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Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice by Michelle Bogre

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Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice by Michelle Bogre

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Documentary photography is undergoing an unprecedented transformation as it adapts to the impact of digital technology, social media and ...

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Brian Eno: Visual Music: (Art Books for Adults, Coffee Table Books with Art, Music Books)

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Buy Brian Eno: Visual Music: (Art Books for Adults, Coffee Table Books with Art, Music Books) by Scoates, Christopher (ISBN: 9781452169361) from Amazon's Book Store. Free UK delivery on eligible orders.

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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle

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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle

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"We expect more from technology and less from each other."

"Texting offers just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control. She is a modern Goldilocks: for her, texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of modern Goldilockses, people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay."

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"We expect more from technology and less from each other." "Texting offers just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control. She is a modern Goldilocks: for her, texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance.

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Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence by Judith Butler

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Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence by Judith Butler

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"When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an "I" exists independently over here and then simply loses a "you" over there, especially if the attachment to "you" is part of what composes who "I" am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who "am" I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost "you" only to discover that "I" have gone missing as well."

"Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity."

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"When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved.

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If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism

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If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism

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If You Lived Here book. Read reviews from world's largest community for readers. A practical manual for community organizing, a history of housing and ho...

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Archive-based exhibitions can often be a little dull. No matter how interesting the contents of a leaflet or letter might be, there's a limit to how aesthetically exciting such documents are when encountered in a gallery setting. Happily, Out and About!: Archiving LGBT+ History at Bishopsgate Institute , a new (and free) exhibition at the Barbican, isn't like that at all: in fact, it's a real visual spectacle, filled with colour and utilising all kinds of media. From the second you walk through the doors, you're met with enormous banners draped from the ceiling, video screens, and a collage of flyers for club nights and sauna adverts surrounding a veiny, erect penis. There's a large table at which you can sit down and rifle through old newspapers, listings, and porn magazines, which makes for a more immersive - and perhaps more arousing - experience than simply peering at a wall.

"There's an ideology behind it," explains Stefan Dickers, Special Collections and Archives Manager at Bishopsgate Institute , the cultural centre from which the exhibition draws its material. "We've been collecting LGBTQ+ archives now for about 10 years, and it's important for us that they're not just relics - rather than being hidden behind glass, we want them to be approachable, touchable, and right there in your face. We also wanted the exhibition itself to be queer, and not done in a traditional, didactic way where you follow a narrative of the grand stories. We hope people come away inspired by what they see as well as feeling angry or sad."

The exhibition is also expansive in the themes it addresses. There's a satisfying tonal disparity in the way that it goes from informative posters about the AIDS crisis and placards from trans liberation protests, to adverts for drag nights and fetish parties. The political, social and sexual are presented side-by-side, which reveals the reality that these things have always been intertwined. It's common today to hear people complain that Pride should be a protest, not a party, but these concepts have never been diametrically opposed. "Protest is hugely important to archive, but it's also important to record people's experiences of going to clubs, having fun, writing poetry, or having sex," says Stefan. "We wanted this exhibition to reflect that while we were protesting against Section 28 [a homophobic Thatcher-era policy which banned 'the promotion of homosexuality' by local authorities, including schools], we were having a lot of fun at the same time. A lot of positives came out of those moments of struggle. I hope people will come away with a sense of the fun of queer life, as well as the difficulties."

It's true that the exhibition does carry a certain melancholy. Looking at all these flyers and listings magazines, the bounty of bars, pubs and nightclubs, it was impossible to escape the feeling that queer life in London has been diminished in the last 20 years, a period during which well over 100 LGBTQ+ venues have closed. But Stefan insists that present-day queer London is still vibrant, exciting and politically charged. The exhibition conveys this idea: one of the first things you see upon walking in is a recent banner for Act Up, an HIV protest group that emerged in the 1980s and reformed in 2014. Today, Act Up continues to fight HIV stigma and advocate for equitable access to treatment for everyone who needs it, showing that there is a continuity between the struggles of past and present.

The claim that it's 'important' for young queer people to learn about LGBTQ+ history risks sounding a little moralising or scolding, but it can be a useful, interesting and enjoyable process. It's certainly helpful for political movements to understand their own lineage; the mistakes made and victories achieved by their forebears. But this exhibition isn't just about looking backwards: it's partly an effort to understand the experiences of LGBTQ+ people today as part of a larger history, and the idea that our own stories are also important to record. The Bishopsgate Institute is hoping that this exhibition will inspire young people to donate their own materials to the archive, and a lot of what is already on display is contemporary: alongside digital photographs of people enjoying nights out on the scene, there is as a vast display of placards taken from a ' Black Trans Lives Matter ' protest in 2020, along with artefacts donated by the Museum of Transology , a community-led project which collects objects and photographs related to trans, intersex and non-binary experiences. "A lot of the collections you can see at the exhibition, such as The Museum of Transology material, come from people donating their own stories," says Stefan. "It's an archive which doesn't talk people; it's people talking about themselves.

While subtly expressed, the indivisibility of the gay, lesbian and trans communities is a major theme of the exhibition: it shows that these histories have always been entwined and that these groups have always fought and partied alongside one another. According to Stefan, the biggest lesson that LGBTQ+ movements can learn today from the past is the importance of unity, and of resisting attempts to divide us. "We need to act together to defend what we've achieved and ensure that it's not threatened in any way." Despite the demonisation that trans people currently face in the media, Stefan isn't worried about the exhibition being controversial. "It's not controversial in my mind," he says, "it's part of the history. And the people who think that's controversial probably shouldn't come to the exhibition. This is the story that we tell; the story we believe in."
'Out and About!' is showing at the Curve room in the Barbican from 28 February - 21 March. Bishopsgate Institute's LGBTQ+ archives are open to the public by appointment year-round, as well as being available online

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Sex, drugs and activism: a history of queer resistance

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Archive-based exhibitions can often be a little dull. No matter how interesting the contents of a leaflet or letter might be, there's a limit to how aesthetically exciting such documents are when encountered in a gallery setting.

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Audre Lorde's 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You'

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Audre Lorde's 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You'

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https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36355617-your-silence-will-not-protect-you

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"As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters"

"There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle."

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"As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves.

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An Important Lesson I Learned as a Photojournalist

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An Important Lesson I Learned as a Photojournalist

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https://petapixel.com/2021/10/02/an-important-lesson-i-learned-as-a-photojournalist/

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I began working on a long-term project on child sexual abuse after receiving a three-day assignment from Marie Claire magazine USA to work with the Police Child Protection Unit in South Africa documenting infant rape. This was back in 2001, but I feel the lesson learned is still very relevant today.

At the time Corbis had bought out Saba Press Photos, my agency of many years, and so I was being represented by them.

Before heading out on assignment, I did my usual in-depth research of the project and spoke to colleagues in South Africa. Because of the nature of the crimes against these children, and because of the strict child protection laws in South Africa, I learned that the children's identities needed to be protected - meaning no real names, and NO FACES.

I passed this information on to the editor in charge at Marie Claire and copied Corbis in all my emails. I explained that I would try to work in a way that didn't show faces, but also knew that there was the option of printing the images with a black bar across eyes, if necessary. And, that this was a really powerful statement.

At the time, I was still shooting film, and so, once I had finished the assignment, I got it all developed, and wrote out frame by frame detailed captions with a clear heading stating, "DO NOT SHOW ANY FACES".

Four or five months later, I received some copies of Marie Claire in the post in Kenya, and when I opened it up to have a look, I was absolutely DEVASTATED. Not only had they shown the faces of children, but they had also used a double-page spread! I was truly gutted.

I had shot so many different angles, where no faces were seen, and they had the choice of putting a bar across the eyes of the children, or blurring their faces. I had given them so many options, but instead they chose to identify these young children who had endured horrendous abuse, AND the editor had the audacity to write in the magazine something along the lines of, "we are doing this story because we care".

I was furious. I wrote to them, and to Corbis, and insisted on speaking to Corbis' lawyers. I said they needed to publish a note of apology for this terrible misjudgment, and maybe they could consider a contribution to an organization in South Africa that works with these children.

I explained that this was pure racism - that it was okay to show the faces of African child victims of rape, but not American ones, and that they had violated the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child by not protecting their identities, only to discover, that at the time, the United States, along with Somalia, were two of the few remaining countries that had yet to ratify the law. I also explained that they have violated my copyrighted images, which stated clearly, "DO NOT SHOW ANY FACES".

In the end, Corbis did not back me, no doubt because they did not want to jeopardize the assignments that came from Marie Claire USA for their other photographers. And, Marie Claire did not give a damn. I quit Corbis on the spot, and never worked with Marie Claire USA again.

I also learned that no matter what, if you do not want the photo published, you should NOT send it to the editors. This is easier to do now with digital photography - film was a bit more complicated, but nevertheless, had I known then that there was even the slightest risk that a woman's magazine that claims to care about women and children's wellbeing would publish my images this way, I would have cut the film up, and sent a few frames to them.

The lesson I learned from this is that your personal work ethic and moral code, your integrity, may differ from that of the publication you are working for and from their editors. So unless you know the editor well and trust that you are on the same page, ethically speaking, protect your work and the people you have photographed.
This essay was originally published at Photojournalism News, a website that promotes real photojournalism works from all over the world. A regular feature is PhotojournalismChat, which features exclusive interviews with distinguished photojournalists. You can follow Photojournalism News on its website, Twitter, and Instagram. About the author: Mariella Furrer is a photographer specializing in social documentary photography and corporate social responsibility. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Furrer's work on her website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Image credits: Header photo licensed from Depositphotos

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An Important Lesson I Learned as a Photojournalist

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I began working on a long-term project on child sexual abuse after receiving a three-day assignment from Marie Claire magazine USA to work with the Police Child Protection Unit in South Africa documenting infant rape. This was back in 2001, but I feel the lesson learned is still very relevant today.

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Understanding a Photograph by John Berger

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Understanding a Photograph by John Berger

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Women in the Picture: Women, art and the power of looking by Catherine McCormack

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Women in the Picture: Women, art and the power of looking by Catherine McCormack

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Author notes provided by Syndetics

Dr Catherine McCormack is an art historian and independent curator. She is the founder and course leader of the 'Women and Art' study programme at Sotheby's Institute of Art where she teaches on art, race and gender. She is the author of The Art of Looking Up (2019) and her written work has featured in The Architectural Review, the Independent and Harper's Bazaar as well as numerous exhibition catalogue essays on historical and contemporary art.

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Dr Catherine McCormack is an art historian and independent curator. She is the founder and course leader of the 'Women and Art' study programme at Sotheby's Institute of Art where she teaches on art, race and gender.

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Photography After Capitalism by Ben Burbridge

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Photography After Capitalism by Ben Burbridge

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Photography After Capitalism book. Read reviews from world's largest community for readers. A polemical analysis of the politics and economics of today's...

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"IS THIS FOR REAL?" The tone of the question was a mixture of disgust, sarcasm, and self-righteousness, but it was uttered just loud enough to betray some outright anxiety. It stopped me in my tracks. I had just passed the smartly dressed, bejeweled young woman who asked it and her tuxedoed beau as they made their way through Tate Britain's grand Duveen Galleries to the opening of a dreadful exhibition of recent bronze sculptures by the Chapman brothers. Turning around, I could not see her face, but only that her hands were extended in front of her in a protective gesture. She might simply have closed her eyes.

The skeptical query was more to the point than the woman might have known, given that the this in question was State Britain, 2007, Mark Wallinger's brilliantly titled installation occupying the museum's central gallery through August 27. It is an exact replica of, indeed, a real makeshift palisade in front of the British Parliament-composed of placards, banners, messages, and personal items, such as a mattress and several teddy bears-that grew to 130 feet in length from June 2001 until the night of May 23, 2006, when it was forcibly removed by no fewer than seventy-eight London police officers. The original "assemblage" was the "work" of Brian Haw, a peacenik who, several months before 9/11, left home to camp out in front of Parliament to protest the economic sanctions against Iraq and, particularly, their effect on children. Haw's strategy was unusual (deliberate, obstinate homelessness plus constant megaphone haranguing), but he probably would not have remained a fixture in the British media were it not for the disastrous invasion of Iraq almost two years after he took up his post. (He remains more than ever a part of the daily news: On February 7, he received the Channel 4 Award for Most Inspiring Political Figure, garnering 54 percent of the viewers' votes as opposed to Tony Blair's 8.) Although he may have welcomed contributions to his barricade before the invasion of Iraq, they clearly began to pour in after the war commenced. Among the countless additions were posters making use of the popular pun Bliar; banners calling Blair and Bush "baby killers"; a large logo showing a human figure pointing a gunlike gas-pump nozzle at its head; a painting representing two soldiers, one standing watch with his machine gun while the other hastily brushes a huge red peace sign on a wall; a list of British MPs who voted for the war; and, most disturbingly, many photos of atrociously mutilated children, their bodies bloated, transformed into those of tadpoles or dog ticks, their faces at times a bloody mess, barely legible as human.

The brochure published by the Tate to accompany Wallinger's exhibition is not very precise about when the artist conceived of the installation, but it does include the text of the parliamentary decree that became the legal basis for Haw's eviction and the dismantling of the protest material. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 stipulates, among other provisions specifically targeted at Haw, that no political demonstration can occur less than "one kilometre in a straight line from the point nearest to it in Parliament Square" without prior authorization from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Although the law went into effect on July 1, 2005, it did not prompt immediate police action, in part due to public embarrassment (notably from the judiciary) over such a gross repudiation of freedoms guaranteed by the Magna Carta, the principles of which Blair had always emphatically professed to maintain. (The brochure, which contains a medley of quotations selected by Wallinger, offers this pearl delivered by the prime minister in a 2002 speech at the George Bush Senior Presidential Library: "When I pass protesters every day at Downing Street, and believe me, you name it, they protest against it, I may not like what they call me, but I thank God they can. That's called freedom.") By this time, Haw had become a prominent public figure and, with the financial aid of many supporters, he launched a legal battle against the government, which he won almost instantly, when on July 29, 2005, the British High Court declared that the law was not retroactively applicable to someone already engaged in protest within the newly prohibited zone. It took a while for Blair and his cronies to fight back and win the second round of the legal battle, and it was during this time that Wallinger digitally recorded Haw's street display in meticulous forensic fashion. To make the rest of Haw's story short: After his arrest and those of several of his supporters, he won the third round and, beginning on January 22, 2007, was legally allowed to occupy a portion of Parliament Square, provided that the length of his display would be limited to roughly ten feet. He is back there now, though his puny stand, the size of a street vendor's, is not easy to access. All pedestrian crossings to his part of the square have been removed, and one must (illegally?) brave the busy traffic on a wide avenue in order to go take a peek. Despite his diminished visibility, he is still being harassed: I went to see him after my second visit to Wallinger's show, but he was back in court that day, his display guarded by friends handing out leaflets urging the rare visitor to go see the exhibition, barely a ten-minute walk away.

"Is this for real?" can be understood in many ways: "Is this the real stuff, the real junk of the Brian Haw of evening news fame?" (it looks absolutely so, it must be said, the posters, teddy bears, and placards evidently dirtied by pollution, the photos convincingly faded); "Is this really considered art?" (as opposed to, say, the bronze phalli of the Chapman brothers next door); and, most important, "Is this really what's happening in Iraq? Are these horrible images really true?"

The gallery's wall text provides answers to the first two questions: (1) No, this is not Haw's stuff, and (2) Yes, it is art, and skillfully crafted at that. To that end, there is a fair amount of insistence on the tedious process of duplication, on the hours spent by an army of assistants scrutinizing photographs and devising tricks to obtain a perfect imitation. State Britain, we are told in the brochure, belongs to a tradition of replicas and appropriations that has, since Duchamp, challenged the very concept of authenticity-and other precedents could have been mentioned here as well, such as Jasper Johns's ale cans or, more recently, Fischli & Weiss's painstakingly faithful simulacra of a painter's entire studio (one of which was on view in their retrospective at Tate Modern until the day before the unveiling of Wallinger's installation). Fine, good to know, but such information sheds little light on the particular efficacy of Wallinger's work, which does not hinge so much on underlining the fragility of the limit between art and non-art, the museological and nonmuseological (that would be hyperbanal) but rather on emphasizing the ideological hold of such a limit in our culture, a hold more solid than ever despite all appearances to the contrary. Thus, when Haw went to the Tate with new items to add to "his" display, he was firmly told first by guards and then by curators that he could not do so, since this was a work of art. ("See the Do Not Touch sign," one imagines a guard imploring. "But I did this!" Haw replies, to which the guard answers, "No, you didn't. Mark Wallinger did, and with great care.")

None of this would make Wallinger's piece one of the most remarkable political works of art ever, were it not for its actual physical context. For it is shown not in a commercial gallery where the happy few of the globalized art world might venture (as, originally, were the startling recent photomontages of Martha Rosler or a 2006 installation by Thomas Hirschhorn, both artists responding as violently as Wallinger to the invasion of Iraq) but in the central hall of a major national museum. Named after Baron Joseph Duveen-one of the most famous art dealers of all time-this enormous Neoclassical hall is the last place one would expect to encounter Wallinger's piece. A place where no one (except, again, the happy initiated few) could possibly foresee having to stroll the entire length of the hair-raising display to visit the marvelous little Turner exhibition down the hall; but also a place where no one ( even the happy few) could possibly foresee that such a graphic, visceral attack against the Blair/Bush policy would be permitted. The Tate, after all, is a state-financed public museum, and not only is the lack of government censorship astounding, but even more so, the lack of self-censorship on the part of the museum's curators and director. Although American museums generally rely far less on public funding, it is nearly impossible to imagine a single one staging an installation as politically inflammatory as this.

Wallinger's work, however, depends not only on its institutional context but also on its historical one. The installation is in part so stunning because it provides a rich trove of vivid information at a time when information, precisely, is drastically screened and controlled (far less, in general, in the UK and Europe than in the US, to be sure, but in none of these places does one regularly encounter such gruesome images of the latest carnage in Baghdad). In short, willingly or not, the beholders of Wallinger's piece learn that the war in Iraq is most certainly not virtual. (Remember this claim by the late Jean Baudrillard about the first Gulf War and the current conflict?) Ironically, though, they learn that this criminal war is not a simulacrum via a simulacrum (a replica), which is guaranteed a much larger public than the "real," measly reincarnation of Haw's stand currently in Parliament Square. They learn, and they are appalled. Few are as vocal as the skeptical woman I mentioned earlier. Most are solemn, silent, slowly gazing at the catalogue of horrors until they can take it no more.

It has become customary, among those nostalgic for an avant-garde stance (I count myself among them), to lament the grip of the culture industry on our life, to bemoan the commercial devolution of everything into mere spectacle. The strength of Wallinger's piece is that it takes hold of this condition and makes use of it while testing it at the same time. The spectacular nature of State Britain is manifold: There is the meteorite effect ("How did this thing land here?"), the grand scale, and the Fischli-&-Weiss-type insistence on geewhiz skill (except for the mattress, which is one of the very few items the police did not remove, it's all a copy!). But it is the testing of these spectacular conventions that is interesting: Is there a threshold beyond which something will no longer be acceptable as spectacle? One notices a thick black line traced on the gallery floor, a line which is a segment of the virtual circle with a one-kilometer radius centered at Parliament Square. One also notices that the line bisects Wallinger's piece. In other words, one half of it is illegal and, technically, could be carted away just like the artifact it replicates (not to speak of the perpetrators, like Tate director Nicholas Serota, who might be first to be arrested for breaking the law). I bet none of this will happen. But why? Precisely because, in this day and age, the culture industry and the political and financial powers that support it need the illusion that art is a refuge (best if it's innocuous, but the culture industry can ultimately accommodate anything) and the dogma that museums are safe havens with special immunity just as churches and mosques once were. Recent violence in such religious sites might lead us to believe that only museums remain cordoned off from real bloodshed and, in this case at least, from the grip of the law-a double standard brilliantly spectacularized by Wallinger. There is something nihilistic, but not entirely defeatist, about his installation. This is the current State (of) Britain, it says: paranoiac enough to abolish rights that had been assured its citizens since 1215, but shrewd enough to let art bask in its fictional perfume of freedom. Let's relish the aroma, while it's still possible. Museums might not be immune forever.

Yve-Alain Bois is a contributing editor of Artforum.

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PIECE MOVEMENT: MARK WALLINGER'S STATE BRITAIN

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"IS THIS FOR REAL?" The tone of the question was a mixture of disgust, sarcasm, and self-righteousness, but it was uttered just loud enough to betray some outright anxiety. It stopped me in my tracks.

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

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Sebastian Junger, the bestselling author of War and The Perfect Storm, takes a critical look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the ma...

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Photographs display attitudes, agency and vision in the way cities are documented and imagined. Cities and Photography explores the relat...

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The use and influence of War Photography: An investigation into the use and influence of war photography with particular reference to Vietnam (1964 - 1973) and Iraq (2002 - 2007) by Hana Elliott

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The use and influence of War Photography: An investigation into the use and influence of war photography with particular reference to Vietnam (1964 - 1973) and Iraq (2002 - 2007) by Hana Elliott

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eligible for voucher

ISBN-13:

978-3-639-18171-5

ISBN-10:

3639181719

EAN:

9783639181715

Book language:

Blurb/Shorttext:

This investigation examines the need for war photography, and the power of the photographic image to influence public opinion. The Vietnam (1964-1973) and Iraq (2002-2007) wars will be the main areas of investigation; both having similar media coverage, yet varied due to technological advances. I have delved into issues of censorship, technological development, the media and editorial control as well as the role of the unbiased documentary photographer as the main topics of discussion. Through the exploration of these topics I will evaluate the use and influence of war photography. Discussing the notion that war imagery can surpass the basic documentation of historical events, and has the ability to change the outcome of wars.

