This week's uproar over Newsweek's Michele Bachmann cover reminded us of a piece we originally aired in 2008 about the ethical rules that govern journalistic portrait photography. As Bob puts it so eloquently in the piece "Where is the distinction between artistic prerogative and photo 'gotcha'? If a picture is worth a thousand words, who protects the subject - and the audience - from a thousand words manipulated or taken out of context?" Have a listen!

TRANSCRIPT:

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Every now and then, photojournalism gives rise to ethical questions. For instance, why was O.J.’s image digitally darkened on the cover of Time? Did tight shots of Saddam’s statue being toppled by Iraqis intentionally obscure the U.S. Marines’ role in the incident? Did newspapers whitewash the horror of war by suppressing images of corpses? Were famous photos from World War I and the Spanish Civil War actually reenactments?

There are clear rules that supposedly govern such situations, sometimes observed, sometimes not. But, as Bob reports, one category of mass media photography operates with hardly any rules at all. 

By the way, go to Onthemedia.org to find a slideshow of the photos discussed in this piece.

BOB GARFIELD: Jill Greenberg is a portrait photographer most famous for a series of pictures of toddlers crying their eyes out. She achieved these hilarious and heartbreaking Kodak moments by giving the kids lollipops, then grabbing the treats away. Okay, maybe it’s a little bit on the cruel side. On the other hand, the kids get over it in about a minute, and the pictures are fabulous. So suck on that one a while.

Meantime, know that Greenberg photographs grownups too, famous ones, on assignment for such publications as Wired, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide and all three major news magazines.

In September, she was asked by The Atlantic to do a cover portrait of John McCain. Now, it happens that Greenberg despises McCain, so after capturing the heroic poses Atlantic editors were seeking, she coaxed the presidential candidate toward a separate lighting setup where she posed him above a strobe. This gave her the shot she was looking for, one she posted on her website, a diabolical McCain awash in ghastly facial shadows.

Later, Greenberg bragged to the New York Post how easy it had been to trick him, like taking candy from a baby, you might say. Yet, she doesn't quite get why her Atlantic editors and many others flipped out.

JILL GREENBERG: I do the job that’s asked of me that day, and what I do beyond that is not really anyone’s business. You know, especially when this election was so crucial to me and my family, I just felt, you know, maybe coloring outside the lines this one time wouldn't be such a big deal.

BOB GARFIELD: Assuming she can locate any line in the first place. The McCain episode was merely the latest to raise ethics questions in portrait photography, chief among them being, are there any? Where is the distinction between artistic prerogative and photo “gotcha”? If a picture is worth a thousand words, who protects the subject - and the audience - from a thousand words manipulated or taken out of context?

The answers reside in the murk of art, journalistic comment, reader expectations and even basic human vanity. But the topic here is potentially corrupting influences, so let's begin with the most obvious, the profit motive. The cover of a magazine is the single biggest determinant of sales.

MARYANNE GOLON: It’s very much an advertisement for the publication.

BOB GARFIELD: MaryAnne Golon is former director of photography for Time Magazine.

MARYANNE GOLON: Once you’re choosing an image, you want the image to be arresting. You want it to stand out in all the media noise on a newsstand.

BOB GARFIELD: Obviously, newsstand appeal hinges mainly on the subject him- or herself, but that quick newsstand scan is critical. Hence the demand for such distinctive portraitists as Greenberg, Platon, Martin Schoeller, Annie Leibovitz and the late Richard Avedon.

MARTIN SCHOELLER: I think there has been a long tradition in portrait photography where photographers try to capture a person’s personality, rather than feeling obliged in trying to make them look good.

BOB GARFIELD: Photographer Martin Schoeller:

MARTIN SCHOELLER: The best example, I think, is Richard Avedon. I mean, you feel like he would take your picture and you would come across as mentally challenged. I don't think Avedon ever tried to please anyone but himself with his portraits.

BOB GARFIELD: Nor Schoeller himself. His ultratight portraits, which have appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, are typically grim mug shots, sort of Chuck Close meets your driver’s license photo. His Jack Nicholson could be a serial rapist, and his Barack Obama resembles Abraham Lincoln, homely wart and all. 

The shots are arty and arresting but not exactly flattering, although Schoeller takes issue with that characterization.

MARTIN SCHOELLER: I don't think my pictures are unflattering, to be honest. The light is very flattering. It’s not a wide-angle lens; they're not distorted. I just think that people are nowadays not used to seeing people as people anymore, and your perception of the environment is so twisted by all these pictures that you see in magazines and advertisements that if you see a person just for who they are, you are really shocked.

BOB GARFIELD: Are we indeed so conditioned to the unreal world of ads and celebrity photography that we, the audience, can't handle the truth? Certainly, magazine photography, at least where movie stars aren't involved, is not hagiography. It is not commissioned to flatter the subject. But whether you’re JFK sitting for Karsh of Ottawa or the family next door posing in sweaters at Olan Mills, no one wants to look mentally challenged or criminal, or demonic, or even unattractive.

