tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/photographs-31980/articles
Photographs – The Conversation
2024-03-06T13:33:38Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/221477
2024-03-06T13:33:38Z
2024-03-06T13:33:38Z
How the Academy Awards became ‘the biggest international fashion show free-for-all’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579696/original/file-20240304-26-fvllso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C2156%2C1539&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The dress actress Lupita Nyong'o wore to the 86th Academy Awards in 2014 became a story in and of itself.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/caactress-lupita-nyongo-poses-in-the-press-room-during-the-news-photo/478056305?adppopup=true">Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Oscars are no longer just a celebration of movies. They’ve also become a fashion show, with fans, designers and the media celebrating and critiquing Hollywood celebrities as they stroll, pause and pose on the red carpet of the annual awards ceremony.</p>
<p>A sharp look can be a story in and of itself.</p>
<p>Take actress <a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/lupita-nyongo-best-red-carpet-fashion">Lupita Nyong’o</a>. After she wore a powder blue Prada dress to the 2014 Oscars, she became the new “It girl” overnight. She was named <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/lupita-nyongo-is-peoples-most-beautiful-2/">People magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman</a>, became the <a href="https://time.com/49612/lupita-nyongo-becomes-new-face-of-lancome/">first Black ambassador</a> for beauty giant Lancôme and landed on the covers of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour.</p>
<p>But fashion wasn’t always so central to the ceremony.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1vtz84g.11">my book about the history of the Oscars red carpet</a>, I point to two essential figures that turned the Oscars into the fashion spectacle we know today.</p>
<h2>TV puts the Oscars in the spotlight</h2>
<p>At the end of the 1940s, the Hollywood film industry was facing economic headwinds. </p>
<p>More and more households <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/american-women-moving-image/television">were buying television sets</a>, which impacted movie-going. The studios also saw their revenues decline when they were forced to sell their theater chains <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-decrees-antitrust-hollywood-1235581215/">after losing an antitrust case in 1948</a>.</p>
<p>Financial struggles continued to mount when, in 1949, <a href="https://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/photoplayjanjun100macf_4_0603">the motion picture companies refused to fund the Academy Awards</a> after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that puts on the awards, allowed British films to compete head-to-head with American productions. </p>
<p>The organization found temporary solutions to keep the event going. But when faced with the possibility of discontinuing the Oscars ceremony altogether due to financial constraints, the academy weighed the advantages and disadvantages of airing the program on television, which was seen as film’s main competitor. Eventually, the academy approached NBC and requested that the network cover the expenses to put on the event <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2022.2065079">in exchange for the rights to broadcast the show in 1953</a>.</p>
<p>Until then, the studios had carefully crafted and controlled their stars’ public image. Television was a new medium – and a more spontaneous one. Studio executives feared how their stars would appear on screen and behave during the broadcast. Furthermore, many nominees were skeptical of appearing at the event since there was no stipulation in their contracts about television appearances.</p>
<h2>Edith Head, guardian of glamour</h2>
<p>So the academy hired <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/27/obituaries/edith-head-fashion-designer-for-the-movies-dies.html">Edith Head</a> as a fashion consultant to supervise the stars’ appearance.</p>
<p>At the time, Head was Hollywood’s most famous costume designer. She’d been working since the days of silent cinema, and she was <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/900041/pdf">accustomed to the media spotlight through her promotional work for Paramount</a>.</p>
<p>Head was responsible for making sure that everyone dressed appropriately, abiding by the “decency and decorum” guidelines suggested by <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.39000007422830&seq=10">the Code of Practice for Television Broadcasters</a>. She also had to ensure that no two dresses were the same and that the outfits worn by presenters and nominees looked good on camera and complemented the set.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Elderly woman wearing sunglasses poses while sitting in a golf cart." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579228/original/file-20240301-16-un6izk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edith Head was hired as the first fashion consultant for the Academy Awards.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/edith-head-outside-her-office-on-the-lot-of-universal-news-photo/77695597?adppopup=true">Mark Sullivan/Contour via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>One of her most important roles ended up being talking up fashion in media interviews leading up to the Oscars, which she frequently referred to as a fashion show. </p>
<p>“This is a very competitive night from a fashion point of view because, as I said, the stars are presenting themselves as themselves,” Head explained on one of <a href="https://collections.new.oscars.org/Details/Collection/546">her radio shows</a>. “For me, as a fashion designer, the most exciting question is who will wear what.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1vtz84g.11">The postwar growth of the international fashion industry</a> paved the way for Hollywood stars to wear the latest creations by European designers, including Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy and Pierre Balmain.</p>
<p>However, by the mid-1960s, new fashion trends such as miniskirts, shapeless dresses, pants and bohemian styles threatened to upend the formal attire of the Oscars and the feminine ideals preferred by Head.</p>
<p>In 1968, she felt compelled to remind young actresses of the event’s stature with a <a href="https://www.oscars.org/collection-highlights/edith-head/?fid=33401">press release</a> after actress <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/65gNaXHLq9oCcbp99">Inger Stevens</a> wore a mini dress to the ceremony in 1967. To Head, this was no informal social gathering; it was a glamorous, upscale fashion parade.</p>
<p>Two years later, in 1970, she reiterated the importance of formal attire <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbMl6BHSMvA">while announcing the nominees</a> for the Oscar for best costume design. She reminded young actresses that the Oscars was “the most important time of the year in Hollywood” and advised them to avoid wearing “the freaky, far-out, unusual fashions.”</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xbMl6BHSMvA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Edith Head stresses the importance of formal attire at the Oscars.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Fred Hayman rights the ship</h2>
<p>After Head said goodbye to her position at the conclusion of the 1971 ceremony, celebrities blew through the boundaries of decorum, inaugurating an era of questionable fashion choices: <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/VEmt61vyUeNku7mn7">Edy Williams’ shocking bikini looks</a>, Bob Mackie’s memorable <a href="https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/gallery/cher-oscars-outfits">transparencies for Cher</a> and Armani’s <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/cyLTjwV1Li1c2AbN7">over-the-top informality for Diane Keaton</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman in elegant black, spidery, see-through dress holds a gold statuette." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579681/original/file-20240304-30-k64ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cher wears a transparent gown designed by Bob Mackie at the 60th Academy Awards in 1988.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/actress-cher-posing-in-the-press-room-at-the-1988-academy-news-photo/529485598?adppopup=true">Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Fashion order was restored in 1989 when Beverly Hills impresario <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/business/smallbusiness/fred-hayman-whose-giorgio-boutique-led-gilding-of-rodeo-drive-dies-at-90.html">Fred Hayman</a> became the event’s new fashion coordinator.</p>
<p>Lucky for him, in the 1990s, fashion was in fashion. </p>
<p>New successful designers such as Giorgio Armani, Thierry Mugler and Gianni Versace elbowed into the spotlight alongside established conglomerate brands like Louis Vuitton and Givenchy. <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-90s-supermodel/_gVRe27kG0w8LA?hl=en">Supermodels had become celebrities</a> on par with actors and actresses, and cable television launched specialized international networks dedicated entirely to fashion and celebrity culture. </p>
<p>Hayman was eager to capitalize on this momentum to promote Rodeo Drive as the luxury shopping mecca of the West Coast.</p>
<p>Hayman had begun his career in the hospitality industry. But in 1961, he switched to fashion after investing in a friend’s boutique, Giorgio Beverly Hills. Hayman would eventually become the boutique’s sole owner. In 1989, the same year he joined the Oscars as fashion coordinator, he rebranded his store as Fred Hayman Beverly Hills <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/08/business/company-news-avon-products-to-acquire-giorgio.html">after selling the Giorgio brand to cosmetics conglomerate Avon</a> to commercialize <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/02/style/marketing-a-perfume-the-story-of-giorgio.html">his perfume line</a>. </p>
<p>Giorgio Beverly Hills catered to the rich and famous by retailing garments from various designers and brands from Europe and New York City. As fashion coordinator of the Oscars, Hayman became the official go-to resource for what to wear to the event, attracting more celebrities, brands and media attention to Rodeo Drive.</p>
<p>Building off Head’s media strategy, Hayman <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=JjPhHwrgoAw">introduced the fashion previews</a>. These were runway shows for the press organized at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard to anticipate each year’s red-carpet trends.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Elegantly dressed women and men pose in front of tall, gold statues." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C7%2C1010%2C668&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579682/original/file-20240304-22-xp7dri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fashion retailer Fred Hayman – center, with white hair – served as the fashion coordinator for the Oscars from 1990 to 1999.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/designers-contribution-to-the-66th-oscars-news-photo/529810800?adppopup=true">Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fashion at the Oscars took a giant leap forward with Hayman. Thanks to his efforts, the West Coast enhanced its fashion profile, prompting luxury brands to open flagship stores along Rodeo Drive. </p>
<p>He continued in his role for a decade until he was replaced by stylist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/nyregion/lwren-scott-found-dead-in-manhattan-apartment.html">L’Wren Scott</a> for the ceremony in 2000. </p>
<p>Through their media savvy, Head and Hayman were able to recast the Academy Awards ceremony as a dazzling spectacle of glamour – what Head frequently described as “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1vtz84g.11">the biggest international fashion show free-for-all</a>.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221477/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Through their media savvy, two consultants were able to make the Oscars as much about the attire as the gold statuettes.
Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, Fulbright Scholar and Sweden-America Foundation Research Fellow, University of Southern California
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223241
2024-02-12T16:03:49Z
2024-02-12T16:03:49Z
Nature award for polar bear photo shows that images of these magnificent creatures still have the power to move people
<p>A polar bear sleeps perched atop a precariously angled shard of melting ice. The bear’s calm is juxtaposed by the frenetic waves lapping at the little island, suggesting that at some point the sea will reclaim it. This is the scene, captured by the photographer Nima Sarikhani, that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-68215592">has won</a> this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice award. </p>
<p>When I saw this picture had won, I had mixed feelings. </p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, the photograph is stunning and fully deserves praise. But the subject of a lone bear on a small patch of ice remains, for me, laden with problems. In the 2015 film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOG6umLGFs8">This Changes Everything</a>, the writer Naomi Klein famously stated that images of “desperate polar bears” were so regularly used in the media that they had begun to bore her. </p>
<p>She didn’t mean that she didn’t care but wanted to draw attention to the way that certain images or motifs lose power the more they are repeated. Was it useful for the environmental movement to keep fixating on polar bears when countless other species were also suffering or when there are, perhaps, more original ways of communicating the issues at hand?</p>
<p>Up until recently, I’d been persuaded by Klein’s argument. Popular messaging around climate change is saturated with images of polar bears and it can be hard to maintain interest. However, that Sarikhani’s photograph received the People’s Choice award is one of many indications that the power of the polar bear is not as diminished as some think it is. Was I wrong to be bored of polar bears?</p>
<p>About a year ago, I started approaching this question from another angle by looking at how polar bears have been depicted in the past.</p>
<h2>Beyond photographs</h2>
<p>As an expert on 19th-century art and visual culture, I’ve frequently encountered polar bears in <a href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-cold-north-124946/search/2024--keyword:polar-bear--referrer:global-search/page/2/view_as/grid">Victorian paintings</a>, yet I hadn’t given them a second thought.</p>
<p>I decided to explore whether there was a connection between these historical works and our current fascination. I also wanted to look beyond a certain way of visualising polar bears. After all, Klein’s reservations were not about polar bears per se, but about images of “desperate” polar bears. Perhaps there are other ways of picturing them that might change the way I thought.</p>
<p>My research took me on a fascinating journey, from delicate <a href="https://collectionsearch.pkc.gov.uk/detail.aspx?parentpriref=">Innuit sculptures</a> of standing bears to some <a href="https://forbesandclark.mused.org/en/items/7271/greenland-whale-fishery">rather dodgy European prints</a> in which they look rather more like white, shaggy dogs. </p>
<p>Through these works, I’ve learned a lot about the long and complex relationship between people and polar bears, and how polar bears have been constantly caught up in wider concerns. For example, Edwin Landseer’s famous 1864 painting <a href="https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/art-collections/collection-highlights/man-proposes-god-disposes/#:%7E:text=This%20painting%20of%20two%20polar,find%20the%20North%2DWest%20passage.">Man Proposes, God Disposes</a> represents two ferocious bears feeding among the wreckage of a ship. </p>
<p>Man Proposes, God Disposes is about the arctic explorer <a href="https://theconversation.com/hms-terror-wreck-found-but-what-happened-to-her-doomed-crew-heres-the-science-65384">John Franklin’s famous failed expedition</a> to discover the Northwest Passage. Here, the polar bears represent man’s violent defeat by nature.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Painting of two polar bears feeding among the wreckage of a ship in the arctic." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=220&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=220&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=220&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574949/original/file-20240212-24-ej4mrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Man Proposes God Disposes by Edwin Landseer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Proposes,_God_Disposes#/media/File:Manproposesgoddisposes.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/diana-and-chase-in-the-arctic-79330">Other Victorian paintings</a>, meanwhile, show how closely the fate of polar bears was aligned to the whaling trade in and around the north and south poles. When whales became scarce in Arctic waters, hunters would turn their attention to the trade in bear skins. Here, man’s dependence on nature is foregrounded as well as the violence enacted upon it.</p>
<p>While researching these pictures I decided to reach out to Doug Allan, a wildlife cameraman who has spent over 35 years filming and photographing in the Arctic. I wanted to know whether Allan could see connections between the longer history of polar bear imagery and contemporary photographs and footage of bears we see today.</p>
<h2>Better stories</h2>
<p>It’s fair to say that Allan has never been bored of polar bears, despite the many hours he has spent in the Arctic waiting for one to amble into view. </p>
<p>He shared my interest in the history of polar bears and the contexts in which their image has been used. Together, we explored the collections in the Scottish city of Perth. Objects owned by Perth Museum and Art Gallery and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, offered me new insights into this subject.</p>
<p>We drew links between 19th-century paintings and the kind of footage he’s filmed for series such as <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mfl7n">Frozen Planet</a>. Although there are many differences, these Victorian paintings and nature documentaries share the goal of trying to capture moments of high drama to communicate a message.</p>
<p>The conclusion we reached was that it wasn’t pictures of polar bears that were boring, the problem was the limited, often maudlin narratives that accompanied them. The images are more than cute, sad or emotional representations of climate collapse – these sorts of descriptions flatten them. Instead, they deserve explanations that tell much more complex, sometimes conflicted stories.</p>
<p>In relation to this, I’m still thinking about Sarikhan’s photograph – about how it differs from other contemporary polar bear images and may relate to this longer tradition of depicting bears.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/M7iAFsAzzk8?si=bDh5FecHL9oE8bjh" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>Why are photos of polar bears on icebergs so popular? What other kinds of polar images are we overlooking? How would our perception of this particular photograph differ, for instance, if the bear were dead, not sleeping?</p>
<p>I may have mixed feelings about Sarikhan’s photograph. However, as someone who has now seen hundreds of images of polar bears, I am far from bored by it. Instead, when I look at it, I see the complex history of polar bear images and the many dramatic narratives of survival and violence that have continuously been thrust upon them.</p>
<p>So, if you are feeling unmoved by what you consider “just another bear on an iceberg” try thinking about the storied tradition of polar bear images, about how these have changed as our own relationship with the environment has, and I dare you to be bored.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223241/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samuel Shaw has in the past received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council</span></em></p>
Image of the majestic creatures remain powerful communicators of humanity’s connection with nature.
Samuel Shaw, Lecturer in History of Art, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/210486
2023-08-21T12:47:49Z
2023-08-21T12:47:49Z
Why are ‘photo dumps’ so popular? A digital communications expert explains
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539601/original/file-20230726-25-fk6s12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=74%2C40%2C4419%2C2943&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/multiracial-girls-having-fun-together-outdoors-1939179247">Nuva Frames/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s summer 2009. You’ve been to a “campout” with your school friends in someone’s back garden and taken a bunch of out-of-focus pictures on your digital camera. The next day, you dig out your trusty USB cable and upload the photos to your laptop, sharing every single one, without even vetting them, to a dedicated Facebook album. The likes and comments come rolling in – the campout is complete.</p>
<p>It somehow feels too soon for a trend like this to come back around, but it has, and in a new form called the “photo dump”. A photo dump is the act of posting multiple pictures from either a specific time span (usually a month or season), or an event (like a holiday), to an image-based social media platform such as Instagram. </p>
<p>The photos must be posted in a seemingly incoherent order and be “<a href="https://www.vogue.in/culture-and-living/content/instagram-photo-dumps-and-gen-z-search-for-authenticity">low effort</a>” as opposed to being obviously edited. Photo dumps are typically tied together by a <a href="https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/instagram-photo-dump-trend-captions-meaning-kim-kardashian-kylie-jenner-bella-hadid-emma-chamberlain">nonchalant caption</a>, as the poster should offer <a href="https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/instagram-photo-dump-trend-captions-meaning-kim-kardashian-kylie-jenner-bella-hadid-emma-chamberlain">little to no explanation</a> of why they chose those particular images. Photo dumps are tremendously popular: even photo editing software <a href="https://www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/photo-dump">Adobe</a> has released a guide to using them to “inject some fun and authenticity into your Instagram presence”.</p>
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<img alt="Quarter life, a series by The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/quarter-life-117947?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">This article is part of Quarter Life</a></strong>, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.</em></p>
<p><em>You may be interested in:</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/instagram-is-making-you-a-worse-tourist-heres-how-to-travel-respectfully-209272?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">Instagram is making you a worse tourist – here’s how to travel respectfully</a></em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/boundaries-or-coercive-control-experts-explain-how-to-tell-the-difference-209896?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">‘Boundaries’ or coercive control? Experts explain how to tell the difference</a></em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/bed-rotting-the-social-media-trend-the-victorians-would-love-especially-writer-elizabeth-gaskell-209725?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">Bed rotting: the social media trend the Victorians would love, especially writer Elizabeth Gaskell</a></em></p>
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<h2>The rise of the dump</h2>
<p>Instagram launched the “carousel” feature in <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/22/instagram-carousels">early 2017</a>, which enables users to include up to ten images in one post. But photo dumps didn’t grace our feeds until around late 2020. There are several potential explanations for the photo dumps trend:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>A social reaction to a fatigue with sponsored content on Instagram, where it feels like every other post tries to, as Vogue puts it: “<a href="https://www.vogue.in/culture-and-living/content/instagram-photo-dumps-and-gen-z-search-for-authenticity">sell you face serum or an electric toothbrush or a pair of leggings</a>”.</p></li>
<li><p>During <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/instagram-photo-dump-trend">the pandemic</a>, few of our life events felt worthy of a single Instagram post, inspiring users to celebrate <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/instagram-photo-dump-trend">the beauty in mundanity</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>Many users are seeking <a href="https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/instagram-trend-2021-photo-dumping/530695">authenticity</a> in their social media use, given growing frustrations with the “fakery” of filters and other forms of digital photo editing. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>“Dump” implies that images have been haphazardly thrown together, but this understates the craftsmanship that goes into post curation on Instagram. Sociologist Erving Goffman argued that there’s no such thing as accidental <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/13511/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-by-erving-goffman/9780241547991">self-presentation</a>. All human <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444819873644">interactions</a>, whether they take place via social media or elsewhere, demand some level of craft and decision making.</p>
<h2>The roots of the dump</h2>
<p>Technological changes do not <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14725860801908528">wipe away</a> existing cultures. The social rituals underpinning older forms of photography and visual communication have evidently made their way into digital spaces, as photo dumps largely conform to the conventions of classic physical photo albums. </p>
<p>People usually craft their physical photo albums into one of a number of themes, like recording an <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00988996">event</a> or a <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00988996">trip</a>, both of which have made their way to Instagram. And both the dump and the album lose meaning if you aren’t known to the poster, akin to the consequences of a physical photo album being discovered <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00988996">at a rummage sale</a>. </p>
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<img alt="A hand holding a phone open on Instagram" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539602/original/file-20230726-27-xe1phm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Grouping photos by theme is popular for dumps.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/7UhkQGlOVJI">June Aye/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>That said, photo dumps and tangible albums are not quite the same. For example, albums benefit tremendously from the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00988996">white space</a> surrounding each carefully placed image, through which authors can craft a <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=10395">narrative of personal memory</a>. Dumps, on the other hand, rely on one short caption to tie the images together. Nonetheless, these resonances still tell us something significant about our relationship to Instagram – perhaps most crucially that the platform now occupies a more intimate place in our lives.</p>
<p>It’s easy to disparage photo dumping. It is, after all, a trend, it feels frivolous, isn’t a “serious” topic. But arranging your photos into an album has long been understood as an <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00988996">intensely personal</a> experience. It enables people to share a <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/9781787564954">story</a> with their audience, conveying social and emotional value not in the truth of each individual image, but in how they have been <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14725860801908528?casa_token=G09RIpJ_3_gAAAAA%3AONDap0GRryn-c4z2kkiirRou6IFzaSspuPY-U2jGpy6awSf2MRjT--AZou0ab5MlZA9PFkWL3EWi#:%7E:text=https%3A//doi.org/10.1080/14725860801908528">pieced together</a>. </p>
<h2>The future of the dump</h2>
<p>The western social media scene is, we are told, falling apart. The Verge has declared “<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782607/social-web-public-apps-end-reddit-twitter-mastodon">the end of a social era on the web</a>”, Twitter users are dropping like flies and <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782607/social-web-public-apps-end-reddit-twitter-mastodon">don’t know where to go next</a>, Reddit moderators <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/15/reddit-profits-goodwill-strike/">are on strike</a> and TikTokers are facing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html">access bans</a> in multiple countries. </p>
<p>Instagram, it seems, feels like a friend, familiar enough to grace with carefully curated, multi-part posts to tell stories about our daily lives. And so, as we grapple with new questions, promises and concerns about emerging technologies such as AI, perhaps we are drawn to using the familiar things in more intimate ways.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight,
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<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210486/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ysabel Gerrard has not previously received funding that is relevant to this article. Ysabel is also an un-contracted, unpaid, independent member of Meta's Suicide and Self-Injury Advisory Board. Her role is to advise the company as an independent academic. She has not signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or contract that prevents her from writing about this topic (or others relating to Meta services), and there are no conflicts of interest or similar here.</span></em></p>
During the pandemic, few of our life events felt worthy of a single Instagram post, inspiring users to celebrate the beauty in mundanity with ‘dumps’.
