Kate Holt Photojournalist

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Kate Holt Photojournalist Kate Holt is a photojournalist and has worked all over the world focussing on humanitarian crises.

Kate is also a photography teacher and mentor with extensive experience of helping people tell stories that make a difference.

12/05/2026

Preparation is really, really important.

And I don’t just mean the research.

Understanding the subject, the story, the country, the political context. All of that matters.

But what people don’t talk about enough is emotional preparation.

Over the years, I’ve seen people arrive in incredibly difficult situations. Active conflict. Deep political instability. Places where you are witnessing death, families losing loved ones, and the most raw human emotions imaginable.

They hadn’t prepared themselves for what they were going to see.

And they fell apart. Sometimes during the assignment. Sometimes afterwards.

If you’re not emotionally prepared, you’re not going to bring anything to that story.

You won’t be able to stay present. You won’t be able to work with clarity. You won’t be able to hold space for what’s unfolding in front of you.

You also need to be honest with yourself about how what you’re seeing is affecting you.

Because if you cave under the pressure, you don’t just lose the story. You risk becoming part of the problem, not part of the awareness you’re hoping to create.

This work carries responsibility.
To the people you’re documenting.
And to yourself.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Go animal early”?It sounds slightly cynical but it reflects something very real about au...
11/05/2026

Have you ever heard the phrase “Go animal early”?

It sounds slightly cynical but it reflects something very real about audience behaviour.

When a crisis breaks, it dominates the news and for a few days it holds attention. But then something happens... people start to switch off.

So journalists look for another angle - something within the same context that feels more accessible.

Often this ends up being a story about animals that captures the viewers attention.

I remember being in the DR Congo during a major escalation in fighting. There were thousands of people being displaced and killed. The situation was dire, the story had been widely covered and global interest was waning.

I was out photographing with a writer one day when we came across a soldier carrying a baby chimpanzee on the end of his rifle.

We followed the story.

The rescue of the baby chimp. The journey to an animal sanctuary. The attempt connect it to a new mother to nurture it.

And that became the story that cut through. It made the front page of The Times.

Not the scale of the conflict, but the individual story of this tiny animal.

People could connect with it. They felt they could help, and it mirrors something we see more broadly.

When a situation feels too vast, people look for something tangible, something they can hold onto.

That doesn’t make the larger story less important but it highlights how people engage.

📸 A Congolese Government soldier stands with his mascot monkey called James on top of his gun on the frontline near the provincial capital of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

11/05/2026

I once photographed a series of women in the Congo using a Hasselblad.

They were photographed in their homes, going about daily life. Cooking. Sitting. Working. Existing in their own spaces. What interested me was the detail. The information in a room. The way people live when they’re not being asked to perform.

Medium format forces you to slow down. The frames are huge. Incredibly clear. You can see everything. And that’s exactly why it was difficult.

I didn’t have a tripod. I couldn’t take one. Some of the travel involved small planes, boats down rivers, long walks carrying everything on our backs through forest. You make choices about what you can physically carry, and you live with them.

So I had to hold the camera perfectly still. I had to work with whatever light was there. I had to be patient.

At the time, it felt quite groundbreaking.

Not because of the images themselves, but because of where they were made. Very few people had taken a Hasselblad, or any medium format camera, into places like that.

Sometimes the technical difficulty is part of the ethics of the work. You choose the harder option because it lets the story exist more fully.

10/05/2026

Preparation matters, but it will only ever take you so far.

Because the moment you arrive, everything can change.

I’ve had days where the entire plan shifts within hours. Borders close, access changes, people move.

Situations evolve in ways no briefing document could ever predict.

I remember being in Rwanda, covering the influx of refugees crossing from Burundi.

We set out early to document people arriving at one border point, only to find it had been shut.

Within minutes, the entire day was rewritten, and we were on the road for another five hours to reach a different crossing.

That unpredictability is the reality.
And it’s why storytelling in these environments isn’t about sticking rigidly to a plan.

It’s about being prepared enough to understand the context… and flexible enough to respond when the story shifts in front of you.