Publishing house:

VDM Verlag Dr. Müller

Website:

http://www.vdm-verlag.de

By (author) :

Hana Elliott

Number of pages:

68

Published on:

2009-07-28

Stock:

Available

Category:

Price:

49.00 €

Keywords:

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the use and influence of war photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The use and influence of War Photography

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The use and influence of War Photography, 978-3-639-18171-5, This investigation examines the need for war photography, and the power of the photographic image to influence public opinion. The Vietnam (1964-1973) and Iraq (2002-2007) wars will be the main areas of investigation; both having similar media coverage, yet varied due to technological advances.

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1000 Words

Writer Conversations

#4 Taous R. Dahmani

Taous R. Dahmani is a historian of photography, researcher and writer based between London and Marseille, France. She is currently writing a PhD on the relationship between political actions and photographic gestures. Dahmani is also editor and content advisor at , a trustee of the Photo Oxford Festival and on the editorial board of MAI: Visual Culture and Feminism.

Recent writings include "Heeding time: reviewing and rereading Périphérique" in Mohamed Bourouissa, Périphérique (Loose Joints, 2021); "A meeting between the thought of Stuart Hall and the films of John Akomfrah" in Penser avec Stuart Hall (La Dispute, 2021); "Racism and anti-racist struggles in 1970s London: When the walls speak, placards respond!" in Le phototexte engagé - Une culture visuelle du militantisme au XXe siècle (Les Presses du réel, 2021); "From a space of resistance, to the institution's place: the history of Autograph ABP, between 1988 and 2007" in and "Bharti Parmar's True Stories: Against the grain of Sir Benjamin Stone's Photographic Collection" in PhotoResearcher #30 (2018).

In 2022, Dahmani will contribute a chapter about Polareyes, a magazine by and for Black British women photographers, in Resist, Organize, Build (SUNY Press, 2022), and serve as the curator of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles, France.
At what point did you start to write about photographs?
The very first time I wrote about a photograph was eight years ago in a university exam for my history of photography course. We had three hours to write a "dissertation" - a methodology-heavy French way of writing a "paper". And it was actually the last time I wrote anything with a pen. I only vaguely remember that I wrote about a Bill Owens photograph and its relation to capitalism. But I vividly remember my eagerness and nascent aspiration.

Fast forward slightly less than a decade and I'm now writing up my PhD as the end product of my journey in French academia. Looking back, this education - its numerous rules and regulations - was a process of acculturation. One way of writing, to perpetuate one way of thinking. On scholarly work, Edward Saïd wrote that it is an 'on-going activity within an already constituted field of discourse.' It exists only to be perpetuated as it is.

In 2019, when Tim Clark, Editor in Chief of 1000 Words, invited me to write about a photobook, I welcomed the invitation as a breath of fresh air. I also welcomed the proposal as an opportunity to transcribe, for a wider readership - a conscious reasoning - the accumulation of knowledge and experience that has shaped me as a researcher. This experience started my interest in non-academic writing - its forms and meanings - and its potential for accessibility. As such, this experience was another "first time".

Today, I feel like I'm playing a tug of war with myself: one team trying to follow presiding ways of writing a PhD thesis; the other exploring the freedom of essay writing. At the end of a long and laborious project such as a PhD thesis, I am embracing the feeling of re-starting, re-becoming an apprentice writer. Originating from the French verb "essayer" (to try), "the essay" is a great form for critical thinking, and I will attempt to weave my academic background into this new form in the future - asking myself, as Daniel C. Blight asked himself a few years ago: 'What is the politics of essay writing on photography?' Blending disciplinary disregard and acute consideration for this form.
What is your writing process?
[I'll answer this question for essay writing only.]
On good days:

1. I place my phone behind my computer screen - on airplane mode - and have a cuppa to hand.

2. I put on my earphones with the curious "focus music" which populates YouTube and which helps me create a sort of "concentration bubble".

3. I read something: either from the digital pile of PDFs under my "research" folder or from an article I have received in one of the many newsletters that arrive every day in my inbox. Reading gets me focused but reading also produces two things: quotations and ideas.

4. I jot down reflections about a selected quote. In her book In the Wake (2016), Christina Sharpe points out that: 'thinking needs care.' I consider quotations a profound demonstration of care for thinkers and their ideas: they are "thank-yous" to the people who produced knowledge before us. They are also invitations for curious readers: footnotes open never-ending "reading pathways".

5. The accumulation of quotes and notes - and sometimes interviews with photographers - form my "base". When I'm not rushed by a deadline I let the reading, the note taking and the "base creation" percolate. The longer the better, the essay will "live" and "evolve" in my mind, creating new possible directions.

6. When the deadline is approaching, I start a new Word document and write a first draft "from scratch". The first sentence takes courage, the second trust. I can't start writing an essay if I don't have a clear orientation - often found during the "percolating period". I tend to think that essays need to make a point, be a demonstration not a decoration. But, might not the best one be precisely both?

7. I go back to my "base" to "feed" the first draft of the essay. I add precision. Because of which kind of photographs/photographers I am writing about, I am wary of ambiguity or obscurity. I make sure any complex ideas mentioned are mobilised in an intelligible way: I want to make sure they are accessible and in accordance with the assumed readership.

8. I think and write in French and English. Early drafts of most of my texts are written in both languages which ultimately leads to me feeling sorry for myself when something "comes out" fine in one language but doesn't translate well. Often, this kickstarts a process where I juggle between a French-English dictionary and a Thesaurus. Another challenge of writing in both these languages is having to navigate different levels of "discourse acceptance": concepts and ideas are not similarly established in different countries; references and words might need to be explained differently (especially in the fields of critical race theory and postcolonial studies).

9. I remove the earphones to read the paragraph written out loud, I correct and I rectify. I repeat the process as many times as there are paragraphs. This list was read at least five times.

I generally love listening to podcasts or watching interviews of people who talk in detail about their craft and practice. So, on bad days, I turn to writers who have written about writing. I often think of this Marguerite Duras quote: 'One cannot write without bodily strength. One must be stronger than oneself to approach writing; one must be stronger than what one is writing.'
What are the questions or problems that motivate your writing?
The last five years of my life have been dedicated to my doctoral research. My thesis is articulated, in a nutshell, around the photographic representation of struggles and the struggle for photographic representation in England from the end of the 1960s to the end of the '80s. Most of my essays, so far, have been more or less inspired by my ongoing obsession with image-making and political action whether expressed in iconographies or ecosystems (or 'worlds' to reference Howard S. Becker).

That said, most of my essays have been dedicated to very contemporary artists/photographers and, as such, most of them have tried to "respond" to image-makers that ' create dangerously ' to quote Edwidge Danticat, who describes that process as such: '[It] is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.' I'm motivated by disobedient artists-photographers. I'm driven by the problems defiant image-makers highlight. Their insubordination can be found in their craft or form, in their practice or discourse. They are oppositional in their way of behaving with, around or against photography. Their rebellion can be loud or whispered - I'll listen.
What kind of reader are you?
As a doctoral researcher, reading is a great part of my day-to-day work. As such, libraries become toolboxes and books instruments towards the completion of a project. The Stakhanovic nature of a PhD means that I rarely re-read books - with the significant exception of bell hooks whom I could read every day. If I re-read an article, it is often in order to "double check" or "make sure".

However, the first lockdown taught me the power of re-reading and reading several books at the same time: realising that, often, as with a person, you need the "right time" to truly discover a book's content. To take an example, I had always "used" Roland Barthes' theories (and taught Camera Lucida (1980) in exactly the same way it had been passed down by my professor), but, with my recent dive into essay writing, I started paying attention to the confidentiality, familiarity and sensitive nature of his work: making him a thousand times more interesting.

So, as I'm trying to become another kind of writer, I'm becoming another kind of reader: trying to find the route towards an embodied strategy of narration that exists at the meeting place of gut (biography) and brain (history/theory). A delicate balance between decency and intelligibility. I have to say that I have come a long way: French academic education forbids expressions of subjectivity or opinion - or more exactly, uses objectivity to hide the dominants' point of views. The first time I wrote "I" to start a sentence I felt a blast of freedom on my keyboard. In How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983), Johanna Russ wrote: 'Although crammed with facts and references, [women's writing] has the wrong style; it is personal and sounds unscholarly, a charge often levelled at modern feminist writing. That is, the tone is not impersonal, detached, and dry enough - in short, not patriarchal enough - to produce belief." As you can imagine, reading beacons such as Saidiya V. Hartman, Sharpe and Tina M. Campt for the first time was extremely arresting.
How significant are theories and histories of photography now that curation is so prominent?
I struggle with this question. For me, one can only compare similar elements and the contrast between the experience of reading and the experience of visiting an exhibition is too dissimilar: providing disparate bodily and intellectual experiences. Being a reader and being a viewer/spectator are two distinct positions. However, I guess we could maybe examine the knowledge produced by catalogues vs. magazines, journals and other sorts of publications. Such an investigation might quickly lead us back to accessibility (price, printed/online, language, themes, etc.). The performative aspect of exhibitions - if the work of going through the doors of a gallery/museum is achieved - makes it probably more approachable. In the age of social media, we face very different ethics of attention and, as a result, disparate receptions/reactions/effects.

That said, if I really have to answer the question, I would say that the "prominent" status of exhibitions over theories/histories that you seem to detect is probably only the result of radical and forward-thinking theorists and historians. Good exhibitions are made by curators (and artists) who read. I have a hard time imagining the act of thinking - or giving shape to ideas - without writing, so I'm guessing curation is another form of writing. Curating can then become a translation and even a visual/embodied comment on theories/histories. Exhibitions can be powerful rhetorical demonstrations. Yet, the limitations of exhibition-making are much more real than the limits of words on paper (publication aside). For me, the main question is who writes and who curates and which platforms these people are given. How we know what we know and who is allowed to share what they know?
What qualities do you admire in other writers?
This is an extremely hard question. But to answer, I would say 1. their politics 2. their attention to detail 3. their humanity.

1. Marguerite Duras wrote that writing is: 'Screaming without sound'. When I read Hartman, Hannah Arendt, Ariella Aïcha Azoulay, Etel Adnan and Trinh T. Minh-ha, I hear their screams. If anger is pain with nowhere to go, writing then becomes a sort of socially accepted "place". Political anger translated into words is definitely something I admire in these writers. I would also like to mention a young generation of badass writers such as Legacy Russell and her Glitch Feminism manifesto (2020) or Durga Chew-Bose's singular writing in Too Much and Not the Mood (2017).

2. A focus on a detail, such as a cup of coffee let's say, can be a powerful rhetorical node, as revealed beautifully by Mahmoud Darwish in Memory for Forgetfulness (1982). I'm not a very patient person, and struggle with the exercise of description, so, recently, when I read A Black Gaze (2021) by Campt, I was quite mesmerised by the attention she seems to give to descriptions of the art works she mobilises (the same consideration/scrutiny can be found in Listening to Images (2017) for example). A detail can also be an anecdote that becomes a compelling argument. In the same book, Campt explains the effect of the weather on her experience of an exhibition: this opened many threads of thought.

3. I'm a big reader of autobiographies and in-depth interviews because of the possibility of hearing the artists' voices. But, the ability of writers such as Olivia Laing, for example, to emphasise her own and artists' human experiences is definitely something I admire. I never thought I would care so much about someone like Andy Warhol until I read The Lonely City (2016). I also love artists such as Coco Fusco who write about other artists - they tend to reveal a very distinctive perspective on the artworks they write about. I like books that are accounts of being and guides for becoming. I also like writers, who are not "writers" as such: recently I read a text written by a photographer, for the first time, wrote about a decade of work. Vasantha Yogananthan's essay, in his latest photobook Amma (2021), moved me greatly because of his bravery in writing about his journey as a photographer with the most generous vulnerability.

What texts have influenced you the most?
[Influence seems like a big word, but, off the top of my head, here is a non-exhaustive list of names, in no particular order, with endless recognition for carrying me through years of doctoral research.]

Edwidge Danticat Jacques Rancière Gayatri Spivak Marie-José Mondzain Allan Sekula Frantz Fanon W.J.T Mitchell Fred Moten James Baldwin Shawn Michelle Smith John Berger Paul Ricoeur Susan Sontag Sara Ahmed Stuart Hall Judith Burtler Simon de Beauvoir Eric Hazan Julia Kristeva Angela Y. Davis Adrienne Rich Nicholas Mirzoeff Edouard Glissant Christina Sharpe Elsa Tamara Trodd Dorlin Jo Spence Sarah Lewis Victor Burgin Kobena Mercer Laura Mulvey Chris Kraus Steve Edwards Lucy R. Lippard Val Williams Elvan Zabunyan Mieke Bal Jacqueline Bobo Hazel V. Carby Eddie Chambers Patricia Hill Collins Sandra Harding Elizabeth Edwards Anna Backman Rogers Siona Wilson Harriet Riches Paul Gilroy bell hooks Heidi Safia Mirza Griselda Pollock Rozsika Parker Liz Wells Deborah Willis Pratibha Parmar David A. Bailey Roshini Kempadoo Sarat Maharaj Gilane Tawados Ambalavaner Sivanandan Maurice Berger John Tagg Albert Memmi Saul Alinsky Antonio Gramsci Audre Lorde C.L.R. James Edward Saïd Homi K. Bhabha Fatima Mernissi Walter Rodney Achille Mbembe Frieda Ekotto Derek Walcott Patrick Chamoiseau Mahmoud Darwish Paul B. Preciado Tina M. Campt Saidiya Hartman Hannah Arendt Ariella Aïcha Azoulay Etel Adnan Aruna D'Souza Teju Cole Trinh T. Minh-ha and many others that I'll regret not naming once this interview is published.
What is the place of criticality in photography writing now?
I am tempted to give a somewhat literal answer to this question: addressing geography and platforms. The hegemony of the English language and concomitantly the predominance of the global North in knowledge dissemination (not production) questions "the place of criticality in photography writing now". Published and widely circulated criticality in photography is not diverse or inclusive enough. However, the recent publication of Dark Mirrors (2021) by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is an inspiring step for critical writing.

Then comes the question of where does one find critical thinking (as opposed to journalism) in photography today? A few online platforms (in English) exist, a couple of publishers defend it - that's it (in France, outside academia, it's almost non-existent for example). Critical consciousness certainly exists, the lack of platforms to express it is, for me, an important aspect today. Without sounding boards, it is difficult to develop true debate and exchange or create space for a diversity of equal voices to express themselves.

Lastly, I feel like the place of criticality in photography writing now is in complexifying "recently acknowledged" notions/ideas/struggles. Lately, oppositions around photographer Deana Lawson's iconography are for me fascinating "places" of criticality, for example. Debate is probably one of the greatest signs of the recognition of a multi-layered artist and a complex body of work.♦

Further interviews in the Writer Conversations series can be read here.

-
Writer Conversations is edited by Lucy Soutter (University of Westminster) and Duncan Wooldridge (Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London), upon the invitation of Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University).

Images:

1-Taous R. Dahmani © Lynn S.K

2-Book cover of Joanna Russ, How To Suppress Women's Writing (University of Texas Press, 1983)

3-Book cover of Christina Sharpe, In the Wake - On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)

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Writer Conversations #4 | Taous R. Dahmani

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Taous R. Dahmani on being driven by the problems defiant image-makers highlight, how the limitations of exhibition-making are much more real than the limits of words on paper and her belief that the place of criticality in photography writing now is in complexifying "recently acknowledged" notions/ideas/struggles.

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Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze by Charlotte Jansen

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Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze by Charlotte Jansen

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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A new generation of female artists is emerging who have grown up in a culture saturated with social media and selfies.

This book looks at how young women are using photography and the internet to explore issues of self-image and female identity, and the impact this is having on contemporary art.

Forty artists are featured, all of whose principal subject matter is either themselves or other women. Each is accompanied by a short profile based on personal interviews with the author, giving a fascinating insight into this exciting shift in female creativity.

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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics: A new generation of female artists is emerging who have grown up in a culture saturated with social media and selfies. This book looks at how young women are using photography and the internet to explore issues of self-image and female identity, and the impact this is having on contemporary art.

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Self-Portraiture as Activism by Laurence Cornet

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Self-Portraiture as Activism by Laurence Cornet

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Zanele Muholi's latest photobook is a raging manifesto of resistance; a powerful attempt to rid photography of a colonial gaze.

© Zanele Muholi, courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Aperture has just released the compilation of self-portraits that South-African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi shot over the past six years. An ode to self-acceptance and to tolerance, her 90 variations of herself are accompanied with texts, ranging from essays to poetry, by an array of voices rising from different continents and experiences.

Somnyama Ngonyama (i.e., Hail the Dark Lioness, in Zulu, Muholi's mother tongue) is as challenging as its title suggests. As a contributor, Tamar Garb writes that Muholi's "eyes look out fixedly, as if to defy those historical protocols of posing that required subservience to type, their cataloguing of the texture of hair, the shape of a nose, the sheen of skin, the character of lips, the better to construct taxonomies and lists."
© Zanele Muholi, courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey © Zanele Muholi, courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness by Zanele Muholi Richardson Gallery, New York Richardson Gallery, New York
A stand against the tyranny of classification, Muholi's self-portraits are a passionate outcry against the white establishment - the abnormally high numbers of murdered black people being shut down, the as abnormally high number of black people incarcerated, of abandoned migrants, the taste for exoticism and the prejudicial representation of blackness.

Zanele Muholi (born in Umlazi, South Africa, 1972) is a visual activist and photographer, co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Laurence Cornet is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn focusing on cultural and environmental issues.

But it's also a dire criticism of South Africa - a democracy that in 2012 orchestrated the killing of 34 miners asking for better wages; that allows servitude and the trading of women for money; and whose newspapers are covered with homophobic news. By telling multiple stories of oppression and resistance, and in doing so, incarnating what it means to be black in the world today, Muholi's series "validates our existence in all forms and shades, and asserts our status as significant beings", contributor Jackie Mondi argues - Mondi, whose call for the provision of free HIV/AIDS treatment was quoted in the 2009 Republic of South Africa Budget Speech.

The multiplicity of references and voices - be it Muholi's various embodiments or the alternance between her photographs and the texts - amplifies her shout. It becomes a collective, almost mystical voice that emanates from the oppressed who came before her and will come after.

"There is a black warrior behind every dark veil
A warrior powerful even though they think she is frail
[...]
Can you smell the hot lava she produces?
She is a black woman, mad at the many times
She has been told she is not enough
Not worthy enough
[...]
She has found the strength to roar
Hear her roar loud until the chains break
[...]
Restless yet she rests peacefully in the stereotypical role she plays", South African poet, Mapula Lehong, writes, to give the measure of Muholi's communicative determination.

Published by Aperture Foundation // Photographs by Zanele Muholi

Interview and essay contribution by Renée Mussai // Other contributions by Unoma Azuah, Cheryl Clarke, Fariba Derakhshani, Sophie Hackett, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Mapula Lehong, Sindiwe Magona, Napo Masheane, Hlonipha Mokoena, Jackie Mondi, Deborah Willis, and Christie van Zyl, among others

Hardcover // 224 page, 100 tritone images // 26.5 x 35.5 cm // $75

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Zanele Muholi's latest photobook is a raging manifesto of resistance; a powerful attempt to rid photography of a colonial gaze. © Zanele Muholi, courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York Aperture has just released the compilation of self-portraits that South-African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi shot over the past six years.

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Regarding the pain of others by Susan Sontag

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Regarding the pain of others by Susan Sontag

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Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism: Filming on an Uneven Field by Davinia Thornley

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Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism: Filming on an Uneven Field by Davinia Thornley

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Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism is a manifesto for a developing area, one that provides a new model for reading films...

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Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image

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Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image

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واقعاً درباره این کتاب چی بگم؟

از نظر من، فوق‌العاده بود! از مقدمه تا "در پایان روز"، عاشقش شدم!

من فکر می‌کنم اتفاقی که دید کنونی ربکا نوریس رو ساخته، مرگ برادرشه. سوگ باعث ثبت تصاویر "شاعرانه" شده. الکس وب هم بیشترین تاثیر رو از سفر کردن گرفته. پی بردن به نقطه عطف زندگی یک هنرمند، کمک زیادی به بهتر شناختن هنرش می‌کنه. از همین یادداشت‌ها هم می‌شه فهمید که چرا عکس‌های الکس وب این‌قدر پر از رنگ و نوره و چرا عکس‌های ربکا نوریس [به قول همسرش] ته‌رنگ پاییز داره.

نویسنده‌ها نمی‌گن که بیا بهت چیزی یاد ب...more

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On Street Photography and the Poetic Image

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واقعاً درباره این کتاب چی بگم؟ از نظر من، فوق‌العاده بود! از مقدمه تا "در پایان روز"، عاشقش شدم! من فکر می‌کنم اتفاقی که دید کنونی ربکا نوریس رو ساخته، مرگ برادرشه. سوگ باعث ثبت تصاویر "شاعرانه" شده. الکس وب هم بیشترین تاثیر رو از سفر کردن گرفته.

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Photography and Cinema (Paperback)--by David Campany [2008 Edition]

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Photography and Cinema (Paperback)--by David Campany [2008 Edition] book. Read reviews from world's largest community for readers.

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Akala, 'Natives, Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire'

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Akala, 'Natives, Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire'

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36352480-natives

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I first came across Akala via this awesome track: Comedy, Tragedy, History, a wonderful twist on Shakespeare. Then I came across a review of 'Natives' in the Guardian (of course) and was immediately intrigued. This book is a moving account of growing up mixed-race in Britain and an incisive account of racism's history in America and Europe which also asks wider questions about class, historiography, and politics. I learned a lot from it, notably about Cuba's role in the fall of South African apa...more

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I first came across Akala via this awesome track: Comedy, Tragedy, History, a wonderful twist on Shakespeare. Then I came across a review of 'Natives' in the Guardian (of course) and was immediately intrigued.