Ysabel Gerrard, Senior Lecturer in Digital Communication, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/209570
2023-07-14T13:04:52Z
2023-07-14T13:04:52Z
A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography – Tate Modern show celebrates new generation of artists, but misses a trick
<p>The last large survey exhibition of African photography by a major western gallery was <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/insight-african-photographers-1940-to-the-present">In/Sight</a> at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1996. Twenty-seven years later, Tate Modern is introducing a British audience to the next generation of African photographers. </p>
<p>With such a long gap, there are high expectations for <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/contemporary-african-photography-a-world-in-common">A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography</a>. And the exhibition faces many curatorial challenges. </p>
<p>For most British visitors, this exhibition serves as an enlightening journey that challenges their perspective. It confronts and dismantles enduring colonial stereotypes associated with Africa. Simultaneously, it stands as a long-awaited affirmation of African photographers, validating their unique use of the medium.</p>
<p>The show’s curator, Osei Bonsu, developed three major themes – “identity and tradition”, “counter histories” and “imagined futures”. The 36 featured photographers tell stories of a new and confident Africa. It’s an Africa that celebrates its spirituality and is untangling itself from its colonial past. This is awe-inspiring work, by a new generation of artists who draw on the rich social and political history of the continent to tell their stories.</p>
<p>When entering the exhibition, I was immediately taken in by a series of large portraits: <a href="https://georgeosodi.photoshelter.com/portfolio/G0000X9MCoZDi.bE">Nigerian Monarchs by George Osodi</a>. The formality of the images speaks to the importance of these rulers as custodians of cultural heritage – even though their powers were eroded during British colonial rule. </p>
<p>The portrait of <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/george-osodi-hrm-agbogidi-obi-james-ikechukwu-anyasi-ll-obi-of-idumuje-unor">Obi Anyasi II</a>, the longest reigning African king, is a clever comment on Nigeria’s past. His stern gaze competes with that of Queen Elizabeth II, whose portrait is printed on his gown. In the exhibition catalogue, Osodi explains that documenting and archiving culture is “key to understanding cultural origins, and thus developing a sense of identity”.</p>
<p>In the same room is Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s series <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/kudzanai-chiurai-we-live-in-silence-iv-1">We Live in Silence</a>. These works are a reminder that Christian missionaries contributed to the colonial occupation of the continent and were instrumental in dismantling pre-colonial societies, in which women had often been powerful and influential figures. </p>
<p>Inspired by Bible scenes, Chiurai’s work focuses on modern African women. He reclaims their space in the historic narrative of the continent. </p>
<p>At the same time, female artists are still struggling to claiming their space in the exhibition as only 12 women featured. Gender balance should have been a fundamental consideration in the curation of this exhibition, as it is crucial to foster equal representation of African women in the arts.</p>
<h2>Dialogue and consent</h2>
<p><a href="https://wuraogunji.com/home.html">Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s work</a> stood out as the only piece in the show that documented a response from Africans and engaged the African audience directly. </p>
<p>In her performance video, Will I Still Carry Water When I Am a Dead Woman? a group of masked women drag golden water canisters through the busy streets of Lagos, Nigeria. The reactions of the local people underscored art’s potential to challenge the undervaluing of female labour. It provokes dialogue where performance art is not widely understood or appreciated.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Will I Still Carry Water When I Am a Dead Woman? by Wura-Natasha Ogunji.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Ogunji, born in Nigeria, received her BA from Stanford University and an MFA from San Jose State University in the US. This highlights yet another issue with the roster of photographers in the exhibition. A considerable number have well-established ties with European and American art institutions. </p>
<p>Also, a significant portion have pursued their studies in Europe and the US, are represented by international galleries and maintain a dual presence between two continents. They are part of the global art scene that sees African art as a growing investment opportunity. There’s a risk that will result in the best examples of African art leaving the continent. As French gallery owner Cécile Fakhoury <a href="https://news.artnet.com/market/1-54-marrakesh-2020-1784178">has observed</a>: “If we keep going as we are, in ten or 20 years we will see all the major pieces in foreign countries.” </p>
<p>As this intensifies, it perpetuates a resource vacuum for local artists solely residing and working in Africa. It highlights the continuous underfunding of the cultural sector by most African governments and the lack of globally recognised art institutions on the continent. </p>
<p>Sadly, Tate Modern has missed a trick here. It could have more purposefully supported and celebrated the creation of local African art and included material that challenged its own position (as well as that of other western art institutions) in the global art market. As it is, I am provoked to think that A World in Common is a European exhibition with African content, rather than an exhibition that invites uncomfortable conversations about the function of institutions in the effort to decolonise our understanding of African art. </p>
<p>In the final two rooms, artists are imagining futures for Africa. Kiripi Katembo’s beautiful photographs of Kinshasa reflected in rainwater puddles capture urban life through a surreal mirror. Andrew Esiebo’s large images create a momentary stillness in the ever-changing architecture and landscape of Lagos. They comment on the “endless juxtapositions that exist in the city, between past and present, modernity and tradition”, as Esiebe observes in the catalogue.</p>
<p>What struck me most about the exhibition was the consent implicitly and explicitly expressed in all the works by collaborating with the sitters and avoiding works created through covert observations. </p>
<p>By working with masks, mirrors, self-portraiture or consenting sitters, the featured artists all circumnavigate the historic and often still-present exploitative relationship between the camera and the African continent. This is a decolonial approach to photography we can all learn from, but it also poses the question of how African photographers will make visible the richness of everyday life on the continent.</p>
<p>On the epilogue text panel, Senegalese writer and academic Felwine Sarr calls for “Africans to think and formulate their own future”. The 36 exhibiting artists definitely do that. But the curatorial challenges are manifold. My observations are an attempt to move the conversation beyond the thought-provoking work of the photographers and towards challenging the role of Tate Modern. </p>
<p><em>A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography is on at the Tate Modern until January 4 2024.</em></p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight,
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerstin Hacker receives funding from Educational Partnerships in Africa Grant (2009 - 2012)</span></em></p>
A World in Common is a European exhibition with African content, rather than a space that invites conversations and engagement that go beyond the images themselves.
Kerstin Hacker, Senior Lecturer, Photography, Anglia Ruskin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204078
2023-06-09T12:29:14Z
2023-06-09T12:29:14Z
The US has a child labor problem – recalling an embarrassing past that Americans may think they’ve left behind
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530946/original/file-20230608-2398-osoifr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=311%2C187%2C2993%2C2286&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lewis Wickes Hine, 'A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill, 1909.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P545)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Special Collections, where I am head curator, we’ve recently completed <a href="https://umbc.edu/stories/preserving-the-photography-of-lewis-hine/">a major digitization and rehousing project</a> of our collection of over 5,400 photographs made by <a href="https://iphf.org/inductees/lewis-hine/">Lewis Wickes Hine</a> in the early 20th century.</p>
<p>Traveling the country with his camera, Hine captured the often oppressive working conditions of thousands of children – some as young as 3 years old. </p>
<p>As I’ve worked with this collection over the past two years, the social and political implications of Hine’s photographs have been very much on my mind. The patina of these black-and-white photographs suggests a bygone era – an embarrassing past that many Americans might imagine they’ve left behind. </p>
<p>But with <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart/in-2023-america-has-a-child-labor-problem/">numerous reports</a> of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/us-crack-down-child-labor-amid-massive-uptick-2023-02-27/">child labor violations</a>, many involving immigrants, occurring in the U.S., along with an uptick in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/10/1162531885/arkansas-child-labor-law-under-16-years-old-sarah-huckabee-sanders">state legislation</a> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/iowa-child-labor-bill-d2546845dd6ad7ec0a2c74fb3fc0def3">rolling back the legal working age</a>, it’s clear that Hine’s work is as relevant today as it was a century ago.</p>
<h2>‘An investigator with a camera’</h2>
<p>A sociologist by training, Hine began making photographs in 1903 while working as a teacher at the progressive Ethical Culture School in New York City. </p>
<p>Between 1903 and 1908, he and his students photographed migrants at Ellis Island. Hine believed that the future of the U.S. rested in its identity as an immigrant nation – a position that contrasted with <a href="https://pluralism.org/xenophobia-closing-the-door">escalating xenophobic fears</a>. </p>
<p>Based on this work, the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/background.html">National Child Labor Committee</a>, which advocated for child labor laws, hired Hine to document the living and working conditions of American children. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Boy covered in soot poses with his hands clasped behind his back." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530975/original/file-20230608-29-2g9rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lewis Wickes Hine, ‘Trapper Boy, Turkey Knob Mine, MacDonald, West Virginia, 1908.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gelatin silver print. 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P148)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By the late 19th century, several states had passed <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-2-the-reform-movement.htm">laws limiting the age of child laborers</a> and establishing maximum working hours. But at the turn of the century, the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-1.htm">number of working kids soared</a> – between 1890 and 1910, 18% of children ages 10 to 15 were employed.</p>
<p>In his work for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine journeyed to farms and mills in the industrializing South and the streets and factories of the Northeast. He <a href="https://90025031.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/9/4/22941172/6532401.png?256">used a Graflex camera</a> with 5-by-7-inch glass plate negatives and employed flash powder for nighttime and interior shots, hauling upward of 50 pounds of equipment on his slight frame. </p>
<p>To gain entry into factories and other facilities, Hine sometimes disguised himself as a Bible, postcard or insurance salesman. Other times he’d wait outside to catch workers arriving for or departing from their shifts.</p>
<p>Along with photographic records, Hine collected his subjects’ personal stories, including their ages and ethnicities. He documented their working lives, such as their typical hours and any injuries or ailments they incurred as a result of their labor. </p>
<p>Hine, who considered himself “<a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2525831M/Lewis_Hine_in_Europe">an investigator with a camera</a>,” used this information to create what he termed “photo stories” – combinations of images and text that could be used on posters, in public lectures and in published reports to help the organization advance its mission.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Boys standing at a table splayed with seafood as an older worker obsveres" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=355&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=355&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=355&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531002/original/file-20230608-21-jdp136.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lewis Wickes Hine’s photograph of three young fish cutters working at the Seacoast Canning Co. in Eastport, Maine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/nclc/00900/00972v.jpg">National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Legislation follows</h2>
<p>Hine’s muckraking photographs exemplify the genre of <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/edph/hd_edph.htm">documentary photography</a>, which relies upon the perceived truthfulness of photography to make a case for social change. </p>
<p>The camera serves as an eyewitness to a societal ill, a problem that needs a solution. Hine portrayed his subjects in a direct manner, typically frontally and looking straight into the camera, against the backdrop of the very factories, farmland or cities where they worked. </p>
<p>By capturing details of his sitters’ bare feet, tattered clothes, soiled faces and hands, and diminutive stature against hulking industrial equipment, Hine made a direct statement about the poor conditions and precarity of these children’s lives.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Five young boys wearing caps and holding newspapers in front of an imposing white building." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530972/original/file-20230608-19-jlog7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lewis Wickes Hine, ‘Group of newsies selling on Capitol steps, April 11, 1912.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P2904)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hine’s photographs made a successful case for child labor reform. </p>
<p>Notably, the National Child Labor Committee’s efforts resulted in Congress establishing the <a href="https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/Story_of_CB.pdf">Children’s Bureau</a> in 1912 and passing the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/keating-owen-child-labor-act">Keating-Owen Act</a> in 1916, which limited working hours for children and prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor.</p>
<p>Although the <a href="http://sites.gsu.edu/us-constipedia/child-labor-law/">Supreme Court later ruled</a> it and a subsequent Child Labor Tax Law of 1919 unconstitutional, momentum for enshrining protections for child workers had been created. In 1938, Congress passed the <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa">Fair Labor Standards Act</a>, which established restrictions and protections on employing children. </p>
<p>The National Child Labor Committee’s project also included advocacy for the enforcement of existing child labor regulations, a regulatory problem reemerging today as the Department of Labor – the agency tasked with enforcing labor laws – <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/dols-wage-arm-vows-child-labor-focus-despite-no-rule-changes">comes under fire</a> for failing to protect child workers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Hooded girl in a field of cotton stares forlornly at the camera." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530998/original/file-20230608-29-alq94t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A young picker carries a large sack of cotton on her back.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/young-cotton-picker-carries-a-large-sack-of-cotton-on-her-news-photo/640486085?adppopup=true">Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The ethics of picturing child labor</h2>
<p>A recent surge of unaccompanied minors, primarily from Central America, has brought new attention to America’s old problem of child labor and has threatened the very laws Hine and the National Child Labor Committee worked to enact. </p>
<p>Some estimates suggest that one-third of migrants under 18 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html">are working illegally</a>, whether it’s laboring more hours than current laws permit, or working without the proper authorizations. Many of them perform hazardous jobs similar to those of Hine’s subjects: handling dangerous equipment and being exposed to noxious chemicals in factories, slaughterhouses and industrial farms.</p>
<p>While the content of Hine’s photographs remains pertinent to today’s child labor crisis, a key distinction between the subject of Hine’s photographs and working children today is race. </p>
<p>Hine focused his camera almost exclusively on white children who arrived in the country during waves of immigration from Europe during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. <a href="https://journalpanorama.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Zelt-American-Photographs-Abroad.pdf">As art historian Natalie Zelt argues</a>, Hine’s pictorial treatment of Black children – either ignored or forced to the margins of his images – implied to viewers that the face of childhood in America was, by default, white. </p>
<p>The perceived racial hierarchies of Hine’s era reverberate into the present, where underage migrants of color live and work at the margins of society.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A group of women hold drums and signs reading 'Popeyes Stop Exploiting Child Labor.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531004/original/file-20230608-29-lcdhg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Workers protest outside a Popeye’s restaurant in Oakland, Calif., on May 18, 2023, after reports emerged of the franchise exploiting child labor.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/betty-escobar-left-and-other-fast-food-workers-protest-at-news-photo/1491552588?adppopup=true">Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/underage-workers/">Contemporary reports</a> of child labor violations offer few images to accompany their texts, graphs and statistics. There are legitimate reasons for this. By not including identifying personal information or portraits, news outlets protect a vulnerable population. <a href="https://www.unicef.org/eca/media/ethical-guidelines">Ethical guidelines</a> frown upon revealing private details of the lives of children interviewed. And, as Hine’s experience demonstrates, it can be difficult to infiltrate the sites of these labor violations, since they are typically kept secure.</p>
<p>Digital cameras and smartphones offer a workaround. Beginning in 2015, the International Labor Organization <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labor-trafficking/My-PEC">urged child laborers in Myanmar</a> to become “young activists” and use their own images and words to create “photo stories” – echoing Hine’s use of the term – that the organization could then disseminate.</p>
<p>Photographs of child labor in foreign countries are far more common than those made in the U.S., which leaves the impression that child labor is someone else’s problem, not ours. Perhaps it’s too hard for Americans to look at this domestic issue square in the eyes. </p>
<p>A similar effect is at work when viewing Hine’s photographs today. While they were originally valued for their immediacy, they can seem to belong to a distant past.</p>
<p>But if Hine’s photographic archive of child laborers is evidence of the power of photography to sway public opinion, does the lack of images in today’s reporting – even if nobly intended – create a disconnect? </p>
<p>Is the public capable of understanding the harmful consequences of lack of labor enforcement when the faces of the people affected are missing from the picture?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204078/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beth Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
While Lewis Hine’s early-20th century photographs of working children compelled Congress to limit or ban child labor, the US Department of Labor is now under fire for failing to enforce these laws.
Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections and Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206574
2023-06-04T20:04:48Z
2023-06-04T20:04:48Z
Social media snaps map the sweep of Japan’s cherry blossom season in unprecedented detail
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528956/original/file-20230530-19-j7i2pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3456%2C3559&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/-6yI4Z8ehlU">Kazuo Ota / Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Social media contains enormous amounts of data about people, our everyday lives, and our interactions with our surroundings. As a byproduct, it also contains a vast trove of information about the natural world.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0367253023001019#sec0024a">new study published in Flora</a>, we show how social media can be used for “incidental citizen science”. From photos posted to a social site, we mapped countrywide patterns in nature over a decade in relatively fine detail.</p>
<p>Our case study was the annual spread of cherry blossom flowering across Japan, where millions of people view the blooming each year in a cultural event called “hanami”. The flowering spreads across Japan in a wave (“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_blossom_front">sakura zensen</a>” or 桜前線) following the warmth of the arriving spring season.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="ALT TEXT" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529000/original/file-20230530-15-mix84k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Celebrating the cherry blossom is a centuries-old tradition in Japan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanami">hanami festival</a> has been documented for centuries, and research shows climate change is making <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6bb4">early blossoming more likely</a>. The advent of mobile phones – and social network sites that allow people to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1574954116302321">upload photos tagged with time and location data</a> – presents a new opportunity to study how Japan’s flowering events are affected by seasonal climate. </p>
<h2>Why are flowers useful to understand how nature is being altered by climate change?</h2>
<p>Many flowering plants, including the cherry blossoms of Japan (<em>Prunus</em> subgenus <em>Cerasus</em>), require insect pollination. To reproduce, plant flowers bloom at optimal times to receive visits from insects like bees. </p>
<p>Temperature is <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200549">an important mechanism</a> for plants to trigger this flowering. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2008.01269.x">Previous research</a> has highlighted how climate change may create mismatches in space or time between the blooming of plants and the emergence of pollinating insects.</p>
<p><iframe id="rtiQ0" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/rtiQ0/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>It has been difficult for researchers to map the extent of this problem in detail, as its study requires simultaneous data collection over large areas. The use of citizen science images deliberately, or incidentally, uploaded to social network sites enables <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data">big data</a> solutions.</p>
<h2>How did we conduct our study?</h2>
<p>We collected images from Japan uploaded to <a href="https://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a> between 2008 and 2018 that were tagged by users as “cherry blossoms”. We used computer vision techniques to analyse these images, and to provide sets of keywords describing their image content. </p>
<p>Next, we automatically filtered out images appearing to contain content that the computer vision algorithms determined didn’t match our targeted cherry blossoms. For instance, many contained images of autumn leaves, another popular ecological event to view in Japan. </p>
<p>The locations and timestamps of the remaining cherry blossom images were then used to generate marks on a map of Japan showing the seasonal wave of sakura blossoms, and to estimate peak bloom times each year in different cities.</p>
<h2>Checking the data</h2>
<p>An important component of any scientific investigation is validation – how well does a proposed solution or data set represent the real-world phenomenon under study? </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528702/original/file-20230528-21-4fxpkv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Blossom dates calculated from social media images compare well with official data.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ElQadi et al.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our study using social network site images was validated against the detailed information published by the <a href="https://www.japan.travel/en/see-and-do/cherry-blossom-forecast-2023/">Japan National Tourism Organization</a>. </p>
<p>We also manually examined a subset of images to confirm the presence of cherry flowers. </p>
<p>Plum flowers (<em>Prunus mume</em>) look very similar to cherry blossoms, especially to tourists, and they are frequently mistaken and mislabelled as cherry blossoms. We used visible “notches” at the end of cherry petals, and other characteristics, to distinguish cherries from plums.</p>
<p>Taken together, the data let us map the flowering event as it unfolds across Japan. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An animated map showing cherry blossom flowering across Japan" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528769/original/file-20230529-17-wmgf5g.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Images uploaded to social media over a ten year period 2008-2018, let us map the cherry blossom front as it sweeps across Japan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ElQadi et al.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Out-of-season blooms</h2>
<p>Our social network site analysis was sufficiently detailed to accurately pinpoint the annual peak spring bloom in the major cities of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo">Tokyo</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto">Kyoto</a>, to within a few days of official records. </p>
<p>Our data also revealed the presence of a consistent, and persistent, out-of-season cherry bloom in autumn. Upon further searching, we discovered that this “unexpected” seasonal bloom had also been noted in <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45898333">mainstream media</a> in recent years. We thus confirmed that this is a real event, not an artefact of our study.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528832/original/file-20230529-25-wonef0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cherry blossom photographs from Flickr taken within Japan from 2008 to 2018 show an April peak as well as an unexpected smaller peak in November.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ElQadi et al.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, even without knowing it, many of us are already helping to understand how climate change influences our environment, simply by posting online photographs we capture. Dedicated sites like <a href="https://wildpollinatorcount.com/">Wild Pollinator Count</a> are excellent resources to contribute to the growing knowledge base. </p>
<p>The complex issues of climate change are still being mapped. Citizen science allows our daily observations to improve our understanding, and so better manage our relationship with the natural world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206574/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Dyer receives funding from The Australian Research Council, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Dorin receives funding and/or support from the Australian Research Council, AgriFutures, Costa Group, Australian Blueberry Growers Association and Sunny Ridge berries.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carolyn Vlasveld was undertaking a PhD at Monash University while collaborating on the study mentioned in this article. Her PhD was financially supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, a Monash University Graduate Research Completion Award, an Ecological Society of Australia (ESA) Student Scholarship, a Denis and Maisie Carr Award and Travel Grant, and an Australian Society of Plant Scientists RN Robertson Travelling Fellowship.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Moataz ElQadi worked on this project as part of his PhD where he was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship and a Monash university stipend. Moataz also received an AI for Earth grant from Microsoft.</span></em></p>
Publicly available data on social media opens a new avenue for studying the environment with “incidental citizen science”.
