I, Too, Am Harvard
photo series

Me Too Am

Note: This was originally posted on NJWV.

A photo campaign highlighting the faces and voices of black students at Harvard College. Our voices often go unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned—this project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are Harvard.

—I, Too, Am Harvard

I, Too, Am Harvard
I, Too, Am Harvard
I, Too, Am Harvard
I, Too, Am Harvard

Our project was inspired by the recent ‘I, too, am Harvard’ initiative. The Harvard project resonated with a sense of communal disaffection that students of colour at Oxford have with the University. The sharing of the Buzzfeed article ‘I, too, am Harvard’ on the online Oxford based race forum, ‘Skin Deep’ led to students quickly self organising a photoshoot within the same week. A message that was consistently reaffirmed throughout the day was that students in their daily encounters at Oxford are made to feel different and Othered from the Oxford community.

—I, Too, Am Oxford

I, Too, Am Oxford
I, Too, Am Oxford
I, Too, Am Oxford
I, Too, Am Oxford

We hope to offer the opportunity to build a stage on which men and women of color can be included in the atmosphere of this campus. Most of all, we want to continue the momentum pushed forth by other I Am movements across the nation and the world.

—I, Too, Am Princeton

I, Too, Am Princeton
I, Too, Am Princeton
I, Too, Am Princeton
I, Too, Am Princeton
I, Too, Am Princeton
I, Too, Am Princeton

So this has become a proper meme on college campuses now. I’ve also seen a Johns Hopkins version on Twitter. I’m sure there are others going on as well. Part of me is resistant to this type of “me too” project in that it risks becoming Yet-Another-I-Too-Am project—where the perceived lack of creativity makes it easier to dismiss the concerns the project raises.

Part of me though sees it as being absolutely necessary since an all-too-easy response to seeing I, Too, Am Harvard is to think “that would never happen here.” It’s very easy to dismiss these as someone else’s problem until one shows up on your campus or alma mater.

This assumes that people, say at Princeton, even saw the Harvard or Oxford projects. I’m totally okay with doing a me too project because you think your audience is ignorant of the other projects. A lot of the point of privilege is being completely unaware of this sort of thing until it gets held up in your face.

I also like looking at these as listing microaggressions rather than completely eggregious racism since it’s very easy for us to dismiss and distance ourselves from the obviously-racist stuff and very difficult for us to even be aware of how we’re all committing microaggressions. The more we’re aware of how these little comments hurt—even the intended-compliments about “good english”—and how we all use them, the better off we’ll all be.

And yes, I’m saying “we all” because I fully subscribe to the idea that we’re all a little bit racist and that acknowledging as much is the most-important  step to dealing with it.

About the form

The other thing about these projects that interests me is the form itself. This kind of portrait where the subject is holding a sign isn’t anything new. But it’s become an increasingly popular form on the web. I think a lot of this is because of how popular image macros have become; holding your own sign is a very easy way to make your own in-camera image macro.

It’s also representative of how much photography has become the medium of communication these days. It’s no longer text or images. It’s both. And fluency in both is what all the kids are doing now.

Marie Cosindas, Mrs Jack’s Floral, a dye transfer print of 1966
photographers

Marie Cosindas

Image
Marie Cosindas, Andy Warhol, NYC, 1966.
Marie Cosindas, Andy Warhol, NYC, 1966.

All of Cosindas’ portraits have, as Rohrbach says, a composition that demands the viewer study the image carefully. “They’re dark; they come from an earlier sensibility, where one was meant to look at prints over a long period of time and let these intimate images come to you up out of the darkness.” They also have a timeless feel, difficult to date to the 1960s.

(via The colour photography pioneer that time forgot – Telegraph)

A photographer I’d never heard of until reading this article. Considering how much the narrative is that we only started valuing color photography as art in the mid-1970s, it’s important to note that Cosindas was being exhibited a decade earlier.

The way Cosindas’s photos look like paintings and evoke the sense of classic portraiture is also perfectly timed on the heels of my post on erasure which thought about how photographic portraiture differs from painted portraits.

Ben Taub
photo series

War tourists

Journalists who cover war grow quickly accustomed to the strange assembly of characters who show up in border towns looking for a battle. In the past six months alone, Kilis has housed a French woman armed with boxes of antidepressants to hand out to refugees; a Japanese man who went to Aleppo several times a week just to do a bit of shooting; an Italian woman whose fixer claims she went searching for alien DNA on the front lines; numerous foreign jihadists; and amateur photographers whose blunders have created extremely dangerous circumstances for locals on the ground.

—War Tourists Flock to Syria’s Front Lines – The Daily Beast

Ben Taub
Ben Taub

Ben Taub is a senior here at Princeton. There’s a small show of his photos in the dorm where I ate brunch last Saturday. Part of me is very impressed at how he’s been able to go to Turkey and practice photojournalism . Part of me is wondering how responsible it is to send a college kid on this sort of project—and about the ethics of reporting on “War Tourism” when you’re a college kid who’s engaging in arguably similar behavior.

As for the photos themselves, they’re fine. Nothing iconic—but what are the odds of that happening? As photojournalism it’s really about the story—which is absent in the show and which got complicated when I looked Taub up online and got the rest of the story.

And this isn’t a knock on Taub as much as it’s just another reason for me to question most photojournalism and the way media companies frame the stories.

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
history

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe

Image
Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

cavetocanvas:

Édouard Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862 Things to think about when studying:

  • Why was this painting so offensive to the public?
  • What historical works does Manet draw inspiration from?
  • How does the lighting of the scene show influence from the beginnings of photography?

Cave to Canvas has done an AP Art History study guide the past couple years. I always keep an eye out for photography stuff because I’m curious how it fits in the canon* and how much it’s kept distinct from everything else. So imagine my happiness when I saw the last question for  Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.

*My reaction to last year’s study guide in many ways created my mission statement for Hairy Beast.

In this case, we’re looking at studio lighting with its unrealistic look and lack of shadow. That this piece was so scandalous at the time* in part because of the unrealistic photographic lighting lays out a lot of the battles photography has had to fight to be accepted as art—and a lot of the battles within photography itself.

*In many ways this is the first modern artwork in that it’s about the artist’s vision to do whatever the fuck he wants. As much as I’m a Duchamp fanboy, yeah, Manet was freaking people out a half century before Duchamp came on the scene.

Entire, Indivisible