On Oct. 24, award-winning photojournalist Christina House met with members of The Bolt and Storm to share her career experience. Having first embraced photography at the tender age of seven, House’s portfolio includes a decade as a freelance photographer and six years as a staff photojournalist at the Los
Angeles
Times. Her greatest career projects include “Game Changers: A Celebration of Women in Sports,” which won the 2021 National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism Awards, and “Hollywood’s Finest,” a collection of photos on homelessness in LA that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize.
Within the newspaper, House covers southern California. She especially enjoys photographing celebrities and major local events, like Coachella.
“I love capturing people in their element,” she said. “They just happen to run by my camera… In general, photography requires a lot of patience. When the magic moment happens, you’re ready.”
In 2018, House was looking to start a project covering homelessness in Hollywood when the newsroom received a call from a woman asking the Times to cover a story about her daughter, McKenzie Trahan, who was living on the streets at seven months pregnant and had just lost all her possessions in a camp sweep. House and her team, which included journalist Gale Holland and videographer Claire Collins, set out to look for McKenzie.
“[McKenzie] was tired of being invisible and wanted to share her story and what she was going through,” House said. “Homelessness is one of the biggest issues of our time. We were searching for ways to zoom into the face of the person instead of just reporting on numbers… and we just so happened to receive this call.”
For over a year, House and her team followed McKenzie’s journey as she gave birth, struggled with sobriety, looked for employment and eventually fell back into old habits and lost custody of her child, she said. The resulting photo essay, “Hollywood’s Finest,” condensed into 30 photos from the thousands taken over the course of the project, won House the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
“I was also pregnant at the time, so the connection I had with [McKenzie] was very real,” House said. “Knowing I had a comfortable bed at home while she couldn’t simply walk away from it all…was just terrifying.”
When asked about her favorite photo within the collection, House pulls up a hospital scene: McKenzie on the left, sitting cross-legged on the hospital bed and grinning so hard her eyes were shut and one of McKenzie’s friends on the right next to the medical equipment, holding up the newborn baby girl.
“I loved this moment,” House said, wistfully looking up at the projected photo. “The day of the birth, and how proud she was of herself and how far she made it. She was housed, her baby was healthy, family and friends were there. She was in a very good place there.”
House plans to continue to shed light on the underreported communities around her.
“I look for a story in everything,” she said. “Every story deserves to be told.”
