who, on his website, describes himself this way. 

Cornell Watson: Dope-ass Black photographer here in Durham, North Carolina. 

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Host: Dope-ass Black photographer. If Cornell’s name is ringing a bell for you, that may be because of a small firestorm that erupted over a photo exhibit he created called Tarred Healing.

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Host: It was meant to examine and honor sacred Black spaces at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Though he created it at the University’s request during an artist’s residency there, UNC ultimately refused to display it. It’s a pretty infuriating but ultimately amazing story with a rather unexpected win of an ending. We’re gonna talk about one of the images in this episode, but you can hear the fuller story as a podcast extra on the Broken Ground website. 

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Host: Today we’re gonna talk about Cornell’s environmental photography, and how he got started taking pictures in the first place.

Cornell Watson: I kind of dabble in a couple different things, but primarily it’s photojournalism and, I would say, like, conceptual photography. 

Host: Cornell’s “dabbling” has gotten him published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic, ProPublica, and too many other publications to name. The wild thing about all his success is that he hasn’t been doing any of this very long.  

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Cornell Watson: I got a camera a little over four years ago to photograph my daughter. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.

Cornell Watson: And I basically, like, thumbed through the manual, watched a bunch of YouTube videos and was just educating myself on, like, the ins and outs of how to use this thing. And fell in love with photography. 

Leanna First-Arai: What about it did you love so much?

Cornell Watson: Well, my grandma had tons of photo albums of all of her kids and grandkids and great-grands. And so I think I realized the importance of having photos and being able to look back on those images and be able to share with future family members and my daughter. 

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Leanna First-Arai:  So then how did you get from taking pictures of your own family to taking pictures for, for other people?  

Cornell Watson: I had a close friend that had two kids and I started photographing their family. And then I had someone ask me if I would photograph their family and they wanted to pay me. And I was like, what is this? You know, like … 

Leanna First-Arai: Money for service? Whoa! 

Cornell Watson: Yeah, exactly! Yeah, I was like, oh, I could actually do this. Like, this is fun. And, um, yeah, it turned into a business, into a family photography business that I did on the side while I worked my day job in HR talent acquisition. Um, kinda like where things really kicked off at was in 2020 when the pandemic came along. 

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Cornell Watson: My family photography business had basically come to a halt. And so that dream got crushed because you know, everybody was quarantining at this point.

Leanna First-Arai: Right, and so this is when you kind of pivoted and you began working on a photo essay called “Behind the Mask.”

Cornell Watson: Yes.

Leanna First-Arai: So this is a really profound series of photos on being Black in America, that you produced following the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020. 

Cornell Watson: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: I would really encourage all of our listeners to check it out and we’ll link to it on our website at Broken Ground Podcast dot org. But that photo essay, Cornell, it was so powerful that you got it published in the Washington Post.

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Cornell Watson: Yeah, in the photography section of the Post. From that point it was, like, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. And T-Mobile had reached out to ask me to photograph their holiday campaign for the year. And so that really just like set me up to do full-time photography, photojournalism. 

Leanna First-Arai: What momentum. 

Cornell Watson: Yeah.

Leanna First-Arai: So we’re talking these pretty big-time clients, which I imagine these folks are coming to you with requests of their own, with visions of their own, um, but what to you has remained the common thread in your work? 

Cornell Watson: For me, it was important to have my work centered around the Black community. And then everything else just kind of flows around that. Could be, like, joy related to the community or it could be like serious issues, like social issues that are related to the community, and so, yeah, I kind of weave in and out of that.

Leanna First-Arai: And increasingly a lot of your photography focuses on environmental issues too, right?

Cornell Watson: Yeah, thinking about it now, it’s, um, it’s becoming more, more common, more regular. And maybe that’s because, you know, there’s, like, a ton of, like, environmental issues in North Carolina. 

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Leanna First-Arai: What are some of the ones that come to mind? 

Cornell Watson: Badin, North Carolina and chemicals there in, in the water.

Leanna First-Arai: Right. So, Badin is the site of an old aluminum plant owned by a company called Alcoa. It’s been closed for ages but is still leaching toxins into the surrounding community. 

Cornell Watson: Yeah. Um, Sampson County. The landfill there and the hog farms and the poultry farms. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mmm.

Cornell Watson: Wilmington and PFAS, Fayetteville and PFAS. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, and for listeners who might not be familiar, PFAs are a group of man-made chemicals, also known as “forever chemicals.” 

Cornell Watson: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: Really nasty stuff because they, they don’t break down and they can accumulate in the soil, in the water, in  our bodies. 