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War and photography : a cultural history / Caroline Brothers

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War and photography : a cultural history / Caroline Brothers

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Drawing on the work of Barthes, Eco, Foucault, Baudrillard, Burgin and Tagg, and on the historians of mentalities, War and Photography presents a theoretical approach to the understanding of press photography in its historical and contemporary context.
Brothers applies her argument with special reference to French and British newspaper images of the Spanish Civil War, a selection of which is presented in the book. Rejecting analyses based upon the content of the images alone, she argues that photographic meaning is largely predetermined by its institutional and cultural context. Acting as witnesses despite themselves, photographs convey a wealth of information not about any objective reality, but about the collective attitudes and beliefs particular to the culture in which they operate.

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📖[PDF] War and Photography by Caroline Brothers | Perlego

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Drawing on the work of Barthes, Eco, Foucault, Baudrillard, Burgin and Tagg, and on the historians of mentalities, War and Photography presents a theoretical approach to the understanding of press photography in its historical and contemporary context.

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Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon

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Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon

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University of the Arts Library Catalogue

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Catalogue: Powered by Koha, Supported by PTFS-Europe

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The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit 

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The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit 

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Our mother, healer and activist whose children, products of her mind and heart, in times of silencing and oppression, awaken women into empowerment and freedom. Highly recommended. Ivet. Xxx

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The ebook and audiobook are available through hoopla digital. If your local library doesn't give you access to hoopla, I would recommend checking withThe ebook and audiobook are available through hoopla digital. If your local library doesn't give you access to hoopla, I would recommend checking with them to see what ebook services they do offer (overdrive, etc.), and seeing if they carry the ebook through that service. ...more (less)

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Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨ Campbell

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The ebook and audiobook are available through hoopla digital. If your local library doesn't give you access to hoopla, I would recommend checking withThe ebook and audiobook are available through hoopla digital. If your local library doesn't give you access to hoopla, I would recommend checking with them to see what ebook services they do offer (overdrive, etc.), and seeing if they carry the ebook through that service.

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Reni Eddo Lodge, 'Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race'

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Reni Eddo Lodge, 'Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race'

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33606119-why-i-m-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race

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Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

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Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race book. Read 2,021 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In 2014, award-winning jour...

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Shooting the Darkness; Iconic Images of the Troubles and the Stories of the Photographers Who Took Them  by Tom Burke

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Shooting the Darkness; Iconic Images of the Troubles and the Stories of the Photographers Who Took Them  by Tom Burke

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Based on the acclaimed documentary by Broadstone Films, this landmark book presents the stories of leading photographers - Alan Lewis, Paul Faith, Martin Nangle, Stanley Matchett, Trevor Dickson, Hugh Russell and Crispin Rodwell - whose images captured some of the most important events of the Troubles. They talk, many of them for the first time, about the photographs they took - how they got the shot; what it cost them to take the photograph; and reflect on whether it was worth it. More broadly, they talk about what it was like to be a photographer during the Troubles: how the paramilitary groups dealt with them, the ethical dilemmas they faced, and the emotional fallout they experienced. The book includes the stories behind iconic images such as Bishop Edward Daly waving a blood-stained handkerchief on Bloody Sunday, Sean Downes being shot and killed by an RUC plastic bullet in Andersonstown in 1984, and the brutal attack of corporals Derek Wood and David Howes in March 1988.

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Shooting the Darkness: Iconic Images of the Troubles and the Stories of the Photographers Who Took Them

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Based on the acclaimed documentary by Broadstone Films, this landmark book presents the stories of leading photographers - Alan Lewis, Paul Faith, Martin Nangle, Stanley Matchett, Trevor Dickson, Hugh Russell and Crispin Rodwell - whose images captured some of the most important events of the Tro...

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Writing is intimidating. There's this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people. You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you're pulling out your own intestines.

But you're not a writer, so this isn't your problem, right? Well, the thing is, writing is not some mystic art. It's a practical skill-particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with. When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you-because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has.

Done well, it means you're contributing signal, instead of noise.

No one's born with this skill, though. We hear routinely from people who say they'd love to write for A List Apart or start blogging, but don't know where to start. They feel unfocused and overwhelmed by the task. If this is beginning to sound like you, read on-because I'm going to walk you through how writing works, and how you can get better at it.

I mean, yeah. But I'm not asking you to write pages of flourishing prose in one sitting. (Hint: nobody does that, anyway. I'll get to that.) I'm asking that you start with thinking. I suspect, if you're a reader, you're already a thinker-which means you're halfway there. Really. Because writing-that first leap into taking your idea and making it a Thing People Read-isn't really about wording. It's about thinking. And if you can tell the difference between an article that knows what it's about and one that exists purely to sell ad space, then you're pretty good at that already.

Think about the things you had to look up on the internet just to figure out how to do your current job. Or maybe those things aren't even on the internet-you learned from direct experience. You should write that stuff down, because when you connect your ideas into a written piece, you give voice and direction to something that otherwise just rattles around in the form of entrenched habits and beliefs-a resigned "that's just the way we've always done it around here."

Choosing the words to describe your work means you're doing it on purpose. You're going on the record as someone who thinks about why they do what they do, and understands how each decision affects the results. And developing this knack for critical thinking will also make you better at what you do.

Starting with something messy#section3

Thinking: check. Now you just need to start putting your ideas on paper. Try not to reread until you absolutely have to, preferably on a different day altogether. Just think about what you're trying to say, and jot the main ideas down. If you're not sure how to finish a sentence, abandon it halfway through. If you want to write extensively about one particular idea but your mind's moving too quickly to flesh it all out, paraphrase for now and move on to the next big point.

When the words aren't forthcoming, stick to paraphrasing. That's all outlining really is: paraphrasing what you'd actually like to write about. Worst-case scenario here is that you'll end up with a lot of open questions you'd like to answer. "More research needed" is an open door, not a reason to stop writing.

If you're anything like me, the end result of this first step is going to look a little like an outline interspersed with rants and probably a few side notes about errands you realized you need to run this afternoon. It is laughably far from something you'd share with anyone.

In other words, it's a rough draft.

With this, you have formally started writing. It doesn't look pretty, does it? And it won't until the very end. But this is an essential part of the process. Have a look at what you've got. You may have to cut through a lot of the ranting (and certainly the grocery list) to get to it, but somewhere in there is the heart of your idea, the takeaway that you want your readers to have. Find it.

Coming to your point#section4

Imagine you're showing a neighbor around your house before you go on vacation. Even if you spend an hour yakking about lasagna recipes, or the weather, or the latest gossip about your other neighbors, you'll probably sum up the key points: the houseplants are here, the gas and water shutoff are there, and the cat food is under the sink.

Your rough draft is the yakking. You want to get to the cat food: your thesis. By the time your neighbor shows up and you're out of cell phone range, the week-old gossip will be a lot less important than the cat food. Start with your main takeaway idea, and state it as clearly as you can in the early part of your draft. This is what you hope your readers will remember, and it's what will organize and guide the rest of your piece.

For example, take this very article. I hope you're enjoying the read so far, but the reason it's really appearing here in A List Apart is not because I'm so terribly witty and insightful. It's because I want to strip away the magic of good writing and explain the actual, learnable, non-mystical work that goes into it. I want you to come away from it thinking, "If writing is really mostly about thinking rather than wording, I could totally give this writing thing a try." That's the cat food.

I started outlining with this in mind, using very literal and awkward phrasing like, "Writing is a teachable/learnable skill that people should learn about more." The good phrasing comes later, but you can see the glimmer of an idea there.

But I don't really have an argument. I just have this anecdote to share.#section5

Most how-to documentation is just formalized anecdote. This is how we learn. Here is the thesis statement for nearly all training documentation out there: "This is what's worked so far to attain this particular goal and will probably work for you, too." That's an argument! It's hidden underneath just about all the advice that's out there (including this article): "Here's what worked for me when I wanted to accomplish [task]." It's definitely worth writing down-consider how many Google searches are typically answered by precisely this kind of information.

Personal anecdote is hugely helpful, especially in a fast-changing field like web design and development. To turn your piece from a meandering narrative into something more substantial, though, here are a few things to think about.

First of all, why did this excerpt from your experience stand out to you, personally? Was this the moment something clicked for you regarding your work?

Secondly, why do you think things turned out the way they did? Were you surprised? Do you do things differently now as a result? When you spell this out, it's the difference between journaling for yourself and writing for an audience.

Finally, is this something others in your line of work are prone to miss? Is it a rookie error, or something more like an industry-wide oversight? If you've tried to search online for similar opinions, do you get a lot of misinformation? Or is the good information simply not in a place where others in your field are likely to see it?

Supporting your readers#section6

As an editor, I usually come in around this phase. This is also the point where you're no longer writing for yourself and are instead truly writing for an audience. You may have had a loose theme you wanted to explore in your first draft, but at this point, we need to start thinking about your readers. Thanks to your rough draft, you've got a better idea of the central point of your article. Maybe there are even a few readers out there who will read that pithy summary and immediately agree with you.

But most people will need more explanation, or even some convincing, to come around to your point of view. This is where your supporting arguments come in.

The phrase "supporting arguments" probably recalls a few five-paragraph-essay-fueled nightmares for you, and I won't pretend it isn't a pain to dig back into your draft's structure to work out strong organization. But supporting your main point isn't something you do just for the invisible essay-graders out there. You do it for your readers-the ones who live outside your own brain and don't benefit from shared neural connections.

A supporting argument, in short, adds weight and legitimacy to your main point by showing how it applies in related situations. Go back to your main takeaway statement, and imagine that a skeptical reader replies with, "Why?" Why is that claim true? Why does it matter? Or, better yet, "What does that do for me?" Sometimes you'll need to show hard data. Other times, just fleshing out a good example will help your readers follow along. (The latter is the approach I've taken.) You don't need to intimidate people with your brilliance here; it's really more of a conversation than a debate.

How many supporting arguments are enough? Basically, you want to get to the point where the unaddressed "Why?" questions from your imagined skeptics are outside the scope of your topic. ("Why should I write?" Because it's good for your work. "Why is it good for my work?" Because it helps you work more purposefully. "Why should I work more purposefully?" ...Maybe talk to your boss or your therapist about that last one.)

No thanks, having readers sounds harsh and scary.#section7

It's easy to see these "why" questions and imagine some kind of antagonistic mob. Most readers aren't in this mode, though; more often, they're simply distracted, and need reminders of what you were just saying-imagine someone with half an eye on a football game or one hand on an unruly toddler.

You want to be a friend to your readers here, in the sense that you want to respect their time and attention. Except in rare literary circles, there's no good reason to make your readers work hard just to understand what you're trying to say. Each supporting argument or illustrative example you include needs to connect clearly back to your main point; the whole thing is moot if your readers trail off before getting to the cat food.

Sometimes when I begin outlining, I make these cognitive ties overly literal so that it's easier for me to keep track of where my own brain is going (e.g., "Explain why a clear organizational structure makes it easier for readers to keep their attention on your writing"), and later I'll flesh out the language and section transitions to feel a little more natural (e.g., this section).

This is an ongoing part of the process, too. Once you start showing other people your drafts, a good question to ask at every stage is, "Did you get lost anywhere?" This is one of the few questions people are likely to answer honestly, since they'll often believe "getting lost" is something that reflects on their reading comprehension and not your written organization. (Think again!)

And if someone does get lost? That doesn't mean your argument is a lost cause; it probably just needs more coaxing out of the coils of your brain.

Getting to "good" writing#section8

At this point you have the structure of a solid essay. In the editing world, this is pretty far along the path to publication; most of what remains here are line edits to improve word choice and sentence structure.

This is also where, unfortunately, word nerds get a little intimidating with their fervor. (Disclaimer: I am one of these people. Don't take it personally. We live for these things.) This isn't likely to be the stage that will break your essay. You've already put in the hard work by establishing the structure.

At this point, you'll clarify meaning in meandering phrases, or perhaps reorder paragraphs to keep the narrative momentum running smoothly. It is decidedly different work from the writing you did earlier-sometimes more satisfying (it feels wonderful to get a sentence to really sing), but also with more hang-ups (instead of breezing along, now's the moment when you really do have to make sure your grammatical tenses are all lined up). Here at ALA, we're pretty rigorous about this stage, and generally get right into the article with our authors. Every publication has its own style, though; many newspaper editors are even more hands-on in the interest of maintaining a consistent voice, while a less formal blog might give each contributor a lot of room to allow individual personality to shine through.

Even when you're not writing for a publication with its own editorial staff, this is a good point in the process to bring in as many fresh readers as you can. They'll trip up on all those oddly phrased sentences, repeated words, or misspellings you've skimmed past countless times. And at the end of the day, if a typo slips through, or the grammar isn't quite perfect, it doesn't make you less of a communicator-which is really what this whole exercise was about.

I've encountered a number of people with good ideas who happen to hate the process of writing. I get it-even for people who write regularly, it can be a frustrating process. (By the time this makes it through copyediting and onto the site, you will be reading the ninth version of this article.)

But the payoff is so, so worth it. Wherever you are on your professional path, whether you have years of experience or a fresh outlook to share, writing your ideas down gives you a particular new ownership over what you do. It examines all the "whys" of the job, turning entrenched habits into intentional actions. It equips you with the communication skills to sell yourself and your work to bosses and clients.

This is what crafting purposefulness looks like. We need more of it on the web, just as you need it in your life. Not just wording, but thinking. Not just noise, but signal. Put your ideas out there. We'd love to hear them.

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Writing is intimidating. There's this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people. You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you're pulling out your own intestines.

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Representing a range of photographic practices, these works from the Princeton University Art Museum collection explore how the human experiences of belonging and alienation have long been both subject and effect of photography. Since the announcement of the technology's invention in 1839, photographers have sought to depict human relationships and social dynamics. At the same time, the practices of taking and viewing photographs have themselves structured new relationships between photographer, subject, and viewer. Considering the different motives of these participants can raise important questions about the ethics of the photographic encounter. As the link between subject and viewer, what responsibilities fall on the photographer? How do subjects assert their own right to speak?

Situated among a myriad of historical examples, this installation highlights three photographers for whom experiences of inclusion and exclusion were an essential interest. Lewis Hine's documents of early-20th century immigrants in New York, Roman Vishniac's portrayal of European Jewish communities in the years before the Holocaust, and Fazal Sheikh's collaborative portraits of displaced persons in recent decades foreground both the struggle and dignity of marginalized groups. In a time when photographs saturate our social lives to an ever-increasing extent, these images invite us to consider both the empathetic promise and potential pitfalls of the medium.

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Representing a range of photographic practices, these works from the Princeton University Art Museum collection explore how the human experiences of belonging and alienation have long been both subject and effect of photography. Since the announcement of the technology's invention in 1839, photographers have sought to depict human relationships and social dynamics.

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Remembering displacement: Photography and the interactive spaces of memory

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Remembering displacement: Photography and the interactive spaces of memory

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274483392_Remembering_displacement_Photography_and_the_interactive_spaces_of_memory/citations

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Photography, journalism, and trauma by Barbie Zelizer

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Photography, journalism, and trauma by Barbie Zelizer

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https://libsearch.arts.ac.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=258123

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Photography, journalism, and trauma | Barbie Zelizer | Taylor & Franci

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Not long after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a memo from the American Press Institute went out to US news editors and

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Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, Mark Sealy

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Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, Mark Sealy

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https://libsearch.arts.ac.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=1322583&query_desc=kw%2Cwrdl%3A%20decolonising%20the%20camera

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Decolonising the camera : photography in racial time / Mark Sealy.

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Photojournalism in War and Armed Conflicts by Jelka Ninja Below

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Photojournalism in War and Armed Conflicts by Jelka Ninja Below

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The global beauty industry : colorism, racism, and the national body

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The global beauty industry : colorism, racism, and the national body

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University of the Arts Library Catalogue

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The global beauty industry [electronic resource] : colorism, racism, and the national body.

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ARTICLE By Fiona Macdonald

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Don McCullin: The photos we can’t look away from

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As a new exhibition of work by Don McCullin opens in London, Fiona Macdonald takes a look at gripping images of war and poverty by one of Britain’s greatest living photographers.

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Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practise by Carolyn Lazard

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Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practise by Carolyn Lazard

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This section provides a list of recommendations that focus primarily on the hard and soft architecture of accessibility. These are not legal requirements: these guidelines are meant to facilitate actual infrastructural change while proposing solutions for how institutions of varying resources, personnel, and building management might meet the call to eradicate access barriers.

Table of Contents:

There are multiple tools and resources available for supporting d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HOH) members of an arts community. While smaller scale arts spaces may not have the resources to provide American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation at every event, they should be able to offer it as an option for most events. Part III of this guide will provide more detailed information about how to list access information in advance of an event. To have an event properly interpreted, you will most likely need to hire two interpreters over the course of an event. Interpreters will often ask for a list of key terms, or some texts to help familiarize themselves with the language of the event. Some basic manners with interpreters: please do not address them directly while they are interpreting, because they are working. If you are communicating with someone who primarily communicates via lipreading and/or ASL, please respond directly to them with your words, gaze, and body language, and not to their interpreter.

Audio Description is a service that narrates visual content to increase accessibility for the blind and visually impaired. It can also be helpful for people with learning and cognitive disabilities. For performances, this can take the form of live narration through a headset. Audio describers provide real-time narration which connects to a headset for the audio describer user. For visual media, audio description can be incorporated as its own discrete soundtrack. The audio description symbol is the letters "AD" followed by three parentheses. Ideally, institutions should make professional audio description available at their events. An alternative, cost-effective option is to have an organization's staff trained in audio description, as there are many AD training programs available nationally.

CART is a real-time, speech-to-text captioning system that can be used for live and remote events broadcast online. A stenographer or captioner does the real-time transcription which is then displayed on a monitor or an LED board. CART is helpful for the deaf and hard of hearing (HOH), people with English as a second language, and people with learning and cognitive disabilities. Not all members of the deaf and HOH community speak ASL, so CART can be a critical point of communication access. It also produces a transcript of events for further use and archiving. CART service providers will bring all the required equipment and their services, like ASL, should be arranged well in advance of an event.

People with multiple chemical sensitivities and chemical injuries are incredibly sensitive to petroleum-based chemicals and fragrances that permeate body products, cleaning products, building materials, and foods. Most household and industrial materials off-gas chemicals which can trigger a wide array of responses inclusive of migraines, cognitive impairments, asthma, and other allergic reactions. The air is a shared resources and indoor air quality is an access issue for many disabled people (especially the chronically ill). A few measures can be taken to create a more accessible shared air space.

Institutions can ask their patrons to come to events fragrance-free. It can be difficult to regulate what people choose to put on their bodies, but if a space is labeled as fragrance-free it will discourage people from using perfume and cologne before attending an event. Organizations can also impact air quality by using non-toxic, unscented cleaning product without "fragrance." "Fragrance" is an unregulated substance found in ingredient lists that is a common irritant for chemically sensitive people. Cleaning common spaces regularly to remove dust and other allergens is recommended as well as periodically having arts spaces checked for mold. Smoking areas should be clearly designated at a minimum of 5 feet from the entrance of the space.

In an ideal world, cultural organizations wouldn't have to provide childcare because it would already be covered by the state. Unfortunately that's not the case, but there are some critical things that arts spaces can provide to facilitate access for parents, caregivers, and children. Playstations or even a box with toys and drawing materials can be incredibly helpful to people with children. Most restrooms in public buildings are mandated to have baby-changing stations. Baby-changing stations should be installed in all gendered restrooms, not just the "women's" restroom. Simply stating that "children are welcome" or that your program includes "adult material" can be very helpful to caregivers in determining whether your event is accessible to them or not.

Closed captioning facilitates access for the deaf and hearing-impaired (HOH). It includes text-based transcription of dialogue and description of sounds, affect, and music. A variety of media content also provide closed captions and can be recognized by the closed caption symbol of two white "Cs" in a black box. DVD media often contain closed captions under the subtitles menu. YouTube provides an option for closed captions as well as a separate transcript of the captions. Arts spaces can facilitate access by using closed captions that are already provided with media and they can also easily produce original captions for content. Resources and free software for generating captions can be found in Part IV of this guide.

People with psychological, developmental, and/or cognitive disabilities face incredible barriers to community access. It's important to hold space and awareness for varied communication styles. It's helpful to speak slowly and allow for variations in people's response time. Institutions should not make assumptions about how to read the communication styles of others. According to narrow, nondisabled communication styles, some people may appear to be less responsive than they are and vice versa. Some disabled people may need to twitch, pace, and/or not maintain eye contact. The way organizations and their staff communicate with their public is the primary mode of accessibility in non-profit arts spaces. When an event is being introduced, the language of accessibility should be brought into the space. Statements can be made that announce an organization's willingness to make accommodations if anyone needs assistance. Viewers and audience members should be directed to a specific members of staff who will troubleshoot last-minute accommodations. Another helpful tip is to limit the use of jargon which can be a barrier to those who are dealing with cognitive and developmental impairments and/or those who do not have access to higher education. Access needs are not static; they can change in relation to infinite factors. Staff members should introduce themselves often and use names repeatedly. If there are multiple points throughout an event when a staff member is addressing the audience, they can recapitulate the evening and explain the different phases of the event. People should be invited to clarify points of inquiry or any confusion they have. A lot of access is primarily about letting guards down and facilitating an environment where needs can be met.