So do portraitists and editors have any responsibility to their subjects’ basic vanity? Reporters certainly don't. If the reporting doesn't distort facts or context, nobody has a beef. Why should photography be held to a different standard?

PLATON: All I can do is to try and find a human quality -

BOB GARFIELD: This is the photographer, Platon.

PLATON: - and break through all of these plastic walls that are put up in front of me and my sitter, and all the time restrictions and all the pressure that they try to bombard me with to stop me finding perhaps my sense of what the truth is.

BOB GARFIELD: Platon shot the famous Esquire photo of Bill Clinton, cat-who-ate-the-canary grin on his face, hands on his knees and necktie, like the arrow of Eros, pointing to his notorious crotch. Platon has also famously crafted portraits of a menacing Barry Bonds, Karl Rove cowled in a sinister black aura and a sepulchral Vladimir Putin.

Platon believes it is loathsome to use digital or darkroom tricks to distort somebody’s likeness, but he’s cool with whatever actually happens at the shoot, such as his April, 2005 Ann Coulter photo on the cover of Time Magazine. The incendiary right-wing author was shot from almost floor level with a wide-angle lens, filling the foreground with her optically elongated legs. I can tell you, this is the one and only time I personally felt sympathy for Ann Coulter. She looked like a blonde praying mantis. Platon:

PLATON: She’s very tall, very, very slim, very skinny, and she’s got these massive long legs. I mean, sure, there is a distortion perhaps of perspective, but this is really how I see her. I was probably a few inches away from her toes when I was taking the picture, so for her to be slightly smiling at me and leaning forward, she knows what’s going on.

BOB GARFIELD: But did she know the effect of the wide lens?

PLATON: Well, I mean, look, everybody now in the business [LAUGHS] seems to know the way I see the world. I want to pull people out of their reality and into our reality.

BOB GARFIELD: Out of her reality, how he sees her, what his truth is. Is that a confession or a mission statement? Time’s MaryAnne Golon was on the set that day, and she thinks the latter. The crux of the matter, she believes, is artistic interpretation.

MARYANNE GOLON: I mean, if someone is a public figure and you subject them to any sort of representation – it could be a political cartoon, it could be an artist illustration, it could be a photographer – there’s going to be an interpretation of that person.

BOB GARFIELD: And for the very reason that people are vain and self-conscious, trying to define their own interpretation of themselves for the lens, they sometimes need to be nudged or prodded or even manipulated into revealing something of themselves, such as when Yousuf Karsh pulled the cigar from Winston Churchill’s mouth – like candy from a baby – and triggered portraiture’s most famous scowl.

MARYANNE GOLON: And should the photographer not have done that? I'd say, no, of course, the photographer should have yanked the cigar [LAUGHS] out of his mouth because it was a fantastic, reflective, important portrait of an important person, at an important time. And I would pretty much hold the same for Ann Coulter and the image Platon did.

BOB GARFIELD: Fair enough, although let the record reflect that after Platon pulled Coulter from her reality to his, Golon got a call from her own mother who thought Coulter looked like a spider.

In photography, this reality thing is hard to pin down. Each of a sitting’s dozens or hundreds of shots is a frozen two-dimensional representation of a living, moving, three-dimensional being, a laser-sliced instant, invisible in real time. It may be a reasonable likeness, it may express some aspect of mood or personality, but it is, by definition, out of context, altered by angle, lighting and optics. Platon:

PLATON: It’s such a strange artistic process that it’s very difficult to express in words. I mean, you could say that I'm a disturber or I'm a professional outsider, and I come in and try to disturb the status quo.

BOB GARFIELD: In purely artistic terms, such sentiments are unassailable, but if a magazine writer marched into a profile interview with the announced intention of cajoling from a subject a single word or phrase that would be the sole focus of the profile, well, that’s pretty much the definition of gotcha journalism. Is creating a disturbance ever a reasonable journalistic technique?

PLATON: To be quite honest, I'm often surprised that I'm allowed to carry on doing what I do every day. But I haven't been stopped yet, and I'm still waiting to be sent out of the country for bad photographic behavior.

BOB GARFIELD: Not likely. Platon is prized by editors, for the same reason he is shocking to readers. He plays havoc with our expectations, expectations so obsessively reinforced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue that we've all been, in Platon’s words, “sedated with perfection.” 

You may recall Schoeller saying much the same. In magazine photography circles, this is a steady refrain. Here’s Maer Roshan, founder and editor-in-chief of the recently-defunct Radar Magazine.

MAER ROSHAN: You look at any Hollywood celebrity, half of your time is spent wrangling over what they will wear. Some of them demand final photo approval. They demand certain photographers. Hollywood celebrities have a lot of power over how they're depicted in magazine covers.