Adrian Dyer, Associate Professor, Monash University
Alan Dorin, Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Carolyn Vlasveld, PhD candidate, Monash University
Moataz ElQadi, Adjunct Researcher, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203212
2023-04-24T13:32:36Z
2023-04-24T13:32:36Z
Yevonde: an introduction to the woman who pioneered colour photography
<p>The National Portrait Gallery, London, reopens in June following a three-year closure for the “<a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/assets/uploads/files/News-Release_NPG-2023-24-Programme-Launch.pdf">largest redevelopment</a>” in its 127-year history. Its opening exhibition, <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2023/yevonde-life-and-colour">Yevonde: Life and Colour</a>, will be the most comprehensive to date on British photographer, <a href="https://www.maryevans.com/weekly/yevonde/yevonde.php">Yevonde Middleton</a> (1893-1975).</p>
<p>Signing her work simply, Yevonde (though she also worked under “Madame Yevonde”), she was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, she was a pioneer. Yet <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/blog/yevonde-a-beginners-guide?tags=photography">Yevonde</a> is not widely known outside photography circles. </p>
<p>In 1921, she became the first women to lecture at the <a href="https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/d1bd8e08-f35b-3b75-b5de-199281847bd3">Professional Photographers’ Association</a>. In the 1930s – against a tide of resistance – she championed the use of colour photography and was the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Goddesses_Others.html?id=5UymAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">first person in Britain to exhibit colour portraits</a>. </p>
<p>Over a 60-year career, Yevonde photographed the rich and famous. Around 10,000 sitters passed through her studios. She also ran a successful commercial photography business until the year before her death, shortly before her 83rd birthday.</p>
<p>From her teens, Yevonde was an advocate of women’s suffrage and was active in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Womens-Social-and-Political-Union">Women’s Social and Political Union</a>, the militant wing of the suffrage movement, from 1909. </p>
<p>However, a personal disinclination for suffragette lawbreaking (and the prison sentence that would likely follow) led her to champion women’s emancipation via a different route.</p>
<p>In her autobiography, <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-camera/oclc/86024496">In camera</a> (1940), she remembers thinking at age 17: “I must earn my own living … To be independent was the greatest thing in life”. </p>
<p>It was an advertisement in suffrage newspaper <a href="https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:has924jop">Votes for Women</a>, that gave Yevonde the idea that photography could offer economic independence.</p>
<p>Yevonde’s only formal training was an apprenticeship to <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp17338/lallie-charles-ne-charlotte-elizabeth-martin?role=art">Charlotte (Lallie) Charles</a> (1911-13). Despite not finishing, and taking only one photograph throughout, it gave her the fundamentals to start a photographic business.</p>
<p>In 1914, having just turned 21 – and with some funding from her family – she opened her first studio.</p>
<h2>Colour photography and innovation</h2>
<p>Yevonde’s decision to set out on her own coincided with the decline of Lallie Charles’ studio. This reflected a widespread malaise in photographic portraiture, which was at that time stylistically confined to long-established conventions of black and white.</p>
<p>She explained that clients were: “Getting tired of the pale soft … prints, tired of the artificial roses, of the Empire furniture … They grumbled at the lack of variety in the poses.”</p>
<p>Seeing an opportunity to try something different, she developed a more dynamic approach and style, establishing a moderately successful business despite the disruption of the first world war and a stint as a land worker.</p>
<p>But it was with the advent of <a href="https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history-colour-photography">Vivex</a> – a technically demanding process for colouring photographs – around 1930, that Yevonde’s breakthrough came, despite strong resistance to colour photography from within the profession and potential clients. </p>
<p>“I started experimenting madly”, she remembered in her autobiography, “oblivious of the fact that people did not want such things.”</p>
<p>She believed that photographers had become: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>So engrossed in the beauty of light and shade and in their deep velvety blacks and sparkling whites that they will tell you quite seriously that the colour photograph is unnecessary and unnatural.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the same time, Yevonde was excited to discover that a few studios were beginning to explore the new process, despite feeling that their preoccupation with achieving naturalistic colour rendered everything “astonishingly unattractive”.</p>
<p>She declared that her priority was to use colour differently, to “produce a striking and original picture”.</p>
<h2>Yevonde’s Goddesses Series</h2>
<p>Yevonde’s most famous project – the Goddesses Series of 1935 – was inspired by a charity ball. Soon after she photographed several society women in the guise of a mythological goddess. Each woman was furnished with props derived from Yevonde’s, sometimes whimsical, interpretation of their attributes.</p>
<p>For me, the series reveals both the extent and the limits of her pioneering spirit.</p>
<p>Despite her attempts to renegotiate the conventions of her time, Yevonde – ever the expedient businesswoman – was mindful of her client’s wishes, the majority of whom were female. As a result, many of her subjects align with the prevailing expectations of beauty and behaviour: looking sultry but with a submissive air, gazing wistfully out of the frame.</p>
<p>But in other examples, the women she photographed appeared liberated from the shackles of expectations for their sex. There’s daring composition and movement in the <a href="http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/yevonde-madame-1893/object/mrs-richard-hart-davis-as-ariel-yevonde-1935-goddesses-p6648">representation of Ariel</a> and the <a href="https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1410633/mrs-mayer-as-medusa-photograph-madame-yevonde/">confrontational gaze of Medusa</a>.</p>
<p>In other work, an audacious use of saturated primary colour is highly effective, as in the portrait of actress <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2023/yevonde-life-and-colour">Vivien Leigh</a>.</p>
<p>In her photograph of actress Joan Maude, a vibrant palette of reds is brought together in a single image. This shows an industrious photographer thrilling to the possibilities offered by the new colour technology.</p>
<p>Sadly, with the outbreak of the second world war, Vivex ceased trading and Yevonde was obliged to return to black and white.</p>
<p>Throughout her career, Yevonde sought to promote and motivate other women photographers, encouraging them to “come out and meet one another” and to “join the association” of photographers. </p>
<p>“We must see one another’s work and criticise, and, more important still, receive criticism,” she wrote in her autobiography, “or we shall never improve”.</p>
<p>Most previous exhibitions have favoured Yevonde’s Goddesses Series. The planned show at the reopened Portrait Gallery, however, will broaden the scope considerably and include some newly discovered works. </p>
<p>As much as I love Yevonde’s use of colour, I am looking forward to seeing her later portraits in black and white and her practice of bringing elements of surrealism into her portraiture and other commercial work. </p>
<p><em>Yevonde: Life and Colour will be at the National Portrait Gallery, 22 June to 15 October 2023.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203212/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Darcy White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Yevonde was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, a pioneer.
Darcy White, Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Sheffield Hallam University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/195650
2022-12-09T01:11:38Z
2022-12-09T01:11:38Z
Looking back from beyond the Moon: how views from space have changed the way we see Earth
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C23%2C4000%2C2970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A new view of Earth and its place.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/52529813962/">NASA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A photograph taken by NASA’s Orion spacecraft has given us a new perspective on our home planet. </p>
<p>The snap was taken during the Artemis I mission, which sent an uncrewed vehicle on a journey around the Moon and back in preparation for astronauts’ planned lunar return in 2025. </p>
<p>We get pictures of Earth every day from satellites and the International Space Station. But there’s something different about seeing ourselves from the other side of the Moon.</p>
<p>How does this image compare to other iconic views of Earth from the outside?</p>
<h2>Earthrise</h2>
<p>In December 1968, three astronauts were orbiting the Moon to test systems in preparation for the Apollo 11 landing. When they saw Earth rise over the lunar horizon, they knew this was something special. The crew scrambled to find colour film in time to capture it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=198&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=198&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=198&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=248&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=248&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498576/original/file-20221201-14-4c6utt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=248&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Excerpt from the Apollo 8 flight transcript, at the moment the crew observed the Earth rise.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NASA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Photographer Galen Rowell called the resulting image “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”. </p>
<p>Six years earlier, biologist Rachel Carson’s book <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html">Silent Spring</a> drew public attention to how human industries were harming terrestrial ecosystems. The book ignited the environmental movement and laid the ground for the reception of Earthrise.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498582/original/file-20221201-26-ptx1r4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Earthrise.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NASA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The economist <a href="https://www.iied.org/iied-founder-barbara-ward">Barbara Ward</a>, author of <a href="https://steps-centre.org/timeline/book-spaceship-earth/">Spaceship Earth</a> and one of the <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000074879">founders of sustainable development</a>, said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Above all, we are the generation to see through the eyes of the astronauts the astonishing ‘earthrise’ of our small and beautiful planet above the
barren horizons of the moon. Indeed, we in this generation would be some
kind of psychological monstrosity if this were not an age of intense, passionate, committed debate and search.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She saw Earthrise as part of the underpinning of a “moral community” that would enable a more equitable distribution of the planet’s wealth.</p>
<h2>Blue marble</h2>
<p>The last Apollo mission took place in 1972. On their way to the Moon, the astronauts snapped the whole Earth illuminated by the Sun, giving it the appearance of a glass marble. It is one of the most reproduced photographs in history.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498580/original/file-20221201-26-bl9mlg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Blue Marble.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NASA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Earthrise, this image became an emblem of the environmental movement. It showed a planet requiring stewardship at the global scale.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-first-photograph-of-the-entire-globe-50-years-on-blue-marble-still-inspires-175051">The first photograph of the entire globe: 50 years on, Blue Marble still inspires</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The Blue Marble is often used to illustrate the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis#:%7E:text=The%20Gaia%20hypothesis%2C%20named%20after,that%20are%20favorable%20to%20life.">Gaia hypothesis</a>, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and ’70s. The hypothesis proposes that Earth is a complex self-regulating system which acts to maintain a state of equilibrium. While the theory is not widely accepted today, it provided a catalyst for a holistic approach to Earth’s environment as a biosphere in delicate balance.</p>
<p>The impression of a single, whole Earth, however, conceals the fact that not all nations or communities are equally responsible for upsetting the balance and creating environmental disequilibrium. </p>
<h2>Pale blue dot</h2>
<p>Our farthest view of Earth comes from the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. At the request of visionary astronomer <a href="https://www.space.com/15994-carl-sagan.html">Carl Sagan</a>, it turned its camera back on Earth for one last time at a distance of 6 billion kilometres. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498647/original/file-20221202-14-tw00t5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pale Blue Dot, updated by Kevin M. Gill using modern image-processing techniques, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NASA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If Blue Marble evoked a fragile Earth, Pale Blue Dot emphasised Earth’s insignificance in the cosmos. </p>
<p>Sagan added a human dimension to his interpretation of the image:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being that ever was, lived out their lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vi4bj5T0xls" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>Rather than focusing on Earth’s environment, invisible from this distance, Sagan made a point about the futility of human hatred, violence and war when seen in the context of the cosmos. </p>
<h2>Tin can, grey rock, blue marble</h2>
<p>Now, on the cusp of a return to the Moon 50 years after Blue Marble was taken, the Orion image offers us something different. </p>
<p>Scholars have noted the absence of the photographer in Earthrise, Blue Marble and Pale Blue Dot. This gives the <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/5/1/171/8126/Fractal-Eaarth-Visualizing-the-Global-Environment">impression of an objective gaze</a>, leaving out the social and political context that enables such a photograph to be taken.</p>
<p>Here, we know what is taking the picture – and who. The NASA logo is right in the centre. It’s a symbol as clear as the US flag planted on the lunar surface by the Apollo 11 mission.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C23%2C4000%2C2970&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photo showing a white spacecraft in the foreground, with the Moon and Earth in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C23%2C4000%2C2970&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498605/original/file-20221202-15-xmkv40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A new view of Earth and its place.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/52529813962/">NASA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The largest object in the image is a piece of human technology, symbolising mastery over the natural world. The spacecraft is framed as a celestial body with greater visual status than the Moon and Earth in the distance. The message: geopolitical power is no longer centred on Earth but on the ability to leave it.</p>
<p>Elon Musk sent an identical message in photographs of his red Tesla sportscar, launched into solar orbit in 2018, with Earth as the background.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-sports-car-and-a-glitter-ball-are-now-in-space-what-does-that-say-about-us-as-humans-91156">A sports car and a glitter ball are now in space – what does that say about us as humans?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But there’s a new vision of the environment in the Orion image too. It’s more than the whole Earth: it shows us the entire Earth–Moon system as a single entity, where both have similar weighting. </p>
<p>This expansion of the human sphere of influence represents another shift in cosmic consciousness, where we cease thinking of Earth as isolated and alone. </p>
<p>It also expands the sphere of environmental ethics. As traffic between Earth and the Moon increases, human activities will have impacts on the lunar and <a href="https://thespaceoption.com/portfolio/cislunar-space/">cislunar</a> environment. We’re responsible for more than just Earth now.</p>
<h2>Our place in the cosmos</h2>
<p>Images from outside have been powerful commentaries on the state of Earth. </p>
<p>But if a picture were able to bring about a fundamental change in managing Earth’s environment and the life dependent on it, it would have happened by now.
The Orion image does show how a change of perspective can reframe thinking about human relationships with space. </p>
<p>It’s about acknowledging that Earth isn’t a sealed spaceship, but is in dynamic interchange with the cosmos.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195650/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice Gorman is a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia and Co-Chief Investigator of the International Space Station Archaeological Project.</span></em></p>
A new photo taken on the Artemis I mission shows Earth isn’t a sealed spaceship, but is in dynamic interchange with the cosmos.
Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/189525
2022-08-31T12:29:18Z
2022-08-31T12:29:18Z
Unknown Holocaust photos – found in attics and archives – are helping researchers recover lost stories and providing a tool against denial
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481646/original/file-20220829-18-44snrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C2%2C797%2C541&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jewish deportees march through the German town of Würzburg to the railroad station on April 25, 1942.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa6232">US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The summer of 2022 marked the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportations-to-killing-centers">80th anniversary of the first Nazi deportation</a> of Jewish families from Germany to Auschwitz. </p>
<p>Although the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jewish men and women, for many places where those tragic events happened, no images are known to document the crime. Surprisingly, there’s not even photographic evidence from <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/berlin">Berlin, the Nazi capital and home to Germany’s largest Jewish community</a>.</p>
<p>The lack of known images is important. Unlike in the past, historians now agree that photographs and film must be taken seriously as primary sources for their research. These sources can complement the analysis of administrative documents and survivor testimonies and thus enrich our understanding of Nazi persecution.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1020030">a historian originally from Germany and now teaching in the U.S.</a>, I have researched the Nazi persecution of the Jews for 30 years and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aug_8D0AAAAJ&hl=en">published 10 books on the Holocaust</a>.</p>
<p>I searched for unpublished images in all the archives I visited during my research. But I have to admit that I – along with many of my colleagues – did not take the gathered visual evidence seriously as a primary source and rather used it to illustrate my publications. </p>
<p>During the past decade, scholars have realized how pictures can contribute to our understanding of mass violence as well as the resistance to it. Some can provide the only evidence we have about an act of persecution – for example, a photograph of anti-Jewish graffiti. Others will reveal additional details, as in the image of a court proceeding against anti-Nazi resistors. </p>
<p>Photographs are now in some cases the sole objects of scholarly inquiry. They are used to identify perpetrators and victims in specific cases, when other sources would not reveal them.</p>
<p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">Here’s one example: An image shows</a> uniformed Nazis standing in front of a passenger train filled with German Jews in Munich on Nov. 20, 1942. Who were those men? More importantly, what are the stories of the barely recognizable victims behind the windows in this image?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Soldiers watching a train filled with people as a person is pushed onto it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The deportation of Munich Jews to Kowno in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, Nov. 20, 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">City Archive Munich, DE-1992-FS-NS-00015</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Investigating photos of Nazi deportations</h2>
<p>Between 1938 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were <a href="https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/chronology/view.xhtml?lang=en">deported</a> from Germany, mainly to ghettos and camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. </p>
<p>To make pictures of Nazi deportations accessible for research and education, a group of university, educational and archival institutions in Germany and the Dornsife <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cagr">Center for Advanced Genocide Research</a> at the University of Southern California launched the <a href="https://lastseen.arolsen-archives.org/en/">#LastSeen Project — Pictures of Nazi Deportations</a> in October 2021.</p>
<p>This effort aims to locate, collect and analyze images of Nazi mass deportations in Germany. The deportations started with the forced expulsion of around 17,000 Jews of Polish origin in October 1938, <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht">right before the widespread antisemitic violence of Kristallnacht</a>, and culminated in the mass deportations to Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945. </p>
<p>The mass deportation targeted not only Jews, but also people with disabilities as well as tens of thousands of Romani.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Hundreds of people being marched down a village street, while onlookers watch." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Romani families, in total 490 people, from Germany’s southwest border region are deported to Nazi-occupied Poland, May 22, 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Research Office for Racial Hygiene, Federal Archive Germany, Barch R 165, 244-42.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What can we learn from the pictures? Not only when, where and how these forced relocations took place, but who participated, who witnessed them and who was affected by the persecution acts.</p>
<p>I work with the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to manage the outreach for the #LastSeen Project in the English-speaking world. The project has three main goals: first, gathering all existing pictures. These images will then be analyzed to identify the victims and perpetrators and recover the stories behind the pictures. Finally, a digital platform will provide access to all the images and unearthed information, both enabling a new level of study of this visual evidence and establishing a powerful tool against Holocaust denial.</p>
<p>When the project began, the partners were skeptical of whether we would find a significant number of never-before-seen images of mass deportations. </p>
<p>But after addressing the German public and querying 1,750 German archives, within the first six months of the project we received dozens of unknown images, more then doubling the number of German towns, from 27 to over 60, where we now have photographs documenting Nazi deportations. </p>
<p>Many of these photos had collected dust on shelves in local archives in Germany, and some were found in private homes. In the future, the project hopes for discoveries in archives, museums and family possession in the U.S. and the U.K., but also in Canada, South Africa and Australia. We know that liberators took photographs with them from Germany at the end of the war, and survivors received them later via various channels. </p>
<h2>Tracing unknown images beyond Germany</h2>
<p>The project has already located photos in the United States. In two cases, survivors had donated them to archives, which project staff learned during research visits. <a href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn671780">Simon Strauss gave an image</a> to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum depicting the deportation in his German hometown of Hanau. He wrote on it, “Uncle Ludwig transported.” The second photo was at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which had received the hitherto <a href="https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE9435726">only known picture</a> from the Nazi deportation of the Jews in Bad Homburg. </p>
<p>To locate more photos, the project counts on the help of ordinary citizens, researchers, archivists, museum curators and survivors’ families. </p>
<p>After joining the project, I searched the <a href="https://vhaonline.usc.edu/login">USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive</a>, which holds over 53,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Many of the Jews who gave testimony talked about Nazi deportations. All interviewees shared photographs. While many of these more than 700,000 images are artifacts of personal value, such as family and wedding photos, some images depict Nazi persecution.</p>
<p>Within minutes of my search using the term “deportation stills” I was staring at photographs showing a Nazi deportation in a small town in central Germany. At the end of his 1996 interview, Lothar Lou Beverstein, born in 1921, shared two photographs from his hometown of Halberstadt that he had received from friends after the war. Beverstein identified his father, Hugo, and his mother, Paula, <a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">in an image showing Nazis lining up deportees</a> in front of the city’s famous 13th-century Gothic cathedral.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large group of people assembled on the street in front of a timbered building and a large church, with people watching them on the other side of the street." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jewish families from Halberstadt, Germany, assembled for deportation from the city, April 12, 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/vha17046">USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, Lou Beverstein interview.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both of Lou Beverstein’s parents were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto on April 12, 1942. In his interview, Beverstein declared that to his knowledge nobody survived from that transport, which according to a list consisted of 24 men, 59 women and 23 children. Now the project needs to locate Lou Beverstein’s family in the United States or connect to other descendants from Halberstadt to find out more about the origins of the images and the identities of the deportees depicted in them. </p>
<h2>Naming and recognizing victims</h2>
<p>The identities of deportees and perpetrators in the existing images are often unknown. Most photographs show groups of victims whom project staff aim to identify so they and their stories can be acknowledged. This is very difficult, since there are seldom close-up shots.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two young girls in winter coats and hats, both wearing Jewish stars on their coats." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1769%2C1254&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two Jewish girls awaiting deportation in Munich on Nov. 11, 1942. Their identities are not known.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">City Archive Munich DE-1992-FS-NS-00013</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even in a <a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=crop&dpr=1">photograph clearly showing two Jewish girls</a>, we do not know anything other than that the Gestapo deported them to Kowno with the same transport <a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">depicted in the image showing Munich Jews being deported</a> referenced at the beginning of this article. The nearly 1,000 deportees from Munich were shot soon after they arrived at their destination in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.</p>
<p>This is but one example of how scholars desperately need the public’s help to recover the stories of countless unidentified victims of the Nazis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189525/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wolf Gruner directs the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, which is a partner institution in the LastSeen project. </span></em></p>
Holocaust scholars long relied on documents and survivor testimonies to help reconstruct the history of that tragic event. Now, they’re turning to wordless witnesses to learn more: pictures.
Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/172836
2021-12-22T13:09:13Z
2021-12-22T13:09:13Z
As spiritualism’s popularity grows, photographer Shannon Taggart takes viewers inside the world of séances, mediums and orbs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435879/original/file-20211206-13-zj3lkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C6%2C2243%2C1488&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Table-tipping workshop with mediums Jane and Chris Howarth in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2014.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The word séance conjures images of darkened rooms, entranced mediums, strange occurrences and spirit voices. For many contemporary audiences, these visions might seem like something out of the past, or perhaps a movie, rather than a living belief system.</p>
<p>For the past 20 years, American photographer Shannon Taggart has explored <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/spiritualism-religion">modern spiritualism</a>, a religion whose adherents believe in communication with the dead.</p>
<p>Her photographic series “<a href="https://www.shannontaggart.com/">Séance</a>,” which was recently on view at the <a href="https://library.umbc.edu/">Albin O. Kuhn Gallery</a> at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, provides a window into this often misunderstood religion.</p>
<p>As a curator and art historian who has researched <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/iconoclasm-products-9780773557376.php">apparition photographs</a> and <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9781588396594/everything-connected">the art of conspiracy theory</a>, I was drawn to Taggart’s images because they offer a lens through which to examine the role of spirituality in modern life.</p>
<p>In an era defined by a global pandemic, heightened political division and the planetary threat of climate change, I wonder: Is spiritualism due for a major resurgence?</p>
<h2>Spiritualism comes knocking</h2>
<p>Spiritualism emerged near Rochester, New York, in 1848 when two sisters, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/">Kate and Margaret Fox, claimed to hear a mysterious rapping at their bedroom wall</a>. The adolescents claimed to communicate through a system of knocks with the spirit of a man who had died in the house years earlier. News of the phenomenon traveled quickly, and the girls appeared before crowds demonstrating their purported abilities.</p>
<p>Soon, reports of similar phenomena occurring across the United States appeared in the press, and the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/why-did-so-many-victorians-try-to-speak-with-the-dead">possibility of speaking with the deceased fueled the popular imagination</a>.</p>
<p>Spiritualism first grew in private. People who channeled communication with the dead, called mediums, operated out of their homes, where they would organize séance circles, gatherings in which a small group attempted to make contact with the spirit world.</p>
<p>Over time, spiritualists started appearing publicly at conventions and outdoor summer camp meetings. By the 1870s, they began to put down roots, founding like-minded communities and centers of study, such as the spiritualist colony of <a href="https://www.lilydaleassembly.org/">Lily Dale, New York</a>, established in 1879.</p>
<p>In addition to holding séances, spiritualists practice healings and believe in the gift of prophecy. Mediums say they convey messages from the dead to the living, including reports about the future.</p>
<p>Many spiritualists hoped to make utopian visions of the future a reality in the present by supporting progressive <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274532/ghosts-of-futures-past">political causes such as abolitionism, women’s rights and Indigenous rights</a>. </p>
<p>Notably, spiritualism gave women an unprecedented role in religion, providing an audience and a platform to deliver messages both personal and political. Suffragists Marion H. Skidmore, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony all spoke at Lily Dale. The views of spiritualists thus represented a <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253215024/radical-spirits-second-edition/">radical break from traditional religious and political authority</a>. </p>
<h2>Ghosts in the machine</h2>
<p>The Fox sisters’ purported ability to communicate with the dead became known as “<a href="https://narratively.com/the-sisters-who-spoke-to-spirits/">the spiritual telegraph</a>,” referencing the then-recent invention by Samuel B. Morse. As spiritualism developed, adherents embraced technology as tools for spirit communication and to prove the existence of spirits.</p>
<p>Photography became “<a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300111361/perfect-medium">the perfect medium</a>” with which to create an iconography of spiritualism. Whether it was through astronomical, microscopic or X-ray photography, cameras could render the unseen visible. Despite the proliferation of <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300185010/faking-it">altered photographs in the 19th century</a>, the photograph’s status as a truthful representation of reality remained – and, one might argue, continues to remain – largely intact.</p>
<p>Photography also played a leading role in the 19th century’s memorial culture, since the camera could freeze time and render absent loved ones present, if only as a visual trace.</p>
<p>The American Civil War brought death at an unprecedented scale into people’s living rooms through the pages of the illustrated press. Black attire, mourning jewelry and the genre of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581">post-mortem photography</a> were commonplace in a culture of grieving.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman holds photo album with two black and white portraits." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sandy Candy Eppinger’s family spirit photographs, which show her brother Eugene Candy with the spirits of their grandmother Ethel Philips and great aunt Helen Thompson, at Lily Dale, New York, in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 1860s, New York portrait photographer William Mumler and his wife, Hannah Mumler, a medium, offered portrait sessions in which spirits of the sitters’ loved ones appeared to manifest in the resulting photographs.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-strange-case-of-william-mumler-spirit">Mumler’s spectacular portraits also raised the specter of hucksterism</a>. The photographer was charged with fraud by claimants who argued he faked the photographs, and none other than showman P.T. Barnum gave evidence for the prosecution.</p>
<p>In the early 20th century, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle <a href="https://martynjolly.com/2013/10/03/photographing-the-dead/">famously rallied to defend British medium Ada Emma Deane</a>, who was also accused of faking spirit photographs.</p>
<p>The double-sided coin of belief and skepticism haunts these historical examples; nonetheless, the psychological impact of these images among the grieving remained powerful.</p>
<h2>Spiritualist revivals</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/82f99df5-b74b-4938-8a21-f0d32f5d28f0">History seems to suggest</a> that catastrophic loss of life can spur renewed interest in spiritualist beliefs. </p>
<p>Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Mumlers’ portraits became all the rage amid the devastation of the U.S. Civil War, while Deane’s popularity peaked in the wake of World War I and the flu pandemic. </p>
<p>Has the pervading sense of uncertainty induced by the COVID-19 pandemic triggered another spiritualist revival?</p>
<p>Alternative belief structures, including <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/astrology-in-the-age-of-uncertainty">astrology</a> and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c4afbc05-a715-4b83-9323-44e4c4f95ca5">tarot</a>, seem to have experienced a resurgence, reaching new audiences through the internet and social media.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Trumpets with faces painted on them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Séance trumpets featuring celebrity spirit guides, including Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury, hand-painted by medium Sylvia Howarth, in England in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Recently, a number of mediums have become famous thanks to their endorsements by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/style/carissa-schumacher-flamingo-estate-los-angeles.html?smid=em-share">celebrity clientele</a>. Some mediums claim to be able to channel stars from the grave, from Louis Armstrong to Elvis Presley.</p>
<p>While modern mediums <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/psychics-skeptics-facebook.html">have their detractors</a>, their eager adoption of television and the internet is a logical step for a religion that has always embraced new technologies.</p>
<p>What was once seen as a niche subculture or the domain of late-night 1-900 call-in shows has gone mainstream: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/psychics-skeptics-facebook.html">Psychic businesses were a US$2 billion industry in 2018</a>. </p>
<h2>Shannon Taggart’s ‘Séance’</h2>
<p>This new spirituality has influenced pop culture as well as high art; the Guggenheim’s 2019 retrospective of Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint was the <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/press-release/hilma-af-klint-paintings-for-the-future-most-visited-exhibition-in-solomon-r-guggenheim-museums-history">most-visited exhibition</a> in the museum’s history, drawing over 600,000 viewers.</p>
<p>New York Times art critic Roberta Smith argued that the exhibition’s impact amounted to a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/design/hilma-af-klint-guggenheim.html">psychic and historical shift</a>” in the art world. Smith’s use of the word “psychic” is apt; the exhibition was a watershed not only for restoring to primacy women’s role in the development of abstract painting, but also for re-centering the spiritual within art.</p>
<p>Taggart’s photographs, meanwhile, explore present-day practices, sites and objects of spiritualism. </p>
<p>Allowing chance and automation to guide camera experiments, she reveals processes of transformation and altered states through blurred effects, halos of light and doubling in images that reference historical spirit photographs.</p>
<p>In one image, for example, a grieving mother raises her arms into a darkened sky dotted with circles of light known as orbs. Orb photography is a recent innovation within spirit photography in which practitioners call upon spirits to manifest orbs, which are then captured by digital cameras. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/782092656">Orb photography</a> is another example of the ambiguity of spirit photographs: Does it channel the supernatural, or simply capture reflections of dust on the camera lens? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman stands before American flag with arms outstretched." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kim Kitchen calls to her deceased daughter Casey and asks her for orbs in Lily Dale, New York, in 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Taggart, that question is largely beside the point. Her aim is to remain truthful to the psychological experience of spiritualism, to make visible what is ineffable.</p>
<p>Taggart’s photographs recover the marginalized history of spiritualism at a moment when the religion feels once again on the verge of a resurgence.</p>
<p>As Taggart <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZKhTXn3bl4">is fond of saying</a>, “You don’t have to take spiritualism literally to take it seriously.”</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=weekly&source=inline-weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172836/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beth Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Alternative beliefs like spiritualism seem to experience resurgences in times of crisis. Taggart has spent the past 20 years exploring the oft-misunderstood religion.
Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections and Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/160137
2021-05-07T12:42:36Z
2021-05-07T12:42:36Z
Faces of those America is leaving behind in Afghanistan
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399027/original/file-20210505-19-12r3lst.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C2%2C659%2C488&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The people of Afghanistan that the author encountered live very different lives from Americans.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>U.S. troops are <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/29/politics/us-afghanistan-withdrawal-begun/index.html">already heading home from Afghanistan</a>, ending a two-decade-long war that saw as many as 100,000 American troops there. The withdrawal of the remaining few thousand is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/afghanistan-troops-withdrawal.html">slated to be complete</a> by the symbolic date of Sept. 11, 2021.</p>
<p>I know this land well from my journeys across more than half of its provinces as a <a href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">professor of Afghan history</a> and as a former <a href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/pdfs/Steve%20Coll_Directorates_ch%2014-Williams.pdf">employee of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center</a> <a href="https://mepc.org/journal/mullah-omars-missiles-field-report-suicide-bombers-afghanistan">tracking the movement</a> of Taliban and al-Qaida suicide bombers. I also <a href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/us_army_afg/field_us_army_afg.html">advised the military</a> on Afghan terrain, tribes, politics and history.</p>
<p>While on my solo missions for the CIA and U.S. Army beyond the safety of our base’s walls, in what my team described as the “red zone,” I also did something that none of my U.S. Army comrades – who traveled in convoys and were restricted by <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-military-rules-of-engagement-in-afghanistan-questioned-1454349100">formal rules of engagement</a> – could do. I freely photographed the fascinating Afghan people around me as they went about their lives in an active war zone.</p>
<p>Lately, I worry about the fate of the people in these photos and others I have taken. Their world may be destroyed if, or when, the fast-advancing Taliban reconquer the last remaining government-controlled zones. </p>
<p>These images show glimpses of the potentially doomed people and ways of life the U.S. is leaving behind as the troops depart.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Armed men ride horses through rocky ground" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398158/original/file-20210430-15-1wit0yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Uzbek Mongol cavalry commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum, nicknamed ‘The Taliban Killer,’ rides his prized war stallion Surkun in 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The warlord</h2>
<p>In this photograph from 2003, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek Mongol cavalry commander, rides his prized war stallion Surkun. </p>
<p>Dostum, a legendary military leader who fought alongside the Soviets in the 1980s to extend modernity to Afghanistan and has <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42908396">faced accusations of war crimes against the Taliban which he denies</a>, is a friend and the focus of my 2013 book, “<a href="https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/last-warlord--the-products-9781613748008.php">The Last Warlord: The Afghan Warrior who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime</a>.” In 2001 he rode Surkun into combat alongside horse-mounted U.S. Special Forces Green Berets to overthrow his northern Turkic-Mongol people’s historic foes, the ethnic Aryan Pashtun Taliban regime.</p>
<p>Hundreds of his riders were killed in the <a href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/pdfs/930854297(3).pdf">desperate mountain campaign against their Taliban enemies</a>, as seen in the 2019 Hollywood blockbuster “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1413492/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">12 Strong: The True, Declassified Story of the Horse Soldiers of Afghanistan</a>,” which was in part <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168036">based on my book</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young girl and her brother sit under a fabric tent" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398162/original/file-20210430-14-1em1aa7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A young Afghan girl sits with her younger brother in 2007.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The girl</h2>
<p>This cherubic nine-year-old girl at left was charged with babysitting her little brother while her parents worked in the fields in a remote desert region. I have no idea what her fate was, but many impoverished girls like her do not get the opportunity to get an education and are married off in arranged marriages when they are young.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A crowd of Afghans smile around a guest" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398173/original/file-20210430-22-1kxb7f3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2005, I (center) received warm welcomes all across northern Afghanistan, where the people were generally friendly toward Americans.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The hosts</h2>
<p>I was always amazed at the warm welcomes I received while traveling among the Uzbek-Mongol, Persian-Tajik and Hazara-Shiite Mongol tribes of northern Afghanistan, who are closely allied with the U.S. I was regularly invited into their simple homes, where my hosts would eagerly offer me lamb or goat, often after slaughtering their only source of meat for an honored guest. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two chickens fight in the center of a crowd of people, watching the action closely" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398165/original/file-20210430-15-uw1ha6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chicken fights were a popular – if bloody – form of entertainment in Kabul in 2005, but they were banned by the Taliban.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The chicken fighters</h2>
<p>On most Friday afternoons during my time in Kabul, there were chicken fights, like this one in the Garden of Babur, a popular park built around the marble grave of Babur, the founder of India’s magnificent Moghul Empire. At the fights, men bet on which chicken would win, but the pastime was banned by the Taliban as “un-Islamic” as all such “sinful” games distracted from the worship of God. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A group of Afghan middle school girls" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398174/original/file-20210430-23-fbv3b5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">After the Taliban were driven out of their area, these Afghan girls, pictured in 2005, were allowed to attend school.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The schoolgirls</h2>
<p>After five years of being denied the right to an education by the Taliban, these middle school girls in the town of Sheberghan in 2005 were excited to return to school. One girl, third from the right, was crying: She had just told me the story of how the Taliban had killed her parents.</p>
<p>She fretted, “The day the Americans leave the Taliban will return and execute us girls if we try to learn to read and write, which is forbidden for females by their law.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man and two boys stand in front of cliffs showing a large void where a Buddha statue used to be" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398188/original/file-20210430-15-1s8y0h5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Behind the boys and me is a massive cutout in the cliff, where a standing Buddha statue used to be, before the Taliban destroyed it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The guardians of the Buddhas</h2>
<p>In the idyllic Vale of Bamiyan, at 8,000 feet above sea level in the remote Hindu Kush mountains, the Hazara Mongols for centuries cherished two massive statues of the Buddha, carved into the cliffs in the sixth century. In 2001, the Sunni <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/world/asia/afghanistan-bamiyan-buddhas.html">Taliban destroyed the statues</a>, defying international outcry, in a direct insult to the repressed Shiite Hazaras.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A bearded man in a turban stands with an adult camel and a camel calf in front of a tent." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398172/original/file-20210430-17-1ukn8sn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Kuchis, Aryan Pashtuns, wandered the soaring mountains and vast deserts of Afghanistan, living their entire lives in tents without electricity or any modern conveniences.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The nomads</h2>
<p>As I traversed the soaring mountains and vast deserts of this ancient land that time seemingly forgot, I frequently encountered welcoming and curious Aryan Pashtun nomads known as Kuchis. These wanderers invariably invited me to join them for a simple meal in exchange for my stories about a different world known as America, a land that these humble people, who live out their entire lives in tents without electricity, could not imagine.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man with a rifle stands in front of a restaurant window" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398170/original/file-20210430-18-1udoa9p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">After Kabul was freed from Taliban rule, American-style restaurants started cropping up.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The burger and pizza chef</h2>
<p>An Afghan who worked on a U.S. base and came to love all things American opened this pizza and burger restaurant in Kabul which, like many businesses, featured an armed guard out front. Other American-style restaurants opened up after the Taliban were driven from Kabul, including the remarkably delicious KFC – Kabul Fried Chicken.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A group of bearded men stand behind a barred door." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398176/original/file-20210430-14-h7e1f7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Taliban fighters captured by General Dostum were imprisoned in the northern deserts of Afghanistan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.brianglynwilliams.com/">Brian Glyn Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Taliban</h2>
<p>I interviewed several dozen Taliban members, who had been captured by General Dostum’s forces, in a fortress-like prison in the northern deserts of Afghanistan. One of the captives told me a common Taliban mantra: “You Americans may have the watches, but we have the time… We will outlast you.”</p>
<p>[<em>Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=100Ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160137/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian Glyn Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As American troops leave Afghanistan, a scholar of the country’s history and culture reexamines his photos of the nation’s people.
