This past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released images taken by its recently launched GOES-16 satellite. With its high-definition camera, the satellite shows our planet in vivid detail. (images by NOAA, via NY Times)
What happens when a major art museum throws out your art work? Well, New York sculptor Pat Lasch had that exact experience at the Museum of Modern Art. Randy Kennedy writes:
Recently Ms. Lasch, 72, discovered a mistake that even the loveliest rose is unlikely to fix: The Museum of Modern Art, which commissioned a 5-foot-2-inch-tall cake sculpture in 1979 as part of its 50th anniversary, appears to have discarded the piece, which Ms. Lasch wanted to borrow for a retrospective of her work opening in March at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.
Ms. Lasch, a first-generation feminist who started working in the early 1970s, said she contacted the Museum of Modern Art last fall after the curator in Palm Springs, Mara Gladstone, was unable to find records of the cake sculpture in the archives at MoMA. “Mara said, ‘Pat, I don’t know how to tell you this,” Ms. Lasch recalled in a recent interview.
A 32-year-old freelancer from Queens, Munira Ahmed, has become the face of resistance to the Trump administration. Her face was used by artist Shepard Fairey (the artist best known for his Hope poster for Obama’s 2008 campaign) for his new poster:
“It’s an honor because of what the picture represents,” Ahmed said. “It’s not anti-anything. It’s about inclusion. It’s about saying, ‘I am American just as you are.’”
At the march in Washington, Ahmed said, “one congresswoman came up to me and said she knew immediately that the woman in the picture was me. I was surprised because I assumed people would think it was someone who covered [with a hijab] and I actually don’t.
“One group of girls asked me when I stopped covering, and I told them I never did.”
The real story about the Churchill bust in the Oval Office:
The Churchill bust story has been a constant source of poor reporting. Sometimes it is incorrectly reported that Blair made the loan of Bust B in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when in fact he made it two months earlier. Meanwhile, the Obama White House for years misled reporters about whether the president had a hand in the decision to return the bust. Clearly, Obama misunderstood the symbolism of removing the bust from the Oval Office and was embarrassed to admit it.
Why African photographers don’t get to tell African photo stories in Western media:
If the construction of the African as child-like, or not quite human, who has little agency or intellect, aided the colonial project, today, the narrative continues to aid the construction of the European self as civilised, maintaining the African and Africa as the location of savagery, helplessness, and devastation. It also creates Europe as a desirable location that those who have no agency and have done little to better themselves attempt to infiltrate – much to Europe’s chagrin.
Aida Muluneh, Ethiopian-born artist, documentary photographer, and the founder of Desta for Africa (DFA) – a creative consultancy that curates exhibitions and pursues cultural projects with local and international institutions – emphasises: “Photography continues to play a key role in how we are seen, not just as Africans, but as black people from every corner of the world. Stereotypes and prejudice are incited by images, and if it’s used, yet again, to undermine those of us who are truly doing the difficult work, then we need to have some uncomfortable conversations.”
87% of UK freelance photogs asked to work for free in 2016; 16% said yes:
The study “reveals an alarming trend for corporate ‘entitlement’ when it comes to how freelance professionals are treated,” Approve.io tells PetaPixel.
Of all freelancers across all industries (e.g. photography, writing, design), 70% of people were asked to work for free, and 10% said yes. So it seems that photographers have a higher rate of being asked for free services (and agreeing to those requests) compared to other types of creatives.
A century ago, a group of bohemians in Manhattan declared Greenwich Village “The Free and Independent Republic of Washington Square,” even taking over the arch in the middle of Washington Square Park to prove their point. Here’s some more info about that unusual event:
At the time, the Village was still a bohemian paradise (rather than today’s ritzy neighborhood that uses its artistic legacy as a marketing tool), home to artists and playwrights and others who moved against the grain of conventional American society of the time. Some of the artists of the day—including surrealist Marcel Duchamp and painter John Sloan—decided to further affirm the neighborhood’s countercultural bona fides by staging a coup, of sorts, of the Washington Square Arch, and proclaim its independence from the rest of Gilded Age, capitalist New York City.
Researchers showed the Obama 2009 and Trump 2017 inauguration photos of the Washington Mall to partisans and, as expected, they saw what they wanted:
For the question about which image went with which inauguration, 41 percent of Trump supporters gave the wrong answer; that’s significantly more than the wrong answers given by 8 percent of Clinton voters and 21 percent of those who did not vote.
But what’s even more noteworthy is that 15 percent of people who voted for Trump told us that more people were in the image on the left — the photo from Trump’s inauguration — than the picture on the right. We got that answer from only 2 percent of Clinton voters and 3 percent of nonvoters.
Combining the Trump administration and the classic Watchmen graphic novel is strangely appropriate:
An old film strip made by Soviet artists in 1960 that envisions life in the year 2017:
No one expected the National Park Service to be such a strong voice in resistance to the Trump administration, yet here we are:
In his first days in office, Donald Trump has made a point of censoring and restricting what the National Park Service can and cannot say on its various official Twitter accounts. After the NPS tweeted photos of Trump’s small inauguration crowd, he temporarily suspended its Twitter privileges. And when the Badlands tweeted about climate change today, those tweets were then deleted. But now some unnamed individuals within the National Park Service have created an unofficial Twitter account that Trump can’t touch.
Here is the alternative US National Park Twitter account (@AltNatParkSer).
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