BOB GARFIELD: A New York Times piece last weekend described, for instance, Angelina Jolie’s demands not only for photo approval from People Magazine but also promises about reportage in exchange for baby pictures. 

For self-respecting photographers and editors, that stuff is frustrating and humiliating. And one after another, they describe the impulse to assert independence. It comes up [LAUGHS] so often, you have to wonder, when a subject without the leverage to call the shots gets stung, is that entirely independence or also backlash?

Consider Radar’s September cover piece, titled What’s So Scary About Michelle Obama? Plucked to illustrate it, from the rolls and rolls of shots of a smiling future First Lady, was one moment when she stared blankly at the camera, her arms folded across her chest – the angry black woman, herself.

Now, the story was precisely about confronting that stereotype, so the cover photo could be justified on pertinence alone. But Obama felt hoodwinked, a fate Angelina Jolie need not fear. Is that fair? 

Well, maybe it is. One argument goes that a photo subject, by agreeing to the shoot, assumes all risks. Jill Greenberg:

JILL GREENBERG: You know, maybe Ann Coulter doesn't have a publicist from a great agency that is good at protecting her. But when somebody signs up for a cover photo shoot, they're doing it for their own best interest; they're doing it for their own P.R. And, you know, you have to be careful. You don't know what the story’s going to be. I mean -

BOB GARFIELD: Caveat emptor.

JILL GREENBERG: Exactly. It’s a gamble.

BOB GARFIELD: Wow. Media roulette. You pays your money and you takes your chances. Moreover, Greenberg says, the wheel is sometimes rigged.

JILL GREENBERG: I've been assigned by magazine editors to make people look bad. You know, I've been assigned to trick my subject by magazine editors. It’s just really strange. I mean, people just don't actually know the way things are.

BOB GARFIELD: Greenberg declined to provide details or to name names, so let's just hope premeditated photo hatchet jobs are rare. But if they aren't, how could we be surprised? When it comes to ethics or canons of conduct, the lines, if they even exist, are maddeningly out of focus.

JILL GREENBERG: I went to art school, so I don't know what those canons and ethics are.

BOB GARFIELD: Nor is she, by any means, alone. I asked Martin Schoeller - is there a standard of basic fairness, for example?

MARTIN SCHOELLER: I think this varies greatly from photographer to photographer. Yeah. No, I guess no [LAUGHS] is the answer.

BOB GARFIELD: No. Schoeller hasn't gotten the memo, Greenberg hasn't gotten the memo, because the memo has yet to be written. High time, I'd say, not because these issues are black and white, but because they obviously aren't.

This week a man was shoved off a New York subway platform and killed by an oncoming train. A freelance photographer on assignment for the New York Post happened to be on the platform, camera in hand. He shot the scene, and the Post printed a photo of the man’s last moment before being struck by a train on the front page. Brooke talks to New York Times media columnist David Carr about the resulting controversy around the photo.

Since Obama announced Osama Bin Laden's death last Sunday, reporters have besieged the White House for more information on the operation's details, including photos of the corpse. The administration mulled whether to release the photos, ultimately deciding not to. The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch and The American Prospect's Paul Waldman debate the decision.

This week, a photo of a drowned Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi, shocked the world. The three-year-old's body washed ashore in Turkey, after the boat his family was on capsized on the way to the Greek island of Kos. Brooke discusses why she thinks the image should be seen -- and what it means that it has been so widely shared.

SONG: "Night Thoughts" - John Zorn

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the U.S. War Relocation Authority made a decision it would soon regret. It hired famed photographer Dorothea Lange to take pictures as 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were removed from their homes on the West Coast and interned at remote military-style camps throughout the interior.

The agency had hoped Lange's photos would depict the process as orderly and humane.

But the hundreds of photos that Lange turned over did the opposite. She considered internment a grave injustice, and her photos depict it that way. She captured the confused and chaotic scenes of Japanese-Americans crowding onto buses and trains, the stressed and confused looks on their faces, their shuttered businesses, the threadbare barracks that would become their homes for months or years.

Instead of allowing Lange to publish her photos, the government seized them.

Now, some of them are on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, through Feb. 21. They are part of an exhibit that tells the story of Japanese internment through the pictures of three photographers: Lange; the equally renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams, whose photos from California's Manzanar internment camp anchor the exhibit; and Toyo Miyatake, a Japanese-American photographer who was interned at Manzanar but smuggled in a camera.

The stories that photos tell depend so much on who's snapping the shutter, and Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams illustrates that in dramatic fashion. Each photographer offers a vastly different perspective on what Japanese internment was like, their photos reflecting differences not only in style, but in the relationship each photographer had to this shameful chapter of U.S. history.

Dorothea Lange

The photo below, showing a Japanese woman recently arrived at her living quarters, was among the hundreds of Lange's photos that were seized by government censors. On this original proof, the word "Impounded" is handwritten in the lower margin.