Cornell Watson: Yeah. Sadly, I feel like you could almost just point somewhere in North Carolina and you’re gonna find an environmental issue. 

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Leanna First-Arai: One of the first series of your photos that I came across was through SELC, the organization that supports this podcast, um, because SELC commissioned you to shoot a story about factory-scale hog farms.

Cornell Watson: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: Also known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs. Wanted to ask kind of just what that experience was like, if you could just kind of bring us there and paint a visual for us. 

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Cornell Watson: You immediately see the injustice, like, when you go to these places. Like, you can smell the injustice when you go to these places. They take hog waste, they have it out in these open air lagoons, and then they spray it around in fields that are really close to people’s homes – mostly, like, people of color’s homes. And particles travel in the air, you know? And cause all sorts of, like, health issues, like asthma and things that we probably don’t even know about right now. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, fair. Can you imagine sitting on the porch with, you know, friends and family …

Cornell Watson: No. I cannot imagine standing on the porch. Even thinking about my kids running around, like, while you know that there’s particles that are in the air. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: Yeah, it’s pretty bad all around. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah. 

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Leanna First-Arai: I was assigned to a story related to poultry CAFOs in Delaware once, and I had a moment where I was chasing a truck filled with chickens that were, like, heading to be slaughtered. 

Cornell Watson: Yeah.

Leanna First-Arai: And one of the things that I remember from, from that story, and then also that struck me when looking through your photos for SELC, was just kind of, it’s hard to really capture how bad it is in words and in, in images and …

Cornell Watson: Yeah.

Leanna First-Arai: … and, you know, in your images you see a dist – like a barn in the distance and a field, and, but what are some of the challenges that you see of capturing what the experience is? 

Cornell Watson: Yeah. Um, there’s that community fear of retaliation. 

Leanna First-Arai: Umm, yeah.

Cornell Watson: Um, like, the person that was guiding us around was like, you know, we can’t really stop long and photograph here, even though legally, like, we could photograph from the side of the road. Like, we just kept it moving, so a lot of the photographs were just, like, from the back seat of the car with the window down. It was raining that day, and so we’re in a moving car. So it’s just like a lot, a lot of technical challenges in that way, but also just a lot of like emotional challenges with how far do I push this to try to get close to some of this and capture this before, um, it becomes, like, a safety issue? 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmmm.

Cornell Watson: You have a lot of community members who are scared to, like, be vocal about it because there’s that fear of retaliation. 

Leanna First-Arai: Cornell, have you yourself ever witnessed any, anything like this, any sort of retaliation? 

Cornell Watson: Yeah, there was one incident where I was in Sampson County with researchers from App State that were doing water testing. They were in a neighborhood basically doing door-to-door knocking where they were like offering free water testing. And this White guy came out of the house – we hadn’t even knocked on his door yet – he was just like, ‘What are y’all doing out here,’ you know, kind of thing. And, uh, it was like, ‘Hey, like we’re just like, you know, testing water.’ He was like, ‘My water’s already been tested, like, get off my property,’ kind of thing.

Leanna First-Arai: Goodness.

Cornell Watson: And so we left and not even ten minutes later, a Sampson County sheriff pulled up and pulled us over, um, and started questioning us about, like, what we were doing in the neighborhood. So, not only am I up against, like, some of the stuff, but, like, they are always up against, like, they’re living there every day, so whenever they are doing this work, every single day, like, those are the things that they’re up against. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Cornell, is there someone that you’ve met along the way whose story just really sticks with you when you’re thinking about water pollution or air pollution related to CAFOs?

Cornell Watson: Um, in that same neighborhood that we got the police called on us …

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.

Cornell Watson: They were doing the water testing, they were also conducting surveys. They were talking to this woman, this older Black woman, and I went in and one of the first things I noticed was she had a huge, like, corporate water cooler in her kitchen. And I was just like, ‘This isn’t normal!’

Leanna First-Arai: Okay, so this is one of those water coolers with a big blue barrel 40 pound barrel …

Cornell Watson: Yup.

Leanna First-Arai: … that you have to turn upside down and wrestle into the stand so it doesn’t spill.

Cornell Watson: Yeah, they are so afraid of drinking the water. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Cornell Watson: You know, like, older people will, like, collect those roosters and porcelain turkeys or whatever and sit ’em on top of the refrigerator? 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: Well, instead of that sitting on top of the refrigerator, it was sitting on top of the water cooler. 

Leanna First-Arai: The porcelain chicken tchotchke on, on the water cooler. 

