Why Aren't We Talking About Diversity Behind the Lens in the Outdoor Industry?
We're making important steps towards diversifying the outdoor industry, but there's more to do for underrepresented creative professionals.
In a recent conversation with a marketing manager working for a large outdoor organisation, they revealed to me that 100% of their content last year was shot by cis-white men. I wish I could feign surprise. While the outdoor industry has made significant strides in promoting diversity and inclusivity across its content and brand ambassadors, the conversation around diverse creators has been left behind. This oversight is compounded in significance when we consider that directors, photographers and videographers play a vital role in not only representing diverse perspectives but also in shaping the very content they produce.
This conversation is already well underway in the film industry. The notion of the male gaze has been widely accepted and, as a result, the authorship behind features and commercials is slowly moving away from all-male written and directed narratives. Non-profit initiative Free The Bid (now called Free The Work), launched in 2016 by film director Alma Har'el, invited brands and agencies to pledge to accept just one pitch from a woman director on every triple-bid commercial. The initiative didn’t even ask to give women the job, just at least give them the chance to pitch on it. When the opportunity to pitch on work never even presents itself, it’s no wonder that many female directors have lesser developed portfolios than their male counterparts. Free The Bid states that “taking the pledge will reveal unique creative voices of women whose visions have previously been overlooked. Women are usually only invited to bid on products that are marketed toward women – imagine the possibilities of expanding beyond the stereotypical.” The results of these dialogues are self-evident. In 2007, just 3% of all film directors were women (yes, you read that right: 97% of all films we watched growing up were directed, scripted and crafted from the male point of view). Today that figure is a little less bleak. Last year 22% of US films released by streaming services were directed by women. While women still only accounted for 8% of cinematographers, this number is growing with collectives such as Illuminatrix DOPs and Women Behind the Camera garnering brand support in the film industry.
When the conversation on diversity behind the camera is so well-developed in the film industry, only a stone’s throw from the outdoor industry, I’m struck by how devoid of attention the topic is here in the outdoor space. Adventure and outdoor lifestyle photographer, Beth Squire, shared a story last year on Instagram that read:
“In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a number of campaigns for brands that have been shot and filmed exclusively by men. Not only this, but it seems like every element of these shoots has been… men. […] We all know that the lack of diversity is (very) far from ideal, but to not include one woman in your campaign really is awful. It’s not like it would be difficult: there are so many amazing female photographers that I know.”
Without a wide range of perspectives being involved in the creating of content, we’re left with cut-and-paste campaigns and films that give us an outlook from the same standpoint. Last month, climber and athlete, Genevive Walker, shared an ad she recently featured in. In the accompanying caption, she wrote:
“I think this was the first time I worked with a videographer who wasn’t white! My authenticity shines. #representationmatters in front AND behind the lens.”
In June 2022, camera and drone technology company DJI, released a campaign video for their newest gimbal product, DJI RS 3. In the three-minute ad featuring numerous videographers and athletes showcasing the product in use across forested, mountainous and icy landscapes, every single creator and athlete featured was a white male. The Instagram post that launched the campaign received hundreds of comments from men and women alike highlighting the absurd and outdated choice of talent, many tagging accomplished female creatives who could’ve been chosen. Not only do campaigns like these continue to perpetuate the systemic story that girls can’t play with toys made for boys, but they reinforce the lack of diversity within the industry, telling 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube that this is what outdoor and adventure creators look like. By failing to include a more diverse range of talent in their campaign, DJI missed an opportunity to reflect the reality of their customer base and connect with a broader community of creators.
This issue isn’t just confined to brands, it’s pervasive across other media too. Flicking through Volume 24 of Sidetracked magazine on my kitchen table, I note that 18 out of 20 photo credits are male. As one of the leading outdoor magazines capturing the essence of adventure in a tri-annual printed journal, the almost exclusive attribution of these images to male photographers sends a powerful message - one that echoes the narratives that have historically dominated our perception of adventure. Revered platforms like Sidetracked play a pivotal role in shaping cultural narratives, but with no real pathways into the outdoor industry for creatives, it’s unsurprising that only the privileged gain entry. While I don’t for one second believe that the diverse talent to capture those stories is simply ‘not out there’, it just requires a bit more forethought.
