Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now.
There’s an interesting societal shift happening here in photography. For counterpoint, compare this with Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic).
Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now.
There’s an interesting societal shift happening here in photography. For counterpoint, compare this with Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic).
Sheila Nevins has explored the human condition in the thousand or so documentaries she produced for HBO. From more than 30 years of telling us stories about ourselves, to her experience as a woman in the workplace, Sheila has plenty to say about communicating. And she never holds back. In this delightful episode, Alan Alda talks with Sheila about her life, how she feels about aging, the #MeToo movement, sex, divorce, documentaries, storytelling, and just about everything else! This episode is sponsored by Calm. Check out www.calm.com/alda for more details.
She makes an interesting point about humility that people with power (and especially within the entertainment industry) should be aware of and work to improve.
Most shocking was the story she tells about her me too moment and how she viewed it. Definitely a perspective I wouldn’t have expected.
Her perspective about looking at individuals as a way into human problems and making documentaries is similar to a philosophy I remember hearing from Masha Gessen in an interview that Jeffrey Goldberg did with her. The upshot is that, especially for righting wrongs and general atrocities, focusing a story on a particular individual has a lot more power than focusing on the nameless and faceless masses. Sheila’s example of the Holocaust survivor is a particular apt one. (As I think about it Masha would be a great interview for this podcast.)
In fact, I recently watched an immigration related documentary on Frontline and while I didn’t personally find the lead woman very relate-able or sympathetic, I was still pissed off at the process because her individual story was still so powerful.
This general ideal also reminds me of the gut-punch scene at the end of the film A Time To Kill (1996) [spoiler alert] which ends with the command to the jury “Now imagine she’s white.”
Photo colorist Marina Amaral leads the digital Faces of Auschwitz project.
Czesława Kwoka was born on August 15, 1928 in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in the Polish Zamość region that fell victim to Hitler’s Lebensraum (living space) – the ideological policy of territorial expansion into Eastern Europe. Czesława and her mother, Katarzyna, were Roman Catholics: a group reviled by the Nazi Party. The Nazis refused... Read More
Randi Zuckerberg says, "I don't think living in a sterile, stepford-like online community where we simply press the delete button on the ugly reality of how people feel is helpful."
What shapes the way we perceive the world around us? A lot of it has to do with invisible frames of reference that filter our experiences and determine how we feel. Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin interview a woman who gets a glimpse of what she's been missing all her life – and then loses it. And they talk to Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj about which frame of reference is better – his or his dad's.
I often think about frames of reference having grown up in poor, rural Appalachia and then living in affluent areas of Connecticut and later Los Angeles. I’m sure it’s had more of an effect on me than I could verbalize.
The closest I’ve come to having as significant a frame of reference change as the physician who realized she had Asperger syndrome (and how she came to know), was when I worked my way through David Christian’s Big History concept. In some sense I had some background in both science and history which helped, but I cannot possibly go back to seeing the world (and the Universe we live in) the same way again.
Incidentally, the fact that this treatment seemed so effective for this woman hopefully means that some really heavy and interesting research is continuing in these areas.
The final segment was interesting from the perspective of gradations in change of reference. I was blown down by the idea of the “skin lamp.” Just the phrase and it’s horrific meaning is enough to drastically change anyone’s frame of reference.