Our Story

I picked up a camera for the first time in sixth grade. It was a photography elective — film, the kind where you had to wait to see what you’d made. I remember the first thing I photographed: my desk lamp. Close up. Black and white. Just the light.

When I saw what I’d made, something shifted. For the first time I had a tool that told the truth. That said: this is what I see. Look.

I never put it down.

I should tell you why that camera mattered so much to me.

I grew up with something invisible. A condition the world couldn’t see and, for a long time, refused to believe. I looked fine. I seemed fine. And so the gap between what I was living and what people were willing to acknowledge was something I carried quietly, for years, alone.

I know what it costs to not be seen. To have your reality dismissed because it doesn’t fit what someone else expects to find. To want nothing more than for one person to look at you — really look — and say: I believe you. This is real.

That experience is the root of everything I have built. It is why I photograph people the way I do. It is why I teach the way I teach. And it is the reason this organization exists — not as a project I thought would be interesting, but as something I couldn’t not do.

I went on to study Cultural Anthropology, earn a professional photography certification, and spend more than sixteen years as a photo researcher and editor in children’s publishing. I have been a professional photographer for over 25 years, running my own portrait studio for more than 20 of them. Along the way I taught and mentored hundreds of students — and that work shaped me just as much as it shaped them.

And through all of it, the question that drove me never changed: what does it really mean to be seen?

The longer I worked with images, the harder it became to ignore something:

We are surrounded by images that are shaping us — and almost nobody is teaching us how to see them.

Not really see them. Not in the way that asks: who made this, and why? What is this image telling me, and what is it hiding? Whose story is being told here — and whose isn’t?

Those questions matter more right now than they ever have. We are living through a moment when images are being generated by machines, curated by algorithms, weaponized by politics, and erased from public record. The visual landscape is changing faster than most people can track.

And most of us were never given the tools to navigate it.

I started MNVL because I couldn’t find the organization I was looking for. Not in Minnesota. Not anywhere that felt like home.

I wanted something rooted in community. Accessible to everyone — not just artists or academics or people who already knew the vocabulary. Something that took the question of visual literacy seriously as a civic issue, not just a creative one.

Something that understood that being seen — truly seen, on your own terms — is not a luxury. It is a human right.

I am a photo researcher, a portrait photographer, an educator, and a cultural anthropologist. I have spent my career looking carefully at images and asking hard questions about them.

This organization is what happens when all of that refuses to stay quiet any longer.

It is the answer I built because the one I needed didn’t exist. And it is the most honest thing I have ever made.

With gratitude,

Giliane E. Mansfeldt

Founder & Executive Director

Minnesota Center for Visual Literacy