Brian Glyn Williams, Professor of Islamic History, UMass Dartmouth
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/150080
2020-11-24T18:58:47Z
2020-11-24T18:58:47Z
I studied 5,000 phone images: objects were more popular than people, but women took way more selfies
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369397/original/file-20201115-17-18czst8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=55%2C0%2C6135%2C4068&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/Cenevox">T. J. Thomson</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Though we take a staggering number of photos each year (an estimated <a href="https://focus.mylio.com/tech-today/how-many-photos-will-be-taken-in-2020">1.43 trillion</a> in 2020), we share relatively few of these and are using our cameras in different ways compared to the days of film.</p>
<p>Analysing how we use our camera phones, which are responsible for <a href="https://focus.mylio.com/tech-today/how-many-photos-will-be-taken-in-2020">90.9%</a> of all photographs taken, and the images we share with them can reveal important insights about who we are and what we value.</p>
<p>I <a href="https://figshare.com/articles/journal%20contribution/Exploring_the_life_cycle_of_smartphone_images_from_camera_rolls_to_social_media_platforms/12552245/1">examined</a> the lifecycle of a pool of about 5,000 images taken by more than a dozen people living in Australia to see what they photographed, “screenshotted”, and shared in a four-week period in early 2019. </p>
<p>I also interviewed these amateur photographers about how they used their phones to make images. </p>
<h2>Women versus men</h2>
<p>On average, one in four images on our smartphones is a screenshot, of say, a social media post or recipe. </p>
<p>And out of every four images, about 1.74 are of objects, 1.07 are of humans, 1 is of the built or natural environment, and just .18 are of animals. (The missing .01 percent are indeterminate because they are either underexposed or blurry.</p>
<p>Women and men seem to use their camera rolls differently. Women in the study were much more likely to photograph themselves or have themselves photographed.</p>
<p>They took selfies 8.6 times more often than men and were photographed 3.5 times more often than men. Women documented their possessions 5.4 times more than men. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman takes selfie at home" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369399/original/file-20201115-19-yydu2y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women in the study took selfies 8.6 times more often than men.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Unsplash/Mateus Campos Felipe</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Meanwhile, men were more than twice as likely to photograph strangers, such as passersby on the street, tourists, or crowds at gigs, beaches or parks. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-hidden-women-to-influencers-and-individuals-putting-mothers-in-the-frame-137702">From hidden women to influencers and individuals – putting mothers in the frame</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A consistent look</h2>
<p>Only 6.5%, on average, of the overall image pool was shared by its owner on social media. Thus, the vast majority of images remained on participants’ camera rolls. </p>
<p>When they did share, nine out of 10 users shared to a single platform. Instagram was the most popular sharing platform, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Smart phone with images displayed" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369396/original/file-20201115-23-1aig0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Study participants only shared 6.5% of the images they captured on camera phones.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">T. J. Thomson</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Photos of people and animals were the most shared, followed by places, and objects. </p>
<p>Participants were keen to share visual media with common reference points — presenting a consistent aesthetic motif to their followers — and images they considered flattering.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/3-2-billion-images-and-720-000-hours-of-video-are-shared-online-daily-can-you-sort-real-from-fake-148630">3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are shared online daily. Can you sort real from fake?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Why people take photos</h2>
<p>Interviewees told me they whipped out their camera phones for five primary reasons.</p>
<p><strong>1. Making memories</strong></p>
<p>The urge to hold onto experience is strong. As one participant put it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m getting ready to move so I’m just trying to get as many memories of my dogs as possible. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another participant, prompted by a photo they’d taken, added: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was out with my family going bowling and I took this because I wanted to have something as a reminder of that. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>2. New experiences, rare treats or first times</strong> </p>
<p>These experiences included major milestones, such as the first day at university or moving into a new home, as well as more banal and everyday activities, such as when a normally busy space was uncharacteristically empty. One participant remembered: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This, I sent it [a photo of me working on my laptop in a coffee shop] to my friend and said, ‘I’m here’. It was a Polish coffee shop and no one else was there. No other customers and I thought it was kind of funny.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>3. Ideas and inspiration</strong> </p>
<p>Some users took screenshots of tattoos they wanted to get, while others captured recipes, people posing, or arrangements of objects they liked. One interviewee said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ll often screenshot photos of influencers I follow to try to copy makeup looks, outfits, how they edit their photos, that kind of thing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>4. Evidence and receipts</strong> </p>
<p>Phones were handy to document rental car damage, a builder’s progress, or dubious social media claims. One man noted: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s a group in my hometown called ‘[Redacted] Whispers’ and this person was telling a story and it reminded me of a video I had seen and I questioned the authenticity of it … I don’t remember if I shared it to anyone. I just remember taking the screenshot to prove, if need be, that I didn’t believe it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>5. Communication aids</strong> </p>
<p>When a contact asks, “Where are you?” or “What are you doing?”, some camera phone users reported they simply take a picture of their location or themselves and send it in response instead of typing a reply. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s just easier to send a photo than to explain. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Crowd at concert holds phones up high to take photos." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370492/original/file-20201120-19-zstr7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When users do share images, Instagram is the most popular platform.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Unsplash/Noiseporn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/travelgram-live-tourist-snaps-have-turned-solo-adventures-into-social-occasions-124583">#travelgram: live tourist snaps have turned solo adventures into social occasions</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Our changing visual values</h2>
<p>That participants used their smartphones most often to document objects is a testament to how digital technology has changed what we visually value. </p>
<p>Where once pictures of loved ones and travel destinations filled photo albums and scrapbooks, our camera rolls are now filled primarily with mundane and quotidian objects. </p>
<p>Humans came a distant second and environments came in an even more distant third. This indicates we’re using our smartphones for more functional purposes, such as screenshotting a work roster or timetable, compared to when we used cameras for more primarily aesthetic or relational purposes.</p>
<p>But when it comes to sharing, we still value human connection and disproportionately share images of humans over things or places.</p>
<p>As the number of images taken in 2021 is expected to <a href="https://focus.mylio.com/tech-today/how-many-photos-will-be-taken-in-2020">grow again</a>, consider what you photograph and screenshot in the coming year and what this reveals about yourself, your place in society, and your values.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150080/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>TJ Thomson receives funding from Australian Research Council through Discovery project DP210100589 ‘Amplifying Voices from the Royal Commission into Aged Care’.</span></em></p>
Researchers found women and men use their camera rolls differently - and our visual values have changed.
T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Media, Queensland University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137702
2020-05-08T04:54:41Z
2020-05-08T04:54:41Z
From hidden women to influencers and individuals – putting mothers in the frame
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333580/original/file-20200508-49542-w0hpqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C18%2C749%2C966&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother portrait, showing a mother of seven children in California, 1936.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b29516">US Library of Congress/Flickr</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There are images of her everywhere, especially as Mother’s Day draws near.</p>
<p>As two photographers who happen to be mothers, we think critically about the way photography overly determines the image of “The Mother”. </p>
<p>One iconic example is <a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2009631019/">Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother</a>, taken in depression-era America. The central figure is framed by her two children who lean against her, while her arms perform the quintessentially nurturing pose – the maternal embrace of an infant. </p>
<p>Lange’s photograph reenacts the ultimate symbol of femininity: Madonna and child. But not all photographs of mothers are the same. From early snapshots to images on screen, how mothers appear in photographs speaks to our changing view of their role in the family and in society. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-why-your-mom-may-be-the-mother-of-all-heroes-115341">Psychology behind why your mom may be the mother of all heroes</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The woman behind the child</h2>
<p>The mother appears throughout the history of photography. Perhaps the first illustrated demonstration of a mother’s involvement in the form is a drawing by <a href="http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/46529/theodore-maurisset-la-daguerreotypomanie-daguerreotypomania-french-december-1839/">Theodore Maurisset</a>. Detailed in this illustration is a mother who comically wrestles with her reluctant child to have his photographic portrait taken. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333604/original/file-20200508-49573-12qw8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Detail from La Daguerreotypomanie (Daguerreotypomania) by Théodore Maurisset, Paris, France, 1839.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/46529/theodore-maurisset-la-daguerreotypomanie-daguerreotypomania-french-december-1839/">J. Paul Getty Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The next time she appears, in the Victorian era, she is the “Hidden Mother” smothered under thick velvet fabric to hold her child still enough to be photographed clearly. She is furniture. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333576/original/file-20200508-49589-a7v28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In Victorian era baby photographs, mothers are used to prop up their subjects.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hidden-mother_portrait.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the most significant photographic treatise on photography, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading">Camera Lucida</a>, Roland Barthes continues the hidden theme. </p>
<p>Central to this intimate book is a picture of his mother as a six-year-old girl, which Barthes calls the <a href="https://photoworks.org.uk/great-unknown/">Winter Garden</a> photograph. While pivotal to the book, he never shows us the image, declaring her picture could only have meaning for him. </p>
<p>The Winter Garden photograph takes Barthes to a time before his mother was a mother. It allows him to recognise her autonomy and passage into the role of mother: “I studied the little girl and at last <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/c/c5/Barthes_Roland_Camera_Lucida_Reflections_on_Photography.pdf">rediscovered my mother</a>”. </p>
<p>He finds her not as a teenager, but as an innocent child.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1143&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1143&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333590/original/file-20200508-49579-ihs58v.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1143&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roland Barthes and his mother, around 1925.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Pure love</h2>
<p>This notion of purity links us to the ideal image of moral good associated with Christianity’s immaculate mother. </p>
<p>We come into the world from the mother. First pictured in utero and then pushed, surgically removed or pulled out into the world and her arms – breast-fed, bottle-fed, skin-on-skin. </p>
<p>In a technological society, birth is a photographic event. From <a href="https://babyology.com.au/pregnancy/stages-of-pregnancy/the-story-behind-that-famous-demi-moore-pregnancy-shoot/">pregnancy</a> through to delivery, a mother’s identity is mediated through conception – her status changes from woman to mother. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333591/original/file-20200508-49584-1yzmxkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mother and child in a photograph captioned: ‘Stel and Don when he was 3 months old’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsofv/15939339301/in/photostream/">Genealogical Society of Victoria/Flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As advertisers remind us, this archetype hinges on her visual representation performing everyday activities. The most ubiquitous images visualise her in the home: performing housework; displaying her culinary and baking flair. </p>
<p>Bonus noteworthy qualities include her glowing skin, soft femininity and healthy hair. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333582/original/file-20200508-49565-41tnk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/?f[0]=obj_collectiontitle:Australia%20Post%20Historical%20collection&solrsort=random%20asc&object=111683">National Museum of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over time, the mother shifts and changes. </p>
<p>Here she is a 1950s housewife, there she is a modern soccer mum. She glows pregnant in the style of <a href="https://babyology.com.au/pregnancy/stages-of-pregnancy/the-story-behind-that-famous-demi-moore-pregnancy-shoot/">Demi Moore</a> on the cover of Vanity Fair and later <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BP-rXUGBPJa/">Beyonce</a> and the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/07/the-coast-of-utopia-surfer-moms-instagram-influencers">yummy mummies of Instagram</a>. Her values change, but her role remains prescribed by her relation to the child and the nuclear family. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BP-rXUGBPJa","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>If she doesn’t fit this mould, she transgresses from her role into the “other mother”. While monstrous mother, working mother, evil mother, angry mother, crack mother are archetypes presented in cinema and literature, there are few photographic examples that capture her departure from purity. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333573/original/file-20200508-49565-1iiwzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mother provider in the kitchen, always.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/HOUSEWIFE_IN_THE_KITCHEN_OF_HER_MOBILE_HOME_IN_ONE_OF_THE_TRAILER_PARKS._THE_TWO_PARKS_WERE_CREATED_IN_RESPONSE_TO..._-_NARA_-_558298.jpg/1600px-HOUSEWIFE_IN_THE_KITCHEN_OF_HER_MOBILE_HOME_IN_ONE_OF_THE_TRAILER_PARKS._THE_TWO_PARKS_WERE_CREATED_IN_RESPONSE_TO..._-_NARA_-_558298.jpg">Horacio Villalobos/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Photography is limited in its capacity to represent such complexity without caption or heavy-handed <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/50744">parody</a>. </p>
<p>In 2018, Alec Soth photographed mothers struggling with opioid addiction for the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/magazine/children-of-the-opioid-epidemic.html">New York Times magazine</a>. Soth’s images don’t moralise or glamorise. Without the accompanying captions, the women appear simply in relation to their children. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/forget-flowers-and-chocolates-for-mothers-day-keep-free-childcare-going-instead-137992">Forget flowers and chocolates for Mother's Day: keep free childcare going instead</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The possibilities</h2>
<p>If she is not the prescribed archetypal mother, or the transgressive mother, what other photographic possibilities are there for her? </p>
<p>The popular <a href="https://www.instagram.com/mothersbefore/?hl=en">Instagram account</a> and book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50158601-mothers-before">Mothers Before</a> shows photographs of mothers before they became mothers, submitted and captioned from the perspective of their children. </p>
<p>While the images show mothers in their youth, the captions still describe each woman in terms of her value as caregiver.</p>
<p>Last week, Fiona Wolf won the Head On Photography Festival’s <a href="https://www.headon.com.au/blog/winners-2020-head-photo-awards">portrait category</a> for The Gift, RHW 2020, which showed the “modern family story of a girl born by a warrior woman to two loving dads”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333574/original/file-20200508-49558-1ywzylw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fiona Wolf’s The Gift, RHW 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Head On Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fashion photographer Charlie Engman represents his mother in close collaboration with her. The work they do together sidesteps cliches. </p>
<p>In his book <a href="https://www.editionpatrickfrey.com/en/books/mom-charlie-engman">MOM</a>, Engman provides us with an image of motherhood that sits outside of the usual tropes of family portrait photography and the nurturing matriarch. We get a glimpse of a woman who is a person in her own right and in charge of her image, regardless of her reproductive status. </p>
<p>Unlike Barthes’ mother, Engman’s mother has a name: Kathleen McCain Engman. She has sexuality, agency, and is far from the hidden mother. She is in a category of her own: amorphous, elusive and individual. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BikD4VZn02A","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137702/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
From Madonna and child to fierce matriarch, mothers have appeared in frame since photography began – even it sometimes they are just part of the furniture.
Cherine Fahd, Director Photography, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
Sara Oscar, Lecturer in Photography, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/129959
2020-02-14T22:22:54Z
2020-02-14T22:22:54Z
Out-of-context photos are a powerful low-tech form of misinformation
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315312/original/file-20200213-11017-18y1u91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5514%2C3862&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Have some healthy skepticism when you encounter images online.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/sad-black-woman-near-window-reading-phone-message-royalty-free-image/1054665140">tommaso79/Stock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When you think of visual misinformation, maybe you think of deepfakes – videos that appear real but have actually been created using <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/01/business/pentagons-race-against-deepfakes/">powerful video editing algorithms</a>. The creators <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley">edit celebrities into pornographic movies</a>, and they can <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0">put words into the mouths</a> of people who never said them. </p>
<p>But the majority of visual misinformation that people are exposed to involves much simpler forms of deception. One common technique involves recycling legitimate old photographs and videos and presenting them as evidence of recent events.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312964/original/file-20200130-41532-ipmqop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The meme applies misleading text to a photo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.facebook.com/turningpointusa/photos/a.376802782368444/2076532475728791/">Turning Point USA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For example, Turning Point USA, a conservative group with over 1.5 million followers on Facebook, posted a photo of a ransacked grocery store with the caption “YUP! #SocialismSucks.” In reality, the empty supermarket shelves have nothing to do with socialism; the photo was taken in <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shopping-aisle-empty-socialism/">Japan after a major earthquake in 2011</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312965/original/file-20200130-41507-pd14ii.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The caption tells a different story than the picture actually does.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://archive.fo/7Mjn0">Twitter screen grab</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In another instance, after a global warming protest in London’s Hyde Park in 2019, photos began circulating as proof that the protesters had left the area covered in trash. In reality, some of the photos were from Mumbai, India, and others came from a completely <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/protesters-hyde-park-rubbish/">different event in the park</a>.</p>
<p>I’m a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AUtiwQQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">cognitive psychologist</a> who studies how people learn correct and incorrect information from the world around them. Psychological research demonstrates that these out-of-context photographs can be a particularly potent form of misinformation. And unlike deepfakes, they are incredibly simple to create. </p>
<h2>Out of context and incorrect</h2>
<p>Out-of-context photos are very common source of misinformation.</p>
<p>In the day after the January Iranian attack on U.S. military bases in Iraq, reporter <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/false-and-unverified-information-iraq-attack">Jane Lytvynenko at Buzzfeed documented</a> numerous instances of old photos or videos being presented as evidence of the attack on social media. These included photos from a 2017 military strike by Iran in Syria, video of Russian training exercises from 2014 and even footage from a video game. In fact, out of the 22 false rumors documented in the article, 12 involve this kind of out-of-context photos or video.</p>
<p>This form of misinformation can be particularly dangerous because images are a powerful tool for swaying popular opinion and promoting false beliefs. Psychological research has shown that people are more likely to believe true and false trivia statements, such as “turtles are deaf,” <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.06.004">when they’re presented</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0">alongside an image</a>. In addition, people are more likely to claim they’ve previously seen freshly made-up headlines when they’re <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.10.006">accompanied by a photograph</a>. Photos also increase the numbers of likes and shares that a post receives in a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.04.005">simulated social media environment</a>, along with people’s beliefs that the post is true. </p>
<p>And pictures can alter what people remember from the news. In an experiment, one group of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1362">people read a news article</a> about a hurricane accompanied by a photograph of a village after the storm. They were more likely to falsely remember that there were deaths and serious injuries compared to people who instead saw a photo of the village before the hurricane strike. This suggests that the false pictures of the Jan. 2020 Iranian attack may have affected people’s memory for details of the event.</p>
<h2>Why they’re effective</h2>
<p>There are a number of reasons photographs likely increase your belief in statements.</p>
<p>First, you’re used to photographs being used for photojournalism and serving as proof that an event happened.</p>
<p>Second, seeing a photograph can help you more quickly retrieve related information from memory. People tend to use this ease of retrieval as a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868309341564">signal that information is true</a>.</p>
<p>Photographs also make it more easy to imagine an event happening, which can make it <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1644">feel more true</a>. </p>
<p>Finally, pictures simply capture your attention. A <a href="https://www.cmo.com/content/dam/CMO_Other/ADI/ADI_Mobilegeddon/Q2-2015-Social-Intelligence-Report.pdf">2015 study by Adobe</a> found that posts that included images received more than three times the Facebook interactions than posts with just text.</p>
<h2>Adding info so you know what you’re seeing</h2>
<p>Journalists, researchers and technologists have begun working on this problem.</p>
<p>Recently, the <a href="https://www.newsprovenanceproject.com/">News Provenance Project</a>, a collaboration between The New York Times and IBM, released a <a href="https://poc.newsprovenanceproject.com/">proof-of-concept</a> strategy for how images could be labeled to include more information about their age, location where taken and original publisher. This simple check could help prevent old images from being used to support false information about recent events.</p>
<p>In addition, social media companies such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter could begin to label photographs with information about when they were first published on the platform.</p>
<p>Until these kinds of solutions are implemented, though, readers are left on their own. One of the best techniques to protect yourself from misinformation, especially during a breaking news event, is to use a reverse image search. From the Google Chrome browser, it’s as simple as right-clicking on a photograph and choosing “Search Google for image.” You’ll then see a list of all the other places that photograph has appeared online. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312963/original/file-20200130-41554-1l6humx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">FirstDraft, a nonprofit focused on fighting misinformation and improving journalism, provides tips for conducting a reverse image search.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://firstdraftnews.org/first-draft-flashcards/">FirstDraft</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As consumers and users of social media, we have a responsibility for ensuring that information we share is accurate and informative. By keeping an eye out for out-of-context photographs, you can help keep misinformation in check.</p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129959/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Fazio has received funding from Facebook and the Knight Foundation for her research on misinformation. </span></em></p>
Images without context or presented with text that misrepresents what they show can be a powerful tool of misinformation, especially since photos make statements seem more believable.