This next photo is of a converted racetrack in San Bruno, Calif., where Japanese-American families were temporarily housed in horse stalls while they awaited transport to camps.

Lange's photo of the Manzanar internment camp during a dust storm highlights the camp's remote desert location.

Ansel Adams

Adams visited Manzanar to take photos in 1943 at the request of camp director Ralph Merritt, who was a personal friend.

"They don't look quite as dusty and quite as forbidding as Dorothea Lange's photos," Robert Kirschner, the Skirball's director, told me as we walked through the exhibit recently.

Indeed, the place that looks barren and depressing in Lange's pictures manages to look beautiful in Adams'. You get little sense that it was even a detention center, in part because Adams, like other photographers, was not allowed to shoot the guard towers or barbed wire. This photo, though, was taken from a guard tower:

There are scenes from a baseball game, kids walking to school, a gathering outside a chapel. Lots of smiles, too, and portraits of camp residents cropped so close, you can see every blemish and stray hair. In Adams' vision, Manzanar comes off as a place where Japanese-Americans, dignified, resilient and optimistic in spite of their circumstances, built a temporary community in the desert.

Kirschner said that if Adams' photos appear to sugarcoat the indignities of life in an internment camp, it is because he did not see himself as a social activist the way Lange did. Still, Kirscher says, Adams was challenging internment in his own way, by depicting its victims as patriotic, law-abiding Americans.

Unlike Lange, Adams was given permission to publish his photos. Before the war ended, he did so in a book called Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans, in which he warned about the dangers of letting wartime hysteria justify depriving U.S. citizens of their freedom.

Toyo Miyatake

Before World War II, Miyatake had a photo studio in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. When he learned he would be interned at Manzanar, he asked a carpenter to build him a wooden box with a hole carved out at one end to accommodate a lens. He turned this box into a makeshift camera that he snuck around the camp, as his grandson Alan Miyatake explains in the video below, which is featured in the exhibit.

Fearful of being discovered, Miyatake at first only took pictures at dusk or dawn, usually without people in them. Camp director Merritt eventually caught Miyatake, but instead of punishing him, allowed him to take pictures openly. Miyatake later became the camp's official photographer.

His photos, some of which are featured in the video above, convey an intimacy with camp life absent in the pictures that Adams and Lange took. He captured laughter at a picnic and men delivering vegetables to the mess hall (at 4:21 in the video).

His photos also had moments of silent protest. In one picture (5:03) three boys peer through the camp's barbed wire fence to the outside world. And in another, Miyatake's son, Archie, holds a pair of clippers against the fence, "to show," Kirschner said, "that at some point, the barbed wire has to come down."

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An image of man passing a baby under a fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border has taken top honors at this year's World Press Photo of the Year.

The photo, titled "Hope for a New Life," was taken by Australian photographer Warren Richardson and shows a man with his eyes set on the horizon, passing the infant under coils of razor-wire into outstretched arms in the moonlight.

Richardson took the photo in late August in Röszke, Hungary, which is on the border with Serbia. Hungarian police have routinely cracked down on the massive flow of migrants fleeing from Syria, Iraq and other countries.

"It had such power because of its simplicity, especially the symbolism of the barbed wire," general jury chair and Agence France-Press photo director Francis Kohn said in a press release from World Press Photo.

"It's subtle, and shows the emotion and the real feeling from the deep heart of a father just trying to hand over his baby to the world he was longing to be in," adds jury member and director of new media development at Xinhua News Agency Huang Wen.

Richardson describes the experience of covering border crossings in this area over the course of five days on his website: "There were men, women and children, amputees, the sick, all with stories to tell about where they had come from and where they wanted to go."

One night stood out, he says. "There was a group of Syrians hiding amongst the apple trees on the Serbian side of the border with Hungary, their challenge was to put as many people under the newly constructed razor wire fence. In the group there were some ten engineers that had taken a good look at the fence to see where they could cross so that they could get as many of their friends and family members into Hungary."

Here's more of Richardson's account:

"Like a finely tuned machine, they played cat and mouse with the Hungarian police. The police would come and go from near where the Syrian group was hiding. Each time the police showed up, they would try to fix the fence so that people would not go under. But each time the police would leave, the Syrian engineers would make another hole so that they could help as many people as possible get under the fence. The police continually returned to the same spot, but this time they were a little more verbal and angry. The police attempted to fix the new holes that the Syrian engineers had made. The police were yelling into the darkness in broken English, 'do not come illegally into Hungary, go away we do not want you here, if we catch you, you will be arrested.' They proceeded to spray pepper everywhere to prevent anyone from using this particular spot. Again the police moved on to check other areas they were having problems with. Once again the Syrian engineers, with tears in their eyes from the pepper spray, created another hole in the fence to allow more people to move forward into Hungary to get to Germany, as this is where they desperately wanted to be. Four hours on from when they started, they had helped more than 200 people go under the razor wire fence. Once everyone had passed under the fence, the Syrian engineers said their last good byes to me, and left as they were the last ones to go into the darkness of the night."