Organizations can facilitate more accessible environments by creating an institutional culture that privileges consent in interpersonal interactions. Before entering into someone's personal space, asking for consent should be encouraged in regards to touching other people's bodies, hair, assistive devices, etc. In the event of performance works that are interactive or require accessing the personal space of audience members, staff should highlight this aspect of the event in event literature and/or while introducing the event itself.

Content warnings facilitate access for people with psychological disabilities, especially people who live with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Content warnings are notes that can be mentioned verbally at an event, or written at the beginning of a text or video online, that name potentially triggering content. PTSD triggers can cause survivors of abuse or trauma to experience panic attacks, psychotic breakdowns, and a wide host of emotional and physiological symptoms. Anything could be potentially triggering depending on the individual's experience of trauma but there are common topics which should be mentioned in a content warning: rape and sexual assault, suicide and self-harm, incest and child abuse, and gendered and racialized violence. Content warnings have, in recent history, come under scrutiny as a form of censorship, yet warnings provide increased access to content through transparency. While institutions cannot control someone's experience in an art space, they can provide their audiences with the knowledge and the tools to navigate the space and their own mental health.

As food intolerances and allergies become more and more prevalent, there are some basic guidelines to follow when offering food to the public. Foods with known allergens and irritants (tree nuts, gluten, dairy, soy, seafood) should be clearly labeled. Certain foods, like peanuts, can result in serious hospitalizations for those with a peanut allergy. If you are hosting an event with snacks, please be mindful of people's varied tolerances for foods and for example, purchase both regular and gluten-free products. Consider buying simple snacks with limited ingredients e.g.. carrots with hummus. Also, if you are serving alcohol, please provide alternatives for those who do not drink. Food and drinking are such critical elements of sociality and arts events can be as inclusive as possible, allowing for people's varied needs.

There are harm reduction measures that institutions can take to support the access needs of people living with chemical dependencies. Narcan (Naloxone) is a short-term opioid-blocker that can reverse fatal overdoses. Narcan can be purchased as an injectable or as an easy to use nasal spray. It costs between $20-$40 dollars and can be a life-saving intervention. Arts organizations should have Narcan on hand and staff should be familiar with how to administer it.

Most of the internet is inaccessible to blind and vision-impaired people. A screen reader is commonly used text-to-speech or text-to-Braille software that increases web accessibility. Screen readers cannot read images and so all images require image captions in order to be legible. Image captions are usually 1-3 sentence descriptions of the content of an image. It's best if they are as simply described as possible. Increasing web accessibility also supports those who are illiterate, live with learning disabilities, and/or have poor internet connections. Further guidelines on how to write image captions are in Part IV.

Harsh lighting can trigger chronic migraines and photosensitive epilepsy. Fluorescent lights are significantly more triggering than LED natural lights. If an arts space has scalable lights, they should consider using dimmer lighting for events. Audience members should be be told in advance when stroboscopic lights are used in performances and screenings. If possible, flash photography should not be used during events. If it is absolutely necessary, patrons should be made aware during event introductions.

Live Streaming or video documentation made available to the public are another critical tool for creating more accessible arts institutions. Many people's primary encounters with art are through the internet. Arts spaces can be inaccessible for those who cannot leave their homes due to a wide array of disabilities. The technology will undoubtedly change over time, but there are many free applications available for live streaming. Currently, social media platforms with streaming services such as Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Instagram Live are the most reliable and produce videos that can be archived for further use and dissemination. In addition, if your audience will be captured during the livestream, please let the audience know that they will be included before the event begins and ask for their consent. Be prepared to rearrange seats to accommodate audience responses.

While the ADA has a narrow scope of focus, its stipulations for architectural barriers are well worth noting. When these considerations are taken into account, a space can become accessible to a wide range of people with varying mobilities: wheelchair users, walker users, cane users, children, people carrying bags, and people pushing strollers. The standard ADA compliant door width is between 32 inches and 48 inches with a clearance of 36" around the door. Automated entrances are ideal, but a lever handle that can be used with one hand is prefered over a round knob which is less accessible. For a building that does not have an on-grade entrance (an entrance that is flush with the ground), ADA ramps require a slope ratio of 1:12. If a building cannot accommodate the installation of a ramp, temporary ramps can be purchased.

Many disabled people rely on personal care assistants for care work and for facilitating myriad points of access. If a disabled person visits an arts space and is accompanied by a PCA, their PCA should receive free admission. If it's necessary to communicate with someone who is accompanied by a PCA, please respond to that individual with your words, gaze, and body language, and not their PCA.

Service animals are trained animals that support people living with a wide variety of disability-related impairments. People with service animals should be welcomed into cultural spaces and accommodated. If a person with animal allergies is present, an organization's staff should facilitate people occupying different parts of an arts space to mediate the situation.

Restrooms cross over into mobility access as well: For ADA compliance, restrooms or restroom stalls should be large enough to have a clear circle, wheelchair-turning radius of 60 inches. Sinks (or at least one sink, in a multi-stall bathroom) should be mounted under 34 inches from the ground with clearance underneath. Faucets should be accessible like door handles: either lever-operated, triggered by touch or movement, or electronically-operated. Toilets should be 17 to 19 inches off of the ground with grab bars on the side and rear wall, 33 to to 36 inches off of the ground.

In addition to architectural barriers, some considerations regarding gender not addressed by the ADA can significantly increase the accessibility of an arts space. Trans and gender-nonconforming people face significant barriers to safely using restrooms in public spaces. Restrooms are often gender-segregated and labeled as "men's room" and "women's room." This kind of signage promotes gender policing which is a safety risk for people who do not fit neatly into prevailing cisexist and binary models of gender. Institutions can re-label restrooms (especially single-stall restrooms) with gender-inclusive signs by producing new vinyl signs or handwritten and taped signs, depending on respective budgets. Labels should state clearly "all gender restroom" or "gender-inclusive restroom." Even if a restroom without signage is presumed to be all gender, it's helpful to have it clearly marked.

The census reports that 17.8% of the U.S. population is Spanish-speaking. Institutions can greatly increase access by having well-translated bilingual text online on their website and in their print materials. Ideally all events would be bilingual with simultaneous Spanish language translation. Institutions may not be able to provide this at every event, but should make it clearly available as a resource for its spanish-speaking public.

People of varying sizes and abilities require varying kinds of seating for an event. Organizations and institutions can invest in diverse seating with this in mind. Some things to consider: chairs that are too low can be difficult to move in an out of. Chairs with armrests can be helpful to be people with mobility restrictions while also being a barrier to fat people. The key is to have a set diverse seating options. Chairs with backs, rather than benches and stools, are also supportive for people in different kinds of bodies. It's best to have modular seating that can be arranged differently for different events and different audiences. Chairs should be arranged to accommodate larger aisles (at least 36 inches) for wheelchairs and custom seating arrangements that leave space for wheelchairs along with stable chairs. Please be sure to keep aisles clear of bags and equipment.

Institutions can increase accessibility for a neurodiverse public by providing sensory rooms for sensory stimulation and calming. If an arts spaces has access to a room in addition to their primary exhibition or performance space, this can be turned into a sensory room. These separate spaces usually contain different objects that can support autistic people to regulate sensory input and stimulation. Weighted blankets, pillows, yoga mats, bosu balls, and dim lighting are a few things that can help create a sensory room.

The poverty rate for disabled populations is double the national average. Disability is often the cause and the consequence of poverty. This, obviously, restricts the capacity for disabled people to spend time in arts and cultural institutions. Understandably, arts nonprofits rely in part on ticket sales to fund portions of their programming. Yet, thinking through access, there are alternative business models that allow for more equitable admissions policies. Arts organizations can institute a sliding scale admissions policy. Sliding scales acknowledge the economic diversity of one's audience and the impact that lack of economic access can have on one's access to cultural organizations. They foreground everyone's inherent value in a given space and create a culture in which everyone feels equally a part of the sustainability of an arts organization, within their economic means. For example, if the current cost of admission for your event is $10, consider creating a pay scale of $6-$15.

There are many guidelines for general print text accessibility, but here are a few basic recommendations that can be easily adhered to: Organizations should abstain from using all bold or all caps for extended blocks of text. When possible, use lists or bulleted items. And always use a san-serif typeface for long sections of text. To accommodate those with low vision, 16-18 point font is preferred.

If your space puts on exhibitions displaying physical objects, consider putting together touch tours of your exhibitions. Touch tours increase accessibility for people who are blind or vision-impaired by facilitating tactile engagement with art works. They can incorporate the work on display or they can use relief versions of 2-dimensional work, replicas, and creative props to help illustrate exhibitions. Tours can be guided or self-guided and can be be even more accessible with the use of Braille maps and audio guides for a comprehensive experience.

The very ability to arrive at an arts institution is deeply dependent on the transportation infrastructure that surrounds the space. Providing transportation information is a simple and critical way to facilitate increased access to your space. In event announcements, detailed information about the location of your venue should be listed. Some questions to consider when writing transportation information: How far is your space from the subway or bus station? Is that subway station or bus station wheelchair accessible? Are you in a neighborhood where there are compromised curb cuts? Are you in a neighborhood that is well-serviced by taxis? Is there street parking near your venue?

Consider budgeting a small pool of money for the creation of a transportation fund for community members for whom transportation is an access barrier. Many public transit systems are difficult or impossible for disabled people to navigate. Public transportation can also be inaccessible for trans people, especially trans feminine people of color, who are at risk for assault. Facing a physically inaccessible and socially hostile public transit system, the ability to travel in a taxi is the difference between being able to participate in a cultural space or not. In addition to providing transportation information, list your transportation fund as an available resource along with event details.

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Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice

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Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice is an accessibility guide geared toward small-scale arts nonprofits and the potentially expansive publics these organizations serve. It details specific ways in which disabled people are excluded from cultural spaces and offers possible solutions to those barriers.

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The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective

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The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective

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The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care-childcare, healthcare, elder care-to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.

The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.

The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.

Reviews

Read all 10 reviews

The Care Manifesto is a radiant invitation to transform our economy and society, a roadmap for how we can emerge from overlapping crises and weave a new social fabric. The ethic of universal care is an antidote to the spiralling carelessness that our current system shows towards people and the planet. The authors understand that care is not a commodity: it's a practice, a core value, and an organizing principle on which a new politics can and must be built.

Naomi Klein, author of On Fire

Finally a 'care manifesto' that shows how powerful caring can and should be in changing global practices and institutions and in transforming our world! No longer a private concern nor the exclusive preoccupation of moralists speculating about the essential feminine, care is given by this text in the form of a bracing critique of neo-liberal profit-making. The Care Manifesto charts a path toward the transformation of kinship, the gendered division of labor, ecological activism, and secures the principles of interdependence that should guide progressive transnational institutions. The Care Collective writes with a compelling clarity, a capacity for reflection in the midst of urgent times, and remind us that care brings with it a complex history and a promising future. As they note, among the meanings of the Old English caru, are care, concern, anxiety, sorrow, grief, trouble - all terms that resonate with our times. Care implicates our lives in each others lives, mapping and animating a politics of promise for our times.

Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

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The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care-childcare, healthcare, elder care-to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world.

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Creating Change: Leah Clements on working towards a disability inclusive art world, British Journal of Photography, July 2021 (online)

Interview with Harun Morrison and Leah Clements, Frieze, July 2021 (online)

Creating Change: Silvia Rosi on art as a form of self-reflection and recuperation, British Journal of Photography, July 2021 (online)

Contextual essay for Deptford X festival, July 2021 (online)

In a World That Makes Us Sick, Bare Minimum Collective Have the Antidote, Frieze, July 2021 (online)

Creating Change: Industria on Advocating for Fair Pay, British Journal of Photography, July 2021 (online)

Turning the Camera on Myself: The Limitless Potentials of the Self-portrait in the work of Ronan Mckenzie, Photomonitor, June 2021 (online)

The future of art spaces: How accessible is the virtual space?, British Journal of Photography, June 2021 (online + print)

This Artwork Changed My Life, Elephant, June 2021 (online)

In the meantime... exhibition response, Royal College of Art and Camden Art Centre, May 2021, (online)

Lindsey Mendick at Cooke Latham gallery review, Frieze, May 2021 (online + print)

How to Start a Gallery in a Pandemic, Frieze, February 2021 (online)

Olu Ogunnaike at Cell Project Space review, Frieze, December 2020 (online)

On the Blue in WATA, HOME, exhibition text, December 2020 (online)

Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant review, Frieze, November 2020 (online)

Moving Towards Rupture, Resistance and Refusal in Black Moving Image Works, GRAIN, October 2020 (online)

Towner Cinema Newsletter (Guest Editor), August 2020 (online)

Practicing Care for Ourselves and One Another Handout, produced for Deptford X Support Network, August 2020 (online)

'Situating Myself in the Photoworks Archive', Photoworks Annual, July 2020 (print)

'The Quiet Revolution of the Self Isolated', Art Work Magazine, July 2020 (online)

'Does Anyone Really Care? Learning How to Sustain a Practice in the Arts and Survive', Who's Doing the Washing Up, Re-imagine Europe, February 2020 (online)
'The BBZ art show looks at what it means to take up space and survive', Dazed Digital, August 2019 (online)

'Freedom of Movement: Dancing Towards a New Conception of Europe', Photoworks Annual, March 2019 (print)

'Tools for Resistance', Cause and Effect, 2017 (print)

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How Art Can Give Voice to the Medically Unexplained

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Creating Change: Leah Clements on working towards a disability inclusive art world, British Journal of Photography, July 2021 (online) Interview with Harun Morrison and Leah Clements, Frieze, July 2021 (online) Creating Change: Silvia Rosi on art as a form of self-reflection and recuperation, British Journal of Photography, July 2021 (online)

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Part of Soft Sanctuary Season

A love letter to image descriptions and closed captions, by Bella Milroy.

'In taking up the practice of creating image descriptions and closed captions for my Instagram posts and stories about two years ago, I found not only were these incredibly exciting forms of writing, but they were inadvertently creating small prompts for mindful, meditative reflection as to what i was that i was looking at, hearing, and feeling in that moment'

You can find the plain text version of the zine below, and can download a printable PDF of the zine here:

Cover : 'Me n Dor on the fridge with dust ', Bella Milroy, 12ø Collective's 30/30, 2020
Cover Image description: A digital photograph capturing the blurry reflection of a crouched figure with what looks like a small white westie dog sat on their knee. The image sits between capturing the space of the room, and the hard surface on which the space is reflected, which is grubby and marked. The reflection is caught on the silvery surface of the fridge, which is covered in dust and makes the image blurry. The figures sit to the right of the image with their heads pointed down and to the left, with the rest of the blurry domestic space to the left of the image. The only clarity in the image is found in the top right corner where a shiny metallic strip depicts what looks like the fridge door handle.
Access

As

Meditation
A love letter to image descriptions and closed captioning Bella Milroy
When considering where image descriptions (also known as alt-text) and closed captions sit within cultural consciousness, it's fair to say that these aspects of online accessibility, like most forms of accessibility, are not well used, understood, or even considered by the world at large.

They are a function of crucial access for disabled people not just online, but across all formats of visual and audible media. In taking up the practice of creating image descriptions and closed captions for my Instagram posts and stories about two years ago, I found not only were these incredibly exciting forms of writing, but they were inadvertently creating small prompts for mindful, meditative reflection as to what it was that I was looking at, hearing and feeling in that moment.

When used in this way, image descriptions, closed captions and audio recordings are both a vitally important part of accessibility, and a way of evoking the less tangible qualities of what is being experienced.

They have the potential to explore what is visible in ways that encourage a sense of atmosphere, relying heavily on the sensory aspects of how these mediums are understood; layers of textures, structure and character are used to allude to possible scenes, objects or places. Images and sounds are drawn out to become wholly suggestive materials in ways that point to what they could be, but never fully take you to exactly what they are. It's a form of writing that attempts to stand entirely in the shoes of the observer.

This is particularly the case for alt-text writing.

Whilst remaining true to their format of describing an image, these texts are deeply uncertain in nature, only hinting at what might be there; perhaps - looks like - has the appearance of.

Considered but never explicit, this exercise in writing can be a beautiful jumping off point in prompting you to consider just what it is that you're looking at.

Then we have closed captions.

The subtitles that are used in visual media that translate dialogue and sounds.

Again, when we move beyond a simple transcribing of words being spoken or music being played, we can search for the other sounds occurring that evoke atmosphere or time of day. They are the essence of , placing you much more in the moment, and offering what that moment actually feels like. Audio recordings of written work do this too, but in less direct ways. Here, atmosphere is drawn out through breath, a stutter in the sentence or a fumbling of a tricky word. The written word shifts to a performance where text is transformed; emoted, expressed, emphasised and played out through the lyrical enactment of paragraphs and chapter breaks. This, along with pauses at the end of sentences and varying tonal shifts give differing weights, creating an outline of what is being described that frames it in a space of softness, as if being read to at bedtime.

Never dictating or explaining, alt text, closed captions and audio recordings move as a gentle guiding hand, revealing a broader experience of the world around us.

Working with these written formats is both a very practical and a deeply conceptual practice. On the most basic practical level, this exercise asks you to pause for a moment, and really think; what is in this image, what am I looking at?

On the next few pages, you'll find some examples of this practice as featured in my participation in 12ø's annual creative programme, 30/30.

' Sun-Scanned Image (Spring Silhouette) ', Bella Milroy, 12ø Collective's 30/30, 2020
Image description: A digital landscape photograph showing the silhouette of a rose bush. The rose is lanky and gangly in structure with thorns sticking out along each of the stems. The plant only has about 6 or 7 long stems shown in the image and they are all pointing vaguely upwards. The leaves on the plant are backlit by a pale pastel grey/blue sky, and give the leaves a hint of stained glass. Colour is only faintly visible in the image and most of what is depicted is tonal. Two tiny birds fly in tandem with one below the other in the distance off to the right of the image with both sets of wings pointed upwards, giving the appearance of duck ornaments on a kitchen wall in a 1970's kitchen. There is flatness to the image in the way the sunlight gives it this silhouette, but because of the translucency of the light and the leaves, the image still holds a three-dimensional quality to it, sitting somewhere between a digital scan and photograph.

'Patio', Bella Milroy, 12ø Collective's 30/30, 2020
Image Description: A digital photograph of what looks like slabs of patio squares from a birds eye view. The left of the image is covered in a strip of shade and afternoon sunshine casts shadows over the slabs. In the cracks are weeds, some of which look like dandelions, lambs ear, moss and grasses. The shadows cast over them look like they are from a wiry hedgerow with vines and tendrils reaching across the slabs. These slabs are grey/beige in colour and some of the weeds are green, though everything has a dusty, muddy tone to it.

' What a Powerful Coven!' (The only kind of magic I believe in) ' Bella Milroy, 12ø Collective's 30/30, 2020
Image Description: A digital landscape photograph of a scrub/mud-bank with twigs and leaves debris scattered. The mud-bank could be an exposed side of a compost bin but it isn't clear to tell. Semi-camouflaged is a large grey toad sat in the centre of the image clinging to the mud-bank. The toad is grey/brown in colour, with one yellowy eye pointing out on its right side. Even though it is small in the centre of the image, perhaps even overlooked blending in amongst the mud and leaves, it's shape and size hold a weight and heftiness to it that give it that brilliant toad-like quality; it's marbled, knobbly skin and paunch tummy with clinging webbed feet.
What happens in the simple practicalities of writing these descriptors, is that you begin to notice what is going on here.

You're stepping into the scene and inhabiting the surroundings in a way that feels no less than being mindful of the present moment (even if it happens to be one you're experiencing virtually).

What I love most about this process, is that whilst the nuts and bolts of this writing begin very much like a shopping list of what's included in the image - a digital landscape photograph showing the silhouette of a rose bush - the more details that are added, the more atmosphere is evoked, the more we step closer to nuance and ambiguity of what the image portrays. It's about what could be happening here, what might be felt in the scene. This process is an attempt to place you as close as you possibly can be to what appears to be revealed

My love affair with this process is very much motivated by wanting to write lengthy meanderings of describers, wandering about a scene and attempting to breathe in its air. But image descriptions don't always have to be these extended, (some could say tedious!) texts.

A beautiful example of this is an image found on the website of the writer and theatre director Maria Oshodi:

Image Description: Black and white picture of Maria sitting in a chair, head resting on a hand in contemplation.
I love this beautifully simple marriage of image and descriptor. It in no way is hindered by the brevity of this single sentence, with the poetry of words like contemplation allowing for the scale of image to be communicated. It is full of mood, full of character, full of thought! I love how the use of this wording allows for vastness in such a succinct way. It is precise, and yet it is unbound. It shows how describers don't always need to rely on word count, allowing for a deliberate choice of words to make room for our own imagination as to what is being presented to us.

This process is an attempt to place you as close as possible to what appears to be revealed. It's about removing the presumptions of what our senses offer us, instead considering what the image or sound is communicating, right there in that moment. In this endeavour for objectivity, you are prompted to refrain from simply passing them off in reference to what you already know them to be, leaving behind the familiarity found in a matrix of memories and shorthand. It asks you to peel it right back to where it becomes a moment in time, where there is a weave of textures, colours and shapes that suggest other things, where there expressions given and mood felt.

This writing has the potential to say,
Take what you know before and leave it there.
Look at this thing now and really look at it.
Listen to it.
What is happening here, right here, what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? What does it appear to be?
Could it be...something? Perhaps? Maybe?

Image description: a still of a video taken from my Instagram Stories capturing the ambience of the environment using closed captions. The image shows what looks like a plank or board of roughly sawn wood that is aged grey and brown. There are splits in the board, with large knots and cracks. A handful of large, bright pink rose petals are scattered on the board at the top left of the image, and dark splatters of what look like raindrops are dotted across the wooden surface suggesting this scene is outdoors. At the bottom is a caption in black text with a white background that reads: "CC *birds tweeting and raindrops falling*". Other features of the online feed are visible such as the viewing counter, the title of the feed "CC Faves", and the three dots in the bottom corner indicating "more"..

