"Traveling with the pack is a good way to get lousy pictures," says Molly Bingham. She lost the crowd in Maxi Miha, Lake Baikal, Siberia, where in 1993 she found chambermaids delivering fresh sheets by horseback to cabins at a summer hotel. TIM MEISBURGER

Has Camera, Will Travel

Molly Bingham brings the world into focus.

Siberia may be a vanishing point for some, but Molly Bingham '90 saw it as a place to launch a career. In 1993 she gambled that focusing on foreign ground would help to distinguish her from the pack of aspiring photojournalists in the United States. "It's easier to gain recognition by going abroad," she says. "You get points for being able to get yourself to a foreign location, stay safe, and get good pictures. You can prove up front that you have what it takes to deal with complicated situations."

More complicated, for instance, than the assignments she had as a 17-year-old at the Louisville Courier-Journal. As an intern at what was then the family newspaper, she photographed the participants in a make-your-own-costume-from-Rainbow-Bread-wrappers contest and beat the competition to the first pictures of a tire-fire that burned for three days. "You won't find those photos in my portfolio," she says. "I wasn't a very good photographer then."

El Prado, Chiapas, Mexico, 1995. The Zapatista revolt encouraged indigenous Mexicans, including women, to take pride in themselves and to expect respect.

But Bingham has spent the interim studying history, perfecting her art, and squeezing in and out of tight places to earn her credentials, from Cambridge to Siberia to Central Africa and back. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper's, and the Independent of London, and in 1997 she went to Burundi on assignment for Human Rights Watch. Not yet affiliated with an agency, she often works on spec or markets her photographs after she has returned from a site. In 1995 she and a journalist settled for a time in a small Mexican village to research the relationship between the Zapatista rebels and the Mexican people. "I still haven't sold anything from Chiapas," she says, "and I think that's a great piece."

Gisenyi, Rwanda, 1996. A young Rwandan refugee waits with her mother for a doctor from Médicins sans frontières to tend to the stray bullet that lodged in her jaw as they fled through the forest at night. Many children became separated from their parents when, over a period of three days, 700,000 residents of the world's largest refugee camp, in Zaire, spontaneously picked up and began the trek home to Rwanda. Yarlung Valley, Central Tibet, 1993. Chinese culture is slowly overtaking Tibet; Beijing provides hefty incentives for its citizens to move there, including business loans and permission to bear more than one child. But images of vanishing traditions--such as this one of a Tibetan woman inspecting a barley field on an underpopulated plateau--linger on.

For the most part, magazines and newspapers are interested not in nuanced, feature-oriented work--such as her Chiapas photographs--but in spot news, says Bingham, and they maintain a fairly narrow view of what constitutes suitable coverage, though even that can be unpredictable. "You file three photographs [with a news service], and maybe they put one on the wire, maybe they don't," she says. "You don't know whether that one is going to be the superconservative photo you took of the press conference, or something more artistic you tried to put in."

Bingham aims to produce images that will endure as art even after they fade from the news, but she also believes that photographs can communicate the political reality of a situation better than anything else. She was pleased when Human Rights Watch used her Burundi photographs not only for one specific Africa report, but also for general advocacy purposes. As documentary art, photographs can have an effect on policy, Bingham says--which doesn't mean they aren't objective: "If you bring back photos from North Korea that show people are starving there, that may affect policy, but it's also the truth."

Bururi, Burundi, 1997. Up to 300,000 of Burundi's majority Hutus have been virtually held hostage by a Tutsi-dominated military in regroupment camps. Although there are some similarities, Rwanda's Hutu-Tutsi conflict differs significantly from that in Burundi, where a Tutsi aristocracy has ruled for years.

Bingham has spent most of the winter at her new home in Washington, D.C., archiving the 500 rolls of film she produced last year and visiting grant libraries in search of funding for a couple of "epic" projects she has in mind. She won't stay put for long. She has a short list of agencies she'd like to work for, work being the operative word. "My family name may help me with an individual here and there, but with an agency like Magnum? God, no; it probably even hurts me," she says. "I'm a good photographer, and I work hard--have to work hard--at what I do." And like any good photographer, Bingham wants her photographs to speak for themselves.

~Janet Hawkins