It's not clear if the man depicted in this photo was among this particular group of engineers. But it gives a sense of the atmosphere where this photo was taken.

In a press release from World Press Photo, Richardson says the photo was taken by moonlight, because a flash would give away their location to the police.

Richardson, who is currently based in Eastern Europe, says on his website that his next project will involve walking to the Arctic Circle.

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Of all of the arts, photography may be the discipline most accustomed to the nudge of technology, and photographer and artist Stephen Wilkes fully embraces the challenge. His latest project, "Day to Night," takes on the idea of showcasing, in one composite still image, the transformation of a place over the course of a day.

Take his photo of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. For 26 hours, Wilkes shot 2,200 photos without moving the camera and while suspended in the air in a tent-like structure with a little window, so that animals wouldn't see or hear him as he photographed them coming to a watering hole from sunrise to deep into the night.

"I photograph by hand; this is not a time lapse. ... It's my eye seeing very specific moments," Wilkes says. "I like to describe myself as a collector of magical moments."

Once Wilkes has all the images, he picks the best moments of the day and the night and creates what he calls a master plate. Those images then get seamlessly blended into one single photograph, where time is on a diagonal vector, with sunrise beginning in the bottom right-hand corner. That process of creating a single image can take about four months — though it's photographed in a single day.

I spoke with Wilkes in Vancouver, ahead of his TED talk, about the powers of digital photography, the experience of looking in the face of time and the challenge of sharing emotion through an image. Below are some of the highlights of our conversation.

Interview Highlights

On watching animal life unfold during the Serengeti shoot

I'm changing time within the picture. As the sun is rotating, light is changing and all these animals, you can see time change on the light in the animals. It's all based on time. ... (At) sunrise you begin to see the watering hole is quiet and the animals migrate in as the sun rises. Wildebeests and zebras graze together; one has terrible eyes and the other has lousy hearing — the blind leading the deaf. There are meerkats. It was like watching the movie Jungle Book. As time is changing, you see the sun getting higher, you see the light begins to rotate and starts to go behind the animals. I'm watching them. Guess who else is watching them? A lion.

They have this whole process of coming in and going out, it's a rhythm. I'm telling the story based on time. It's such a complicated process and yet there's so much luck involved.

On evolving as a photographer

I discovered digital in 2000 and started to realize, because I had to come through the process of analog...I wanted to push the medium outward. So what I've been exploring is this concept of day-to-night, where I change time within a photograph. I'm really exploring the space-time continuum within a two-dimensional photograph. And it's really cool because I can tell stories that photographs could never tell before. Compressing an entire day into a single image, the best moments, allows me to share things on a narrative level that you just couldn't see.

On the power of seeing the face of time

The most exciting part of it really is how people respond to the work. It's an amazing, emotional thing. When people can see time, the face of time in a way, it's this thing we can never put our hands around. But yet, when you look at it, it makes you feel a different way and there's an emotional thing that happens and that's exciting. I just think it's the best time to be alive as a photographer, really. I think as technology keeps evolving the things you could only imagine or dream are at your fingertips now. It's just about where you want to go.

On the advantages of digital photography

When you can capture an image on a silicon chip versus a piece of film you can see it instantly, that's the first thing. For me, when I do one of my photographs, I can shoot 2,500 images in a single day. Now, if I was doing that with an 8x10 camera, which is the image quality I have in my digital back*, that would be 2,500 sheets of 8x10 film. It would be impossible to do what I'm doing, just the visualization of that would be impossible — and financially, to boot. And my assistant would probably jump out of the cherry picker!

*Editor's Note: A digital back is a piece of equipment you can add to the back of a film camera to modify it to take digital images.

On the high level of detail in digital photography

So if I'm a storyteller, I love that, suddenly things that were insignificant are really significant now. And that's the power of what's happening now. Eventually photography is going to look like a window; you're going to have a visceral experience with my pictures on the wall. Because the way you'll see into my pictures is almost the way the eye sees, and that's the way it's going. For me, I want you to feel the way I felt when I stood there and took the picture.

On the future of photo printing

I work with a master printer in New York and I actually print on conventional photographic paper because of the depth perception. I really want to enhance that, but there are so many new technologies that are coming out in terms of 3-D printing and all kinds of different things. Who knows where we're going to be five, 10, 15 years from now based on what's happening and the speed of what's happening.

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Text by Niema Jordan, video by Debora Silva

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Photographer Brittani “Brittsense” Sensabaugh. Photo by Nema Etebar, courtesy of KQED

Photographs of young girls with Afro-puffs and intricately-designed cornrows sit next to pictures of women with multi-colored sponge rollers and acrylic nails. A father with his daughter perched atop his shoulders. A young woman dancing on the corner of West 116th Street in Harlem, a bright pink wall contrasting with her black leotard.

