Lecture with Don Bartletti

11:00am, Saturday, May 7

With more than 4 decades working along the U.S./Mexico border, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Don Bartletti believes migration for survival is as old as humanity, unstoppable as the wind and frequently misunderstood.  In his lecture Don will detail how he photographed courage, hope, joy, fear, hate, and heartbreak on both sides of this political boundary.

 “Ethical reporting with a camera helps organize the chaos of an issue and creates the evidence we need for contemporary reflection and historical preservation.  Pictures stem the flow of ignorance and fix beauty that hides in plain sight.  Photographing the super-charged issue of migration has taken a great amount of research, an exhausting amount time and a fair amount of luck.  The easy part was being honest and principled.”

Bartletti’s descriptions will include the ethical and aesthetic decisions he made while confronting people experiencing life-changing decisions.  Although he’s able to keep his comments devoid of spin or opinion, he will not hesitate to reveal the emotion he experienced as certain images imprinted on film, on a digital sensor and in his memory.  

About Don Bartletti

In 1966 Bartletti rode a motorcycle from London to Athens with a Kodak Instamatic camera. In August 1967 he made his first photo essay in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury with a Yashica-Mat twin lens reflex. In 1968 he graduated from Palomar College with a degree in Photography. He joined the U.S. Army in 1968, became an Infantry Lieutenant and completed a tour of duty in Vietnam with an M-16 rifle and 2 Nikon SLRs. In 1972 Bartletti began his photojournalism career at his hometown paper, the Vista Press. He soon moved on to the Oceanside Blade-Tribune, then to the San Diego Union/Tribune before joining the Los Angeles Times as a staff photographer.

Don Bartletti won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for "Enrique's Journey," a 6-part photo essay about Central American migrant stowaway children riding freight trains through Mexico. He was a 2015 Pulitzer Finalist for International Reporting for "Product of Mexico," - the exploitation of migrant child farmworkers in Mexico who harvest produce for export to the U.S.

In 2015, after 32 years with the Los Angeles Times, Don retired. He’s still making photographs and inspires new generations of photographers through lectures and a commitment to humanitarian causes. His photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and are held in private collections throughout the U.S. and Mexico.