Lisa Fazio, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/124978
2019-10-24T11:49:14Z
2019-10-24T11:49:14Z
Leaf peep for science – I want your old photos of fall foliage
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/298412/original/file-20191023-119433-8lq1kf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1101%2C437%2C5393%2C3303&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What can your vacation pix tell scientists?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/female-hiker-standing-on-ledge-enjoying-1463849003">Try Media/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every October, when I was growing up in Massachusetts, my parents would check out the fall foliage reports and determine where we were going to drive to see the colorful leaves. And they still do. In New England, leaf peeping, as it’s called, is a <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-10-19/leaf-peeping-huge-new-england-will-climate-change-alter-tourism">billion dollar industry</a> and millions of people travel to the region during foliage season. </p>
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<p>In Maine’s Acadia National Park, visitation has <a href="https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/">more than doubled in September and October</a> since the early 1990s. Tourists book leaf peeping cruises, bus trips and lodging packages, all scheduled to coincide with what’s traditionally been the somewhat predictable fall foliage season.</p>
<p>But Earth’s climate is changing. A big question is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057373">how climate change’s impacts</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/fall-foliage-in-the-crosshairs-of-climate-change-32012">on the timing, duration and vibrancy</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-GTR-99">of fall foliage</a> will affect the tourist season.</p>
<h2>Pulling together all kinds of data</h2>
<p>Untangling the relationship between climate, fall foliage and visitorship in Acadia National Park – <a href="http://www.stephaniespera.com/anpfallfoliage.html">the goal of my research</a> – requires a variety of data, including meteorological observations, park visitor surveys and knowledge of when fall foliage starts, peaks and ends every year.</p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cG3piHgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">As an environmental scientist</a>, one of the primary ways I study changes in vegetation phenology – that is, the timing of biological events like flowering, leaf out, or onset and duration of fall foliage – is through the use of satellite data. Every day, <a href="https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/">dozens of satellites</a> circle the Earth collecting data on everything from land cover to weather to sea surface temperatures to ground water to the chemical composition of the atmosphere. </p>
<p>These data are crucial in teasing apart environmental changes. Scientists have used satellite data of land cover and vegetation to show that as global temperatures increase, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2007.04.003">trees are flowering earlier</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JG001977">earlier</a>.</p>
<p>But like all technology, the farther back in time you go, the lower the quality of the data. Even worse, there isn’t any reliable satellite data over Acadia National Park before the year 2000 at all. So my team needs to get creative.</p>
<h2>Science behind the seasonal display</h2>
<p>Here’s what biologists do know. As summer turns to autumn, the days get shorter and colder, both of which are signals to trees to stop <a href="https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/autumn-foliage-color">photosynthesizing</a> and producing the chlorophyll that makes their leaves green. With green chlorophyll out of the picture, the orange and yellow carotenoid pigments in the leaves that are masked by all the chlorophyll production all summer have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2007.202">their moment to shine</a>.</p>
<p>In some trees, cooler weather cues the production of a chemical called anthocyanin, which helps trees pull the nutrients from their leaves into their trunk and roots. Anthocyanin is responsible for those gorgeous red and purple leaves on trees like red maples and <a href="https://www.americanforests.org/blog/science-behind-fall-foliage/">dogwoods</a>. </p>
<p>While every tree is different, studies have found that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.133">earlier spring bud burst</a>, warmer temperatures and a dry fall are linked to a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509991112">later fall foliage season</a>. A <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2017.12.259">shorter foliage season</a> can result from a hot summer and wet fall. Additionally, the concentration of nitrogen in the atmosphere – which humans are releasing into the atmosphere on faster time scales than nature does – affects just how red those <a href="https://academic.oup.com/treephys/article/23/5/325/1657937">gorgeous maples get</a>.</p>
<p>The northeastern U.S. has gotten <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101302">warmer</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-16-0195.1">wetter</a> over the last century. How have these climate changes affected the timing, vibrancy and duration of fall foliage in Acadia National Park? Have tourists, in turn, changed how and when they visit the park?</p>
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<h2>Looking in new places for old foliage records</h2>
<p>To answer this question, my team is using historical data on temperature and precipitation in Acadia National Park. What we’re missing, though, is information about when fall foliage has started and peaked, going back through the decades. </p>
<p>Most historical records of phenology, like those of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2008.10.038">Henry David Thoreau</a>, are focused on the spring season. Historical documentation of fall foliage is harder to come by.</p>
<p>My colleagues and I are mining National Park reports and old newspapers, like this article in the Oct. 12, 1893 Bar Harbor Times, which is local to Acadia National Park:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The autumn foliage on Mount Desert was never more brilliant than this year. The hills are ablaze with crimson and yellow, and the woodbine embowered cottages are resplendent with opalescent tints. But, alas ‘tis but the beetie glow in the consumptive’s cheek. A few weeks and winter’s white pail will cover all the autumn glories.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the records are few and far between.</p>
<p>We’ve found one continuous record of fall foliage since 1975, although it’s not focused on the Acadia area. <a href="https://pollyspancakeparlor.com/wp-content/uploads/Leaf-Chart-1-1.pdf">Polly’s Pancake Parlor</a> in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire has been collecting data on onset and peak of fall foliage since the mid-1970s. Interestingly, their data show that since 1975 fall foliage gets going earlier in the year, but peak fall foliage occurs later.</p>
<h2>Maybe you have the selfies we seek</h2>
<p>This lack of data is why we need citizen scientists to help us fill in the gaps. </p>
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<p>With apps and programs like <a href="https://www.usanpn.org/natures_notebook">Nature’s Notebook</a>, <a href="https://www.inaturalist.org/">iNaturalist</a>, <a href="https://budburst.org/">BudBurst</a> and <a href="https://ebird.org/home">eBird</a>, it’s never been easier for anyone to share their observations of the world around them. Scientists have recently been trawling social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and Instagram for data to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/srep02976">estimate park visitation rates</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2014.08.008">map monarch butterfly and snowy owl sightings</a> and understand the various ways people <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1614158113">value different landscapes</a>. </p>
<p>Collecting photos from people who’ve traveled to Acadia is helping us validate the satellite data we do have. My team is able to make sure what we see in the satellite images actually represents of what is happening on the ground in the park. We are so appreciative of all the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B3aO1trhMmg/">photos</a> we’ve received from people who have visited Acadia this year. And we have received a bunch, 907 to be exact, of submitted photos from the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B2EzlCLBtWX/">post-cellphone camera era</a>.</p>
<p>That doesn’t get us back to before the advent of continuous satellite data, though. We need leaf peepers to dig deeper into their personal photo albums to help us figure out the timing of fall foliage before the year 2000.</p>
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<p>Those earlier photos – from a time of yore when you actually had to remove film from a camera and take it to get developed – are proving much harder to come by. So far we have two data points from before 2010, one from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B2RdMktBGzW/">1987</a> and one from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B2ce1DTBECS/">1981</a>.</p>
<p>We’re <a href="http://www.stephaniespera.com/anpfallfoliage.html">asking for your help</a>. We know those awkward family photos of you or your parents in their 1970s bell bottoms standing in front of Acadia’s Jordan Pond exist. And we want them. If you have any old vacation photos taken in the park during the fall, scan them and <a href="mailto:anpfallfoliage@richmond.edu">send them our way</a>.</p>
<p>Understanding the relationships between climate change, fall foliage and park visitorship have important implications for park management, the local economies of towns on and around Mount Desert Island, and those of us who love visiting Acadia in the fall. So leaf peep – for science.</p>
<p>
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<header></header>
<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Stephanie Spera is a member of the American Association of Geographers. </a></p>
<footer>The association is a funding partner of The Conversation US.</footer>
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</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124978/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Spera receives funding for this project from from the Second Century Stewardship, a collaboration between the Schoodic Institute, National Park Service and the National Park Foundation.</span></em></p>
To untangle the relationship between climate change, fall foliage and national park visitors, researchers are asking tourists to check their old photo albums for snapshots that could hold valuable data.
Stephanie Spera, Assistant Professor of Climate Change & Remote Sensing, University of Richmond
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/114546
2019-06-24T12:46:39Z
2019-06-24T12:46:39Z
Identifying a fake picture online is harder than you might think
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270846/original/file-20190424-121258-i438l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=398%2C0%2C4713%2C2880&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">If you know how photo editing works, you might have a leg up at spotting fakes.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/professional-photographer-works-photo-editing-app-1213219357">Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It can be hard to tell whether a picture is real. Consider, as the participants in our recent research did, these two images and see whether you think neither, either or both of them has been doctored.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266589/original/file-20190329-70986-1paif5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Image A: Is it real?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona Kasra</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266590/original/file-20190329-70999-1h9frw0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Image B: What about this one?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona Kasra</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>You might have based your assessment of the images on the visual information alone, or perhaps factored in your evaluation of how reputable the source is, or the number of people who liked and shared the images.</p>
<p>My collaborators and <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0228-5404">I</a> recently studied <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1461444818799526">how people evaluate the credibility</a> of images that accompany online stories and what elements figure into that evaluation. We found that you’re far less likely to fall for fake images if you’re more experienced with the internet, digital photography and online media platforms – if you have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1461444818799526">what scholars call “digital media literacy.”</a></p>
<h2>Who is duped by fakes?</h2>
<p>Were you duped? Both of the images are fake.</p>
<p>We wanted to find out <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1461444818799526">how much each of several factors contributed</a> to the accuracy of people’s judgment about online images. We hypothesized that the trustworthiness of the original source might be an element, as might the credibility of any secondary source, such as people who shared or reposted it. We also anticipated that the viewer’s existing attitude about the depicted issue might influence them: If they disagreed with something about what the image showed, they might be more likely to deem it a fake and, conversely, more likely to believe it if they agreed with what they saw.</p>
<p>In addition, we wanted to see how much it mattered whether a person was familiar with the tools and techniques that allow people to manipulate images and generate fake ones. Those methods have <a href="https://theconversation.com/detecting-deepfake-videos-in-the-blink-of-an-eye-101072">advanced much more quickly</a> in recent years than technologies that can detect digital manipulation.</p>
<p>Until the <a href="https://theblog.adobe.com/spotting-image-manipulation-ai/">detectives catch up</a>, the risks and dangers remain high of ill-intentioned people using fake images to influence public opinion or cause emotional distress. Just last month, during the post-election unrest in Indonesia, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3011392/chinese-indonesians-jakarta-fear-attacks-community-anti-china">a man deliberately spread a fake image</a> on social media to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment among the public. </p>
<p>Our research was intended to gain insight on how people make decisions about the authenticity of these images online. </p>
<h2>Testing fake images</h2>
<p>For our study, we created six fake photos on a diverse set of topics, including domestic and international politics, scientific discovery, natural disaster and social issues. Then we created 28 mock-up compositions of how each of those photos might appear online, such as shared on Facebook or published on The New York Times website.</p>
<p>Each mock-up presented a fake image accompanied by a short textual description about its content and a few contextual cues and features such as the particular place it purportedly appeared, information on what its source was and whether anyone had reshared it – as well as how many likes or other interactions had happened.</p>
<p>All of the images and accompanying text and information were fabrications – including the two at the top of this article.</p>
<p>We used only fake images to avoid the possibility that any participants might have come across the original image before joining our study. Our research did not examine a related problem known as misattribution, where a real image is presented in an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/world/americas/migrant-caravan-fake-images-news.html">unrelated context or with false information</a>.</p>
<p>We recruited 3,476 participants from <a href="https://www.mturk.com/">Amazon Mechanical Turk</a>, all of whom were at least 18 and lived in the U.S.</p>
<p>Each research participant first answered a randomly ordered set of questions regarding their internet skills, digital imaging experience and attitude toward various sociopolitical issues. They were then presented with a randomly selected image mock-up on their desktop and instructed to look at the image carefully and rate its credibility.</p>
<h2>Context didn’t help</h2>
<p>We found that participants’ judgments of how credible the images were didn’t vary with the different contexts we put them in. When we put the picture showing a collapsed bridge in a Facebook post that only four people had shared, people judged it just as likely to be fake as when it appeared that image was part of an article on The New York Times website.</p>
<p>Instead, the main factors that determined whether a person could correctly perceive each image as a fake were their level of experience with the internet and digital photography. People who had a lot of familiarity with social media and digital imaging tools were more skeptical about the authenticity of the images and less likely to accept them at face value.</p>
<p>We also found out that people’s existing beliefs and opinions greatly influenced how they judged the credibility of images. For example, when a person disagreed with the premise of the photo presented to them, they were more likely to believe it was a fake. This finding is consistent with studies showing what is called “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12105">confirmation bias</a>,” or the tendency for people to believe a piece of new information is real or true <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/may/13/internet-confirmation-bias">if it matches up</a> with what they already think.</p>
<p>Confirmation bias could help explain why false information spreads so readily online – when people encounter something that affirms their views, they more readily share that information among their communities online.</p>
<p>Other research has shown that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2009.04.011">manipulated images can distort viewers’ memory</a> and even <a href="https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/02/study-familiarity-often-breeds-votes-for-the-next-president/">influence their decision-making</a>. So the harm that can be done by fake images is real and significant. Our findings suggest that to reduce the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121213-fake-pictures-make-real-memories">potential harm of fake images</a>, the most effective strategy is to offer more people experiences with online media and digital image editing – including by investing in education. Then they’ll know more about how to evaluate online images and be less likely to fall for a fake.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mona Kasra receives funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>
People fall for fake photos regardless of whether they seem to come from Facebook or The New York Times. What actually helps?
Mona Kasra, Assistant Professor of Digital Media Design, University of Virginia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/110131
2019-02-04T11:40:05Z
2019-02-04T11:40:05Z
The real problem with posting about your kids online
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255862/original/file-20190128-108367-1f84g22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=471%2C431%2C2897%2C1603&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Say cheese so I can show all my friends how cute you are – and unwittingly show corporations your age, race and gender!'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/mother-son-posing-selfie-on-white-1105410509?src=oEd5Q9nhIGnL07HSfbVI9w-2-34">Fancy Studio/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/01/03/my-daughter-asked-me-stop-writing-about-motherhood-heres-why-i-cant-do-that/">recent essay</a> published in The Washington Post, a mother explained her decision to continue writing essays and blog posts about her daughter even after the girl had protested. The woman said that while she felt bad, she was “not done exploring my motherhood in my writing.”</p>
<p>One commentor <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/01/mommy-blogging-christie-tate-generation-gap.html">criticized</a> parents like the essay’s author for having “turned their family’s daily dramas into content.” Another <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/things-you-should-not-post-on-social-media-children-influencers-mommy-bloggers">said</a> the woman’s essay surfaces a “nagging – and loaded – question among parents in the age of Instagram. … Are our present social media posts going to mortify our kids in the future?”</p>
<p>These questions are valid, and I’ve <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/baby-picture-posting-etiquette-parents-cant-control-their-childrens-digital-footprints.html">published research</a> about the need for parents to steward their children’s privacy online. I agree with critics who accuse the woman of being tone-deaf to her child’s concerns. </p>
<p>However, I believe the broader criticism of parents and their social media behavior is misplaced.</p>
<p>I’ve been studying this topic – sometimes called <a href="https://theconversation.com/too-much-information-more-than-80-of-children-have-an-online-presence-by-the-age-of-two-83251">“sharenting”</a> – <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9XBNcA8AAAAJ&hl=en">for six years</a>. Too often, public discourse pits parents against children. Parents, critics say, are being narcissistic by blogging about their kids and posting their photos on Facebook and Instagram; they’re willing to invade their child’s privacy in exchange for attention and likes from their friends. So the story goes. </p>
<p>But this parent-versus-child framing obscures a bigger problem: the economic logic of social media platforms that exploit users for profit.</p>
<h2>A natural impulse</h2>
<p>Despite the heated responses sharenting can evoke, it’s nothing new. For centuries, people have recorded daily minutiae in diaries and scrapbooks. Products like baby books explicitly invite parents to log information about their children. </p>
<p>Communication scholar Lee Humphreys sees the impulse parents feel to document and share information about their kids as a form of “<a href="http://blogs.cornell.edu/humphreys/the-qualified-self/">media accounting</a>.” Throughout their lives, people occupy many roles – child, spouse, parent, friend, colleague. Humphreys argues that one way to perform these roles is by documenting them. Looking back on these traces can help people shape a sense of self, construct a coherent life story and feel connected to others.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255868/original/file-20190128-108358-9gpw14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To share photographs of your kids is to be human.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pxhere.com/en/photo/908990">pxhere</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If you’ve ever thumbed through an old yearbook, a grandparent’s travel photos or a historical figure’s diary, you’ve looked at media accounts. Same if you’ve scrolled through a blog’s archives or your Facebook Timeline. Social media may be fairly new, but the act of recording everyday life is age-old.</p>
<p>Writing about family life online can <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67380/">help parents</a> express themselves creatively and connect with other parents. Media accounting can also help people make sense of their identities as a parent. Being a parent – and seeing yourself as a parent – involves talking and writing about your children. </p>
<h2>Surveillance capitalism enters the equation</h2>
<p>Framed this way, it becomes clear why telling parents to stop blogging or posting about their children online is a challenging proposition. Media accounting is central to people’s social lives, and it’s been happening for a long time.</p>
<p>But the fact that parents are doing it on blogs and social media does raise unique issues. Family album photos don’t transmit digital data and become visible only when you decide to show them to someone, whereas those Instagram pictures sit on servers owned by Facebook and are visible to anyone who scrolls through your profile.</p>
<p>Children’s opinions matter, and if a child vehemently opposes sharenting, parents could always consider using paper diaries or physical photo albums. Parents can take <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2017/05/17/sharenting-in-whose-interests/">other steps</a> to manage their children’s privacy, such as using a pseudonym for their child and giving their child veto power over content.</p>
<p>However, debates about privacy and sharenting often focus on a parent’s followers or friends seeing the content. They tend to ignore what corporations do with that data. Social media didn’t cause parents to engage in media accounting, but it has profoundly altered the terms by which they do so. </p>
<p>Unlike the diary entries, photo albums and home videos of yore, blog posts, Instagram photos and YouTube videos reside in platforms owned by corporations and can be made visible to far more people than most parents realize or expect.</p>
<p>The problem is less about parents and more about social media platforms. These platforms increasingly operate according to an economic logic that business scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook">surveillance capitalism</a>.” They produce goods and services designed to extract enormous amounts of data from individuals, mine that data for patterns, and use it to influence people’s behavior.</p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be this way. <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/qualified-self">In her book</a> on media accounting, Humphreys mentions that in its early days, Kodak exclusively developed its customers’ film. </p>
<p>“While Kodak processed millions of customer photos,” Humphreys writes, “they did not share that information with advertisers in exchange for access to their customers. … In other words, Kodak did not commodify its users.” </p>
<p>Social media platforms do just that. Sharenting tells them what your child looks like, when she was born, what she likes to do, when she hits her developmental milestones and more. These platforms pursue a business model predicated on knowing users – perhaps more deeply than they know themselves – and using that knowledge to their own ends. </p>
<p>Against this backdrop, the concern is less that parents talk about their kids online and more that the places where parents spend time online are owned by companies who want access to every corner of our lives.</p>
<p>In my view, that’s the privacy problem that needs fixing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110131/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Priya Kumar is affiliated with Ranking Digital Rights, a nonprofit research initiative that sets human rights standards for technology companies.</span></em></p>
Parents have engaged in forms of ‘sharenting’ for generations. The digital age has complicated things, but while critics make some valid points, they’re not seeing the forest for the trees.
Priya C. Kumar, PhD Candidate in Information Studies, University of Maryland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106121
2018-11-05T22:33:26Z
2018-11-05T22:33:26Z
Visual tropes of migration tell predictable but misleading stories
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244014/original/file-20181105-74769-ln7xmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A photograph by Oliver de Ros presents a different impression of the migrants at the Guatemalan border than the standard tropes published. Migrants bound for the U.S.-Mexico border wait on a bridge that stretches over the Suchiate River, connecting Guatemala and Mexico, Friday, Oct. 19, 2018. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Oliver de Ros)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The “caravan” of thousands of Central Americans currently travelling through Mexico has become a touch-point for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/world/americas/trump-immigrant-caravan.html?login=email&auth=login-email">U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric</a>. This group, made up primarily of Hondurans, but including people from other countries in the Northern Triangle, left San Pedro Sula on Oct. 13, 2018. </p>
<p>They are fleeing <a href="https://www.wola.org/analysis/fact-sheet-united-states-immigration-central-american-asylum-seekers/">abject poverty, violence, extortion and the threat of forced recruitment into international gangs</a>. People are travelling together because the company of others provides some protection from the usual dangers they would face as undocumented migrants in Mexico. On their own they would be <a href="https://www.wola.org/files/mxgt/report/">targeted both by criminal organizations, who are involved in kidnapping and human trafficking and by Mexican officials</a> who beat, rob and apprehend migrants, as well as collude with the cartels. </p>
<p>While the conditions themselves are not new, the heated political response makes the current situation more concerning than ever. </p>
<p>When mainstream news agencies report on Central American migration, they frequently use a series of visual tropes to turn complex issues into predictable narratives. Editors often select formulaic photographs from subscription news agencies to illustrate stories. Many of these borrow from <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1472586022000005053">religious iconography</a> or draw on stereotypes to portray the displaced. </p>
<p>The images shape readers’ understanding of stories, often <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/about-to-die-9780199752140?cc=ca&lang=en&">without their awareness</a>. In my research into representations of 21st-century global migration, I have identified a series of recurring tropes.</p>
<p>Here I concentrate on two images that media have used in coverage about the current “caravan” of Central American migrants: one; a group of people on the move and two; the disorderly crowd. This story discusses the implications of using these visual tropes and offers an alternative approach.</p>
<h2>‘Waves of foreigners’</h2>
<p>The popular motif of a group of people on the move is typically used to convey the scale of migration from Central America. Sometimes these stories are in sympathy with the plight of migrants, but often the images are used to express or agitate already existing anxiety about waves of foreigners. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243535/original/file-20181101-83641-1xt88b6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Central American migrants walking to the U.S. start their day departing Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, on Oct. 21, 2018. This image could seem like it shows people escaping persecution or it could suggest a foreign invasion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Moises Castillo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Moises Castillo’s photograph (right) we see a stream of bodies stretching as far as the eye can see. The people are represented as an anonymous mass, making it harder for viewers to identify with their plight. The figures spill off the edges of the frame suggesting an unceasing flow, an allusion to the exodus. While the image references the biblical story of a people escaping from persecution for a new life, it could be used to suggest a foreign invasion. </p>
<p>Whether you perceive the migrant caravan as deserving of aid or a threat to national security, this trope elicits polarized viewpoints. Although the same image may be used to support different ideologies (normally in different publications and with modified captions), a visual trope invariably simplifies a story by making it familiar.</p>
<h2>‘Disorderly crowd’</h2>
<p>The trope of the disorderly crowd is a common means of representing migrants as a threat. In Oliver de Ros’s photograph (below) of migrants attempting to cross the Guatemala-Mexico border, we see three men in the foreground climbing a fence, while a large crowd fills the street in the background. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243538/original/file-20181101-83657-1xww9at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this Oct. 19, 2018 photo, thousands of Honduran migrants rush across the border towards Mexico, in Tecun Uman, Guatemala. Migrants broke down the gates at the border crossing and began streaming toward a bridge into Mexico. Images of unruly young men play into age-old fears and tend to feed intolerance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Oliver de Ros)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Photographs of unruly young men call to mind age-old fears of “the Other.” In North America, <a href="https://theconversation.com/thugs-is-a-race-code-word-that-fuels-anti-black-racism-100312">there is a long, racist history of associating non-white men with violence and criminality</a>, and images of unrest tend to feed intolerance. They convey the idea that humans are merely bodies that need to be managed and function as a call to order. </p>
<p>The effect is to disconnect migrants from the problems that have caused their displacement and to conceal the political failures that have led to the crisis. Instead of picturing the dangers migrants face on their journey, they themselves are portrayed as a menace. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2018/nov/01/donald-trump-latest-election-video-racist-midterms">Trump would like you to believe</a> that people fleeing desperate circumstances in Central America represent a threat to the United States. <a href="https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/jongua">Research on immigration indicates otherwise</a>. By using tropes that maintain the status quo, the media avoids a more complicated story about how immigration policy results in violence perpetrated against migrants.</p>
<h2>Photographs can inspire change</h2>
<p>Photographs engage our emotions and have the power to inspire change, but each one can only convey a limited view of a complex reality. When we allow visual tropes to represent complicated situations, we misunderstand events, sometimes with dire consequences. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243830/original/file-20181105-83632-1vvbjto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Migrants bound for the U.S.-Mexico border wait on a bridge that stretches over the Suchiate River, connecting Guatemala and Mexico, in Tecun Uman, Guatemala, Friday, Oct. 19, 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Oliver de Ros)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another photograph by Oliver de Ros presents a different impression of the migrants at the Guatemala–Mexico border on the same day, Oct. 19th. In this image, women hold their children close as they wait to find out if they will be able to cross the bridge. A man at the centre of the photograph conveys his distress with a gesture as a child sits on his shoulders, clasping her small hands around his neck. Stuck in a crowd and unable to move on, the young men in the foreground look pensive and vulnerable. </p>
<p>This photograph resists a simple reading. Each person has a story about why they left their home and what they hope to achieve. The faces and gestures convey hardship and suffering, emphasizing the human cost of political failure. </p>
<p>When visual tropes are used to represent an event, they situate viewers as mere spectators to predictable narratives with foregone conclusions. Photographs have the potential to affect us deeply, and in some cases may have an impact on public perception and even policy decisions, but well-worn motifs do not inspire such a response. Instead, they shut down interpretation and turn viewers into passive observers who are less inclined to speak out.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106121/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Bassnett receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>
Photographs can influence us – they can inspire us to act and they can also impact the way we think about issues. The recent published photos about the migrant ‘caravan’ convey several stereotypes.