“Forgotten Cities is for the people who feel hopeless, voiceless,” photographer Brittani “Brittsense” Sensabaugh said.

Since 2013, Sensabaugh has documented the daily experiences of people living in cities and neighborhoods deemed “too dangerous” by some. For her, they are communities shining with examples of unconditional love and resilience. “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin,” Sensabaugh’s first solo exhibition in her hometown, opened Feb. 5 at Betti Ono in Oakland.

I asked her a few questions during her homecoming debut.

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Photo from the #222ForgottenCities project. Photo by Brittsense

My first love was journalism. I always wanted to write for magazines. My older brother saw my writings and told me that I needed to put some imagery behind it. I was open to it, but I was really just comfortable with writing. At my graduation he gave me a Kodak camera. Two years later he died in his sleep. I just remember saying to myself, will I be able to live out my dreams? He died at such a young age. I didn’t talk for months, didn’t leave the bed. I woke up one day and saw the camera and was like this was a way for me to connect with him, so I started shooting.

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Photo from the series “The Power of Melanin.” Photo by Brittsense

I felt myself being more attracted to the person that was wearing the garment than the garment. I want to know the reason you put it on. Is it because your mom dressed a certain way? I always like to get to the root of things — and fashion, especially in New York, is all about the trends. I wasn’t interested in the trends, I was interested in the art of it. Moving to New York to do fashion photography because it was the fashion capital took the fun out of it. I felt myself drifting away from it.

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Photo from the #222ForgottenCities project. Photo by Brittsense

I was on the A train in New York. I had on an Oakland hoodie. This elderly white lady pointed to the hoodie and said, “Don’t ever go to that place. There’s nothing but drug dealers there and thugs.” I let her go on but I stopped her before I got off the train and said, “You know, I’m none of those things and I’m from there.” I remember getting off the train and feeling really angry and I said to myself, “I need to change the perception.”

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Photo from the #222ForgottenCities project. Photo by Brittsense

Anyka Barber came to New York for AFROPUNK. She came and met me when I was documenting the Tompkins Projects in Brooklyn and we talked for two hours. Anyka is a very beautiful woman, her energy is warm and her energy was very uplifting. What I admired about her was that she walked in the trenches with me. So I was down for it.

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Photo from the #222ForgottenCities project. Photo by Brittsense

I want people to come into the space and feel comfortable. I want them to see themselves. Every day is a challenge. We are beautiful though. We are warriors. I want them to come in and feel that unconditional love. I want them to feel the power of melanin that they have within them.

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This is America's image of hard times.

“Migrant Mother” was one of thousands of pictures Dorothea Lange took on assignment for the federal government, documenting the poverty of the Dust Bowl. But this was the one that stuck, coming to symbolize all those suffering in the Great Depression. Later, Lange would complain, “People think I haven’t made anything else!”

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The retouched version of Dorothea Lange’s photo of Florence Owens Thompson and her children, taken in 1936 in Nipomo, California

(Dorothea Lange | Library of Congress)

Lange had been a portrait photographer in San Francisco, posing the city’s wealthy and successful, and her compositional instincts helped turn Florence Thompson into a Madonna figure. But because the photo was commissioned by the government, it wasn’t copyright-protected. And over time, as her image was endlessly reprinted, adapted, satirized, used in ads for perfume and luggage, Thompson grew bitter.

Can any single image taken now ever imprint itself on our consciousness the way “Migrant Mother” did? “Great images will continue to bubble to the top,” says Sarah Meister, a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Although in this era of image proliferation, it’s harder and harder.” But photographers will still look to images of hardship to find deeper truths. “Who’s that woman?” wondered LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer and MacArthur Fellow, when she first saw “Migrant Mother” in photo history books. “How did it help her reveal what was happening in those moments for her and her family?”

Unlike Lange, who spent only moments with Thompson, Frazier has spent years photographing herself, her mother and grandmother, and the physical decline of their community — pictures that were collected in the book "The Notion of Family." Frazier comes from Braddock, Pennsylvania, a dying steel town. In one diptych image, she shows her mother during a test for epilepsy, and the hospital being torn down. “If I am living in this industrial ruin that has been abandoned, and there’s no one here from the media covering this and no one telling our story, how do I pick up the camera and start to document it?”

(Originally aired April 19, 2013)

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The unretouched photo. This version shows a thumb in the immediate foreground on the right side.

(Dorothea Lange | Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-DIG-ppmsca-12883 (digital file from print); LC-USZ62-95653 (film copy negative)])

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Another shot by Lange. The original caption for the photo read "Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute."

(Dorothea Lange | Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-9093-C (film negative)])

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Lange took several photos of Thompson and her children.