Cornell Watson: Yup. And so she was sitting at the table, doing her bills, and she was complaining about why she even had to pay for a water bill because she had to pay for filtered water. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.

Cornell Watson: And on the kitchen table were these flowers that were, like, wilting away. You just look at a scene, it just kinda like told the whole story about, like, the impact of, like, environmental injustice …

Leanna First-Arai: Mmmm.

Cornell Watson: … um, and just how daunting and sad it is. 

Leanna First-Arai: That says a lot. 

Cornell Watson: Yeah.

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Leanna First-Arai: Another set of photos that we were looking through is the, the shoot you did to accompany an article in Mother Jones Magazine last year. 

Cornell Watson: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: And this is an article that was co-written by Victoria Bouloubasis, who was actually a guest in our last episode. And it focuses on Brent Jackson, a North Carolina State Senator now in his seventh term, who’s also a big wig tobacco farmer. Can you tell us about that shoot?

Cornell Watson: Yeah, that one definitely sticks with me because, you know, we go to the grocery store, we get our produce, we don’t really think about how it got to the store. But photographing that story with Victoria, you really see a whole chain of harm to the people that help get those items into the store. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm. 

Cornell Watson: We were at one of the houses where the farm workers were staying at. And this house, according to him, was like an, a big upgrade from the houses that he had stayed in before. But even that was, um … it makes you wonder like, how is it even legal, that, like, this can even operate this way? The long hours that they work, you know, like these seven-day workweeks, like, how is this even possible? How is the pay even possible? You know, the heat? What really is worrisome is the fact that some of his worst experiences was working on the farm of a North Carolina senator. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.

Cornell Watson: You know, like, that’s a problem. And that this congressperson was in a position of power to write legislation to shield him from litigation that would hold him accountable for the working conditions that he put farm workers under. And then you have the whole other layer of the tobacco corporation funding his campaign to, like, basically continue, like, this, this workflow, you know, of raw goods for them. So yeah, it is just crazy, like, when you really, like, look at some of these stories, like, that one in particular, it’s really a shame that, like, we don’t have more people that vote to make sure people like this aren’t in power.

Leanna First-Arai: No, absolutely. 

Cornell Watson: Yeah.

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Leanna First-Arai: In researching for this episode, we found a kind of evocative documentary photograph of yours that made it into the Guardian newspaper’s, um, “Showcase of 2022 Photos of the U.S.” 

Cornell Watson: Mm-hmm.

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Leanna First-Arai: In this image, we see this pool of water, a rippling reflection of a couple standing over it. Um, in the background you see this clear blue sky. The caption says they’re Lelon and Senorita Howard, who live near the Pungo River in Eastern North Carolina.

Cornell Watson: Yeah, so, it’s a sea level rise story, climate migration story. Actually where they’re standing at is in their front yard. It is like a canal that runs along the edge, like a ditch canal. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: With sea level rise, even on sunny days, they experience flooding sometimes with the way that tides come in because it’s all connected. 

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Leanna First-Arai: So I take it this was a creative way to depict the phenomenon of sea level rise without actually, you know, showing the, like, typical images of streets underwater or flooded homes, or that kind of a thing.

Cornell Watson: Yeah. When I went there, there wasn’t any flooding, you know, like, you can’t quite see the impact of sea level rise because a lot of times it isn’t flooded. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: Even for me, like, this one was a learning experience because, you’re right, like, harm is actively being done, but you can’t see it. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, a lot of environmental problems facing us here in the South are really similar to that in that they’re slow moving and often invisible. And it can be super tricky for journalists to convey a sense of urgency. So how is it that you convey this sense of urgency in your photos, especially with something like climate change?

Cornell Watson: Sadly, the only way to get people to really care about climate change is for them to be able to, like, have a connection to climate change and sea level rise, because it’s not in their backyard yet; it’s in someone else’s backyard. So you gotta get them to connect to someone else’s backyard , before it’s inevitably in their backyard.

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Leanna First-Arai:  I know you literally photographed Lelon and Senorita Howard in their backyard, but can you say more about what you mean by a connection to climate change in this case?

Cornell Watson: For them, it is their connection to the land. They have been in this area – it’s a predominantly Black community. Their ancestors are buried on this land. Like, they have worked this land while they were enslaved. They have worked this land when they were free. All of their memories are tied to this land. So when that area is underwater, all of that history, all of that culture, all of those memories, will basically get washed away. 

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Leanna First-Arai: So I know the picture we’re talking about was featured in a photo spread in the Guardian newspaper, but we couldn’t actually find any article associated with the image. 

Cornell Watson: The story never got published. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hunh.

