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My mandate to be bold

A Monitor photographer gets over shyness to be the eyes of a readership.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
April 2012: Women at Showra Qurbonian center play with a baby while on a break.

I am shy by nature. When I travel for fun, without the license my job provides to approach strangers cold, I photograph landscapes, textures, and the details of a place, not the people.

But for a photojournalist, "shy" is not an option. I've learned to overcome my reserve – at least when I'm working. I can be bold because I know I must be the eyes of our readers. So sometimes I get to do what I was able to do in this instance: "time travel" back a century and connect with people who seemed nothing like me; a connection I'll never forget. About 10 of them sat around the edges of a small room in Kabul, Afghanistan, huddled over their embroidery at a center that teaches women moneymaking skills and provides literacy training. I loved these women. I loved photographing them. This time it was the people in front of the camera who were shy – at first. After we got used to each other, smiling and giggling together, none of us were.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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