The Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs’ David Alexander is a photographer on a mission. As manager of Photoshare, a free editorial collection of more than 30,000 captioned global health and development photos, he’s worked for more than a decade advocating the role of photography in global health communication.

It’s this passion that led him to create Family Planning Voices, a global storytelling platform, with Family Planning 2020 and several team members from the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project. As its lead photographer, he has made portraits of over 500 individuals connected to the family planning community.

“In the past, a lot of my effort has been around making people aware of how important access to these images is, and the reuse of these images,” he says. “The one part that I wasn’t really able to start sharing with people, which Family Planning Voices let me do, was how the process of making images is actually a really valuable learning and network building activity.”

Read more on Alexander’s work and read his four tips for aspiring portrait photographers here.