That balance between preparation and adaptability is something I come back to again and again in my work, and it’s a big part of what I teach in my course.

Learning how to see is one thing.

Learning how to respond when the story changes is something else entirely.

09/05/2026

I first worked in the Middle East during the Second Gulf War in 2003.

I travelled from Amman to Baghdad with a convoy carrying essential medical supplies as the American invasion unfolded. It was a very unusual way to enter a country at war.

Some journalists travelled in organised convoys of vehicles. I managed to get a lift with one, and I remember very clearly the atmosphere on the road and the reactions of Iraqi civilians as we passed through.

I arrived in Baghdad on the night Saddam Hussein fell.

It was a monumental moment in Iraq’s history, but very quickly it became clear to me that the real story was not about military victory or political change.

It was about people. It was about what conflict was doing to ordinary Iraqi families in real time.

That instinct took me south to Basra, where I stayed in a hospital that had received some of the supplies from the convoy I had travelled with. It was dangerous to move around.

There was huge insecurity and uncertainty. But inside that hospital, the consequences of war were impossible to ignore.

That is often how I have worked throughout my career.

You arrive somewhere because of one story, but if you are paying attention, another story reveals itself. Usually, it is the more important one.

For me, the job has never simply been to photograph conflict. It has been to photograph the people forced to live through it.

08/05/2026

One of the biggest changes I have seen in photojournalism over the years is in how we photograph children.

When I was working in Iraq in 2003, there was far less scrutiny around consent, identity and the use of images of children.

There was more freedom to photograph the reality of what was in front of you as it was.

That has changed significantly, and in many ways understandably so.

Today, many charities and organisations are far more cautious about showing children’s faces, and we adhere to those safeguarding standards at Arete.

There are very good reasons for that. Protection matters. Consent matters. Dignity matters.

But I also think something is lost.

When we can no longer see a child’s face, we often lose the emotional connection that makes people stop and pay attention. We do not see the fear in their eyes. We do not see the pain. We do not connect eye to eye.

A child’s face can carry truth in a way very little else can.

This is one of the real tensions in humanitarian storytelling now. How do we protect people properly while still allowing audiences to feel the humanity of what they are seeing?

I do not think there is a perfect answer.

But I do think it is a conversation worth having.

There’s a tendency, especially when starting out in photojournalism, to think that storytelling has to be something dram...
08/05/2026

There’s a tendency, especially when starting out in photojournalism, to think that storytelling has to be something dramatic like a conflict, a natural disaster or a major event.

We search for something that feels significant enough to justify being documented.

Over time I have found that some of the most powerful stories are much closer and part of daily life.

They’re in places people walk past without noticing. They’re in routines, in relationships and in small details that feel ordinary.

And because they feel ordinary they are often ignored.

What we try to teach on my Teachable course (link in bio) is that storytelling isn’t about finding the most extreme situation.
It is about how you choose to see what’s already there.

How do you frame it?
What do you focus on?
What do you include and what do you leave out?

Two people can photograph the exact same situation and tell completely different stories.

It’s about perspective, and this is something that is underestimated.

They think the story has to be extraordinary but often it is the way you tell it that makes it so.

📸 Swedi - Lenghe Musabouoa, 30 years old and a refugee from the Congo, who now owns a small hair salon, does a clients hair in his salon in Nakivale Refugee Camp Isingoro District, Uganda.

One of my favourite places to photograph is Afghanistan. There’s a quality to the light there that’s very difficult to d...
29/04/2026

One of my favourite places to photograph is Afghanistan.

There’s a quality to the light there that’s very difficult to describe properly.

It feels cleaner, sharper, more defined.

It may be something to do with altitude. It may be environmental. I’ve never fully understood it, but it forces you to pay attention.

You can’t be lazy with it.

The light can be extremely harsh during the middle of the day, so you’re often pushed indoors.

And that changes everything. Suddenly you’re working with far less light. You’re relying on what comes through a doorway or a window.

You’re watching how it falls across a face, how it creates shadow or how it isolates someone within a frame.

You don’t have endless options so you become more intentional.