(Dorothea Lange | Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-9095 (film negative)])

Traditional street photography usually catches strangers passing through a public space, but the photographer Michele Iversen catches strangers in private spaces — without their permission. At night she sits in her car and watches the glowing windows of strangers' homes, waiting for the perfect shot.

Since 1995 Iversen has been collecting these images for her “Night Surveillance Series.” "I find my theater, and then the performance begins,” Iversen says. She's captured people binge eating, washing dishes, sleeping.

Iversen admits she feels uncomfortable watching her subjects — and wants her audience to be uncomfortable looking at her photographs as well. And yet she continues to make them: “They are like these beautiful tableaux to me, they tell a story. They show people’s lives.”

What do you think of Iversen’s work? Is it acceptable to invade someone’s privacy for the purposes of making art? Tell us in a comment below.

(Originally aired December 17, 2010)

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"Night Surveillance Series," Untitled no. 62. Altadena, CA, 1995. Digital Chromogenic Print, 38"x 46."

(Michele Iversen)

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"Night Surveillance Series," Untitled no. 22. Pasadena, CA, 1995.

(Michele Iversen)

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"Night Surveillance Series," Untitled no. 88. Sierra Madre, CA, 1996.

(Michele Iversen)

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"Night Surveillance Series," Untitled no. 50. Pasadena, CA, 1995

(Michele Iversen)

"I have taken a lot of pictures because I've been up here for a long time," NASA astronaut Scott Kelly said during a recent press conference from the International Space Station. "I've definitely taken some good ones and some memorable ones."

When he returns to Earth on Tuesday evening, Kelly will have spent 340 days aboard the ISS. While that's not quite a year, it's still a record for an American astronaut, and one of the longest-lasting spaceflights ever.

Kelly is not the only member of his family to visit the station. His twin brother, Mark Kelly, was also an astronaut, and flew multiple shuttle missions to the orbiting outpost. The twins grew up in West Orange, N.J., as the sons of police officers. "We lived a pretty exciting and adventurous life," Scott says of his childhood.

Scott Kelly takes his images through the windows of the Space Station's cupola module. It might give the impression that he lives and works with the Earth constantly in view, but that's not the case. Most of the space station's rooms are fluorescent-lit boxes. "You don't get real sunlight," he says.

His photographs have captured some stunning views of Earth at all times of the day and night. The process of photography has changed his perspective on the planet. "The more I look at Earth, and certain parts of Earth, the more I feel [like] an environmentalist," Kelly says. "It's just a blanket of pollution in certain areas. We can fix that if we put our minds to it."

Photography was one small part of Kelly's mission. He conducted numerous experiments, some to determine how space was affecting his health, and others to test new technologies, like a dedicated greenhouse for growing plants in zero gravity. NASA hopes the knowledge gained from his extended mission will prepare the space agency for lengthy missions to places like Mars.

Kelly's photographs have won the astronaut nearly a million followers on Twitter, but he says taking the pictures is only a small part of why he's there. Kelly believes in space flight, and in humanity's future beyond the confines of Earth. "The thing I like most about flying in space is not the view," says Kelly. "The thing I like about it is doing something I feel very, very strongly about."

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It’s common for women depicted in cartoons and comics to have idealized, exaggerated features: think of the impossibly small waists, extra-long legs, and ample chests in comic books — a medium still overwhelmingly drawn by men.

The illustrations of the young Pakistani-American artist Ayqa Khan proudly flout these expectations. Khan's vibrant and colorful drawings and photographs sit at the intersection of Desi (also known as South Asian) traditions and American youth culture. The women in her work roller skate while wearing a niqab, eat doughnuts, drive, smoke, swim, and skateboard — all while casually rocking body hair on their arms, legs, chins, chests, and backs. Their hair is dark, stubbly, and unmissable. Over the last several months, Khan has grown an online following for her bold and unapologetic depictions.

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"It's the Time to Disco," 2016

(Ayqa Khan)

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Khan talked about the role of body hair in her work, saying, “I am actively drawing body hair. My intentions are to normalize it... because it is something that shouldn't be a huge deal considering body hair is natural and the removal of it is a social construct, yet the judgment and pain that comes with having body hair is... harmful and needs to be stopped.”

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"Self via iPhone," 2015

(Ayqa Khan)

Khan's Instagram and Tumblr followers frequently write to her, thanking her for creating art they can identify with as fellow South Asian women and women of color. They also confide in her, sharing their own struggles with parents, strict beauty standards, relationships, and making art. As a self-taught artist, Khan is open and accessible in return, creating a dialogue with her fans through social media.

"When people ask me personal questions or tell me problems that I feel a lot of people can relate to, it is important for me to respond publicly," Khan wrote in an email. "I want to create a safe space where people who suffer can go to and heal."

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"I'm Out," 2015

(Ayqa Khan)

Khan's work has attracted its share of criticism. After a recent BuzzFeed round-up of her work, some commenters called the depictions “gross and unkempt,” and compared women with body hair to Chewbacca, calling the women’s choice “a deal breaker.” Khan responded on her Tumblr, “It is important for me to recognize the pain and harm that comes with such constructs.”

