I make pictures to see, experience, understand, make sense of, comprehend, feel what is happening in the world. Or, at least, photographing is an ongoing attempt to engage what is outside myself.

For me, the photograph is less of a prized object than it is a doorway; photographs put us in places where we can come closest to others' experiences. How do these people make their lives? What is important to them? How do they think and feel? What can they teach us all? What do they want to say?

Instead of dropping into someone's life for a brief moment, I try to work more closely with subjects over time. We engage in a little dance of sorts - as people reveal and share their lives, we move across a plane of experience together. It's my hope that by working this way, the photographs that result will be more of a collaboration, a visual manifestation of their lives during the time we were together.
 

Loret Gnivecki Steinberg has taught at RIT in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences since 1988. Most of her photographic work has focused on longer documentary projects. For the last nine years she has been photographing and writing about children, the criminal justice system, and the larger issues related to youth and violence. Selected work from her project, "These are not Ozzie and Harriet's children..." has been exhibited and published nationally.

Steinberg's major research and teaching interests are in documentary studies, photojournalism and ethics of photography. She is currently the Professional Freedoms and Responsibilities Chair for the Visual Communications Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and writes a quarterly column for the division publication, ViewPoints.

In the past two years, Steinberg has lectured on community service projects within the curriculum at annual conferences of the Society of Photographic Education and AEJMC. She also speaks and writes frequently on ethics and photography.