You start to think about composition differently. You start to notice small details - how someone turns their head, where they sit or how the light catches their expression.

This is where the work becomes more considered. It becomes about responding to the conditions you’re given and the more challenging those conditions are the more they push you creatively.

📸 Sediqa, a widow and mother of six children, and who is a beneficiary of Medairs cash support for vulnerable families, poses for photographs with her children in the one roomed house she rents in the region of Bamyan, Afghanistan

One of the most difficult aspects of this work is something that isn’t often talked about – Ethics.Particularly when you...
28/04/2026

One of the most difficult aspects of this work is something that isn’t often talked about – Ethics.

Particularly when you’re working in the throws of a crisis - because you’re not just documenting a situation, you are documenting people at their most vulnerable.

This comes with a responsibility that goes beyond getting the shot.

How do you ask for consent when someone is in distress?

How do you explain what the image might be used for?

How do you balance urgency with respect?

These are questions that don’t have simple answers but they have to be considered.

I’ve always tried to ground my approach in something quite personal.

Would I want to be photographed like this?

Would I want my family to be shown in this way?

If the answer is no, I simply don't take the photograph.

📸 A child displaced by fighting between rebel soldiers and government troops poses for photographs in Mingkaman, South Sudan.

I’m often asked whether the rise of social media has changed the way we shoot. Yes it has, but not in the way that most ...
21/04/2026

I’m often asked whether the rise of social media has changed the way we shoot. Yes it has, but not in the way that most people assume.

When I started out one was primarily shooting for print or for long-form editorial. There was a clear end use; a newspaper spread, a magazine feature or occasionally a broadcast piece.

Now almost every NGO or UN agency we work with is thinking about multiple outputs at once.

They want short-form content for Instagram.
They want vertical videos for TikTok.
They want quick turnaround clips for campaigns.

And at the same time they still need documentary-style footage for archive and material that can sit within a longer narrative film months down the line.

So the demand has shifted, but the fundamentals shouldn’t.

We still insist that Arete videographers shoot horizontally - and this is something we’re quite firm on, even when clients initially push back.

Because horizontal footage gives you options.

You can crop it vertically. You can reframe. You can adapt it for different platforms.

But if you shoot everything vertically, you’ve already limited what that footage can become. You’ve locked it into one format, and in multi- use storytelling, that’s a problem.

A piece filmed for Instagram might later need to sit inside a documentary, or be used in a fundraising film, be archived for future reporting. Suddenly that vertical frame doesn’t work anymore.

The misconception is that content should be created for the platform first but I don’t think that’s right.

It should be created for the story first and then adapted for the platforms. That’s how you protect the longevity of the content. That’s how you make sure the work still holds value beyond the immediate moment.

One of the things I am increasingly aware of is how global crises are now being filtered through inadequate coverage on ...
17/04/2026

One of the things I am increasingly aware of is how global crises are now being filtered through inadequate coverage on social media.

What we are often seeing is the sharp end of a crisis. The bombs. The explosions. The fire. The buildings collapsing. The moments of high drama and spectacle. People on the ground are recording this on their phones and posting.

What we are not seeing is the quieter, more profound impact on people whose lives are irrevocably changed.

We have been working closely with photographers and videographers in Lebanon who are documenting displacement, damaged neighbourhoods, repeated loss and the exhaustion of families who have already been forced to move multiple times.

Some are refugees from Syria. Some have been displaced internally in Lebanon before. Many are living with the consequences of aid cuts as well as conflict.

These are the stories that matter - but they do not travel in the same way online.

At the same time, there are places affected by crisis where we are seeing far less. Not because people are not suffering, but because journalists cannot work freely or because the images are much harder to get out.

And now, alongside this we have AI.

There are moments when even as someone who has worked in this field for decades, I find myself stopping and asking whether what I am looking at is real.

The need for careful, verified, human storytelling has never been greater.

Not just stories that show what is dramatic but stories that show what it feels like to live through a crisis when the cameras are no longer pointed at the blast.

📸 A woman holds her children, who are suffering from measles, in the isolation ward of Bost Hospital, in Lashkar Gah, Helmand, Afghanistan.

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