Cornell Watson: There was some disagreement between the journalist and the editor. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: One of my critiques on the writing was it supplied all the stats, the data, the evidence of sea level rise and climate change, but it didn’t really quite bring it home all the way to the people that it was impacting. And the story loses power when it’s not connected to the people or the community. 

Leanna First-Arai: And to that point, good photojournalism is even more important. In your opinion, what is it that the best environmental photography accomplishes?

Cornell Watson: It can make or break the human connection part of the story. 

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Cornell Watson: Where you look at it and you’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, like, that’s my mom, or that’s my sister.’ Or, you know, the photography can help frame that connection where you really relate to it and you’re like, ‘Oh crap, I gotta do something about this.’ Or ‘I gotta share this story,’ or ‘I gotta,’ you know, it makes you want to do something.

Leanna First-Arai: Cornell, would you say you show up with that in mind every time you go out to shoot? 

Cornell Watson: When I’m creating images, I’m very aware of the power of a photo and what that can do and the story that it can tell and the potential that it has to move people. It almost feels like it’s, like, my responsibility and duty to, like, do it as much justice as I possibly can because a community is depending on this work. Actual lives are depending on the impact of this work. I’m not creating the photos for myself. They really are about the people and the community and hoping that it can reach a broader audience of people who can actually, like, create change and do something. And at the end of the day, like, that’s all I can do. 

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Cornell Watson: And then it’s also a balance of like, well, I’m just one person, so I can’t be everywhere, you know, I can’t be everywhere. 

Leanna First-Arai: Fair enough.

Cornell Watson: You can’t be, like, the super savior of, like, you know, of …

Leanna First-Arai: All the causes.  

Cornell Watson: Of all the the causes. 

Leanna First-Arai: In all the neighborhoods. Yeah. 

Cornell Watson: Yep. 

Leanna First-Arai: All right. So speaking of neighborhoods, there’s one I want to ask you about just outside Chapel Hill. You composed a photo of it for the Tarred Healing exhibit we mentioned at the top of the episode. Can you tell us a little bit about Rogers Eubanks?

Cornell Watson: A historical Black community that started after Black people were freed from slavery, and they moved to that area, a bunch of different families, formed this really strong community there. And later down the road, the county slash, you know, city put in a landfill in their backyard, which created a lot of environmental issues. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mhm. And this is not a unique story, right? 

Cornell Watson: Mm-hmm.

Leanna First-Arai: So, the first ever National Environmental Justice Study published in 1987 found race to be THE most significant predictor of where hazardous waste facilities were located in the U.S. And so Rogers Eubanks is just one of so many communities of color that have had to deal with something like this.

Cornell Watson: They didn’t know anything about landfills or how they operate and they had to educate themselves on everything. They had to learn how to do research studies and, like, you know, learn how to organize. And they did all these things over, like, decades of time to fight against this landfill. And now the community is starting to flourish and thrive again. 

Leanna First-Arai: Uh-hunh.

Cornell Watson: The landfill is still there, but it’s not causing the same level of harm that it used to cause. 

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Leanna First-Arai: So, similar to the documentary photo of the woman with the ceramic rooster, you really managed to tell an entire story in this image, in this single image, but the difference is just that this image is conceptual, meaning it was staged, or like a play or like a still life. Can you describe this image for listeners who haven’t seen it yet?

Cornell Watson: It’s a photo of the Rogers Road and Eubanks Road intersection sign. You can see the two green signs intersecting on the post, and you can see this trash piling up and peaking close to the top. Above the trash, you can see, like, these flowers blooming up towards the street sign. The main activist, uh, that’s in the photo – his name is Reverend Campbell – he’s standing on a ladder and he is pouring water from a canteen onto the flowers. It looks like a sunny sky, but it’s actually a backdrop that we put up …

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm.

Cornell Watson: … because there were, like, power lines and things in the background. So I wanted this image to look, like,   really super clean and, like, look like a sunny, bright day because it is becoming a sunny, bright day for the Rogers-Eubanks community.

Leanna First-Arai: It’s beautiful.

Cornell Watson: Definitely one of my favorite photos, because it tells a very complex story. And it is a story that’s not heard often in these type of situations. Like, it’s not often that, that a community actually wins the fight against a landfill, or that they get clean water. You know? 

Leanna First-Arai: Totally.

Cornell Watson: And it kind of shows, like, what CAN happen when we hold landfills accountable and these communities do start to flourish again, because that’s very evident with the Rogers-Eubanks community.

