David Alexander is a photographer on a mission. As manager of Photoshare, a free editorial collection of more than 30,000 captioned global health and development photos, he’s worked for more than a decade advocating the role of photography in global health communication.

It’s this passion that led him to create Family Planning Voices, a global storytelling platform, with Family Planning 2020 and several team members from the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project. As its lead photographer, he has made portraits of over 500 individuals connected to the family planning community.

“In the past, a lot of my effort has been around making people aware of how important access to these images is, and the reuse of these images,” he says. “The one part that I wasn’t really able to start sharing with people, which Family Planning Voices let me do, was how the process of making images is actually a really valuable learning and network building activity.”

That’s huge, because, as Alexander learned, his portraits filled a professional network-building gap in the family planning community.

“Everybody we sit down with for Family Planning Voices, we do a little research on to see their online presence. I would look up people that were, within the family planning field, pretty influential, and I wouldn’t find a photograph of them or any kind of public persona other than maybe some really basic stuff on a company website. And I know that the family planning community is really passionate, so there was a big disconnect. You didn’t see the advocacy. You didn’t see the passion.”

That’s no longer the case. Just search “family planning” on LinkedIn and you’ll see Alexander’s handiwork. The community now has many faces, and the rest of the world, a means to see the passion.

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