Image Description: A still of a video taken from my Instagram Stories capturing the ambience of the environment using closed captions. The image has a perspective of peering over a tall green hedge to show a large green tree in the distance. Both the hedge and the tree appear to be common conifers, and in the foreground of the image you can see the greenery is covered in due, with the sky above looking as if it has just finished raining; a wash of watery grey. Sat on top of this cone shaped tree is a small bird, grey/brown/black in colour. At the bottom is a caption in white text with a black background that reads: "Cc *blackbird singing its heart out in all its midsummer glory, a pure, summertime tune that drifts so effortlessly through the wind; lyrical and magic*". Other features of the online feed are visible such as the viewing counter, the title of the feed "CC Faves", and the three dots in the bottom corner indicating "more".
It's the way in which these texts sit so inherently unsure of themselves which occupies such potential for truth in writing. You are forced to teeter around what you thinkyou know an image or sound to hold, and never step all the way across, never betraying the familiarity of your senses. And yet, it is in this striving for objectivity, in evoking the tone and tenor of our surroundings, we realise we are of course describing our own, very subjective feelings about it. These descriptions are a kindling of our felt experiences, a literal transcription of sensory stimulus. When approaching this writing from this visceral perspective, it's hard not to fall in love with the richness of what these texts offer us. And it's not as if objectivity and subjectivity have to be mutually exclusive in this context either. I often consider this process a lot like how an art critic presents the experience of an artwork; leading and guiding you as to what is before us and what it consists of. It begins with simple descriptors of what took place, what it looks like, how it moves and what is hidden. It then builds up to offer a sense of feeling, energy and dynamism as to what this artwork - this scene - is doing. It's imagining the experience of what is presented to you as a conversation, a back and forth between what seems to be there, and what is interpreted as such. Humour, tension, temper and temperament all become key components of this experience; it is objectivity cloaked in the subjective voice.

It is holding a thing and saying:
it appears to be this, and this is what it feels like.
"As soon as you walk in, immediately on your left is a wall covered in little clips of text from floor to ceiling. I stood back, it is Ebun Sodipo's 'in the thick of it';
"'though you embarked a long time ago the deep is all this form remembers' // 'this body made to look
this body made to look upon
this body shudders and falls' //...
"I think I love it, always, this deep textual exploration, this repetition, of describing a body in grammar and word. It is spiced (u know how adding spice is a careful, accumulative process, balancing and slowly bringing things out in relation to each other). This work kind of begs the presence of a body near it; be it in reading the words, stitching them together into cogent sense, or of the artist as an authorial memory. It begs a body's presence, but it kind of also rly rejects it when it's close... It wants to feel you close, but not have you compromise a vulnerability. It wants your proximity to not compromise its opacity, which is never at any point rendered able to be punctured. It is a gentle arms length, veiled. I am glad to be handled with this kind of care"

Extract from Zarina Muhammed's review of BBZ Black Book: Alternative Graduate Show 2019 at Copeland Gallery. The White Pube, August 2019.

Image Description: Two images showing vinyl text on a wall. The space appears to be large and industrious, with concrete floors, white walls and harsh strip lighting. The text written in black, word processed font in italic segments.
"In the Thick of It" Ebun Sodipo 2019.BBZ Black Book: Alternative Graduate Show 2019

When we consider these descriptors as a form of narrative storytelling, we suddenly place ourselves in the picture. We find ourselves embedded in these scenes, our versions of that place acting as a retelling of a point of contact with that environment; a parable of layered, tangible space. These texts act as witnesses to moments in time, placing our own authorial voice as an integral component of this. In making room for our own expression of these spaces, the descriptions become beautiful, flawed retellings. They illustrate the continuous tensioning between the objective and subjective, seeking to hold them in a moment in which space is made for them both. It's in these practices that the texts avoid being a lengthy, paint-by-numbers list of what is in front of us, but instead creating a point of stillness. It's here where we can strive for a description to be as interpretive as images and sounds themselves.

When we create space for the way these experiences are felt, we can make room for what they mean to us. Taking notice, and in turn, offering a sense of care and attention to our surroundings allows for a deeper understanding of how we interpret the world around us, and what that world feels like, be it virtually or in-real-life. We can start to consider not only the importance of this in recognising what it means to us, but how we can better communicate it to others. The cold, harsh and often unreliable nature of screen readers and automated captioning leaves so little to the imagination, at best only ever offering the bare minimum of descriptors and translations that fail to convey the bare bones of what is captured. If a picture paints a thousand words, you need more than an automated algorithm to describe it. What we're dealing with here are the very components in which imagination is fed and felt. Without careful and considered dedication to these essential access features (particularly of online spaces), the way we imagine what something looks, sounds or feels like is lost. It's about considering these mediums not only as visual or audio documents, but rich catalogues of living moments, placing our experience of them at the centre of how they are presented. When we centre the importance of these access functions as urgent elements of how we convey image, sound and story, we can explore, nurture and enjoy this as a practice that meditates upon what is around us. It's a practice which reveals our surroundings to be vast, gorgeous lyrics steeped in the desire to communicate our own experience of it, contemplating how then meaning can be expressed through this rich and critical lens of accessibility.
With thanks:
To Maria Brewster, Niamh Riordan and Laura Yates of Human Libraries, who gave me all the time in the world to let this work grow at its own pace.

To Maria Oshodi and Hannah Wallis, with whom I was lucky enough to be able to consult with these artists on the nature of image descriptions and closed captions, and their thoughts were of great influence in writing this piece. The time we spent together was deeply nourishing and creatively inspiring, and I am so grateful for the generosity of their time in this way.

To Paige Ockendon, whose studio assistance was invaluable in transforming my original words into the finished piece it is today.

This text is just one exploration of this area of accessibility, with so many other brilliant projects which have done incredibly important work on these themes.

A selection of further reading/useful links can be found below:

Maria Oshodi - a writer, theatre director and disability arts consultant based in London.
https://mariaoshodi.com/

Hannah Wallis - Artist, curator and researcher.
https://hannahwallis.com/

Zarina Muhammed's review of BBZ Black Book: Alternative Graduate Show 2019 at Copeland Gallery, The White Pube, August 2019:
https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/bbzblkbk

Shannon Finnegan - A multidisciplinary artist whose work, particularly that on image descriptions, has been of great influence on my own writing practice. Her continuing project, Alt Text as Poetry is a collaboration between herself and Bojana Coklyat, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project.
https://shannonfinnegan.com/ https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/ https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-write-an-image-description-2f30d3bf5546 https://accessguide.io/ Back Image Description: A video still taken from my Instagram Stories capturing the ambience of the environment using Closed Captions. The image shows what looks like a closeup of a garden scene, with a hand holding a flower. The flower is star shaped with a stamen in the centre pointing out. The petals are a deep, dark sanguine colour fading to pale purple in the centre. There are leaves and stems in the background, and you can make out that there is garden soil beneath the foliage. The hand holding the flower has white skin, and it appears to be holding the flower gently, tenderly caressing it. The scene looks like it has been raining, as the surrounding leaves and stems are covered in dew. The flower is also wet and shiny, with water droplets hanging on the end of its petals. At the bottom of the image a caption (white text, black background) reads: "Cc: *Birds tweeting in a frenzy of chirps and chirrups*".

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A love letter to image descriptions and closed captions, by Bella Milroy. 'In taking up the practice of creating image descriptions and closed captions for my Instagram posts and stories about two years ago, I found not only were these incredibly exciting forms of writing, but they were inadvertently creating small prompts for mindful, meditative [...]

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You, British & black: the voices behind the UK's anti-racism protests by Aamna Mohdin and Lucy Campbell

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You, British & black: the voices behind the UK's anti-racism protests by Aamna Mohdin and Lucy Campbell

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24 * Northampton * Writer and race equality activist

I remember when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment

An event that I had a first visceral connection to was the London riots of 2011, when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was probably my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment. Black people in this country are given the talk. I was eight years old when my parents gave me that talk; that one day, I might be stopped by the police. I might not have done anything wrong, I just happen to be black in this country and that's a mandate for suspicion. I don't know a black person who hasn't been stopped by the police. The London riots had an impact because I sort of linked it to when my parents gave me the talk. Being stopped by the police can result in someone's death. There are many that have lost their lives in police custody. I encountered racism day in and day out, and some of it was from my teachers. People called me savage, asked if my family lived in huts in Africa. Being black at private schools was very difficult, but if I can deal with racism there, I can deal with it anywhere. Middle-class and upper-class people talk in a certain way, where they could be saying the most horrible things about you but because they say it in such a way, with their accent and their pronunciation of words, how they were taught to speak the Queen's English, that when they do stuff like that, it sort of pads it down a little bit. When Boris Johnson goes on about Muslim women being letterboxes or black people with watermelon smiles, because he says it in that vernacular that is tied to the English private school system, it comes across in such a way that is less threatening than Tommy Robinson. Nothing like this has ever happened in my lifetime. When we protest in Northampton, we're lucky to get 10 people to turn up and we had 1,000 people attend the first Black Lives Matter protest. Northampton is a famously white town. The protest was led by young people. If I didn't go, I would feel guilty. I don't think you can be black in this country and not support the protests. People say that British racism is very subtle and covert. But nothing about the Windrush scandal was covert; it was very open, very honest. Grenfell as well.

18 * Birmingham * Singer and student

If I have to fight every day for the rest of my life, I will

The UK is not innocent and never has been innocent. I remember walking in town with my friends when I was 12, and two white girls were fighting and the police started threatening and ragging up all the black kids that happened to be there, while the white girls continued to fight. We ran home because we knew we would get arrested, even though we weren't part of it. I was flabbergasted. I thought, why just us? To be black in the UK is beautiful, especially now with so many black entertainers. I want to become a music mentor, but first I need to become a performer. I don't really fit the look you see on TV. I'm thick-bodied, thick-lipped, I've got big nostrils and my hair is curly. I have friends who are musicians and they're all slimmer, they have straighter hair, they even act a certain way. But I will always just be myself. I'm not sad that I'm black and I won't pretend to be something I'm not. Casting agencies and judges tell me I don't really "fit the criteria" or they don't think I'd be able to do this part because of "the way you look". They would never say anything about my talent and I'd think, why aren't you judging me based on my talent? When I saw the hurt on my brother's face over George Floyd, or, as he put it "the world", I thought, I'm going to London [to protest]. This can't carry on, we can't not go: this is my fight. The next day, I went to one in Birmingham, then London the week after. We cannot stop - if I have to fight every day for the rest of my life, I will. The energy that day was fire; that day my mentality changed to: "No justice, no peace". I realised I was fighting for me, for my brothers, for my parents, for my ancestors. I want to be able to tell my children: "I fought for you, I fought for your children. I went for us".

21 * London * Student

Being black, especially a black woman, is a political statement in this country

School in the UK was really difficult. I've tried to suppress and put in the back of my mind the traumatic experiences that come down to racism. I was experiencing racism at the age of eight. I was aware that I was being treated differently to other people. It was the end of the day and I really needed to go to the toilet. There was about 10 or 15 minutes of me having my hand up and you could tell I was really distressed. I was crying like I really needed to get to the toilet and then I wet myself. It just makes me really upset that I had to go through such a traumatic experience at such a young age because a fully grown adult didn't like the colour of my skin. I would never want anyone to feel one-tenth of what I felt when I was going to school. You have so much self-hate and you just don't really know how to deal with it. Looking at myself now, I couldn't have imagined when I was younger that I would have turned into this person. We went to France when I was in year 9. The teacher didn't know I was in the lift, I was at the back, and she said: "Oh, my God, all these black people are so annoying". Everybody in the lift turned around and looked at me and I just didn't really know what I was supposed to do. No one defended me. No one said anything, and you know from a really early age that you're on your own. My life has changed drastically within the last six weeks, since Aima and I first put that tweet out and organised the protest in London with All Black Lives. I didn't expect it to change me in the way that it has. Now, I wake up every day and I have purpose and I have something to fight for, and something that I know I can put my full self into that's changing people's lives. Being black in this country, especially a black woman, is a political statement. You've seen just within the past six weeks, how much more confident black people have been, how much more outspoken - they realise their opinions are valid.

19 * Shetland Islands * Student

I remember hearing black people with Scottish accents for the first time and thinking I'm not the only one!

The very first political event I can remember was Obama being elected as the first black president. I was seven or eight at the time. We were in Cuba, so me and my Cuban family, who are all black, were sitting on the couch watching it happen. School was hard. I was bullied mercilessly in primary school and it took me years to realise that actually happened. Just young kids not knowing that people have different skin colours and that is an OK and normal thing. There was a lot of being picked on and being grouped together with other brown-skinned girls or boys when we weren't even the same race. I think we have 1% of ethnic minorities here in Shetland. In primary school, I remember being the only black or mixed-race person and there were three Asian kids. Because I didn't realise I was being bullied, I never thought to talk to my teachers about it. I never sought the support I needed. But when issues did come to light, for the most part I was supported by my teachers. The earliest experience I have, and the worst one probably, is being in the playground and me and a Pakistani boy from my class were pushed together. All the other kids were standing in a circle around us, pointing and laughing, and saying that we were boyfriend and girlfriend just because we had the same skin colour. I went to the protest because somebody has to be the voice for black people in Shetland. Because it's so white-populated, it's hard to find somebody who is going to have the strength and courage to stand up and be that voice. So I thought if I don't do it, who is going to do it? It was really incredible seeing the amount of support. It's the biggest turnout for protests that we've ever had. It was really amazing seeing just how many people came out to support the movement. It was heartening to see. Growing up as a black person in Shetland was hard but it's definitely strengthened my character as a young woman today. I don't really identify with the Scottish side of my family; I would consider myself British more than I would Scottish. And I definitely much more identify with the Cuban side of my family. So amalgamating my black and Scottish sides is something I've not quite done yet. But it's definitely interesting. I can remember hearing black people with Scottish accents for the first time and thinking I'm not the only one!

21 * London * Student

In year 6, my teacher told me, 'When you're older, please don't join a gang'

I would say the first event I was actually politically inclined and knowledgeable about would be over the death of Mark Duggan. It was the first one that hit home. The anger and frustration that was happening within the black community, and just how the media painted him out to be this barbaric guy, when really, he was a human being just like me, who looked like me and my friends. School in the UK was probably the worst experience I've had in my life. The school system didn't understand me or cater to my needs. I got sent to boarding school in Uganda for a few years to study there instead because I felt so out of place in Britain. In year 6, my main teacher approached me and my friend, who was black, and said: "When you're older, please don't join a gang". I replied: "We're not going to join a gang", but it wasn't until I started growing up that I began thinking to myself, what did she actually mean by that remark? Why would she select two black males and differentiate them from their peers? The protests are about the injustices that we face here as the black community, especially with deaths in custody. Black people are twice as likely to die in police custody than any other race in this country. When it comes to disparities in the criminal justice system, it is one of the reasons why I felt I also had to take a stand and move with my brothers and sisters to forge a movement here. I remember the first time I got stopped and searched. It was a section 60 in the Stoke Newington area of London and I was 18. I was walking and a police car pulled up. An officer asked where I was going and I said: 'I'm going to eat'. I put out my hand and he handcuffed me. It was very shocking and traumatising. It fragments people like me from society, it makes us feel like we're not British. Being black in the UK is trying to fit in areas that you know aren't really built in your favour. But when it comes to black culture, everyone wants to copy it and not call it black. I love my culture, I love my heritage, I love what my community has to bring to civil society.

25 * Edinburgh * Student

Teachers refused to test me for dyslexia and instead told my parents to stop speaking other languages at home

I'm dyslexic and I've only just found out at the age of 25, while I was at university struggling. When I was in school, I had the same struggles that I'm going through now with my work, but the teachers refused to test me and told my parents to stop speaking other languages at home. My parents told them there was not a language barrier. My school was very problematic. I remember I got into a fight because this girl hacked into my social media. She made everything about slavery, claiming my family were slaves and put all the pictures as slaves in shackles. I didn't even see it until I got to school, and I remember everyone being really weird to me. I got pulled aside by the headteacher and a police officer into this meeting room. They told me something's happened on your social media and we talked about it. Then they took my phone off me. Afterwards, I had a PE lesson with the girl who did it. I'd never been so angry in my life. I remember blacking out and I went for her and we had a fight. We got sent home and a couple of days later we returned with our parents for a big meeting about it. I remember sitting there with my mum and dad, who said to the teachers: "What are you guys going to do? This can't keep happening to our kids." They were trying to exclude me for being violent. And my parents were like, 'That's not fair. She's obviously at a point where she can't take it anymore. Someone was racist to her.' It was a bullshit conversation. They didn't know what they were doing, but they were trying to do their best. And then halfway through the conversation the girl's parents used the comparison of their daughter being bullied for being ginger as the equivalent to racism. My mum and dad got up and left. I was in a team of people that were organising the protest in Edinburgh. It was overwhelming. I've been in Edinburgh for almost 20 years now and I didn't know there were this many black people here. As bad as the experiences black people have had, I feel like we have a uniqueness that we can laugh so much and we can always find happiness and peace within, despite the damage that goes on. There are things to celebrate in being black and being British, because there are not all bad things about British culture. I like a cup of tea and dipping my biscuits in it. Yes, we are more commonly first-generation migrants but be proud of us for adapting.

21 * Bristol * Student

Blackness means innovation. It means resistance. It means persistence

There were a lot of black and brown people at my school, which was great. I was able to find a group of black girls that I felt that I could find comfort in, friendship and solidarity. But that didn't stop us from facing racism in school. I think one of the difficult things was seeing a lot of kids being put in isolation, being taken out of lessons, being harshly graded, and not being given the same patience as the white students. We do have systemic racism here, and the police are violent towards black bodies. We have a history here, especially in Bristol, of a deep involvement with the transatlantic slave trade. When people say the UK is not innocent, this is what we mean. It's about being stopped and searched, it's about how you feel like there's going to be some kind of altercation every time you leave your house. If you see a police van, even if you've done nothing wrong, you risk the violence of being shot with a Taser stun gun and the violence of being hit with batons. I think it's amazing that there's such a strong black British culture. I love that there's so much influence from the Caribbean community - from the music people listen to, to the slang people use. There's such a heavy influence of blackness across the UK, which can be frustrating when we see that we're not being respected. It gives me a sense of pride because I feel that black people, wherever we go, are so innovative. And especially here in Britain, I think blackness means innovation. It means resistance. It means persistence. I'm from South Sudan and everybody there is very dark-skinned. As a black person, being dark-skinned kind of comes with its own issues that's specific to communities of colour, specifically the black community. I think it will be an obstacle moving forward, and that's paired with being a woman as well. I think it sets up a lot of things against me. But at the same time, I really wouldn't want to be anything else. I feel like being a black woman is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

17 * London * Student

I realised it's not because you're annoying, it's not because you're ugly, it's because you don't look like them

I just remember hating myself because I've always been in school with only white people. It gave me body dysmorphia. I remember feeling ugly as a child. I look back at pictures of myself as a child and I wonder why I felt that way. I had teachers who were racist and I was bullied. Teachers used to belittle me. I never found groups of friends, because they were all white, that I felt that I could slot into. I never felt like I could fit in. It was a traumatic experience and it just leaves you feeling quite socially homeless. I used to get left out and I would wonder to myself, why is this happening? When I was in lockdown, more and more the pieces started to fit together. I'm one of the only ones like this. I'm one of the only ones that are around these people. So then I realised, it's not because you're annoying, it's not because you're ugly, it's not because of this or that, it's because you don't look like them. I think that racism in the UK is so dangerous, more dangerous than people realise. I think for America, if someone doesn't like you because you're black, they'll say it to your face or they'll do it in ways that make it easy to identify. But in the UK, it's so subtle. And it's still systemic. It was my first response to go to the protest to be part of the movement here. It was exhilarating. Seeing streets full of people that look like me and were there for the same reason as me, it made me feel so warm inside. When you go on the train and someone sees your sign and they do the fist, that was stuff I had never experienced before. It made me very emotional. Being black in the UK means you have a very close connection to the cultures that you come from. But it also means you have to go through struggles that people pretend not to see or understand and don't want to fix.

20 * Buckinghamshire * Student

Somebody would cross the road because of coronavirus, but that's an everyday thing for black people

I think my school was very micro-aggressive. People would be like, "Oh, can I touch your hair?" I got a detention once because somebody stuck a pencil in my hair. I had an afro and people thought it was interesting and wanted to run their hands through it, but I'm not an animal. I'm just normal, but because you're unfamiliar with the texture of my hair, you think it's interesting enough that you want to pet me. I look back and I think, wow, I actually tolerated that and allowed that to happen, but it's because I didn't understand what it was. People don't know what Britain has done because we don't get taught it. We've been taught about Henry VIII and his six wives. Who cares? I don't want to know how he manipulated the Christian church so that he could get away with divorce. That's got nothing to do with me. I want to know about what Britain's been up to colonising the whole world; imperialism and the effects of it. I think it's important that we protest. I think there are issues in the UK. It's so important that we also take on America as well. It's interesting that you have people like Boris Johnson, who will happily sit up and say, 'What's going on in America only concerns America', but then what have we been doing in the Middle East for all these years? Coronavirus has given an insight into racism in the UK because when you're walking down the street now, somebody will cross the road because they think you've got coronavirus. But if you're black in the UK that's an everyday thing. It's me walking to school

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Young, British & Black: the voices behind the UK's anti-racism protests

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I remember when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment An event that I had a first visceral connection to was the London riots of 2011, when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was probably my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment.