Sarah Bassnett, Associate Professor, Western University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/94591
2018-04-15T08:45:11Z
2018-04-15T08:45:11Z
Marginalised Namibians are trying to reclaim photography after colonialism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214271/original/file-20180411-543-x7bn9u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">This image, taken by a member of Namibia's San community, reveals a great deal about representation.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tertu Fernandu</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many people think of photography as the ultimate democratic mass medium. Anyone can take and upload a selfie to global platforms. Photos taken by ordinary people and shared on social media have contributed to political change, for example during the <a href="http://www.tjmholden.com/tjmholden.com/TJMH_Academic/University_Courses/Crisis_Communication_2012-2013/Crisis_Communication,_2012-2013/Readings_files/Khamis_Cyberactivism_updated.pdf">Egyptian revolution of 2011</a>.</p>
<p>But in much of Africa, photography has a dark past and a chequered present. Namibia, for instance, was the scene of a <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2018/03/addressing-genocide-namibia/">genocide between 1904 and 1908</a>. Up to 80% of the Herero ethnic group and large portions of other groups were wiped out by the German colonial military machine. Photography played a role in justifying these massacres and in what followed. </p>
<p>Namibia’s archives contain images of proud German troops standing to attention next to the hanged bodies of Herero prisoners. In the years that followed, colonial authorities tried to portray a gentler side of white rule. Images of black people fascinated by white technology – cameras, airplanes, cars – are not uncommon. The South African rulers who followed the Germans from 1915 to 1990 also used photography for propaganda purposes.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214272/original/file-20180411-560-q10wly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A German officer identified as Lieutenant von Durling with Herero captives in about 1905.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herero_Nama_Shark_Island_Death_Camp_Lieutenant_von_Durling_05.jpg">Wikicommons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even today, photography is misused in Namibia. During interviews I conducted for my recently submitted doctoral dissertation, indigenous San people described how, in various villages and on some development projects, the privilege of taking photographs of San people was traded for money and donations of food. </p>
<p>This reality threatens to limit how far photography can be emancipatory in the future. My research involved a number of Namibian organisations that have made photography part of their mission to empower marginalised people. I found that their work is often incredibly positive, challenging widely held Namibian social norms and portraying an urgent demand to be seen. But the devil is in the detail, and often that detail relates to ongoing patterns of privilege.</p>
<h2>Different ways of seeing</h2>
<p>The organisations I worked with seek to “take back” photography from its historical and present misuse. They aim to get marginalised Namibians involved in telling their own stories and documenting their own communities through photography.</p>
<p>I was embedded in some of these projects as an ethnographic researcher, along with some of my senior students from the <a href="http://www.nust.na">Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST)</a>. We were all relatively privileged Namibians and had to take this into account when trying to help people empower themselves through images making without centring our own experiences, especially when acting as teachers and experts.</p>
<p>The role of the teacher and the role of the expert are both traditionally imbued with a degree of power. Such ways of thinking about knowledge are problematic because they imply that for every expert, there is a non-expert who needs to be “given” information. This implies a powerful, involved expert on one hand and a passive receiver of knowledge on the other. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSSgXhajqQ">As I’ve explained in a TEDx talk related to the project</a>, this is a particularly pervasive danger when it comes to education concerning technology.</p>
<p>But <a href="http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=jmle">research shows</a> that people learn in a better and more empowering way when they are allowed to <em>construct</em> their own knowledge, and are the owners of a process that decides what knowledge is important and what is not. </p>
<p>Through my research, I was able to see what happens when traditional ways of thinking are put aside and power is given to students to photographically describe their own identity. The results can be interesting and unique. </p>
<p>One example was the involvement of members of Namibia’s San communities in photographic projects. San people are widely photographed. But their own pictures, which they take themselves, hardly ever show up in published or exhibited photographic work. </p>
<p>The main picture with this article was taken by Tertu Fernandu, one of the San members of a photographic project I work on. The woman in the picture, Kileni Fernando, is a member of one of Namibia’s San communities. She is active in several organisations that represent the San as a collective. </p>
<p>It’s interesting to note the advertising sign for a curio/tourist shop called “Bushman Art” behind her. Bushman is term imposed upon a variety of San ethnic groups by Westerners, and is sometimes seen as derogatory by the San themselves. Stylised representations of typical Namibian ancient rock paintings, as supposedly emblematic of San or “Bushman” culture, are visible as part of the sign and are also painted on the wall behind it. </p>
<p>In the difference between its subject and the background, then, the picture seems to suggest a disconnect between what San people were seen to be in the past and what they are now. It also shows the differences between representations of San people offered to foreign visitors and the characteristics of living Namibian San people in reality.</p>
<h2>Challenging power</h2>
<p>Some of the participants’ photographs also indicated the “in-between-ness” that many told me in interviews they felt regarding their national, regional, gendered, ethnic and other identities. They often used symbolism in photographs to illustrate these feelings.</p>
<p>This picture was taken though the window of a curio shop which sells artefacts supposedly representing Namibia, chiefly to tourists. A hand is seen in the reflection making the sign language symbol for Namibia. On the inside of the window a sculpture of a Himba woman and child wearing traditional dress can be seen, as well as what appear to be a necklace and a carved sculpture of an elephant. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213812/original/file-20180409-114076-rt6akl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Reflections and curios: an image taken by a photography student.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Emmency Nuukala</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The picture seems to suggest that there are many ways of being Namibian, and that the image presented to foreign visitors is only partially correct. It’s only part of the story.</p>
<p>These pictures seem to challenge, or at least question, societal power relationships in Namibia. My participants said in interviews that photography could be a challenge to power structures. They said it could, for example, show queer Namibians – who still face huge <a href="https://www.news24.com/Africa/News/namibias-gay-paraders-call-for-legal-protection-20170730">discrimination</a> – as ordinary people with hopes and desires like anyone else. It was seen as a way for “the youth” to talk to and about each other via social media.</p>
<h2>Photography in future</h2>
<p>It is to be hoped that Namibians interested in photography continue to engage with the photographic record and ask how they can make their practice more humane. </p>
<p>This is happening to some extent. Feminist organisations like the <a href="http://www.wlc-namibia.org/index.php/publications">Women’s Leadership Centre</a> have led the way in publishing books of women’s photography and writing. A number of young urban black women are producing challenging <a href="https://www.namibian.com.na/65420/read/Hildegard-Titus-Us-Now--Rousing-and-Relevant">photographic work</a> within the genre of “<a href="https://www.namibian.com.na/175058/archive-read/Mbewes-Afrofuturist-Village-Inclusive-and-Inspired">afrofuturism</a>”. However, more must be done to take this movement to rural areas.</p>
<p>In short, it is vitally important that marginalised Namibians are encouraged to take up cameras to document their lives – on their own terms.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hugh Ellis received funding for this project from the Namibia University of Science and Technology. He is a board member of the //Ana-Djeh San Trust, which represents the interests of San youth, especially students, in Namibia.</span></em></p>
Marginalised Namibians should be encouraged to take up cameras to document their lives – on their own terms.
Hugh Ellis, Lecturer: photojournalism and digital media, Namibia University of Science and Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/92140
2018-02-22T11:32:04Z
2018-02-22T11:32:04Z
When the media cover mass shootings, would depicting the carnage make a difference?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207323/original/file-20180221-132663-3glf2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C808%2C3964%2C2898&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some argue that news coverage of shootings is too sanitized.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/mysterious-room-case-illustration-167762573?src=KW_IO90InGl49oApHtsv9g-3-63">puriri/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since 20 children were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, we’ve seen <a href="https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174958974/when-to-release-difficult-images">public calls</a> for the release of crime scene photos – the idea being that the visceral horror evoked by images of young, brutalized bodies could spur some sort of action to combat the country’s gun violence epidemic. </p>
<p>The day after the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting, a <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/its-time-to-show-the-carnage-of-mass-shootings.html">Slate article</a> echoed the demand for crime scene photos to be released, arguing that if Americans could actually see the bloodshed, we might finally say, “Enough is enough.” </p>
<p>As a scholar who specializes in photojournalism ethics, I’ve thought extensively about how journalism can responsibly cover gun violence, balancing the <a href="https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp">moral imperatives</a> of seeking truth while minimizing harm. I’ve also studied how images can galvanize viewers. </p>
<p>Fundamental questions remain: What is the line between informing audiences and exploiting victims and their families? Should the media find a balance between shocking and shielding audiences? And when it comes to mass shootings – and gun violence more broadly – if outlets did include more bloody images, would it even make a difference? </p>
<h2>The limitations of a photo</h2>
<p>On the same day of the Parkland shooting, my research on <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002764218756921">news images of mass shootings was published</a>. Given the intense yet fleeting nature of media coverage, I wanted to examine how news outlets cover these crimes, specifically through the lens of visual reporting. </p>
<p>The study analyzed nearly 5,000 newspaper photos from three school shootings: Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Umpqua Community College. Of those images, only 5 percent could be characterized as graphic in nature. </p>
<p>Most depicted the shock and grief of survivors, family and friends. These elements certainly make up an important part of the story. Nonetheless, they create a narrative where, as the Slate article <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/its-time-to-show-the-carnage-of-mass-shootings.html">put it</a>, “mass shootings are bloodless.”</p>
<p>Does that matter?</p>
<p>Research has shown that when audiences feel <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1464884916663597?journalCode=joua">emotionally connected with news events</a>, they’re more likely to change their views or take action. Photographs of violence and bloodshed can certainly serve as a conduit for this emotional connection. Their realism resonates, and they’re able to create a visceral effect that can <a href="https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/4/2/127/1625411">arouse a range of emotions</a>: sorrow, disgust, shock, anger.</p>
<p>But the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-much-power-can-an-image-actually-wield-76069">power of images is limited</a>. After particularly shocking images appear, what we tend to see are <a href="https://qz.com/772819/aylan-kurdis-tragic-death-a-year-ago-didnt-stop-us-from-staying-numb-to-the-syrian-refugee-crisis/">short bursts of activism</a>. For example, in 2015, following the publication of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alan_Kurdi_lifeless_body.jpg">the harrowing image</a> of a drowned Syrian boy lying facedown in the sand, donations to the Red Cross <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/4/640">briefly spiked</a>. But within a week, they returned to their typical levels.</p>
<h2>The ethics of violent imagery</h2>
<p>If a graphic image can inspire some action – even it’s minimal and fleeting – do media outlets have an obligation to run more photos of mass shooting victims?</p>
<p>Perhaps. But other concerns need to be weighed. </p>
<p>For one, there are the victims’ families. Widely disseminated images of their massacred loved ones could no doubt add to their already unthinkable grief.</p>
<p>Moreover, we exist in a media landscape that <a href="https://theconversation.com/exposed-to-a-deluge-of-digital-photos-were-feeling-the-psychological-effects-of-image-overload-52562">overwhelms us with images</a>. Individual photographs become harder to remember, to the point that even graphic ones of bloodshed could fade into ubiquity.</p>
<p>Another concern is the presentation of these images. As media consumers, so much of what we see comes from manipulated, sensationalized and trivialized social media feeds. As a colleague and I <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-facebook-live-means-for-journalism-72233">wrote last year</a>, social media “begs us to become voyeurs” as opposed to informed news consumers. In a digital environment, these images could also be easily appropriated for any number purposes – from pornography to hoaxes – and spread across social media, to the point that their authenticity will be lost. </p>
<p>There’s another unintended consequence: <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/11/mass-shootings-body-counts-media-1/">Grisly images could inspire</a> another mass shooting. <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002764217730854">Research indicates</a> that news coverage of mass shootings – and in particular the attention given to body counts and the perpetrators themselves – can have a contagious effect on would-be mass killers.</p>
<p>Journalism has a responsibility to inform audiences, and sometimes a graphic image does that in a way that words can’t. </p>
<p>However this doesn’t mean that any and all gruesome images should be published. There are professional guidelines for deciding whether to publish these types of images – mainly, to consider <a href="https://www.poynter.org/news/advice-publishing-graphic-photos-iraq">the journalistic purpose</a> of publishing them and the “<a href="https://nppa.org/code-ethics">overriding and justifiable need to see</a>” them. </p>
<p>The extent to which graphic images should be present in our news media is an ongoing debate. And it’s one that must continue. </p>
<h2>A new image emerges</h2>
<p>Following mass shootings, there’s a <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/06/thirteen_stories_you_see_after_every_mass_shooting.html">predictable pattern of news media coverage</a>. There are the breaking news reports filled with speculation. Then details of the perpetrator emerge. Reporters and pundits question whether or not it was an act of terrorism. Elected officials respond with “thoughts and prayers,” and debates about mental health and gun control rage. Finally, there’s coverage of the vigils and funerals.</p>
<p>But this time, there’s something new: images of resistance. </p>
<p>Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are stepping up and demanding action from the country’s elected leaders.</p>
<p>In an <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html">impassioned speech</a>, senior Emma Gonzalez chastised lawmakers, stating, “We are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.”</p>
<p>This, in the end, may prove to be more effective than any images of bloodshed or grief. Fanning across the news outlets and social media networks, these images of resistance seem to be spurring action, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/19/17027250/march-protests-guns-florida-shooting">with school walkouts and nationwide protests</a> against gun violence in the works.</p>
<p>Illustrations of protest, courage and resilience – from high school students, no less – might have the power to sink in. </p>
<p>Perhaps it will be these images – not those of bloodied victims – that will stir people from complacency and move them to action.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92140/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole Smith Dahmen is a supporter of the advocacy organizations Mom's Demand Action and Sandy Hook Promise.</span></em></p>
According to a photojournalism expert, there can be a relationship between exposure to grisly images and activism. But there are also ethical considerations to be made.
Nicole Smith Dahmen, Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/80990
2017-07-14T15:28:27Z
2017-07-14T15:28:27Z
Research as art: revealing the creativity behind academic output
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178102/original/file-20170713-12241-1u0cjdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bioblocks, created for the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Research is the lifeblood of modern universities, but there are very few ways for those behind the academic output to show the real creativity and emotion that underpins it. The story of the research is lost – the many failures that led to the results, the often tortuous process, or the ecstatic highs of successes and the serendipitous path that changes the researcher’s career all fall by the wayside.</p>
<p>Researchers are creative by nature – and at Swansea University we wanted to give them the opportunity to communicate their work in a different way, as art. Our annual <a href="http://www.swansea.ac.uk/research/surf/art-competition/">Research as Art competition</a> gives researchers a platform to explore their creativity and convey the emotion and humanity in their research.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/swanseauniversity/sets/72157682788279123/">striking images entered into the competition</a> are the hook to draw the audience in, but the text is the researcher’s opportunity to engage with people. The most compelling submissions aren’t just an image that was lying on a lab hard drive for years, or a beautiful false-coloured electron microscopy image by which colour is added to an image so that researchers can see the different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are the submissions that describe the years of failure in the laboratory, the inspiration, and the way researchers question themselves daily.</p>
<p>Below are just a selection of the images from this year’s winners, accompanied by their own words.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Beauty in failure”, by Emmanuel Péan, PhD researcher, SPECIFIC</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178100/original/file-20170713-13222-cywwwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This photo, taken with an optical microscope, is the result of a <a href="https://www.ossila.com/pages/perovskites-and-perovskite-solar-cells-an-introduction">perovskite</a> [a type of mineral] sample that went wrong. </p>
<p>The resulting picture looks like meteors crashing onto a sun. Those “meteors” and their “tails” may have been formed by the presence of impurities on the sample. In contrast, the “sun” might have resulted from ethyl acetate not uniformly diffusing into the perovskite sublayer [the slice of mineral].</p>
<p>Scientific research is not always fruitful, however, it is when you make mistakes that you learn the most and have the most fun.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Data saves lives: how do feelings become numbers?”, by Ann John, professor of medicine</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178116/original/file-20170713-4670-1gsmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I work with big data to explore children and young people’s mental health, analysing millions of anonymised routinely collected health records in a secure environment.</p>
<p>In a public lecture I was asked “how do feelings become numbers?”. So in collaboration with artist Karen Ingham we worked with young people to use new technology differently, and explore feelings more directly. We asked them to create a 3D immersive version of their state of mind using a virtual reality <a href="http://www.techadvisor.co.uk/review/wearable-tech/htc-vive-review-2017-3635648/">VIVE headset</a> with a tilt brush. They could walk in, out and around these visual representations of feelings – a true mind-body approach.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Hiding in plain sight”, by Simon Robinson, research officer, computer science</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178097/original/file-20170713-32666-15u12iw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In nature, some animals can blend into their environments to avoid being eaten or to reduce their impact on the ecosystem around them.</p>
<p>Taking inspiration from these evolved systems, we investigate the notion of chameleon-like approaches for mobile interaction design. Our approach shows the value of the concept and motivates further research in materials and form factors that can provide more effective automatic plain-sight hiding.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Banality from familiarity”, by Elizabeth Evans, PhD researcher, engineering</strong></p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178096/original/file-20170713-9804-11ag949.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I wonder whether we researchers can become so close to our work that it becomes banal to us. Not boring or without merit, but something we have become so familiar with we forget that it’s original and unique work that no one else is doing.</p>
<p>Every day I analyse ancient volcanic ash using cutting edge x-ray microscopes, but it takes a third party to remind me how out of the ordinary such a career is.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Iron on the dress: redressing the story of Amy Dillwyn”, by Kirsti Bohata, professor of English literature and creative writing</strong></p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178095/original/file-20170713-13222-9b43ts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://www.swansea.ac.uk/riah/research-projects/thelifeandfictionofamydillwyn/">Amy Dillwyn</a> was one of the first British female industrialists. She has been painted as a woman whose bright future was dashed by the death of her fiancé when she was just 18. In reality, she was already in love with the woman who would dominate her life and fiction for the next 30 years. Her radical novels – some of the earliest lesbian fiction in print –- bend gender and reject romantic endings.</p>
<p>“The iron on the dress” was created by <a href="http://www.walesartsreview.org/a-i-r-mandy-lane/">sculptor Mandy Lane</a>, who poured molten iron over a century-old wedding dress. One observer remarked of the image: “It is like a crime scene, and it is a crime, the crime is the fact that we need to retell the story of this clearly influential woman”.</p>
<p>This research, and the artwork, is about uncovering and correcting the historical and literary record.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Mirror trees: programmable liquid metal spreading tree structures”,
by Timothy Neate, research officer, future interaction technology lab</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178094/original/file-20170713-9804-gk63px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We aim to create future mobile user interfaces which are highly changeable in both their visual and tactile appearance.</p>
<p>Our image shows the spreading effects when a voltage is applied across <a href="https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/eutectic-gallium-indium-egain-a-moldable-liquid-metal-for-electri">EGaIn</a> (an alloy of Gallium and Indium). Its surface tension is affected by the potential across the electrodes causing dramatic spreading effects. This means that the metal transitions from an almost perfect spheroid, to a great, flat, intricate branching tree structure. Modulating the voltage, then, can cause rapid oscillating effects to provide exciting visual and tactile feedback.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Aberration”, by Alexandros Alampounti, PhD researcher, physics</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178091/original/file-20170713-13222-1hdumqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In our lab, we are working with atoms cooled to a millionth above absolute zero. Atomic motion becomes so slow that you can interact with them with astonishing precision. To “talk” to the atoms we need some form of postman to deliver this information: we use an optical fiber -400 nanometres thick! We place the nanofiber close to the atoms and shine a laser through it.</p>
<p>Simply because the size of the fiber is smaller than the wavelength of light that passes through it, light “spills out” due to a quantum mechanical effect akin to quantum tunnelling. It is thanks to this “spillage” that light propagating through the fiber can interact with the atoms which are outside of it! In this image, you see this exact “spillage” from our optical nanofiber. The beautiful pattern arises from a slight misalignment of the camera lenses, known as spherical aberration.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“Bioblocks: building for nature”, by Ruth Callaway, SEACAMS research officer (industrial and business)</strong></p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178101/original/file-20170713-11780-1t9ivor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Swansea University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over 200 children used cubes of clay to sculpt ecologically attractive habitats for coastal creatures. These bioblocks demonstrate that human-made structures can support marine life, while children and their families have gained a better understanding of the unique resilience of sea creatures.</p>
<p>It is hoped that the diverse and complex habitat will enable more species to use this new material as a living space: crevices and holes will provide shelter; variable textures and overhangs will allow animals and seaweed to cling to the material.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80990/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Johnston receives funding from EPSRC and the Welsh European Funding Office. </span></em></p>
Research is not just about producing papers.
