Let’s talk about the title. Why Cameraperson?

“For me, it’s the relationship: camera and people together. Obviously, on another level, it directly addresses the fact that I am a woman, and pretty much every day that I shoot someone calls me a cameraman.”

Addressing you to your face?

“Yeah! It’s just in the language. And I just shot at the DNC, and the press passes both for the DNC and RNC say, ‘Kirsten Johnson, Cameraman,’ and everyone’s press passes said cameraman.”

Do you ever feel like that’s a challenge? Or do you feel like you get people to open up to you in different ways than a man might be able to?

“Yes and yes. I think none of us [are] completely aware of how who we are impacts the people who we’re interacting with. And when one travels around the world, you are foreign — you are something unlike anything someone has seen in a particular place. So for me to be in Afghanistan with a camera, it’s provocative to people, it’s interesting to people, it’s empowering to people. It makes people ask questions, and in some ways, it frees up some interaction that a particular society doesn’t allow. So it can be transgressive to be from the outsider or be other, it sort of gives a way in."

To be an outsider in general in that place, or specifically a woman?

“I think in that particular country, specifically a woman, yes. I think in certain countries there’s such codified ways in which men and women can interact. There’s a lot of separation between men and women that when you enter into those societies, you really shake things up.

"I filmed at this separatist Christian community in Alaska, and all the girls and women had to wear skirts and could only do certain activities. I literally was carrying my camera, and then in my off time, I was carving a wooden bowl out with a chainsaw because I wanted the little girls to see this. I was doing everything I could to show [the young girls] that a different way of being could happen.