It's rare for a person to be talented both as a photographer and as a writer.

The joke is, if you claim to do both, the likelihood is you do one or both badly.

That's not the case with K.K. Otison, who has enjoyed a successful career as both a writer and a photographer.

For the past 10 years, her interviews and photographs have appeared in the Washington Post magazine, as well as numerous other publications.

In her most recent book, activists, Portraits of

Courage, she leverages her skills as an interviewer, writer, and photographer. She explores

what it means to be an activist by interviewing a diverse group of people, both liberal and

conservative. Some of them include Dolores Hu people, both liberal and conservative.

Some of them include Dolores Huerta, Edward Snowden, Gene Mancini, Harry Belafonte,

Shepard Ferry, and Congressman John Lewis.

Each chapter challenges us to reconsider what we believe in activist to be and what motivates them.

I thought it would be a very fulfilling project and hopefully it would be useful. It would be

helpful and it would make people, you know, the way that I do it where I sit down and I talk

with somebody in their own words and then the portraits are sort of

hopefully very intimate, very close, you know, so that, and I didn't want to make a coffee table

book either. I wanted to make a book that was beautiful, but also accessible. So you could sit down

and almost feel like you're talking with that person. Like you are getting a sense of them, a sense of their humanity, a sense of their beliefs.

And, you know, in a way that showed their dignity.

KK is as fascinated with how people speak as with how they look in her photographs.

She understands that both as a writer and photographer, she has to

understand and respect the role she plays in sharing someone else's story. But I had my tape recorder

because I couldn't write it all down and do everything and say that right. And the way that people

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