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War Images: Fabricating Reality by Raphael Sassower & Louis Cicotello

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War Images: Fabricating Reality by Raphael Sassower & Louis Cicotello

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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this book, the authors explore images of war and their effect on society. The authors keep in mind that the experience of being at war is much different from the experience of viewing a war image. Thus it is our responsibility to engage war images critically and personally, because lives are at stake and the future of world peace lies in the balance. The iconic image of any war and its ideological underpinning must be more fully appreciated. This book suggests that consumers of war images must simultaneously pay attention to the details of any given image (and thereby uncover its ideology), while exploring other, alternative images related to the same war, in order to consider other perspectives. The effectiveness of the visual language is such that it demands a careful and critical analysis, such as the one that offered here. The emphasis on the pragmatic reading of images has more to do with the power of images to convey, most commonly, a single idea or value, rather than to engage the observer with an inconsistent or contradictory set of ideas and values. This is where pastiche and collage come into play as compositional strategies through which many images are juxtaposed against each other so as to break the uniformity of an artwork, poster, or photograph. The aesthetic experience, however intense, is not a war experience, and the one could never substitute the other. The visual landscape itself is open to ideological manipulation-selection, framing, focus-so that we end up having to deal with theories and ideas even when we refuse to deal with them at first, for they end up determining and informing what images find their way into our cultural memory.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics: In this book, the authors explore images of war and their effect on society. The authors keep in mind that the experience of being at war is much different from the experience of viewing a war image.

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Yes, and all of Dr. Estes' other works as well. This should be given to every young woman to read and share. She has amazing insight into the human coYes, and all of Dr. Estes' other works as well. This should be given to every young woman to read and share. She has amazing insight into the human condition and how to be the best you can be. ...more (less)

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Yes, and all of Dr. Estes' other works as well. This should be given to every young woman to read and share. She has amazing insight into the human coYes, and all of Dr. Estes' other works as well. This should be given to every young woman to read and share.

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They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door

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Still I Rise - Discover the meaning behind Maya Angelou's inspiring poem, with an audio recording of actress Rosie Perez reading this classic work, which has been celebrated by Serena Williams, Cory Booker, and other public figures.

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The River Remembers Laura Aguilar

A new generation of artists honors a photographer's bold gestures-and envisions their own queer lineages.

Carribean Fragoza

Despite the nearby highway's asphalt and concrete pillars, the overpasses and bridges, despite the litter and traffic noise, the Rio Hondo remembers, in the depths of night, to roll its fog into the San Gabriel Valley of Greater Los Angeles. Across the river, up its banks, the fog spills onto the 60 Freeway, carrying the water's wet, green scent like a strange yet familiar song. The Rio Hondo carries still, in its damp breath, the ancient memories of its first Indigenous inhabitants, along with the Spanish missionaries it flooded and victoriously swept away. It remembers, as some people still do, the old barrios with families who bathed their babies and watered their horses at its rounded-rock beaches. Certainly, the river remembers the late Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar, who lived near its edge for much of her life and whose family had been rooted there five generations deep.

Aguilar grounded herself and her art in the natural landscapes she knew so intimately in order to express her difficult truths. As a lesbian who was fat bodied and struggling with a learning disability, she insisted on finding her way despite the sexism, homophobia, and racism that would otherwise erase her altogether. Aguilar endured personal hardships and the indifference of the art world toward her work for much of her life. Yet despite these obstacles, Aguilar's vulnerability and persistent honesty allowed her to give view to her own life as well as the complex lives of queer people of color in LA's Eastside and beyond.

WORDS

Aguilar pushed beyond the boundaries of her own comfort, driven by genuine curiosity and a spirit of inquiry.

In much of her work, Aguilar pushed beyond the boundaries of her own comfort, driven by genuine curiosity and a spirit of inquiry. As an artist, she sought to master the craft of photography and was known for her insistence on technical perfection while also using the medium to delve into complicated questions of identity and belonging. In the black-and-white series Latina Lesbians (1986-90) and How Mexican Is Mexican (1990), she photographed Chicano and Latino professional women in Los Angeles-experimenting with incorporating writing- to question how, and if, she fit into these communities. Aguilar also challenged herself to venture beyond her own circles of friends and acquaintances to photograph bar goers at an Eastside, working-class lesbian bar called the Plush Pony. Despite her own ambivalence as an outsider, she captured the venue and its patrons' joyous yet guarded spirit. Here, as in most of her portraiture,

Aguilar tests herself against the safety of marginal spaces. By the mid-1990s, Aguilar's nude self-portraits in nature give witness to her arrival at a way of being at home-with both her body and her historical lineage-through a strong connection to the land.

Though Aguilar remains intensely attentive to technical and compositional aspects in her Nature Self-Portraits (1996) and Stillness (1999) series, drawing influence from modernist traditions as well as direct inspiration from the work of contemporaries such as Judy Dater, she also finds a different way to be, positioning herself as an integral part of an ecosystem. Often posing by herself, or with other women, Aguilar reasserts her body, its shape and size, setting it in the context of the desert landscape as a way to belong to a natural and historical place. She affirms her personal and multigenerational relationship to California and collective narratives of the colonized West. Though Boyle Heights is often used as the poster child for gang life, this community has a long history of multiethnic activism and cultural richness despite poverty, discrimination, violence, and gentrification. In her 2019 series They Lost Us to Los Angeles, Montana's images testify to the crucial bonds that are built through the gang lifestyle while also acknowledging its ruinous effects on young people and families. In one image, a young mother tags on a bathroom wall as she carries her baby; in another, a woman tattoos someone's arm while her child observes intently. Montana shows

Aguilar's first retrospective, in 2017, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell at the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM), housed at East Los Angeles College, was met with acclaim and enthusiasm, especially from the Latinx community. But this overdue homecoming at her alma mater was also received with some regret as the attention arrived when Aguilar's health was deteriorating significantly. Aguilar died in 2018, shortly after the exhibition. Throughout her career, Aguilar had struggled with her learning disability, long bouts of depression, and worsening health complications due to diabetes. She found little support in the art institutions that largely ordain artists' success, or lack thereof. In her 1993 series Will Work For, Aguilar condemned the exclusionary power of arts institutions that have historically ignored nonwhite and nonnormative artists like herself by standing in front of a gallery holding up a handwritten sign saying, "Artist Will Work For Axcess."

However, following Aguilar's VPAM retrospective, exposure to her art has awakened growing interest. Though Aguilar was known among her peers for decades, her influence has expanded as it continues to reach younger generations of Latinx artists as they uncover and rewrite their artistic lineages that are not centered on white or Eurocentric traditions. Instead of addressing monolithic identity issues, they delve into personal histories and place-specific ecosystems of their inherited and chosen communities.

Admirers of Aguilar's work often note her perfectionism- people who knew Aguilar from her earliest days as a student photographer remember her unwavering commitment to mastering her craft. Mei Valenzuela, Aguilar's teacher, mentor, and close friend at East Los Angeles College (ELAC), recalls imparting to her an important lesson. Having personally experienced the scrutiny of white male photographers and professors, Valenzuela advised, "You have to master your craft or they will tear you apart. You want technical quality so no one can put you down, and so they'll have to deal with your subjects."

Another Los Angeles-based photographer well served by Valenzuela's mentorship is Star Montana. Also a former photography student at ELAC, Montana focuses on photographing residents of LA's Eastside, capturing them in their daily lives. Montana, who grew up in the East LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights, invites friends and family to share scenes from their homes and neighborhoods.

With knowing intimacy, Montana uplifts stories of survival and resilience as she also grieves for the loss along the way.

that the body of the city is inscribed with the stories of its residents, as their bodies also carry stories grafted into their flesh. The artist communes with dirt, plants, and river water, for example, to reclaim some of the desert's restorative qualities. He identifies ways to more fully embody his border queerness despite the pervasive violence experienced by queer men and boys, and undocumented immigrants, in this same environment. In his ritual-like performance El Amor y su Entierro (Love and its burial, 2020), Villalobos kneels on dirt and runs the sharp spines of an aloe vera plant down the length of his tongue to signify both the silencing of queer voices and experiences and the act of healing that comes from telling one's story.

Among her series of portraits, Montana features her own family's experiences of loss and intergenerational trauma. Often using rescued family photographs, Montana diligently rebuilds an archive that also conserves its own destruction. Water damage gnaws on the edges of photographs and disfigures the images of her beloveds, along with those of a cast of strangers and lovers who vanished as quickly as they appeared in her life. "I wanted to keep the water damage. These are the ruins of diaspora," she says.

Montana's work sits patiently in the grief of displacement, measured in lost land or property, as well as the aching loss of connection to ancestral homeland and the unraveling fabric of family. The beauty of a sunset blazing at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert can be read as a traditional landscape in which the viewers' gaze is cast over seemingly yet-to-be-conquered territories. However, in Montana's Sunset (at the End of the Chihuahuan Desert) (2018), the land bears a family's story of displacement and trauma. Facing west, Montana presents a view toward Los Angeles, with awareness of the challenges her family would face there: "It's aspirational but also terrifying, knowing the difficulty of this journey. I don't romanticize." She associates trauma with her family's westward journey from El Paso, Texas, to Los Angeles following the death of one of her grandmothers. The loss was unbearable, and her family decided to uproot and start anew. However, the move was so disruptive and full of grief that Montana continues to mourn: "Our line was cut. It was the end of our connection to El Paso."

In Aguilar's life and art, Montana sees how she, too, can behold the pained individual and communal body. "I saw she was a depressed, poor, fat, queer woman. In photography, you can be one but not all of these," says Montana, who considers Aguilar's honesty her most important quality: "It's not about ego or beauty. It's about truth." Montana finds resonances of Aguilar's art in works by younger artists such as herself. On social media, she notes that people are actively practicing a diaristic approach to sharing their experiences as queer, poor, and brown youth, including their struggles with mental health and depression. "There are more platforms for us to see each other's work, and it helps," she says.

Aguilar's nude self-portraits demonstrate that colonized bodies of color, like the land, can be sites of healing as well as sites of artistic regeneration. In Aguilar's photographs, the performance and installation artist Jose Villalobos finds evidence of resistance and inspiration for his own work, which is centered on the queer male body. Raised along the El Paso-Juarez border, Villalobos often uses his body as a medium, alongside other natural elements from the landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert and the Rio Grande.

Villalobos pushes against heteronormative Mexican masculinities by reappropriating objects of norteno culture. Elaborately embroidered cowboy belts, boots, and buckles, along with equestrian paraphernalia, such as whips, chaps, and saddles, are deconstructed and reassembled. By turning these elements into dazzling performance objects, sculptures, and outfits,

Villalobos creates space for new queer expressions using materials that traditionally symbolize machismo. For Villalobos, it's imperative to address the highly specific experience of Latinx border life as one so intimately tied to the culture of northern Mexico- an experience that is distinct from other Latinx communities of the West. "People don't understand that the border dynamic is its own thing," says Villalobos, noting El Paso's unique, insular character.

Villalobos observes that El Paso can be conservative-it is home to generations of families who settled in the United States but remain close to Mexico and its Catholic or evangelical values. "It's very old-school. Growing up, I had to silence my voice to feel safe," he recalls, while also noting the "dangers of silence," mainly to his emotional health. However, Villalobos is also committed to reclaiming some of the most characteristic aspects of El PasoJuarez culture through his performances and installations, immersing himself in its materials and sensibilities that are closely tied to the land. While his art is emotional and visceral for any audience, it is also saturated with coded meanings that resist translation. He relishes and digs deeper into regional specificity.

For example, Villalobos ties a blade to the back of his foot as one would tie it to a rooster before a cockfight, both acknowledging the violence resulting from this as well as the tenderness in the deeply contradictory relationship between an animal and its owner. While it can be difficult for most audiences to understand, Villalobos's image holds an entire set of emotions and associations for people raised within the culture. As with many of his Latinx contemporaries, Villalobos is unbothered by the perceived inaccessibility of his work. It is a privilege earned by the labor of previous generations of Latinx artists. He chooses to do as Aguilar did decades ago and immerse the self in the homeland and its environs.

Instead of addressing monolithic identity issues, these artists delve into personal histories of their inherited and chosen communities.

Giving life to new visual landscapes, the most recent work of the photographer and Bronx native Elle Perez offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which the queer body inhabits and belongs to a place. Unlike in their earliest images, Perez foregrounds natural environments-bodies of water, foliage, rocks-often minimizing the human form to the point of seeming absence. However, the perspective from which the world is viewed and shaped is intimately queer, Latinx, and very embodied. "Things become possible when shaping images with light, when a figure is in conversation with light. Plants are modified, the relationship to the body shifts, especially around queerness," says Perez. Using a large-format camera, Perez focuses their attention on palm and cypress trees, for instance, as an approach to "talking about the experience of the body-but not necessarily from looking at a body."

Even from the days in the early 2000s as a young photographer visiting punk scenes and underground wrestling matches in the Bronx, Perez gave intimate views into unseen worlds inhabited and shaped by young and often queer people of color. In play, sex, or violence, Perez's subjects tested their bodies and forged inventive ways of being in the world. Perez remembers that back then, when images of Latinx and queer people were rare, they felt a responsibility to make work that helped fill this void. "When I was much younger, I was thinking a lot about representation.

That was really important to me." Since then, many other artists via the Internet have produced a burgeoning body of photography that has allowed queer and non-cis-male people to see themselves. Unburdened of the labor of representation that is currently shouldered, shared, and lightened by many other artists, Perez is free to think about their own art in a different context. "Now I can talk with a certain level of opacity. I can work with gender malleability explored formally," they explain.

In Aguilar's life and images, Perez is able to locate themself in a lineage of Latinx artists: "I can identify my specific ancestors, and I can also measure our progress." Perez and other Latinx artists remember Aguilar as they recognize their own struggles and journeys. Like the water and the rocks, the sand and the willows, Aguilar's legacy is carried on in the manifestations of Latinx artists who continue to shape the world today.

Carribean Fragoza is a writer based in Los Angeles and the founder of the South El Monte Art Posse, a multidisciplinary arts collective.

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The River Remembers Laura Aguilar | Aperture | Winter 2021

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The River Remembers Laura Aguilar A new generation of artists honors a photographer's bold gestures-and envisions their own queer lineages. Carribean Fragoza Despite the nearby highway's asphalt and concrete pillars, the overpasses and bridges, despite the litter and traffic noise, the Rio Hondo remembers, in the depths of night, to roll its fog into the San Gabriel Valley of Greater Los Angeles.

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The faces you see in your everyday life ultimately define what you see as normal, says Jordan Nicholson, a Getty Images photographer. People with disabilities like myself make up 20% of the population. But many people with disabilities say that for decades, they've felt invisible- as if they were hidden in plain sight. Only infrequently do our images show up on television and film, in advertisements or in catalogs-and often they have a sappy sort of inspirational-ism that some people in the disability community refer to as disability inspiration. (Translation: It makes others feel good while completely ignoring the fact that we want to be treated like people first.) Applauding us when we do what other abled bodies do every day gives the impression that we are largely incapable, while the opposite is quite true.

It's unacceptable. That's why Getty Images, the National Disability Leadership Alliance (NDLA) and Verizon Media are collaborating to change the representation of people with disabilities in the media. Each company brings a different perspective and skill set to the initiative. "Verizon Media has a longstanding commitment to serving our users with disabilities and we have a dedicated accessibility team that works to make our products more accessible," explained Margaux Joffe, associate director of accessibility and Inclusion at Verizon Media, who was instrumental in helping to launch the initiative from the Verizon side.
Seeing The Big Picture
A quick online review of most stock image sites and ad campaigns might give you the impression there are only about three people in the U.S. with a disability willing to have their photo distributed. The selection is paltry and unwittingly, it isolates people with disabilities. Lack of representation has fueled the idea that people with disabilities don't do real everyday things, like shop for groceries, fall in love, take vacations, attend school, hold positions of authority, get married and have sex. The Disability Collection solves an age-old marketing conundrum, which is that you can't be seen until you learn to see, says Seth Godin, author of This Is Marketing.
Working With The Pros
Each company pulled in the heavy hitters to manage the project, called the Disability Collection, an indication that this is not a fad marketing campaign that's likely to die out in a year, but one they have invested heavily in. Getty Images' senior director of creative, Rebecca Swift, helped to share the vision she had with Getty photographers and asking them to seek out opportunities for inclusivity to add to their portfolio. "Disability covers a wide spectrum and by no means is one view the only view that is relevant or representative," says Swift. The project will take time to spread through the photography community, but the pipeline is in place. The partners created a three-step process for submissions, including creating guidelines, generating images and then curation. Verizon also held six focus groups and put out a survey of over 1,000 respondents to learn how the disability community wanted to see themselves represented in imagery as well as the stereotypes to avoid. "We sent a core brief reminding contributor groups, such as lifestyle and education, about the types of shots they might look," says Swift. "Our art direction team is actively pursuing the content, looking at what comes in to grow the disability collection."
Create Nothing About Us Without Us
While there is no quick fix, says Joffe, the timing is spot on. Millennials and Gen-Z'ers are vocal and have easy access to social media, including creating images on their smartphones that they want to see reflected back at them. Verizon Media will be working with Getty Images and the NDLA for at least two years to grow the collection and change the imagery in stock photography. The survey mentioned earlier was used to develop guidelines for photographers on how to represent people with disabilities and suggest photographers stereotypes to avoid.

After sending the guidelines to more than 200,000 photographers within Getty Images' global network, the photography community submitted nearly 10,000 images for review. Disability leaders from various national organizations curated the photographs. That's not a point to be taken lightly. This laudable business model has included people with disabilities at the table making decisions from the very start. If even 10% of businesses in the U.S. did this, imagine how the public's view of every aspect of disability could change dramatically.

But back to reality: The ongoing photo review sessions include 12 disability leaders and 10 national advocacy organizations, including representation from the United Spinal Association and Little People of America to the American Council for the Blind and the Hearing loss Association of America (see their full list of partners, here.). Partners review and approve new images quarterly. The NDLA coalition works to shape policies, politics media and culture and bring a deep knowledge of disability representation to the table. People with disabilities make up 20% of the population, but less than 2% of media images," says Lawrence Carter-Long, director of the Disability and Media Alliance Project in Berkeley, California.
Share This Valuable Disability Message
"Showing breadth and intersectionality to reflect the diversity of disability is the goal," says Joffe. "That includes LBGTQ, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, age, and mental health, photographed together with people who may or may not have a disability." The choices are pretty unlimited. But how do approach these groups and ask if they would want to be photographed, some have asked? The Disability Collection campaign has tried to solve for that very real issue, too. They also recently launched a campaign video, highlighting advocates and held a celebration in D.C. to introduce the collection to the public. And of course, they are engaging with people on Twitter, where there is many active disability advocates and allies. "I want to see the content of disabled people in urban and rural areas, poor and not so poor, young and older. More important I want to see content created by disabled people about disabled people!" said Hector M. Ramirez on Twitter.

The professional side of this collaboration between Verizon Media, Getty and NDLA is meant to be a friendly but strong nudge to the professional photography community. Wanting to be sure to include people with disabilities in the Collection, they also launched a campaign asking nonprofessionals to submit their own photos to the collection (they've received hundreds of non-professional photos already), be a model in a photo shoot or host a shoot a location near them. (Not to worry there are clear rules and waivers that accompany the call for submissions.) The results are stunning but not glamorous. Relatable but not ridiculously posed in that stock shot way most people can pick out of any media campaign. These photos? They will give you goosebumps. They will make you smile. And they will show you exactly what we've all been missing for so long-representation of our friends, family, teachers, teammates, and heroes who just happen to have a disability. This is everyday life, captured on camera.

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Changing How The World Sees Disability One Photo At A Time

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The faces you see in your everyday life ultimately define what you see as normal, says Jordan Nicholson, a Getty Images photographer. People with disabilities like myself make up 20% of the population. But many people with disabilities say that for decades, they've felt invisible- as if they were hidden in plain sight.

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A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations.Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N.

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Following the highly influential Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, this collection of essays, interviews and reflections gives new depth to Mark Sealy's work challenging the legacies of colonial Othering in photography over a quarter of a century.

Weaving together analyses of work by Black photographers in the UK and internationally, interviews with key figures and personal reflections on the changing landscape of Black photography, this book offers an exploration of the past, present and future of decolonial visual practices. Sealy marks out a new path for photography - jazz-like, sensorial and experimental - in order to free it from the classifying colonial lens, offering the reader the opportunity to move both conceptually and spiritually into new visual realms when reading an image .

Photography: Race, Rights and Representation is a vital addition to the decolonial project occurring in contemporary photography and visual practice from one of its leading curatorial figures.
*NOTE: Pre-orders of this book are available via back-order. Customers will be charged at the point of purchase and will receive the book after it has been released on the 15th March 2022.

Introduction
Photography, Representation and Jazz
1.On Being in Limbo
2.Moments Outside the Frame
3. On Joy Gregory, Autoportrait
4. The Decolonial Logic
5. The Memory of Hope by Aïda Muluneh6. On Wilfred Ukpong
Human Rights, Human Wrongs
7. Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery
8. Beyond theLens
9. The Event in Focus (Is not Over)
10. Notes on Towards a Promised Land,by Wendy Ewald
11. The Canvases of Representation and the Photographs of Nontsikelelo Veleko
12. Label Cultural Baggage
Black Atlantic
13. Ward Four and More
14. James VanDerZee: Harlem's Black Photographer
15.When Existence Alone Is Constant Torture
16. A Note from Outside, on Rotimi Fani-Kayode
17. A Gathering of Souls
18. On Faisal Abdu'Allah

- Photo insert -
Future-facing People
19. Critical Conjunctures
20. Every Photograph Has a Story
21. Between Feeling and Time: Brent in the 1980s and 1990s
22. On John Goto
23. Masterji: The Photographs of Maganbhai Patel24. The Triumph of Optimism
Experiments with Time
25. From Here to Eternity
26. Absence and Presence: the work of Oscar Muñoz27. Drowning World by Gideon Mendel
28. Travelling Backwards
29. Waiting
30. Nothing Is Forever
Photography: Promises to Make a Revolution
31. In Five Short Acts
32. Lumumba Framed in Colonial Time
33. The Photographs of Eustáquio Neves
34. What Have 'We' Done with the Image of Africa?
35. Les Bijoux I-IX, Maud Sulter
36. How Does the South Appear on Empire's Art Map?