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Leanna First-Arai: So, Cornell, we’re focusing this season on the concept of news deserts, um, or vacuums of publicly available information, and I just wanted to ask if you’ve sensed that absence of information in the places that you’ve taken assignments, um, or if you’ve maybe gone to photograph somewhere because you specifically knew there was a need.

Cornell Watson: Yeah, I think about it a lot because, like, you know, a lot of these places that we’ve been talking about, like, some of them have local papers and things like that, but local outlets sometimes just don’t have the bandwidth to go really in depth on a story. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: And so it is important for, you know, journalists and photojournalists to come in and kind of pick up the slack when they can. I think a good example is, um, the News and Observer doing that long-form investigative journalism piece on poultry farms a few months ago across North Carolina.

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, so this was a series of more than a dozen articles, plus a bunch of videos, um, and all focused on these, like, massive poultry CAFOs that have spread from rural areas to suburbs, to the coast.

Cornell Watson: A lot of those places that they mentioned were absolutely in news deserts and no one would’ve known about any of those issues had they not ran a story. And, yeah, and then it eventually puts pressure on our people in positions of power to do something about it. Because even in that instance, there’s almost zero regulation for poultry farms in North Carolina. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: You could build one in your backyard today if you wanted to, and no one would say a word.

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, yeah.

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Leanna First-Arai: Any final reflections on how you think about sort of the overlaps between the work you do, sort of, depicting the Black Southern experience, um – or black Southern experiences – and sort of what we think of as the environment?

Cornell Watson: I am very much inspired by the Gordon Parks approach with this. His quote that, like, he picked up a camera because he saw it as like a weapon. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.

Cornell Watson: I don’t think I quite saw it that way in the beginning, but now I absolutely see it that way. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm, can you say more about that? What do you mean exactly? 

Cornell Watson: When I go to an assignment – especially going to my community or a marginalized community – I am keenly aware that my camera is a weapon that can be used for good. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm.

Cornell Watson: The camera can be a light. The example of, like, news deserts, taking your camera to a place like that and being able to show the world, like, what’s going on. Things start to happen. People start to be held accountable. It can move people to act, rally people to join a cause. It shows you the importance of reporting and, um, the power of journalism for sure. 

Leanna First-Arai: Well, hey, thank you so much again, Cornell. Really, it’s been a pleasure. 

Cornell Watson: Cool beans. No, thank you for having me. This was awesome.

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Host: That was photojournalist Cornell Watson. You can see some of his photos and find links to more of his work at Broken Ground Podcast dot org. And remember, if you’re interested in hearing more about that controversy surrounding his Tarred Healing exhibit, you can find that story as a podcast extra on our website. 

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Host: So that’s our final interview this season. As we were working on these last four episodes, so much was happening in the media landscape. News deserts worsened in some places. One hundred people were laid off from Alabama newspapers. Six Virginia papers announced they would be reducing their print days to three per week. As you now know, Southerly had to close up shop. And layoffs at the national level have become almost monthly news, too, with hundreds of jobs cut at outlets from BuzzFeed to NPR to Vox.

No doubt, journalism at large is facing a massive structural crisis, and as the field has grown even more precarious, that means journalists from more marginalized backgrounds, are less likely to be able to do the work and to bring the powerful lens of their life experience to it. 

And that’s of concern for a lot of reasons.

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But it’s far from all doom and gloom. This spring, journalists at the Texas Observer were able to save their newsroom – and their jobs – through a GoFundMe campaign. And small, independent news outlets like Scalawag, Reckon, Verite, The Georgia Recorder, Cardinal News … continue to double down on coverage of environmental justice issues, like the deeply unequal impacts of climate change and the failure of some elected officials to test for lead in public drinking water.

 

Good local coverage has even strengthened in some places. Take the Carolina Public Press, a paper that initially covered mountain communities in North Carolina. Since launching over a decade ago, it’s expanded to cover EVERY county in the state. 

As we bring this season to a close, we want to use our platform as a call to action, as we think about how news deserts and the precarity of journalism right now are themselves contributing to environmental injustice. So, listeners, we want to ask: do you know who covers environmental issues in your backyard?

Whether that’s an individual, a non-profit, a co-op newsroom, maybe it’s a good time to find them, to follow them, to support their work, or even to lend a hand with more systemic efforts that would treat journalism like the essential infrastructure that it is. We’ll post some action items on our website at Broken Ground Podcast dot org.  

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Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment, rooted in the South. Broken Ground is produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Jennie Daley, Pria Mahadevan, Paige Polk, and me, Leanna First-Arai, with the invaluable assistance of Ko Bragg. Visit us at Broken Ground Podcast dot org to find some other great podcast related content.

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