In the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, Polly Irungu turned to the community of fellow Black women photographers she had built on social media sites like Twitter and asked them: “I’m feeling very stuck. Do you feel the same?”

Irungu, who first started taking photographs while in high school in Eugene, Oregon, had lived and worked in New York since 2018, when she joined the staff of The Takeaway, a show on New York Public Radio (WNYC), as the digital content editor. In her free time, she shot photographs of events around the city such as Afropunk 2019 and New York Fashion Week 2020, and sold them to Refinery29, BBC News and other clients. “I was starting to get some cool assignments” she says, but she started to feel stunted. “I wasn’t sure where to go to or who to turn to.”

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Although she had been taking photographs since she was a teenager, Irungu had never been formally trained in the medium. She bought her first camera and laptop with money she made working as a cashier at McDonald’s in high school. Her parents, who emigrated from Nairobi, Kenya, where Irungu was born, wanted her to pursue what they deemed a more practical career, like law or medicine. Even after receiving her degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 2017, she still felt that many avenues towards a successful future in photojournalism were closed to her. “Both journalism and photography are still very white and male-dominated,” she says. She knew she had talent, but she was struggling to feel seen.

When the pandemic hit, Irungu kept her full-time job at WNYC, but she knew that many other Black women photographers, including those she talked to online, had lost their income. In a personal poll of 40 women conducted through her network, Irungu found that 71 percent of Black women photographers had not been hired for work since February.

To help them, she set up the Black Women Photographers Relief Fund on GoFundMe and raised $14,705 from 279 donors. As she dispersed the money to applicants in July, Irungu knew the money was a start, but it was not enough to sustain her colleagues, who would benefit most from getting back to work.

Irungu decided to launch Black Women Photographers, a formal network of professionals modeled after Women Photograph and Diversify Photo. “I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I saw a gap, and I wanted to serve to close the gap,” Irungu says, noting that neither of the other two network focuses specifically on gathering the names and work of Black women and non-binary photographers like Black Women Photographers does.

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Irungu envisioned Black Women Photographers as a place where editors, art buyers and advertisers can search for Black women and non-binary photographers and contact them for assignments. She also wanted to provide members of the network with services including free, high-quality equipment, portfolio reviews, educational training and workshops that they might not have had ready access to in the past. “The photographers in our network have been shut out of so many things,” she says. “Establishment institutions that already have the means can support them.”

In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the United States in June 2020, Irungu launched Black Women Photographers the next month. Currently, the network has over 700 members in countries ranging from Japan to Ethiopia. Since launching, members have been hired through the site by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg, Red Bull and American Airlines, among other clients.

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Through a combination of luck and non-stop hard work—Irungu, feeling burnt out, recently quit her job at WNYC to focus full time on Black Women Photographers—she secured deals with brands including Nikon, Flickr, Adobe and Capture One that provided free equipment and services to members.

Working her Twitter feed, she reached out to brand ambassadors and asked them if they could collaborate. If she didn’t have a way of reaching a brand directly, Irungu “slid” into their emails.

Over the past year, Black Women Photographers has hosted free portfolio reviews with editors and photographers at The New York Times, the Associated Press and National Geographic, as well as organized talks by photography legends including Pete Souza, Nikon Ambassador Audrey Woulard and Canon Explorer of Light Kahran Bethencourt of CreativeSoul Photography. The organization also hosts workshops conceived in partnership with The Everyday Projects.

To celebrate Black Women Photographers’ first anniversary this past summer, Irungu announced a new grant in partnership with Nikon that was set to disburse $40,000 in funds, as well as $10,000 in camera equipment and lenses, to photographers in the network. Recipients for the funds are chosen after a competition within the network judged by Jessy J Photo, Danese Kenon (director of photography at The Philadelphia Inquirer) and Woulard.

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Thus far, Black Women Photographers’ mission to get members in its network back to work and less stuck in their craft has been successful. After a portfolio review with an editor at The New York Times, two photographers who attended received their first ever assignments from the Gray Lady. Taesirat Yusuf, a photographer based in Lagos, Nigeria, recently told Irungu that she had been close to giving up on photography before joining the network. “She told me it’s hard for women to get work in Nigeria,” Irungu recalls. Through Black Women Photographers, Yusuf learned to apply for grants, which gives her the financial support she needs to keep making work.

Irungu knows there is still a lot of work to be done to gain any kind of parity for Black women photographers in the photography industry. A 2020 study conducted by Women Photograph, for example, found that the world’s leading newspapers continue to publish far fewer images by female photographers—and even less by women of color. Only 29 percent of the lead A1 photograph on the front page of the Times in 2020 was taken by a woman.

Even still, Irungu is hopeful that things can change. “We don’t have the blueprint,” she says, “but we’re learning as we go.”