Diversifying Creativity with TONL

The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show

Chase Jarvis

Celebrity, Art, Career, Creativity, Money, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Education, Careers, Writing, Interview, Investment, Influencer, Business, Photography

4.8 • 641 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

By working to highlight a diverse set of narratives from under represented populations, Joshua Kissi and Karen Okonkwo — two of Inc Magazine’s 30 Under 30 — are addressing a huge gap in the creative market.

Karen was at Arizona State University when she decided to start a blog for sorority women. It gained immediate attention. Yet, when a friend asked why there wasn’t any African Americans showcased on the site, she was defensive. As an African American herself, she thought - of course we do! But as she pulled out her phone and started scrolling through the site, she realized her friend was right. She had fallen into the subconsciously biased, racially one-sided trap. Desperately focused on change, she began to showcase all types of women of color, sexual orientation, and under represented groups on her site. But she had a sense she was not doing enough.

This work caught the attention of the Ghanian-American fashion, lifestyle, and brand photographer Joshua Kissi, and together they co-created TONL a photography and media agency focused on creating images of diverse people and sharing their stories with the world.

Enjoy this inspirational, heartfelt and meaningful story of self reflection, discovery, creativity, and action, as we drop in on their presentation from CreativeLive’s PhotoWeek. Learn more and help amplify your creative arsenal at: http://cr8.lv/pw2018

Enjoy!

Today's episode is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world's largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world’s top experts -- Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy Award winners, New York Times best selling authors and the best entrepreneurs of our times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, what's up? It's Chase. Welcome to another episode of the show. That's right,
0:09.0	here on the Chase Jarvis Live show on Creative Live. I love recording these intros because I get so
0:14.3	excited for the person. And in this case, the people you are about to meet, Joshua Kissy and Karen O'Conquo are tackling a really important problem in the creative industry.
0:26.6	They hail from specifically photography, and they are the founders, the co-founders, if you will, of an amazing group called Tonal.
0:34.7	Now, when I heard their story, they were walking the halls here in Creative Live.
0:38.1	I was introduced to them.
0:38.9	I was blown away.
0:40.4	I started looking into their work.
0:42.0	I noticed they were on the ink magazines 30 under 30, just peeling back the first couple of layers
0:47.2	that onion got me really, really hooked, and I'm excited to share them with you today.
0:51.4	Karen was in a sorority at Arizona State University and decided to start
0:54.8	a blog for sorority women. It gained a lot of attention immediately, and yet when a friend of
1:00.8	Karen's asked her, was like, wait, there's no African Americans showcased on your site. She was
1:06.2	defensive. She was like, wait a minute. As an African American herself, she was like, wait, of course I do.
1:13.4	She scrolled through her phone.
1:14.9	She described this to me personally.
1:16.1	She said, I started scrolling into my phone and I realized my friend was right.
1:20.7	She herself as an African American woman had fallen into the subconsciously biased, racially one-sided media.
1:29.5	And that inspired her to make a change, not just in her own site,
1:33.2	but she started looking for ways to impact a larger creative industry.
1:38.2	It was a few years later when she was introduced to a photographer friend,
1:42.5	enter the other chap we're in here from today, photographer
	...

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