Tag Archives: readings

Women in Migration

Free download

Available to purchase, read or download here: https://openbookpublishers.com/product/840.

This book came out of conference in Florence, Italy that I was honored to be a part of. It is an incredible resource.

Introduction: Women and Migration[s]
Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano and Kalia Brooks Nelson

Part One: Imagining Family and Migration 11

  1. Between Self and Memory
    Ellyn Toscano
  2. Fragments of Memory: Writing the Migrant’s Story
    Anna Arabindan-Kesson
  3. A Congolese Woman’s Life in Europe: A Postcolonial Diptych of Migration
    Sandrine Colard
  4. Migrations
    Kathy Engel

Part Two: Mobility and Migration

  1. Carrying Memory
    Marianne Hirsch
  2. Making Through Motion
    Wangechi Mutu
  3. Strange Set of Circumstances: White Artistic Migration and Crazy Quilt
    Karen Finley
  4. Nora Holt: New Negro Composer and Jazz Age Goddess
    Cheryl A. Wall

Part Three: Understanding Pathways

  1. Silsila: Linking Bodies, Deserts, Water
    Sama Alshaibi
  2. My Baby Saved My Life: Migration and Motherhood in an American High School
    Jessica Ingram
  3. Visualizing Displacement Above The Fold
    Lorie Novak
  4. Unveiling Violence: Gender and Migration in the Discourse of Right-Wing Populism
    Debora Spini
  5. A Different Lens
    Maaza Mengiste
  6. Reinventing the Spaces Within: The Early Images of Artist Lalla Essaydi
    Isolde Brielmaier
  7. Swimming with E. C.
    Kellie Jones

Part Four: Reclaiming Our Time

  1. Kinship, the Middle Passage, and the Origins of Racial Slavery
    Jennifer L. Morgan
  2. Black Women’s Work: Resisting and Undoing Character Education and the ‘Good’ White Liberal Agenda
    Bettina L. Love
  3. Filipina Stories: Gabriela NY and Justice for Mary Jane Veloso
    Editha Mesina
  4. Women & Migrations: African Fashion’s Global Takeover
    Allana Finley
  5. What Would It Mean to Sing A Black Girl’s Song?: A Brief Statement on the Reality of Anti-Black Girl Terror
    Treva B. Lindsey

Part Five: Situated at the Edge

  1. Fredi’s Migration: Washington’s Forgotten War on Hollywood
    Pamela Newkirk
  2. Julia de Burgos: Cultural Crossing and Iconicity
    Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
  3. Sarah Parker Remond’s Black American Grand Tour
    Sirpa Salenius
  4. Making Latinx Art: Juana Valdes at the Crossroads of Latinx and Latin American Art
    Arlene Dávila
  5. Moving Mountains: Harriet Hosmer’s Nineteenth-Century Italian Migration to Become the First Professional Woman Sculptor
    Patricia Cronin

Part Six: Transit, Transiting, and Transition

  1. Urban Candy: Screens, Selfies and Imaginings
    Roshini Kempadoo
  2. Controlled Images and Cultural Reassembly: Material Black Girls Living in an Avatar World
    Joan Morgan
  3. Supershero Amrita Simla, Partitioned Once, Migrated Twice
    Sarah K. Khan
  4. Diaspora, Indigeneity, Queer Critique: Tracey Moffatt’s Aesthetics of Dwelling in Displacement
    Gayatri Gopinath
  5. The Performance of Doubles: The Transposition of Gender and Race in Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation
    Kalia Brooks Nelson

Part Seven: The World is Ours, Too

  1. The Roots of Black American Women’s Internationalism: Migrations of the Spirit and the Heart 
    Francille Rusan Wilson
  2. ‘The World is Ours, Too’: Millennial Women and the New Black Travel Movement
    Tiffany M. Gill
  3. Performing a Life: Mattie Allen McAdoo’s Odyssey from Ohio to South Africa, Australia and Beyond, 1890–1900
    Paulette Young
  4. ‘I Don’t Pay Those Borders No Mind At All’: Audley E. Moore (‘Queen Mother’ Moore) – Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist
    Sharon Harley
  5. Löis Mailou Jones in the World
    Cheryl Finley

Part Eight: Emotional Cartography: Tracing the Personal

  1. The Ones Who Leave… the Ones Who Are Left: Guyanese Migration Story
    Grace Aneiza Ali
  2. The Acton Photograph Archive: Between Representation and Re-Interpretation
    Alessandra Capodacqua
  3. Reconciliations at Sea: Reclaiming the Lusophone Archipelago in Mónica de Miranda’s Video Works
    M. Neelika Jayawardane
  4. Transnational Minor Literature: Cristina Ali Farah’s Somali Italian Stories
    Alessandra Di Maio
  5. Seizing Control of the Narrative
    Misan Sagay
  6. Migration as a Woman’s Right: Stories from Comparative and Transnational Slavery Histories in the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
    Gunja SenGupta
  7. The Sacred Migration of Sister Gertrude Morgan
    Imani Uzuri

Now that you have seen the table of contents, you will really want the free download

On Portraiture by Teju Cole

There’s Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More

By Teju Cole

Portraiture existed long before photography was invented. And for more than a dozen years after photography’s invention, it was practically impossible to make a photographic portrait: the required exposure times were too long. But the two eventually came together, and now their pairing seems so natural that it’s as though photography was invented for making portraits…. read more

Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth, around 1864.CreditFrom the American Antiquarian Society

Regarding the Pain of Trump

Regarding the Pain of Trump – Los Angeles Review of Books

by Rebecca Chace

A brilliant reflection on re-reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and the power and danger of images and need to be more than passive witnesses.

