Category: Audio & Podcasts

In a Mother Jones piece, Ramenda Cyrus analyzes A1 coverage of last year’s George Floyd protests and contends that the media is still relying on old tropes to represent Black Americans. In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Allen and Sarah take a look at her arguments and the supporting voices of author Martin Berger and “Reading the Pictures” publisher Michael Shaw.

In 1976 while rummaging through an attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in search of old museum publications, editorial assistant Lorna Condon opened a drawer in a wooden cabinet. Inside, she found a number of flat leather cases which contained a series of daguerreotypes of partially and fully nude Black people. Names were handwritten on paper labels identifying 7 individuals: Alfred, Delia, Drama, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty with assumed ethnicities and occupations. The daguerreotypes represented some of the earliest known images of slaves in the U.S.

January 6, 2021, an infamous day in U.S. History when citizens overran the Capitol was also a day when photojournalists delivered incredible work under heavy duress. In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen review some of the exemplary work and discuss the outsized influence that social media had on the “performative” acts of many of the rioters.

A quarterly print publication of top notch photojournalism for $300 per year? Seasoned photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke believes there’s a market for it and has launched The Curious Society to prove his point.

The New York Times recently published their annual Year in Pictures, and Sarah and Allen discuss their favorite photos, the role of editing in making sense of the world, and what they missed.

Reuters is the first major wire service to publish a year-end “best of” photo gallery. The photos are an incredible collection of well-composed images that convey so many of the seminal moments of the year including COVID-19, protests, wildfires, and more – but the images are highly compressed and the presentation doesn’t do the photos justice.