Richard Johnston, Associate Professor of Engineering, Swansea University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/77026
2017-05-03T16:01:27Z
2017-05-03T16:01:27Z
An artist’s lens on the wonders of the world brings science to life
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167476/original/file-20170502-17267-jbzpkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A baby Hawaiian bobtail squid, measuring just 1.5cm across, is pictured using photomacrography.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark R Smith/Macroscopic Solutions </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1665 <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/robert-hooke-9343172">Robert Hooke</a>, the English pioneer of microscopy, published a groundbreaking book called <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item107702.html">Micrographia</a>. It was filled with meticulous observations of plant cells and insects and demonstrated how Hooke appreciated the communicative power of the image.</p>
<p>Over the next two centuries microscopes kept advancing. As they did, scientists and artists often worked together to examine and reveal the living world’s inner complexities. The images that emerged were immensely valuable to advancing science. They also revealed the spectacle of life to a wider audience.</p>
<p>Then came the 19th century and the emergence of photography. It wasn’t long before the camera and the microscope were united to create the new discipline of microphotography. The artist’s interpretive role became less important. Technology placed the imaging solely in the hands of the scientist – which came with pitfalls. As the technology became more sophisticated and the science more complex, access to this knowledge became increasingly restricted to academic and scientific institutions.</p>
<p>Happily this is changing. Over the past 20 years digital technologies have arrived that are common to science, art and design practice. There’s been an explosion of remarkable high definition, full chroma images. These, coupled with the internet’s power to disseminate images and knowledge, have allowed ordinary people beyond academia and scientific laboratories to witness everything from the outermost extremes of our universe to the inner mechanisms of a human cell.</p>
<p>This is important: a better understanding of science among ordinary people validates the vast amounts of public funds spent on scientific research. It also underpins the benefits that feed directly back into society. </p>
<h2>Celebrating scientists’ images</h2>
<p>As people have once again come to understand the important way artistic practices can be used by scientists to create images and objects to captivate ordinary audiences, new initiatives have sprung up to encourage this. Some of these have encouraged scientists and artists to work together, to share knowledge and to create new ways of seeing and communicating</p>
<p>The Wellcome Images of Science Awards is one such initiative. It was launched in 1997 and aims to bring the work of science research to a wider audience. It’s also a way to inform people about the spectacular images that scientists and artists create, and to celebrate them. I am on the <a href="http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/about/judges/robert-kesseler/">panel of judges</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167500/original/file-20170502-17281-sdc89i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 3D model shows the vessels of a healthy mini pig eye.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter M Maloca, OCTlab at the University of Basel and Moorfields Eye Hospital, London; Christian Schwaller; Ruslan Hlushchuk, University of Bern; Sébastien Barré</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the past 20 years the award has reflected many sophisticated advances in biomedical science and how they’re visualised. The range of techniques increasingly sound like they’ve been lifted from a sci-fi novel: diffusion tensor tractography, Optical Coherence Tomography, thermal imaging. Part of the award’s role is to demystify these terms, getting scientists <a href="http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/">talking about</a> their work and methods.</p>
<p>Such explanations are, of course, important. The sheer beauty and complexity of a mouse’s retinal surface – created by Gabriel Luna using confocal microscopy – adds another dimension. But his technique doesn’t just produce beautiful images: confocal microscopy is hugely beneficial to patients because it’s non-invasive. It also enables a better understanding of eye disease and can be shared by researchers across multiple locations. </p>
<h2>Images offer new insights</h2>
<p>Images have always mattered in science. And new techniques echo the old: one of the <a href="http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2017/language-pathways-of-the-brain">entries</a> in this year’s awards, a model of the eye and of the 3D brain pathway by Stephanie J Forkel and Ahmad Bey, brings to mind scholars in Renaissance Italy who used wax anatomical models to reveal that body’s interior organs and vessels. </p>
<p>Understanding the brain with its infinite complex functions and by extension its misfunctions has long been the holy grail of science. The 3D model of a brain pathway is so mesmerising because it renders visible the very mechanism in our brain we are using to look at it. It’s a neurological portrait.</p>
<p>Data, too, can produce startling images. The work of Eric Clarke, Richard Arnett and Jane Burns is a graphical visualisation of data extracted from tweets containing the <a href="http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2017/breast-cancer-Twitter-connections">hashtag #breastcancer</a>. The result is a beautiful starburst of pointillist coloured nodes; a complex representation of convergent energies that creates an almost mandala-like effect. Here, too, there are echoes of past scientific images: this visualisation is reminiscent of the complex cosmological works of the 17th century physician <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/13/robert-fludd-and-his-images-of-the-divine/">Robert Fludd</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167501/original/file-20170502-17254-1ihjotl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Blood vessels of the African grey parrot, rendered in 3D.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scott Birch and Scott Echols</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Images are not always what they seem at first glance. The very subtle, aqueous hues of the <a href="http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2017/hawaiian-bobtail-squid">Hawaiian Bobtail Squid</a> by Mark R Smith appear almost like a watercolour and are particularly resonant of the aquatic environment in which the squid lives. Its mysterious form and striking patterns reflect our continued fascination with marine life. They also hark back to illustrations by the 19th century zoologist Ernst Haeckel in his celebrated book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Art-Forms-Nature-Prints-Haeckel/dp/3791319906">Art Forms of Nature</a>.</p>
<p>These fascinating images and others like them show how the study of life by scientists and artists always commands our attention. They also draw us in to share the sense of wonder and enquiry that drives their creators – and to understand why scientific research matters so much.</p>
<p><em>An exhibition featuring all the 2017 winners is running at the Unizulu Science Centre in Richards Bay, South Africa, from 22 May 2017 for the remainder of the year. This is being done in partnership with the <a href="http://www.africacentre.ac.za/">Africa Health Research Institute</a>. It’s one of <a href="http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/about/about-the-awards/">a series</a> of global exhibitions – and the only one on the African continent.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77026/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rob Kesseler receives funding from:
NESTA Fellow at Kew 2001 -04.
Year of Bio-diversity Fellow, Gulbenkian Science Institute Portugal. 2010
Wellcome Trust, judge for Images of Science Award.
Chair of Arts Design & Science, University of the Arts London</span></em></p>
A better understanding of science among ordinary people validates the vast amounts of public funds spent on scientific research.
Rob Kesseler, Chair of Arts, Design & Science, University of the Arts London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/70579
2016-12-26T21:55:06Z
2016-12-26T21:55:06Z
Think again before you post online those pics of your kids
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150627/original/image-20161218-26111-1whsamd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The photo of your child may look cute today but how will they feel when they're all grown up?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Michal Staniewski</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>You might think it’s cute to snap a photo of your toddler running around in a playground or having a temper tantrum, and then posting it on social media. But did you ever think it might be a mistake, or even illegal?</p>
<p>The French government earlier this year <a href="https://www.facebook.com/gendarmerienationale/posts/1046288785435316">warned parents</a> to stop posting images of their children on social media networks.</p>
<p>Under France’s rigorous privacy laws, parents could face penalties of up to a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 (A$64,500) if convicted of publicising intimate details of their children without their consent.</p>
<p>This new legality is powerful food for thought for parenting in the Facebook era. As adults, we often express dissatisfaction at the ways young people post their lives online. But if we turn the mirror on ourselves, do we as parents actually have the right to make our family photos public? If so, which ones? </p>
<h2>Sharing pictures</h2>
<p>Part of the issue is our tendency for over-sharing. A recent <a href="http://www.nominet.uk/todays-children-will-feature-in-almost-1000-online-photos-by-the-time-they-reach-age-five/">study</a> by Nominet, which handles the UK’s .uk domain name registry, found that parents post nearly 200 photos of their under fives online every year.</p>
<p>This means that a child will feature in around 1,000 online photos before their fifth birthday. We’ve even got to the point where if you don’t upload photos of our baby, others question whether you are a committed parent.</p>
<p>This new norm means that many children will have a powerful digital identity created by someone else. This process can be likened to the manufacturing of celebrity identities, where parents can potentially shape the public persona of their child in any way they want: child genius, disobedient, fashionista, fussy eater and so on. </p>
<p>How do you think your own mum or dad might shape your online identity? Do you think it would be an accurate portrayal of who you are?</p>
<p>There is also the issue of Likes and comments on those photos. Without realising it, are we choosing to upload posts about our kids that we hope will get the most audience attention? If so, how is this skewing the identity we are shaping for them? </p>
<h2>The web never forgets</h2>
<p>We often tell our kids that once something is on the internet it is there forever, and this is a core concern for kids. <a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/a0f093_3ca344c37a2a4271a32a8670eeec5abf.pdf">Research</a> shows that parents often haven’t considered the potential reach and the longevity of the digital information that they’re sharing about their child.</p>
<p>Your child won’t have much control over where that home video of her having an embarrassing first singing lesson ends up or who sees it.</p>
<p>And for this generation of kids, the publicising of their lives can start even before they are born when parents broadcast photos to all their friends and their friends’ friends of the antenatal scan.</p>
<p>Parents’ actions are generally not maliciously intended. In fact, they actually often see they are exposing something personal about their own life in such posts rather than that of their child.</p>
<p>There’s also benefit from such sharing. Posts about your child bed-wetting might help a friend find solutions, or boost their patience for dealing with a similar issue with their own child. Many parents find this community of support important.</p>
<p>Given the relative youth of social media, it’s hard to say exactly how growing up online could affect children’s privacy, safety and security. But social media has also been around long enough now (Facebook is now 14 years old) that it’s important to seriously consider the issue.</p>
<p>It’s time to question how individuals (both children and adults) should manage boundaries around sharing personal information, and how they can control information that is shared about them. </p>
<p>Posting embarrassing photos of others on Facebook without consent is definitely tricky territory, but what constitutes embarrassing is slightly different for everyone, which makes this new issue even more of a minefield.</p>
<h2>Get the kids involved</h2>
<p>The answer of how to approach this new-found issue might be to listen to what kids have to say about it. Recent <a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/a0f093_3ca344c37a2a4271a32a8670eeec5abf.pdf">research</a> from the University of Michigan asked children and parents to describe the rules they thought families should follow related to technology.</p>
<p>Adults tend to think of these rules around how much time kids spend on screen, but about three times more children than parents thought there should be rules about what parents share and don’t share on social media. Many kids said parents should not post anything about them on online without asking them.</p>
<p>Both children and parents considered positive images, events and news more appropriate to share than negative ones. An image of the child playing on the swings at the park is a lot less likely to resurface than a YouTube video of them having a tantrum because their breakfast is not in their favourite bowl.</p>
<p>If you’re a parent looking for advice or sympathy about a behavioural problem, then a community approach is still very helpful, just don’t post an image and your child’s name as part of the post. This will help to limit the searchability and reach of it.</p>
<p>Asking your children’s consent is also part of the issue and part of the solution. Asking if your child likes the photos of them and whether you can put it up online can be a very quick and respectful conversation. It also sets up a great approach to your kids understanding digital etiquette.</p>
<p>Parents sharing photos of their kids online isn’t only about digital identity. It’s also about our obsession with taking photos of our kids, particularly when they shine (or don’t shine) in their respective activities.</p>
<p>This can make kids feel pressured to perform to help mum and dad get the right snap to share. What the children really want to see is you taking notice of them and acknowledging that they and their actions are important.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70579/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanne Orlando does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Many parents love sharing photos of their children on social media. But they should stop and think about how it might affect their children, now and in the future.
Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Technology and Learning, Western Sydney University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/66356
2016-10-10T17:37:58Z
2016-10-10T17:37:58Z
Why is taking photographs banned in many museums and historic places?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140590/original/image-20161005-20132-i550ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Westminster Abbey doesn't want you to take any selfies.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jay Zagorsky</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Have you ever pulled out your camera or phone in a museum or historic place and suddenly found a staff person telling you “no photographs”?</p>
<p>I was in London recently and it happened repeatedly in places like <a href="http://www.westminster-abbey.org/visit-us/access-and-facilities">Westminster Abbey</a>, <a href="https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/visit/buckinghampalace/plan-your-visit/practical-information">Buckingham Palace</a> and <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/visiting/access/photography-filming-and-mobile-phone-use/">Parliament</a>. </p>
<p>The no-photos policy is not limited to just England but is a worldwide phenomenon. Visitors cannot take photos in places like the <a href="http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/z-Info/MV_Info_Consigli.html">Sistine Chapel</a> in Rome, the <a href="https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/plan-your-visit/house-rules">Van Gogh Museum</a> in Amsterdam or inside Thomas Jefferson’s <a href="https://www.monticello.org/site/visit/customs-courtesies">Monticello home</a>.</p>
<p>Some large art museums like New York’s <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/met-fifth-avenue">Metropolitan Museum of Art</a> and Boston’s <a href="http://www.mfa.org/visit/plan-your-visit/tips-visitors">Museum of Fine Arts</a> have <a href="http://hyperallergic.com/123203/one-of-new-yorks-most-conservative-museums-now-permits-photography/">changed their policies</a> and <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2013/05/13/photography-in-art-museums/">now allow photography</a> in parts of their permanent collections. However, they typically ban all photography in special exhibitions, which are often the main reason people are visiting.</p>
<p>What gives? </p>
<p>I decided to dig into the reasons – largely financial — that museums restrict photos. In the process, I became convinced that it’s time for museums to find creative ways to satisfy people’s desire to snap memories while keeping their collections funded.</p>
<h2>Why the ban is a problem</h2>
<p>Photography bans block our incredible desire to visually record our lives. A rough estimate of the flood of pictures being uploaded to the internet suggests we are <a href="http://www.popphoto.com/news/2013/05/how-many-photos-are-uploaded-to-internet-every-minute">taking</a> and <a href="http://www.popphoto.com/news/2013/05/how-many-photos-are-uploaded-to-internet-every-minute">sharing</a> about <a href="http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends">one trillion digital images</a> each year. Among the most popular images being uploaded are selfies taken in front of famous objects, places and monuments.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cnet.com/topics/phones/best-phones/camera/">Smartphones</a> and camera glasses are making documenting our lives easier than ever and encountering photo bans more frustrating. It is exasperating that many places that ban photography sell reproductions in their <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304403804579264612453735626">gift shops</a>. They also post brilliant high-resolution photographs on their websites of the very same artwork the public is not allowed to capture.</p>
<p>Talking to museum staff and examining <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2013/05/13/photography-in-art-museums/">articles</a>, <a href="mailto:%20https://www.flickr.com/groups/376527@N21/discuss/72157605576789238/">discussions</a>, <a href="http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/08/museum-photo-policies-should-be-as-open.html">blogs</a> and <a href="http://artfcity.com/2008/01/25/no-photo-a-discussion-on-museum-photography-policy/">debates</a> reveal five reasons for the ban – all of which <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo3684426.html">primarily boil down to money</a>.</p>
<h2>The five reasons</h2>
<p>First, camera flashes, which emit intense light, are believed to hurt paintings and the patina of delicate objects. Eliminating flashes, even inadvertent ones, keeps paintings in pristine shape and reduces expensive restoration costs. </p>
<p>However, <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0964777594900418">research by the Unversity of Cambridge’s Martin Evans</a> on <a href="http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/mhe1000/musphoto/flashphoto2.htm">assessing the harm done by flash photography</a> suggests “use of electronic flash by the public poses negligible danger to most museum exhibits.”</p>
<p>Second, eliminating cameras improves the visitor experience. Visitors who enjoy a museum are more likely to come back, join as members and recommend the museum to friends. It is hard to enjoy a painting when people are crowding in front posing for selfies using sticks, which occasionally hit both artwork and other patrons.</p>
<p>People stopping to take pictures also create bottlenecks and traffic jams. Ensuring more people can visit safely and have a good experience boosts revenue.</p>
<p>It also reduces a museum’s insurance costs since some <a href="http://petapixel.com/2012/11/22/clever-canon-commercial-shows-what-photogs-will-do-for-the-perfect-shot/">photographers go through incredible contortions</a>, like hanging off of balconies, to capture the right shot. Lowering the chance of injury makes a museum cheaper to run.</p>
<p>Third, preventing photography ensures the gift shop maintains a monopoly on selling images. If photography is not allowed inside the museum or historic place then the gift shop’s books, posters and postcards are the only legitimate source for high-quality images of a famous painting, statue or room.</p>
<p>Fourth, banning photographs is believed to boost security by preventing thieves or terrorists from visually capturing and pinpointing weaknesses in alarm systems and surveillance cameras. While there are relatively few <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/vangoghpaintings-recovered-by-italian-anti-mafia-police-1475228719">major art thefts</a>, those that occur are headline news.</p>
<p>However, one could argue that uploading digital photographs to the internet is more likely to boost museum security than to compromise it. The more often a picture or object is recognized, the harder it is to sell after being stolen. The widespread sharing of images online means picture taking should be encouraged to reduce theft, not banned.</p>
<p>The fifth reason cited is that taking photographs often violates copyright protections. Copyright is designed to protect authors, composers and artists. When enforced, it ensures the creators are paid anytime someone wants to “<a href="http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf">reproduce the work in copies</a>.” </p>
<p>Copyrights typically last for the artist’s <a href="http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf">life plus 70 years</a>. This means that the vast majority of museum collections of Renaissance artwork, Greek statues and Impressionistic paintings lost their copyright years ago.</p>
<p>Copyright is more of an issue for modern artwork, especially when the piece is loaned to a museum. Museums don’t own the copyright of loaned paintings or sculptures since it resides with the owner or the original artist. However, today it is relatively easy to check if an image is being sold on the internet or used for unauthorized commercial purposes to ensure the copyright holder is paid their due.</p>
<p>Personal photographs uploaded for private viewing do not harm artists. Boosting recognition of a painting or object photographs might even increase the actual value to copyright holders.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140602/original/image-20161005-20148-1uqfkh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The perils of taking selfies?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Thomas White/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What should be done?</h2>
<p>Museums and historic places often have collections that are worth millions. Some contain works of art that are so hard to value that people simply call them “priceless.” </p>
<p>These same institutions, however, <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo3684426.html">are often perpetually short on cash</a>. They constantly seek to boost <a href="http://businessmacroeconomics.com/">revenue</a> and cut costs. One method some places have used to achieve these goals is to ban photography of part or all of their collection. The ban is important because for the typical U.S. art museum, the <a href="https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Art%20Museums%20By%20The%20Numbers%202015.pdf">store is an even more important source of revenue</a> than admissions, classes, special exhibition fees and the cafe.</p>
<p>Museums that ban photography are fighting a losing battle since high-quality cameras are getting smaller and more wearable. <a href="http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/category/hidden+cameras/body+worn+cameras.do">Clothes</a> and glasses from companies like <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13039184/snapchat-spectacles-price-release-date-snap-inc">Snapchat</a> and <a href="https://www.cnet.com/au/news/google-glass-2-0-is-real-photos/">Google</a> mean tiny spy cameras are no longer in the realm of science fiction.</p>
<p>How can some museums generate more revenue and still satisfy our desire to take photographs? One simple model I first saw in the <a href="http://museum.gov.rw/index.php?id=85">Natural History Museum in Rwanda</a> is to charge a photography fee. Patrons can take as many pictures as they want as long as they pay upfront for the privilege.</p>
<p>Another interesting idea is the policy enacted at the <a href="http://www.newportmansions.org/">Newport Mansions</a>, which are summer homes built by the <a href="http://www.ushistory.org/us/36.asp">elite of the Gilded Age</a>. In the mansions, <a href="http://www.newportmansions.org/press/personal-photography">only smartphone cameras</a> are allowed. Larger cameras are banned in an attempt to prevent high-resolution pictures from being taken, which protects gift shop revenue. Unfortunately, with the rapidly improving resolution of smartphone cameras, this policy is only a stopgap.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/plan-your-visit#policies">Banning tripods</a>, which people trip over, and selfie sticks, which occasionally hit artwork and other patrons, makes sense. However completely banning photography in an age in which almost everyone has a camera in their phone no longer makes sense. It is time for museums and historic sites to develop more creative policies like a photography fee charged at entry.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66356/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
It’s easier than ever to visually record our lives thanks to the smartphone and now Snapchat glasses, but many museums and other places are fighting a losing and misguided battle against the trend.
Jay L. Zagorsky, Economist and Research Scientist, The Ohio State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.