Sealy's mode of ethical looking decisively disrupts any Eurocentric frame, recovering hidden narratives and marginalised practices that blast apart the tattered edifice of colonial time. The book argues for the right of recognition - before the law, before the camera, and, more so now than ever, within the institutions that guard a fractured mainstream culture ... Whether in the images of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Maud Sulter, Eustáquio Neves, or through the voice of Stuart Hall, the author pursues the affective power of decolonial vision for the understanding of being.
- Duncan Forbes, Head of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Mark Sealy's Photography: Race, Rights and Representation is essential reading for all of us rethinking images in the twenty-first century. Sealy narrates three decades of 'looking' by revisiting his own archive and gathering not only the ghosts of the photographic past but the voices of our future. This remarkable collection is everlasting as it brings the aesthetic and the political in at a critical time in our history.
- Deborah Willis, Chair, Department of Photography & Imaging, New York University
Sealy uses jazz as a way of being and a way of thinking, as a 'disruptive, unanchored space'. In the essays in this collection, he points to the continuing exploitation of black subjects. Bridging between the spheres of human rights and (post)colonial injustice through pieces spanning body and mind, Sealy proves himself an outstanding writer.
- Wolfgang Kaleck, General Secretary, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

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Photography: Race, Rights and Representation - Lawrence Wishart

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Following the highly influential Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, this collection of essays, interviews and reflections gives new depth to Mark Sealy's work challenging the legacies of colonial Othering in photography over a quarter of a century.

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Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self

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Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self

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أكبر من أنه يكون مطبوعة لمعرض. مجهود عبقري ورا الفكرة و التقييم للمعرض و كل العروض و الورش الموازية ليه. الغريب هو العياب التام لوجود أي فنانين عرب أو من الشرق الأوسط عامة بالرغم من حساسية الموضوع و قربه الشديد لشغل فنانين كتير من المنطقة.

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أكبر من أنه يكون مطبوعة لمعرض. مجهود عبقري ورا الفكرة و التقييم للمعرض و كل العروض و الورش الموازية ليه. الغريب هو العياب التام لوجود أي فنانين عرب أو من الشرق الأوسط عامة بالرغم من حساسية الموضوع و قربه الشديد لشغل فنانين كتير من المنطقة.

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The violence of the image by Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick

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The violence of the image by Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick

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https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/reader.action?docID=2048373

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Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light...

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Photography: Crisis of History by Hurbertus von Amelunxen and Joan Fontcuberta 

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Photography: Crisis of History by Hurbertus von Amelunxen and Joan Fontcuberta 

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Photography - Crisis of History book. Read reviews from world's largest community for readers. Featuring such established and emerging photographers as J...

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Because it is rather on the technical side for me (I have never taken a photography class or read a photography book, other than my camera manual [Panasonic DMC-FZ50]), I wanted to review the chapters I've read thus far for myself, and I figured while I was at it, I might as well begin a long book report. Although Adams discusses film photography rather than digital, most elements are also applicable to digital photography (and you'll have to forgive me for skipping over those that are not).

Chap...more

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The Negative (Ansel Adams Photography, #2)

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Because it is rather on the technical side for me (I have never taken a photography class or read a photography book, other than my camera manual [Panasonic DMC-FZ50]), I wanted to review the chapters I've read thus far for myself, and I figured while I was at it, I might as well begin a long book report.

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Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in Pinsk, a city now in Belarus on March 4, 1932. He received a master's degree in history from the University of Warsaw. He worked for the Communist journal Sztandar Mlodych, The Flag of Youth. He wrote an article describing the misery and despair of steel workers at a new steel plant outside of Krakow that the party bosses had extolled as a showpiece of proletarian culture. He was fired and forced into hiding. Later his findings were confirmed by a blue-ribbon task force and he was awarded Poland's Golden Cross of Merit.

In 1962, PAP, the Polish news agency, appointed him its only correspondent in the third world. His articles about third world conflicts eventually appeared in a series of books including The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, about the lapsed life of Haile Selassie's imperial court; The Soccer War, which dealt with Latin American conflicts; Another Day of Life, about Angola's civil war; Shah of Shahs, about the rise and fall of Iran's last monarch; and Imperium, an account of his travels through Russia and its neighbors after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also wrote for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta. In 1981, the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski stripped him of his journalistic credentials after he committed himself to the Solidarity trade union movement. He then began working with underground publishers, contributing poems, and supporting the dissident culture. He died January 23, 2007 at the age of 74.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in Pinsk, a city now in Belarus on March 4, 1932. He received a master's degree in history from the University of Warsaw. He worked for the Communist journal Sztandar Mlodych, The Flag of Youth.

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The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz, Don Jose Ruiz

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The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz, Don Jose Ruiz

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After reading this book, the world became a much quieter place. listening more and choosing your words carefully become the new norm. Now I understandAfter reading this book, the world became a much quieter place. listening more and choosing your words carefully become the new norm. Now I understand why things can get so distorted when in reality, they don't need to. ...more (less)

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After reading this book, the world became a much quieter place. listening more and choosing your words carefully become the new norm. Now I understandAfter reading this book, the world became a much quieter place. listening more and choosing your words carefully become the new norm.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

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Some very interesting ideas here imprisoned in a lot of opaque, tortuous sentences. Postmodern 'academese' remains the only major European language that I am completely incapable of understanding. I am also sick to death of seeing intelligent friends, both here and in real life, make apologetic comments about how they weren't quite up to the task of fully engaging with texts like this - as if it were their fault!

You know what? If a series of highly educated, intelligent and well-read adults do n...more

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Trevor (I sometimes get notified of comments)

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Some very interesting ideas here imprisoned in a lot of opaque, tortuous sentences. Postmodern 'academese' remains the only major European language that I am completely incapable of understanding. I am also sick to death of seeing intelligent friends, both here and in real life, make apologetic comments about how they weren't quite up to the task of fully engaging with texts like this - as if it were their fault!

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From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada delivering an ever-evolving slide show, Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850-the present, more affectionately known as the "Dyke Show." Over the course of two and a half hours, JEB narrated and presented more than three hundred images to women who gathered in church basements, community centers, women's bookstores, and coffeehouses, eager for, as Carol Seajay, cofounder of San Francisco's Old Wives Tales feminist bookstore and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, put it in an early review, "Images I had never seen before, images I had seen and not perceived. Images on which to build a future." The slide show was designed to grow over the years, as JEB added new pictures by contemporary photographers and participants in the photography workshops that she led wherever she appeared with the show. It eventually included 420 images. What began as a way to distribute and give context to JEB's self-published monograph, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979), became a vocation. She ultimately presented the slide show at least eighty times in more than sixty places.

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self Portrait, 1896
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

JEB structured the Dyke Show in six sections that presented historical photographs by figures such as Lady Clementina Hawarden, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Alice Austen, and Berenice Abbott, alongside a range of contemporary portraits, erotica, and documentary photographs of the early gay liberation movement, her own work, and that of her peers, including Cathy Cade, Tee Corinne, Diana Davies, and Kay Tobin. She laid out for her audiences a new visual history, one with lesbians at its center. In line with lesbian and feminist consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s and 1970s, JEB used the slide shows as a collective exercise in reading photographs to highlight the paucity of the visual record for lesbians and to impart a new way of looking, a queer way of looking.

She did this in two ways. First, she identified historical photographers who, in her view, rebelled against social norms and narrow expectations for women and, in their work and in their lives, embodied a sense of strength, freedom, autonomy. Hawarden, Johnston, Austen, and Abbott formed the focus here. In a recent email, JEB wrote, "Because relatives and others destroyed the evidence of lesbian lives, and because many photographers had to stay closeted in order to survive or make a living in prior times, there wasn't a lot of overt evidence. That's why I felt it was necessary to 'read between the lines' of the existing biographies to interpret the images myself given my own experience and instincts." JEB suggested that there is something in the photographs by these women that can be "read" against biographies that may have suppressed or omitted details about their relationships and sexuality. The photographs supplied a different kind of evidence, discernible perhaps only to those who knew what they were looking for.

Publicity flyer for JEB's slide presentation, "Lesbian Images in Photography, 1850-1984," 1984
© 2014 JEB (Joan E. Biren) and courtesy Joan E. Biren Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

Frances Benjamin Johnston's 1896 cigarette-smoking, beer stein-toting, ankle-revealing self-portrait is a strong case in point: Johnston's playful self-presentation in this photograph defied the more demure, ladylike norms of her time. Offering information about Johnston's life as a successful photographer- she is described in the 1974 monograph A Talent for Detail as an "eccentric," "bohemian" woman who never married-JEB hinted during her slide show that Johnston may have been a lesbian. Though not able to offer clear evidence of Johnston's sexuality, JEB nonetheless felt that assuming Johnston was heterosexual was equally tenuous.

Second, JEB sought to forge what she now describes as a "lesbian semiotics" (though she admits she learned the term much later and was not aware of Hal Fischer's 1977 book Gay Semiotics). She detailed what she calls the "triangle" of interactions between the photographer, the muse (subject), and the viewer. (She elaborates on this further in her article "Lesbian Photography-Seeing Through Our Own Eyes," published in Studies in Visual Communication in 1982.) She contrasted photographs made by straight photographers and those made by lesbians. And, in a section called "The Look, the Stance, the Clothes," JEB attempted to identify more concretely the visual elements that might characterize a lesbian photograph.

Joan E. Biren, Photographers at the Ovular, a feminist photography workshop at Rootworks, Wolf Creek, Oregon, 1980
© 2014 JEB (Joan E. Biren)

For example, she identified a direct look as the product of a certain rapport between photographer and subject, as in Berenice Abbott's portraits of Eugene Murat, Jane Heap, or Janet Flanner. "There's a look here that's passing between a lesbian muse ... and a lesbian photographer, something direct about it, without being confrontative [ sic], it's open in a certain kind of way, there's a presence there behind the eyes," she stated during a 1982 slide show at the Women's Building in San Francisco. JEB found this directness lacking in other portraits of these women, indicating that they didn't "look as powerful." Or she characterized certain postures (slouchy) or clothing (pants, creatively fashionable garb) as more lesbian than others. Such a project may feel quaintly essentialist today when queer images are so much easier to find. Audience comment cards reveal that not everyone embraced JEB's approach even then-some felt she was replacing one set of stereotypes with another. Queer looking was just evolving. However, it is important to note how radical it was to even publicly contemplate a question like Is there a lesbian aesthetic? at the time, as that generation of queers fought for basic civil rights, built communities, and embraced their distinctiveness. JEB proposed a new relationship to photography to her audiences, one that would empower them as creators and interpreters of their own image. "Understanding you have a place in history and in the present day with others like yourself is what gave people the courage to take the risks that coming out in those years demanded," she explained in a recent email.

JEB's grassroots campaign is best understood as one of the projects that developed alongside the LGBTQ rights movement from the 1960s on, whose larger aim was greater visibility as a path to greater acceptance: the production of a visual record. In a 2004 interview as part of Smith College's Voices of Feminism Oral History project, she declared, "I dredged up all these images, which may or may not have been lesbian images. I decided to talk about why I thought they were lesbian images from history. Because this void, this emptiness, this blank of history drove me crazy."

Building this queer visual history has come about as queers have created images to reflect their own experiences and points of view-they made early and effective use of photographic representations as tools for reflection, self-identification, and activism. But many have also, like JEB, cast back into the image record, pre-Stonewall, to reclaim and reinterpret images made decades earlier. Regardless of original intention and publication context, photographs from snapshots to press prints, by known and unknown photographers, have been used as evidence of queer lives lived or to emphasize queer views of the world.

Toronto's monthly gay magazine, The Body Politic, for instance, regularly published such photographs with these ends in mind. Well-known photographers, both queer and not, including Brassaï and Cecil Beaton, as well as images of queer subjects W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Walt Whitman, among others, were pressed into service. A particularly touching example of this reclaiming was published in The Body Politic 's March/April 1972 issue in which writer Ed Jackson penned a tribute to a deceased relative, Harriet Huestis Jackson, whom he had only encountered through a tintype in his family's archive. Her evident facial hair led him to describe her as "one of the early but solitary fighters in the sexual revolution, an unsung heroine who dared to demonstrate for posterity the relative unimportance to sexual identity of a patch of hair." The title of Jackson's homage-"From the Family Album"-highlights not only the source of his astonishing find but also the impulse for creating and maintaining such an album, be it of biological or chosen family.

This queer interpretation of photographs from the past continues. Artists like Canadian Nina Levitt, who recast Alice Austen's well-known group photograph The Darned Club in her 1991 work Submerged (for Alice Austen), or the American collective fierce pussy, who in the early 1990s created Xerox posters from their own baby pictures, class portraits, and other family snapshots, pushed this queer approach into more mainstream contexts-the art gallery and street, respectively- drawing attention to overlooked gestures and challenging unexamined assumptions. Canadian duo Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan took this one step further, inhabiting the format of Life magazine, mimicking its earnest perspective to both highlight and gently skewer lesbian stereotypes. More recently, critic and curator Vince Aletti created a wall installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario from photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine pages, exhibition invites, and other ephemera from his collection, making an analog cloud that was testament to decades of queer looking.

Berenice Abbott, Princess Eugene Murat, 1929
© Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics/Getty Images and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Though Aletti's collecting impulse originates from more private, personal interests, as opposed to JEB's more public, political ones, they nonetheless spring from a common sense that these images stand for more together than alone and that the act of looking shapes us. Perhaps more importantly, they share a sense that this act is one of pleasure. Audio from JEB's 1982 slide show at the Women's Building reveals an audience whose reactions ranged from playful raucousness to quiet outrage to knowing laughter, as they responded to the images and the narration. One writer who saw the slide show in Toronto wrote a review for The Body Politic, where she expressed her delight with and her hunger for these images: "It could have continued for hours more and still I would not have been satiated." Beyond this immediate experience, the reviewer felt her life and desires had been affirmed in a lasting way: "Separately these images are only fragments; put together they form a history that becomes a reality....It has given us a past, shown us a present, and even hinted at a future."

The future occupies JEB these days as she now actively builds and cares for queer visual records and archives. She is organizing her slides and negatives, preparing to deposit them at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, where they will join her papers. Always attuned to the big picture, JEB is also mentoring her lesbian contemporaries on how to preserve and find repositories for records of their own lives, as well as advising institutions like the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History on how to increase their holdings of queer material. She states simply, "This is the continuing work of making sure we will never be invisible again."

This article and photographs were originally published in Aperture, issue 218, "," under the title "Queer Looking."

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JEB's Pathbreaking Archive of Lesbian Photography

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From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada delivering an ever-evolving slide show, Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850-the present, more affectionately known as the "Dyke Show."

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Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop

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Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop

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Over the last decade, the history of hip-hop has been documented in many ways, from publications like Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop to the lauded Netflix series Hip-Hop Evolution (now in its second season). The genre's legacy is inseparably woven into the fabric of American culture, and its significance is constantly felt through all popular forms of music and sound. But one crucial aspect of hip-hop's history remained untapped: what about the iconic visuals we associate with the genre? What's the story behind that infamous photo of Biggie Smalls, his crown tilted on the side of his head, unflinchingly used, worn and recreated as often as Che Guevara's Guerrillero Heroico? Clocking the gaps in this photographic history, journalist Vikki Tobak decided to reach out to the photographers responsible for the seminal images and now-infamous photoshoots that visually define hip-hop.

Tobak's substantial career in music journalism (by way of working at clubs and record labels in Detroit and New York City) saw her grow up with the photographers who captured the fashion, neighborhoods and legacy of hip-hop's iconic figures. Focusing on each photographer's artistic process, Tobak started compiling the contact sheets that surround these recognizable images, including work by photographers who dedicated their lives to candidly documenting the scene. The result is Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop, an impressive book of full-page spreads of images, contact sheets and the stories behind each shoot.

In this interview for LensCulture, Tobak speaks about the early hip-hop journalism scene, the inseparability of sound and visuals, and the importance of including these image-makers in the greater history of photography.

LensCulture: I think it's important to refer to Contact High as a project, not just a book. And this project came together because of your incredible experience in music journalism and, by way of that, music photojournalism. You've had an interesting career, but what are the major turning points that led you to this project specifically?

Vikki Tobak: Because Contact High is such a sweeping historic book, it includes a lot of details for hip-hop heads that are more obscure than mainstream, and that all came very naturally. I guess it's best to start at the very beginning. I grew up as an immigrant kid in a predominantly African-American city: Detroit. My family immigrated there from Kazakhstan when I was five years old, and everything I learned about music I learned through that city. Motown is really embedded in the fabric of the air there, and all the things that I absorbed about America and culture - both good and bad - were through the lens of music. In the 80s, I started hearing hip-hop - around the time that Public Enemy and other groups were popping up. I loved the music, so I became heavily involved in the Detroit club scene as a teenager.

LC: So then what prompted you to move away from Detroit to New York?

VT: I wanted to move to New York to be a part of the magic that was happening in music there. When I moved to New York, I got a job at an independent record label called Payday Records. At the time, they were managing Gangstarr and were putting on a lot of golden era hip-hop groups. And at night, I worked at this club called Nell's, where a lot of hip-hop artists would hang out. Between those two jobs, I became really embedded in the music. At Payday I was the Director of Marketing and PR, so I was this 19-year-old going with all the groups to their photoshoots, acting as a liaison with the media. I was hearing a lot about image-making, and meeting a lot of photographers.

LC: That must have been a very crucial - albeit accidental - professional experience to go through.

VT: Definitely. It was interesting because I got to hear about the decisions from the point of view of the artist and how they wanted to be portrayed, and how visuals played a role in the lyrics that they were writing and the music they were creating. In truth, they were these bigger, legacy-building decisions. After that, I became a writer, and wrote for some of the early hip-hop magazines. I was a music journalist, and then I became a culture journalist, and then I eventually went on to work at CNN and CBS.

LC: I have this obsession with music journalism from the 80s and 90s. I feel like there was this era that I never quite experienced firsthand, when those long-form, intricate features on musicians were actually possible to write. I remember reading a feature on Snoop Dogg and being absolutely floored by the access and candid nature of the artists - that just doesn't happen today.

VT: Yeah, the access was really something else.

LC: You really get that feeling that someone's been hanging out with an artist for a week, watching and observing them, but also becoming a companion in their daily routines and schedules. As a journalist, how did you see that style of writing change and why do you think it did?

VT: The access back then was so different because it was such a smaller scene, and the stakes just weren't as high. Hip-hop was just starting to become this global force, and there wasn't much money in it at the time. There weren't as many brands and sponsorships, so it just wasn't that hard to get access. Both writers and photographers really could just spend multiple days with someone. And you know, we didn't live in the age of Instagram, so people weren't as protective of their image, because for the most part, images would just go on an album cover, or they would function as a press photo in a magazine once a month or sometimes once a year.

It even goes all the way down to fashion. This was a time when Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren didn't want hip-hop artists wearing their clothes. They actively rejected them, and that gave birth to a lot of independent clothing brands, like FUBU and Rocawear. That small DIY scene really impacted the access at the time - it was very organic.

LC: How do you think the book reflects that organic scene?

VT: We were all quite young, and a lot of the photographers and writers were not journalism school kids. A lot of us were getting in where we could, writing for where we could, and we were often writing and photographing for free. Everyone was just kind of making their way together. I think that's what sets the book apart from similar books about different genres. The photographers in this book were often just like the artists, making their way and figuring it out - making mistakes. Today we live in a whole different world, where hip-hop is the mainstream language and culture. All the brands are dying for hip-hop artists to sit in their front rows and wear their clothes. Making this book really made me think about the irony in all that.

LC: So when did you start reflecting on this era in music journalism, but by focusing on photography specifically?

VT: I started to see how these big news organizations treated their archives. They were very meticulous about how they had their contact sheets and archival footage organized. I stayed in touch with everyone from my years working in music, and I started thinking to myself, Wow, hip-hop is over 40 years old now. And we do have this same archive that these big news organizations have - it's just dispersed between individual photographers. I started reaching out to different photographers to start doing some research, and then I started interviewing them one by one.

LC: In your introduction to the book, you say this project looks at the "imagery that shaped the sound" of hip-hop, which is very poetic. It's interesting to think about photography's role in shaping the genre, because like you said, imagery is crucial in the construction of culture. When you look through these album covers of early artists, you can really see how they're invested in the visuals as a representation of the sound. When did you start realizing there's a synergy between images and sound in hip-hop?

VT: It amazes me how a kid outside of the United States, who doesn't speak English and who might not understand the lyrics of the songs he listens to, can look at a photo and understand so much. That is so powerful. When you look back on those early photos by Joe Conzo Jr., Martha Cooper and Jamel Shabazz, they're all about reclaiming power, dignity, and demanding respect of their individuality. They are meant to stand alone.

I think of these images as embodying everything the music stood for, and still stands for today. All these choices - the poses, the clothing, the setting - were choices made by the artists, who were young people of color. What's powerful is that it was so organic, and there were photographers who knew where to point their cameras at that particular moment. Joe Conzo went to high school with the Cold Crush Brothers in the Bronx. He was in high school when he took a lot of these photos, so to me that gut instinct of what the music had was also present in the photographers. The same skillset was present for both the music and the visuals that were being expressed.