Images of suffering and atrocity now have unparalleled access to our most intimate spaces. Most of us keep that connection open in our pockets or in the palm of our hands….

We are vulnerable to images just as we are vulnerable to propaganda. Our visceral experience of violent and disturbing images has changed not only because of the unprecedented speed of their transmission but also because there is no longer any mediation between these images and the viewer. Media outlets used to edit what images were permissible to share with the public. Now, if we have access to the technology, we can share directly with each other in real time. There is true political power in the removal of the mediator, but as there is more to respond to, there is proportionally more emotional instability.

Read entire essay >

 

Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image

Lev Manovich: photos, bio, complete CV.

Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image

Instagram and Contemporary Image (2016) is a free new downloadable book by Lev Manovich.

The book methods combine traditional qualitative approaches of humanities and computational analysis of 16 millions of Instagram photos in 17 global cities carried out in Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com) since 2012.

The book chapters arebeing released online under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license. The chapters are posted online as they are completed. (Three chapters have already been published, and two more will be added during summer 2016.)

The Real Bias Built In at Facebook 

What you see on the social media giant is based on an algorithm. It’s anything but neutral.

The Real Bias Built In at Facebook – The New York Times

The first step forward is for Facebook, and anyone who uses algorithms in subjective decision making, to drop the pretense that they are neutral. Even Google, whose powerful ranking algorithm can decide the fate of companies, or politicians, by changing search results, defines its search algorithms as “computer programs that look for clues to give you back exactly what you want.”

But this is not just about what we want. What we are shown is shaped by these algorithms, which are shaped by what the companies want from us, and there is nothing neutral about that.

Makes me think of the witch in Snow White: “Magic mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest one of all?” Read full article for a good explanation how the algorithms on Facebook (and google) are controlling what we say while pretending to be neutral

Readings on Future of Photography

SOME GOOD READS

.
In the future, there will be no such thing as a “straight photograph”

The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming
TIME Lightbox
by Stephen Mayes

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> The Case for Never Banning a Photograph By Jordan G. Teicher

> What is 21st Century Photography by Daniel Rubinstein

> Meet the Artists who play with the rules of Documentary Photography by Laurence Butet-Roch

LAURA POITRAS and HITO STEYERL [together]

A conversation between two brilliant minds,  LAURA POITRAS and  HITO STEYERL, in the pages of Art Forum May 2015
 A few excerpts:

LP: The limits of my imagination are much less interesting than what I encounter going into the field and filming. So yes, it obviously changed the narrative. But part of vérité filmmaking, and documenting in the present tense as things unfold, is going where the story leads. It’s uncertain and scary at times, but that is why there is drama.

HS: What kind of storytelling can adapt to the technological novelty and also to the vastness of the database as an archive?

….how does the editor work in the twenty-first century? Especially if, as in your case, the editor is also the person with the movie camera and the Soundbeam and the encrypted hard drive; she is a writer who designs a whole infrastructure of communication.

HS on Editing:
… And I think that editing, not only in filmmaking but in a lot of different activities, is a crucial activity. Postproduction is not working on content in retrospect but creating the content. Editing is where the meaning is created.

Godard said an edit could be an “and” or an “or.” That is how traditional film or video editing works. But now editing, with newer media and with physical reality becoming mediatized to a large extent, becomes a much more expanded activity, being able to channel and process information and to put together meaning in a much more expanded field.

Now instead of expanded cinema, it’s expanded editing, expanded postproduction, and circulation across different platforms and formats. I think it’s one of the crucial lenses through which to analyze contemporary activities.

LP: I think in the art world, duration is often seen as transgressive because it’s somehow forcing the audience to go beyond their comfort level, to subject them to an endurance test. And yet duration is absolutely accepted within mainstream cinema. So duration is perceived very differently in those two domains. Warhol, of course, was the supreme example of really pushing that in beautiful ways.

[read entire article]

“Hito Steyerl” is on view at Artists Space, New York, through May 24. “Laura Poitras” will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Feb. 5–May 15, 2016.

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013more links:
Hito Steryl in e-flux and more articles in Art ForumLaura Poitrais Praxis Films

Lyndsey Addario

It’s what I do – new memoir by Photojournalist Lynsey Addario

Article in New York Times Sunday Book Review

Excerpt in NY Times magazine: “What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everything.”

Article and video at TIME light Box

“I would never think of myself as a role model,” says Lynsey Addario. The 41-year-old, twice-kidnapped, mother-of-one, award-winning photojournalist has released, this month, her first book: an autobiography of her life as a Connecticut-born photographer who has spent the last 15 years witnessing the true human cost of war, particularly for women across the world. [read more of the TIME piece and watch video]

The hook for the TIME article is  “Meet the Photographer Who Found How to Balance a Life of Love and War ” –  Although this inspired from the tag line of her memoir (exact wording: “A Photographer’s Life of Love and War” – would the focus on ‘Balance’ ever been used to describe a male photojournalist? Lyndsey Addario has published many brilliant statements on the gender bias in war journalism. (see this post in The NY Times Lens Blog.) Many more entries about her on the Lens blog as well.

Another good interview can be found on the Word and Film website: One Woman’s Wars: A Q&A with Photojournalist Lynsey Addario.

Needless to say, I will be buying and reading the book.

 

Robert Frank at 90

One of my clear memories of college is when Robert Heinecken loaned me his copy of The Americans. I took it home, sat down, looked at it page by page, amazed. It changed my understanding of the power of photography. I then got in my car and went to a bookstore to buy my own copy. Don’t think the intimacy of being introduced to someone’s work on the Internet is quite the same.  One of my most treasured books.

Robert Frank turned 90 on Sunday. So glad to have come across this article in the Guardian.
Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won’t look back

Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back | Art and design | The Guardian