And it’s not like these businesses aren’t willing to go the extra mile. In most outdoor campaigns these days, we see a welcome mix of beige, brown and black faces. Every week on Instagram, a slew of creative directors, content producers, casting agents and photographers put call-outs on their IG stories for underrepresented models. I watch these people-with-power frantically scramble to get diverse talent for their shoot, hyperconscious that any campaign now produced needs to be at least a little bit diverse; even just one brown person is fine. And to their credit, these businesses are putting in the effort to find these models, but when the need for diversity gets just a little less visible - like who’s behind the camera not in front of it - there’s a stark disparity in the people hired, the effort put in to find them and, quite frankly, the care for representation.
In my own journey as a photographer, I’ve noticed some brands invite me to shoot their female-led campaigns and events, while other projects are reserved for their roster of male creators. I see peers get cherry-picked for shooting brand events championing diversity, yet those same creators are not approached for other work from the same brands. On an overseas commercial shoot I recently had the opportunity to assist on, I was brought in for the sole purpose of balancing the gender ratio amongst the team. It struck me how one woman was considered enough to diversify a crew of eight white men. This virtue-signal tokenism highlights the attitude prevailing in our industry: representation is still a tick-box activity.
I’m reminded of what it means for a demographic to be largely left out of shaping the discourse. Last year, Alex Honnold and Hazel Findlay made the first ascent of a sea cliff in Greenland. The National Geographic headlines read: Alex Honnold just led the first ascent of one of Earth’s tallest Arctic sea cliffs. Andrew Bisharat, who wrote the Nat Geo article mentioned Honnold & Findlay’s partnership and their joint first ascent, but the headline and Instagram post served to an audience of 9.6 million did not. As with the DJI campaign, the comments were flooded with outrage. I remember feeling saddened at the time that it was still perfectly normalised and acceptable to write out the achievements of women. The campaign served as a sombre illustration of how history is still being rewritten to prioritise male achievements and diminish those of women and marginalised groups. And when privilege begets privilege, this gap is only set to widen unless we do something about it.
In the US, photographer, climber, and author, Nikki Smith, is doing her bit to create change. Partnering with outdoor clothing and equipment brand, Mountain Hardware, the Open Aperture Photo Clinic was launched in 2018. The programme runs annually and is designed to mentor underrepresented groups interested in outdoor photography and videography. Providing a four-day clinic and ongoing mentorship for a year, the project provides a useful foot in the door for its participants. But accepting just six creatives from underrepresented backgrounds on an annual basis, its wider impact is limited.
As with most spaces failing to diversify, the responsibility for awakening these conversations falls disproportionately upon the minority affected. Despite the privileged incumbent holding a greater position of power to facilitate change, it seems they are too busy or too booked to notice the sea of white cis-faces around them. In the spirit of effecting change rather than just lamenting the status quo, I’m working on developing a collective-directory-network initiative-thingy (catchy-name pending) to see if we can help light the spark from the bottom up.
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While it might take time to grow a more diverse network; to build mentorship programmes and workshops; to host forums and discussions; and to interrogate internal hiring practices and biases—these are the important conversations that are being left behind in our industry, dialogues that are necessary to amplify underrepresented creatives so that we can enrich the collective narrative woven through each of our landscapes, ascents and adventures.
Thanks for writing this great piece, and I am in agreement. As far as Sidetracked goes, it's fair to say that we can always do better – and I think it's also fair to say that we probably put more emphasis on representation in writers than photographers. If you look at the writing credits, there are far more women far more visible in every issue, even if we're not always dead on a 50/50 split. I agree that representation behind the lens is far more challenging and you are right to raise this issue.
Every single day we are trying to do our best to break the image of adventure being an exclusively white male space. IMHO we were striving towards this ideal years before our competitors, and all of us on the editorial team are thinking about this with every issue we make. It's important to us that we have talented and experienced women on our team – I'd like to especially point out Jenny Tough, Emily Woodhouse, and Harriet Osborne, all of whom are absolutely crucial to what we do.
We work extremely hard with a small team and very limited resources to do the best we can, and have proudly published the work of many fantastic women recently. I'm currently in talks with several more for inclusion in the next two issues. One problem is that it's staggeringly hard to fill three issues a year with the level of quality that we aspire to publish as it is, even from the pool of (overwhelmingly white male) submissions that we receive, because the truth is that most of the submissions in our inboxes are low quality. I spend a lot of time seeking out talented female writers and photographers because (with a few exceptions) they just aren't pitching us with the kind of work we publish. Send us the pitches and we'll listen to you! The reality for a small business in a staggeringly difficult market is that we can only do our best.
Overall, I don't see this as purely an issue of representation – I see it as about telling good stories that people want to read, because the white male brave explorer trope is so very overdone at this point.
(My comment copied over from Instagram)
Thanks for putting the work into this article! I’m learning a lot!