LC: So what got you hooked on the contact sheets in particular? I think a straight history of these seminal images is substantial enough, but incorporating this whole other layer of outtakes is really special.

VT: It came from my own love of looking at contact sheets from every genre. The Magnum Contact Sheets book was a major inspiration for this project. It sparked something in me, and I started thinking about all these producers, friends, neighborhoods, spaces and clubs that didn't make it in the money shot - but they were still incredibly instrumental. Looking at contact sheets is like watching a movie unfold - the sequence is very cinematic, and you get to see so much more.

LC: And in that same vein, even though this project is rooted in images of familiar, famous faces, you really focus on the photographers behind the camera. You shed light on the image-makers who have been anonymized by their seminal shots. Why was it important for you to focus on this side of the artistry?

VT: The history of hip-hop has been told in so many different ways now. We have books about lyrics, books about the socio-political climate that gave birth to hip-hop, television programs and extensive documentaries. But we haven't really heard from the collective of photographers. When I was thinking about who to include in the book, I had two sets of criteria. Yes, there are these iconic images, but there are also certain photographers who really dedicated their lives to documenting the culture. It wasn't like one day they were photographing Bob Dylan for Rolling Stone, and the next day they were photographing Biggie. So there are a lot of photographers in the book who didn't necessarily make one iconic image, but I knew I wanted their story to be a part of this project.

Jamel Shabazz is a perfect example. I wasn't sure what image I would get from him, but I knew that I really wanted him to be part of the book. He was out shooting people every day, and is a massive part of telling that story. Sure, we could have included commercial photographers like Annie Leibowitz or Mark Seliger, but hip-hop wasn't important to them on a personal level.

LC: What are some of your favorite treasures that you uncovered throughout all these archives? On the reverse side of that, were there some photos you knew you wanted to include but couldn't find?

VT: Oh yes, I really wanted to get the 2 Live Crew As Nasty As They Wanna Be cover image, which caused a big controversy when it came out because it was considered borderline pornographic. But the photographer couldn't find any of the outtakes! The same thing happened with the Eric B. and Rakim Paid in Full cover - those are all lost. But then there were some really great surprises. We actually found Eric B. and Rakim's Follow the Leader photos, which are really incredible and symbolic, because they're both wearing Dapper Dan.

LC: I really love the Ricky Powell slides you include in the book, because they're more about photographic slides as these little slices of history in and of themselves. They're objects, not images, with his handwriting along their boarders.

VT: Ricky's photos are incredible, and they're so personal - they are him. What I love about his collection of slides is that it's not all celebrities. It's everyone in his life, which really speaks to him as a photographer and as a person. You might have Oprah on one slide, and then the next one is of his dog. He also took incredible notes, and wrote stories on each of the slides. You really feel his hand in all of it, and you feel the beautiful messiness of it, which is also so important. In this day and age, a lot of what we see is such a polished, finished product. Even when we're told it's imperfect, we know that a lot of work went into that imperfection. Ricky and I both worked at Paper Magazine in the early 90s, and even when we were making this book, he still called me the intern.

LC: That's adorable. Let's talk about the structure of the book, in terms of its sequencing and textual decisions. Having amassed so much content, how did you decide how it should be presented?

VT: I had an amazing editor at Random House who suggested I organize everything chronologically, because I was really struggling with what to do. I was thinking about presenting the work alphabetically, but when she made that suggestion it all clicked. It made more sense to tell the story of how hip-hop changed at different moments, and how the visuals changed with it. When I turned in the manuscript for the book, it was much longer than it is now - we had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. There's so much more to each story, and we could talk a lot more about different technical aspects of how each photographer worked, but a lot of those details were cut out. In a way, I feel like it's a blessing, because people seem to really absorb the content - it's just enough. There's a great balance between looking and reading.

LC: Questlove wrote such a beautiful foreword for the book, and he gets right to the crux of that inseparability of sound and image in relation to album covers. How did that collaboration come about?

VT: I knew that visuals were very important to Questlove, and to The Roots in general. They used a Jamel Shabazz photo for the cover of , and a ton of different photos for Things Fall Apart. I would see pictures of him from the early 90s and he'd always have a camera with him, so I had this sense that he really thought about photography and loved it.

One day, on the Contact High Instagram account, we posted an early magazine shoot of The Roots that photographer Alex Arnold had done for an indie magazine. I posted some of the contact sheets from the shoot, and Questlove started commenting saying, "You know, I cannot stand this photo. I hate it so much. I wish I could buy it from the photographer and destroy it so that it would never be seen again." He was hilarious. So I messaged him on Instagram asking what his favorite photo is, and asking him about when he started thinking about how The Roots were being photographed. Because this shoot was obviously a prime example of them just thinking, whatever, and then looking back and regretting that nonchalance.

So I asked him to write the foreword, and he did an amazing job. He wrote in depth about the Gordon Parks' Great Day in Hip-Hop shoot for XXL Magazine, which really meant a lot to him. And I loved the way he traced the line through hip-hop and jazz imagery, because jazz is really the prequel to hip-hop.

LC: I wonder, how has this work been received in the music world vs. the photography world? It's heavily rooted in both, but I came across this work through my love for hip-hop - not through the channel of photography writing, even though it's incredibly important to the history of the medium. Who have you found to be your primary audience?

VT: I'm so glad you picked up on that, because it's a really important detail. It's interesting because when I was putting together the book, I really thought that the photography world was going to dig deep into this content, and I've been a bit surprised by how much more the music world has embraced and been excited about the work. Obviously this is part of a larger issue in the genre, where photos of certain people are perceived as valid or not valid. These photographs are definitely a part of a larger conversation in Black photography, and how men and women of color - young people - have been photographed throughout time. That deserves a firm position in the conversation on photography.

LC: Yeah, this isn't a book about celebrities. It's a book about the photographic work that visualized their history.

VT: Exactly. It's about more than just one person, or one artist, or one photographer - or one writer, for that matter. I wrote the book, but it's really not about me at all. It's not about Jay-Z, it's not about Tupac, it's not about Biggie. It's for everyone, and I really want to celebrate the everyday-ness that went into the foundation of hip-hop. That's what I want people to focus on. Especially today, it's so hard to see past the idea of a celebrity. I want people to look at these contact sheets and look at the neighborhoods. Look at the Bronx, look at Brooklyn, look at these places of everyday-ness that gave birth to what is now a massive global force. The music world is definitely feeling that, and the photo world will have to catch up eventually.

Editor's Note: An exhibition of the incredible work in Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop will be on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography from April 26, 2019 to September 8, 2019. The exhibit will include rare videos, memorabilia, and music to demonstrate how the documentation of a cultural phenomenon impacts not just music, but politics and social movements around the world.

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Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop - Photographs courtesy of Contact High Project | Interview with Vikki Tobak by Cat Lachowskyj | LensCulture

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Over the last decade, the history of hip-hop has been documented in many ways, from publications like Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop to the lauded Netflix series Hip-Hop Evolution (now in its second season). The genre's legacy is inseparably woven into the fabric of American culture, and its significance is constantly felt through all popular forms of music and sound.

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Capitalism & the Limits of Photography by Kevn Coleman & Daniel James (2020)

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Capitalism and the Limits of Photography

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The Lives of Images, Vol. 2: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention

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The Lives of Images, Vol. 2: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention

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The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/arts/design/documenta-committee-resign-israel-gaza.html Follow up after the recent and ongoing 7 Oct 2023 invasion.

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Citing antisemitism, a large publicly installed artwork by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi has been covered up by the artists and the organizers of this year's Documenta 15.

The work in question, titled People's Justice , consists of a large banner meant to commemorate victims of Indonesia's long and brutal dictatorship under former General Suharto, who controlled the nation from 1967 to 1998. The work, which features many exaggerated satirical characters, was made in 2002.

One of the caricatures depicted, however, seems to be a member of the Mossad, Israel's secret service, depicted as a pig. Another figure with fangs and blood-red eyes appears to be an Orthodox Jewish man wearing a black hat with "SS," the acronym for the Nazi Schutzstaffel.

The discovery of these characters within the work erupted into a massive controversy yesterday, June 21, just days after the quinquennial's official opening on June 18. By the end of the day, the artwork was covered up. The collective is being accused of antisemitism by German media as well Israel's embassy to Germany-the latter "disgust" in Times of Israel over the artwork's inclusion in the world-renowned exhibition.

Taring Padi issued an apology for the controversy the work has caused, stating it was not their intention for the figures to be seen in an antisemitic light.

"It is not meant to be related in any way to antisemitism," the collective said in a published yesterday evening on Documenta's official website. They said that they often depict soldiers as animals as a criticism of capitalism and military violence.

"We are saddened that details in this banner are understood differently from its original purpose. We apologize for the hurt caused in this context," they added. The collective's announced "with great regret" that the work would should be immediately covered up.

"This work then becomes a monument of mourning for the impossibility of dialogue at this moment," they said. "This monument, we hope, will be the starting point for a new dialogue."

The apology does not seem to be enough. Some in Germany are calling for the group and organizers to be prosecuted. The president of the German-Israel Society, Volker Beck, the German conservative tabloid Bild that he intended to file a case with prosecutors over the artwork, citing the fact that antisemitism is a crime in Germany.

Israel's embassy called out the exhibition as well, saying in a press statement issued on its Twitter on Monday that "Documenta promotes Goebbels-style propaganda."

"Not only have all the red lines been crossed, they have been smashed," it added.

Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth said the "mere" covering up of the work and apology is unacceptable. "The removal of this mural is only a first step. It must now be followed by others: It must be clarified how it could come about that this mural with anti-Semitic pictorial elements was installed there in the first place," she said.

Artnet News reached out to both Taring Padi and Documenta for further comment but have yet to hear a response.

The concealing of the artwork at Friedrichsplatz is the latest in an ongoing controversy surrounding this year's Documenta, which had already been facing allegations of antisemitism. The curators of Documenta 15, Ruangrupa, cancelled a panel around the topic, which was set to take place in April, after it faces claims that the talks were biased.

The German media has called into question the lack of Israeli artists in the show, which is focused on non-Western art. Many have questioned whether it is tenable that a few participants and artistic team members allegedly support the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

For their part, Ruangrupa's members have vehemently any allegations of antisemitism, calling them "racist defamations."

In May, vandals the arts venue in Kassel that is hosting a Palestinian group show with graffiti, spurring more debate in Germany as to where the boundaries between hate speech and artistic freedom of expression.

"We denounce the media participation in these smear campaigns," Ruangrupa said in a statement. "We also express our dismay and disappointment at the amplification that the original baseless blog post of disinformation and manipulated content received in some of the mainstream media."

The general director of Documenta and Museum Fridericianum Sabine Schormann emphasized that the institution cannot be expected to do background checks on artworks. "The Documenta management is not, and should not be, an authority to which artistic exhibits must be submitted for inspection in advance," she said. "The banner was installed at Friedrichsplatz last Friday afternoon after necessary restoration work was carried out on the 20-year-old work due to storage damage."

Schormann pointed out that the work was not conceived for Kassel or Documenta 15. "It was created in the context of Indonesia's political protest movement and was shown there, and in other non-European locations," she said. "All parties involved regret that feelings were hurt in this way." She said the organization is going to bring together an external advisory on the matter.

Founded by Arnold Bode, Documenta runs with a public budget of €42 million ($51 million), making it one of the largest exhibitions of art in the world. Documenta 15 became the largest show yet with over 1,500 artists participating.

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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'All the Red Lines Have Been Crossed': Just Days After Opening, Documenta Conceals an Artwork Depicting Antisemitic Stereotypes | Artnet News

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Organizers of Documenta 15 have been forced to drape a black curtain over an artwork by Taring Padi over its alleged antisemitic symbolism.

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An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque

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An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque

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An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque on JSTOR

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Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origi...

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Spectatorship of Suffering - Lille Chouliaraki

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Spectatorship of Suffering - Lille Chouliaraki

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Chouliaraki, Lilie (2008) - The Spectatorship of Suffering

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When we see Photographs of some Dead Bodies and Not Others by Sarah Sentilles

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When we see Photographs of some Dead Bodies and Not Others by Sarah Sentilles

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At War

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The body of a soldier killed in Afghanistan being returned to the United States at Dover Air Force Base in 2009, the first year the ban on photos of these events was lifted. Credit Credit Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

From 2007 to 2016, I taught college courses about photography and war, and my students and I discussed what to make of the fact that we almost never saw images of dead American soldiers in the news media. Dead Iraqis, dead Afghans, dead Syrians - yes, we saw those bodies, blown up and bloodied, buried in rubble, partly covered by sheets, on the floor, on the ground, on a stretcher, in a pile - but not dead Americans. Though we couldn't reach an agreement about whether or not the media should show images of our war dead, my students understood that there was a relationship between the visible images from other countries and the suppressed images from our country. Hiding some dead bodies affects how other dead bodies are viewed.

Under President George H.W. Bush, the Defense Department instituted a ban against photographing flag-draped coffins returning from the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The ban, which lasted 19 years, followed a televised embarrassment for Bush. In 1989, networks covering the American invasion of Panama showed split-screen images: On one side, a military honor guard unloading coffins at Dover Air Force Base; on the other, a news conference where Bush, a veteran of World War II, was joking with reporters. That a policy for the suppression of photographs was prompted by what was perceived to be an inappropriate response to the homecoming of fallen soldiers fascinates me as someone who has been researching ethical responses to photographs of suffering for 15 years. The dead often come to us by photograph - in our morning newspapers, in our social-media feeds, on our computer screens next to advertisements for diamond watches or cruises or yoga pants. And many of us fear that we don't know how to look at them, or what to do in response to what we see. We feel helpless. Useless. And then we feel ashamed. Better not to look at all. Better to avoid images of the dead.
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The Obama administration lifted the ban against images of returning military coffins in 2009, but photographs of our war dead remain scarce. This virtual absence of images of American military casualties has been interpreted in multiple and conflicting ways. For some, policies against publishing photographs of dead American service members is a form of censorship that sanitizes war and obscures the violent consequences of military engagement. The news media's near blackout enables collective amnesia about war and its aftermath, critics argue, and allows the American public to ignore the real costs of the wars we send our fellow citizens to fight. Those who support banning photographs of American military casualties understand the images not just as antiwar but also as anti-soldier. They argue that showing the dead inflames controversy and politicizes soldiers' sacrifices. For them, refusing to publish images of dead Americans is a sign of respect, a way to honor the privacy of service members and their families. War-trophy photography - the practice of taking pictures of the dead enemy and bringing those images home like souvenirs - renders suspect all photographs taken in military conflict: Their dead can be captured by our cameras, while our dead should be shielded from theirs. And it is this distinction between "ours" and "theirs" that haunts how photographs of the dead are viewed. In her book "Regarding the Pain of Others," Susan Sontag argued that showing only photographs of violence that happens abroad generates separation between subjects and viewers. These images imply that tragedy is inevitable and unavoidable - and therefore more acceptable - when it is experienced by faraway people; they create the sense that violence is something that happens elsewhere and to others.

When it's common practice to publish photographs of war casualties from other countries but not to publish photographs of war casualties from the United States, then the very fact of visual access to the dead marks them as "other." Likewise, if the refusal to publish images of dead American service members is a sign of respect, then the willingness to publish photographs of other people's dead bodies can be read as a sign of disrespect. Publishing some images while suppressing others sends the message that the visible bodies are somehow less consequential than the bodies granted the privilege of privacy. Whenever I see a photograph of a dead body in the media, I take a screenshot of the image. It's my informal attempt to keep track of whose bodies are shown and whose are hidden. For years, among the hundreds of images I saved, none showed an American soldier. My screenshots also didn't show bodies belonging to American civilians. But then, in 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., by Officer Darren Wilson, and a photograph of Brown's body appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

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A ceremony at Dover Air Force Base honoring the servicemen killed in the bombing in Beirut and the invasion of Grenada in October 1983. Credit Mark Reinstein/Corbis, via Getty Images

Before I saw Brown's body in the newspaper, I thought nationality shielded some dead bodies from view and made other dead bodies available for people to see. But Michael Brown was American. Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Stephon Clark - all Americans. News outlets not only published photographs of them dead or dying in a car, in the street, in a parking lot, in the grass, in a park, on a sidewalk, in their own backyard; they also showed graphic videos of their deaths.

I understand that photographs of Americans killed during war and photographs of black Americans killed by the police are not the same kind of images. They don't exist in the same numbers, either: In the last three years, the annual number of American service members killed in action has been less than 35, while the annual number of black Americans killed by the police has been more than 220. I am also not an expert in the media policies that shape decisions about publishing violent photographs. But it's not the policies themselves that interest me; it's their effects.

If we are rarely allowed to see photographs of dead American soldiers in the news, then what does it mean that we can routinely view, in every major media outlet, images and videos of black Americans being killed by the police? Images - both those we see and those blocked from our view - send messages about whose lives count, about whose lives should be mourned, about who belongs to us and who doesn't. How do we grieve bodies we aren't allowed to see? Concealing images of soldiers killed in action can be read as suggesting there is something shameful about dying, something that should be hidden from view, as if to see the soldier's body would be a kind of humiliation. By not publishing photographs of our war dead, it seems to me we fail our soldiers by denying what it is we ask them to do and to risk when we send them to fight.

It's challenging to care about what we can't see, but we also don't seem to care about what we can see. "The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and the dying," Sontag wrote. But 15 years later, her words are not quite true. Sontag's sentence could be rewritten: The darker the skin, the more likely we are to have full-frontal views of the dead and the dying, even when those suffering bodies are just across town, down the street, right next door.

I cannot view the images of black men killed by the police without remembering lynching photographs, those pictures taken to record the white mob's savagery - to champion it, not to protest it. Lynching photographs were intended to code black bodies as criminal, beatable, killable, and to code white bodies as purveyors of justice. The images were then turned into postcards and sent around the country to celebrate the racist violence that was being done.

Michael Brown's body on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 24, 2014. Credit The New York Times

A dangerous thing, photography. Sometimes, being seen, being looked at, signals value, importance, rank. Yet, other times, being seen - or being watched - signals objectification, victimization, being stripped of dignity. Racism renders black and brown bodies simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. In 1955, when Emmett Till's lynched and mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wanted her son's body visible, his coffin open so people could see what had been done to him. "Let the people see what they did to my boy," she said. "I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me." But were we? Are we? And if we are, is mourning enough?

Sixty years later, Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, wanted his body covered. She learned that it was her son who had been killed when someone showed her a cellphone picture of him laying in the street. "Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon," Claudia Rankine wrote in June 2015 for The New York Times Magazine. "She wanted him covered and removed from sight. He belonged to her, her baby." When the decision about a body's visibility can be made by a mother or a loved one, it's hard to imagine how it could be decent to intervene in that intimate and painful choice. But on a societal level, as a policy, decisions about whose bodies are seen and whose are hidden matter enormously.

Despite the risks and contradictions that come with looking and seeing - the tension between witnessing, honoring and responding on the one hand, and gawking, appropriating and violating on the other - I am convinced that the videos and photographs of police violence against black bodies should be made public, that they must be seen, just as photographs of dead American soldiers should be made public. And holding the two disparate cases together - the contrasting policies of hiding our dead soldiers from sight and circulating images of our slain fellow civilians - can make us understand both war and racism better. If we were to put our war dead and our civilian dead in the same frame, might it be possible to see that they are all "ours"?

It is the hierarchy of grief that must be questioned, Judith Butler argues in "Precarious Life," a book written at the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, criticizing the use of violence as a response to loss. Depending on who you are and where you stand, some lives count more than others, and some deaths count more, too. That is why "there are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be," Butler writes. "If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition," a life worth protecting - and that's a value a country doesn't wish to accord to the people it has categorized as enemies or rivals. But these hierarchies of value and grief are not inevitable or immutable, Butler tells her readers. They are learned and constructed, which means they can be unlearned and reimagined.

"Come on," one of my students said when I taught Butler's text. "Of course we're going to mourn our dead more than theirs." "Who counts as our dead?" another student asked. Publishing some images of the dead while hiding others restricts our answers to that question. Keeping images of "our" war dead out of sight signals a distrust of the viewing public, a fundamental misgiving about our ability to view images ethically, to do anything to repair the violence we see. What's more, it negatively affects how we view the images of the dead we are allowed to see; it suggests that those visible dead do not belong to us. Looking brings risks, particularly through the warped lenses of racism and nationalism. But censorship is not the solution to these failures of looking. The remedy is to become better viewers, to learn ethical and constructive ways to view images of people in pain, especially when those suffering bodies have been marked as "other," as "stranger," as not our kin, and especially when those suffering bodies have been hidden from us.

I worry every day that my response to the pictured suffering of others is inadequate, inappropriate, that I turn away too soon, go on with my daily life, absorbed by my to-do lists and my own pressing concerns. But my failure as a viewer is exacerbated by our media's practice of keeping some bodies protected from view while other bodies - be they victims of bombings or natural disasters or police violence - are visible everywhere. My students were right: Hiding some bodies affects how other bodies are seen. But if we were allowed to see all our dead, if we were to stop obscuring some bodies while revealing others, then photographs might be able to teach us to become better viewers, better grievers, responsible and accountable for the injuries we see.

Sarah Sentilles is the author of "Draw Your Weapons." Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

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When We See Photographs of Some Dead Bodies and Not Others

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At War From 2007 to 2016, I taught college courses about photography and war, and my students and I discussed what to make of the fact that we almost never saw images of dead American soldiers in the news media.

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Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays in Capitalism and the Camera investigate the relationship between capit