Notes Archives
6,388 Posts
Culture Focus Photo September 14, 2015

Past the Reminders: The Life-Threatening NFL

We’re way past the point where an image like this simply serves as a reminder of the problem.

Continue Reading
9/11 Photo September 11, 2015

On 9/11: A New Ground Zero Photo. Five Kids on Bikes.

This remarkable photo, taken 9/12/01, is even more interesting appearing in a year wracked by racial protest and the emergence of #blacklivesmatter.

Continue Reading

Great Migration Photo from Hungary: Taking Flight

Seriously, this might be the most surreal photo of the great migration.

Continue Reading
International Focus Photo September 10, 2015

Simply Transcendent: Bar Palestine Balances Despair and Dignity in Gaza

The achievement here is how the group can take this mindlessly oppressive rubble world and reduce it to pure geometry.

Continue Reading
International Focus Photo September 9, 2015

Migrant Optics: Taking it to Hungary

For its story value, the photo might as well be a movie treatment — the migrant cast as its dramatic hero.

Continue Reading
Culture Focus Photo September 8, 2015

Colbert: Fit to Be Untied

What we're seeing in this photograph is the look of a person who's reached a tipping point.

Continue Reading

Climb Every Mountain, Ford Every Stream: Beyond the Humanitarian Response to the Great Migration

If humanitarian fervor and photos of the migrant crisis dominated last week like nothing else, this largely invisible image served cleverly, if silently, as a counterpoint.

Continue Reading
International Focus Photo September 4, 2015

The Crisis of Leadership

Perhaps what the crisis images ultimately highlight are the abject limits of our governing systems, our leaders and our humanity.

Continue Reading
Culture Focus Photo September 3, 2015

Christian Conservative “Counter Logic”: That Kim Davis Photo and God’s Law

This photograph of Kim Davis denying gay people equal treatment under the law by appealing to the dictates of her own conscience is a picture of the snake eating its own tail.

Continue Reading
Media Focus Photo September 2, 2015

On Obama in Alaska and the (Visitor) Showers at Auschwitz

My takeaway from the White House photographs of Obama’s trip to Alaska, and the photos of the outdoor misting stations at Auschwitz, is pretty similar

Continue Reading
International Focus Photo September 1, 2015

Why We Saw the Photo of the Israeli Solder Giving the Palestinian Boy a Headlock … Not Fighting a Girl

It’s not just man vs. child, especially female child, that exposes the state. It’s also the sense the otherwise omnipotent soldier might actually be over his head.

Continue Reading
International Focus Photo August 31, 2015

Conceptualizing the Migrants

What’s striking to me is how the news imagery of the world-wide migrant crisis is all over the map when it comes to representing these individuals.

Continue Reading
Campaign '16 Photo August 27, 2015

Greenwald on the Depiction of Trump and Ramos as Mirrors

The image seems to specifically key off Greenwald’s criticism of a WAPO article drawing an equivalence between Ramos and Trump as provocateurs.

Continue Reading
Media Focus Photo

The Virginia TV Murder and the Cincinnati Cop Video: The Larger Gesture

With eyes out for symbolism, that arrangement of the hand and fingers is as representative and fraught as any other in this country today.

Continue Reading
Disaster Focus Photo August 26, 2015

More Katrina in Retrospect: Blinded by the Light

The question we asked at the time, and we're asking still, is why the photos published inside the Superdome were so artful and distant?

Continue Reading
Visual Practices & Ethics Photo August 25, 2015

Since Katrina, What’s So Different? — Outside the Crawfish Shak

One thing that characterizes a good deal of these retrospectives is the sense that: that-was-then-and-this-is-now. What stands out to me is how much the racial schism then mirrors the racial schism today.

Continue Reading
Campaign '16 Photo August 24, 2015

On the TIME Trump – American Eagle Shoot … Beyond the Ha, Ha, Ha

If you get too (or completely) distracted by Trump, either through offendedness or amusement from the farce, you’re going to miss the deeper take-away here.

Continue Reading
International Focus Photo August 22, 2015

Newswire Pix: Were it Not for the Culture of Surveillance

I doubt this random newswire photo would have enjoyed the same kind of distribution were it not for the present-day security state.

Continue Reading