BC CULTURE
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

How about a New Year's Eve thread about Gordon Parks & the photo world's deeply entrenched culture of white supremacy? Ok? Let's go.

 We celebrate Gordon Parks as one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century. Rightfully so. His photos were more than exquisite aesthetic objects. They also profoundly shaped the way that white people saw & understood poverty & race. BUT...
But we rarely talk about *why* Parks was able to achieve so much in the photo world.
The answer is simple & clear: He -- alone among Black photographers of his & earlier generations -- received the same kind of mentoring & opportunities that as promising white photographers.
During most of photography's history, the single most important predictor of mainstream professional success was the possession of a white skin.
It didn't matter how talented you were or how accomplished you were or how hard-working you were. If you weren't white, you didn't have a chance of entering the mainstream. The white photo world was just as commuted to white supremacy as the rest of American society.
When Parks began his photographic career, in the late '30s, there were no Black photographers on the staffs of white newspapers and magazines. Black freelancers had the door slammed in their faces. The same was true in fashion & commercial photography.
None of this stopped Black photographers from making pictures. Many achieved greatness working within the Black community as photojournalists, portrait photographers, & art photographers. You should know Thomas Askew, P.H. Polk, James Van Der Zee, Teenie Harris, & so many others.
Talent, skills, artistic vision were out there in abundance among Black photographers. But white photographers, editors, & curators maintained a culture of white supremacy. When you think about your white photo heroes & heroines, ask yourself what they were up to at the time.
Before Parks got his big break -- a Rosenwald fellowship that took him to the FSA in 1941 -- he couldn't imagine success in the white photo world. He imagined a future running a portrait studio in the Black community, working for the Black press, & perhaps teaching at a HBCU.
There were exceptions to the prevailing racism, & Parks always acknowledged the white men & women who opened doors for him -- Roy Stryker, at the FSA, Alexander Lieberman, at Vogue, Wilson Hicks & Sally Kirkland, at @LIFE. They helped to make his career possible.
All of these people saw Parks' astonishing potential & his fierce will to succeed. They gave him a chance and, in doing so, stood up to the pervasive racism of the photo world,
Parks came along at just the right time. In the years immediately after WWII, opportunities slowly opened to Black people, despite Jim Crow being the law or custom throughout the country. Parks was one of a number of "firsts" in business & the professions.
Call him the Jackie Robinson of photography.
A handful of other white people in the photo world also bucked the racism of the day. Edward Steichen, Eugene Smith, Harold Feinstein, the women & men of the Photo League. They were exceptions. (If you know of others, tell me what they did to fight racism in the profession.)
Parks himself long remained an exception. It might be overstating it to call him the Jackie Robinson of photography. Within ten years of Robinson breaking the color line, virtually all major league baseball teams had a Black player. Parks was still alone in the white photo world.
Even Parks's contemporary Roy DeCarava, the first Black photographer to receive a Guggenheim & the first to publish a photo book, saw his career languish from the mid-'50s until the '80s.
Racism hasn't disappeared from the photo world. Far from it. Understanding how deeply it's embedded in the culture of photography is one step toward rooting it out.
There's a lot of writing on this, of course. If you haven't reading everything that Deborah Willis has written, start there. Seriously, read it all. It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of her work on photo history.
Aperture's <@aperturefnd> Vision & Justice issue, brilliantly edited by @sarahelizalewis, is still available as a free pdf download: https://t.co/zl7Bn9LLBA
For a quick start, take a look at Siddhartha Mitter's extraordinary piece on the Kamoinge Workshop. Their story reflects everything that I've said in this thread, but approaches that history from a different angle. https://t.co/0PJa2jbVis

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Patrick Chovanec
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I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
CULTURE
lin\u2077 \U0001f43e
lin⁷ 🐾
@kooluvmini
jm watching as jk, part of the mafia, storms his house and jk being totally confused as to why the man looks so unbothered by it, standing at the top of the stairs with an unfazed expression.
+


and when jm approaches jk with a walk resembling the grace of an elegant snake, jk feels immediately bewitched by him, watching him come closer with his breath stuck in his throat, unable to move, the weapon in his hand slowly sliding out of his grip when jm pushes him down

by his shoulders to make him sit down on the couch behind him.
"w-who are you," jk can't help but stutter out with wide eyes.
to his bewilderment, the man doesn't move to sit next to him on the couch. feeling the pressure of the mysterious man's hands on his shoulder,

jk gasps as he straddles him instead, the man raising one hand to graze a finger over jk's sensitve neck, making jk shiver in surprise. jk wonders if the soft touch was only an illusion, because the seductive expression falls from the man's face from one second to the other,

and suddenly he's grasping jk's chin between two fingers to harshly tip his head up toward his, pushing their faces dangerously close. jk doesn't dare move a single muscle when he locks eyes with the most beautiful man he's ever seen, even forgetting to breathe. the man fixes him
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Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
1. Now that Stan Lee is being eulogized far and wide, it's important to remember how marginal Stan Lee and his collaborators (Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) were in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Marvel Comics (before that Atlas) was just a cog in the machine of a bottom pulp publisher run by Martin Goodman, the husband of one of Lee's cousins. It was the lowest of the low in the publishing world.

3. Now Mario Puzo (not yet the author of the Godfather) shared offices with Stan Lee in the 1950s and 1960s. Puzo wrote for garrish men's adventure magazines and, like Lee, dreamed of writing a novel & breaking out. But Puzo looked down on Lee.

4. Flo Steinberg, 1960s secretary at Marvel: "They were always making jokes about us. They'd come in and giggle. mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and say, 'Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.'"

5. When JFK was killed, the whole office of Magazine Management was stunned and quiet. Except Lee. He continued working. "He was still working on the comic books," Puzo said. "Like that was the most important thing in the world."
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Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
Pierre Boulle was born today in 1912, so what better time to look back at his sociological science-fiction classic that paved the way for Star Wars and the MCU.

This is the story of Planet Of The Apes!


Pierre Boulle is probably best known for his 1952 novel Bridge On The River Kwai, based on his wartime experiences in Indochina. So it was possibly a surprise when 11 years later he authored a science fiction novel.


However Boulle had been a Free French secret agent during the war. He was captured in 1943 by Vichy forces in Vietnam and sentenced to hard labour. This experience of capture would shape his novel La Planète Des Singes.


Published in 1963 La Planète Des Singes recieved good reviews. An English translation - entitled Monkey Planet - was issued the following year. It was a story that seemed to strike a chord with readers.


In the novel two rich travellers find a manuscript written by journalist Ulysse Mérou. It tells a fantastical tale: how he travelled with two wealthy explorers to Betelgeuse. They land on the planet Soror, a world of primitive humans ruled by advanced civilised apes.
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Rob Ford
Rob Ford
@robfordmancs
One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
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There this story was discussed.

In that gathering of such great sages, Rishi Jamdagni asked a question to all the eminent luminaries. He wanted to know which diety is the most revered and gets satisfied easily with our prayers. So Lomash rishi replied that Devi

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There lived a Brahmin named Devdutt in Kosal.

He was childless. He arranged for an elaborate yagya for a intelligent son to be born. He invited all the eminent rishi's to conduct this Yagya. Rishi Suhotra, Pael, Brahaspati Yagyavalka were assigned different tasks. Rishi Gobhil was asked to sing the Saamved.

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and the most common subclass of these problems is the one where you have 3 items/animals to cross with.
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