The negative response served as a reminder of how far American culture has yet to go in accepting women's bodies that deviate from an imagined ideal. But, according to Khan, her work is about more than defending body hair. "I felt I wasn't being represented in a way that felt true to who I was as a person and creator," she wrote in an email. "It's really about how South Asian women are both stereotyped and represented, and also how we view the female body in all types of mediums."

For more than a century, mug shots have helped police catch criminals. Those photos of a person's face and profile trace their roots to Paris in the late 19th century.

Now, some of the earliest mug shots ever taken are on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The black-and-white photos were once on the cutting edge of how police identified suspects.

They were taken by a French criminologist named Alphonse Bertillon, and his techniques set the template that police use today.

Rise Of The Modern Mug Shot

Wilhelm Figueroa, director of the New York City Police Department's photo unit, says there are three parts of a mug shot the NYPD takes after arresting someone: the front view and both side views.

He estimates he has probably taken tens of thousands — and seen millions — of mug shots since he joined the department more than 30 years ago.

"No one looks like a criminal per se. There's nothing about a person's face that says, 'This person's a criminal,' " he says. "We're all capable of great good. We're all capable of being bad people."

And profile mug shots are capable of helping police tell similar-looking people apart.

"Take 10 different people, take pictures of their ears and you'll be to identify each and every one of them because we all have different facets to our ears. Some of us have longer earlobes, some shorter, some thicker, some thinner," he says.

It's an observation that Bertillon championed back in the late 1800s. He went on to create a system for identification that the Paris Police Prefecture adopted in 1882, giving rise to the modern mug shot.

He wasn't the first to introduce mug shots to police, but he did standardize the way photos were taken and added the profile mug shot so police could zero in on a suspect's unique features.

"Men can grow facial hair to cover their chin, but you can't change the shape of your nose except through surgery. And you can't change the contours of your ear," explains Mia Fineman, one of the curators for the Met's new photo exhibition Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play, which features some of Bertillon's work.

The mug shots were part of a broader system of measuring and comparing body parts to help police departments organize thousands of criminal records. In 1884, Bertillon's system helped Parisian police identify 241 repeat offenders. His work became so famous that in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, a client offends Sherlock Holmes by calling him "the second highest expert in Europe" — after Bertillon.

A Mug Shot Legacy

His reputation, though, faded as more police departments learned that fingerprinting was a simpler way to identify people.

Still, his style of mug shots became the standard. Jonathan Finn, a police photography expert who wrote Capturing the Criminal Image, says he is "still very much with us" today in other ways.

"Whenever you go through an airport or at a train station and anything else and somebody asks to see your identification document, that all has roots in the late 1800s and the work of people like Bertillon and his contemporaries," Finn says.

Figueroa says he thinks of Bertillon whenever he comes across an interesting mug shot.

"It could be an interesting curve of the ear, a unique tattoo. It could be a unique port-wine birthmark," he says.

Even in an age of DNA testing and iris scans, he says he doesn't think Bertillon's photo legacy is going anywhere.

"A victim still records the person had black hair, the person had a tattoo that said 'Mom' on their right shoulder. We still live in a very visual world," Figueroa says.

It's one that may have forgotten about Bertillon's name — but is still holding on to his mug shots.

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We here at The Salt like to bring you serious journalistic tails from the world of food. But hey, we like to unleash our silly side, too — and like the rest of the world, we've got a soft spot for man's (and woman's) best friend.

So of course, we're howling with delight at the latest food images charming the Internet: Meme-meister Karen Zack's clever Twitter photos highlighting the eerie resemblance between mutts and meals. In some cases, it takes dogged determination to separate the canines from the cuisine.

Puppy or bagel? Chihuahua or muffin? These are the gnawing questions raised by Zack, who tweets from @teenybiscuit. She's a freelance assistant director in media production who splits her time between Portland, Ore., and Seattle. But she tells us she's looking to get into advertising strategy (we hear she's good with the puparazzi).

Previously, she's pointered out the similarities between other animals and foods (duckling or plantain?), but it's the dogs that have sunk their teeth into the Internet's funny bone. Zack says her image comparing Labradoodles to fried chicken got things going — call it the bark heard round the world.

And her fetching work has imitators nipping at her heels. (See Dalmatian or chocolate chip ice cream? Pug or loaf? Shar-Pei or croissant?)

Ironically, though it's Zack's mutt mugs that have made the Internet sit and stay, she says she herself has a cat ... named Toast.

Yappy Friday, everyone!

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The best mashups are simple, unexpected, and greater than the sum of their parts. Like tasteofstreep, the Instagram account that combines photos of Meryl Streep with assorted food items. It's a simple formula (Meryl Streep photo + color-coordinating food item + wacky background), but it manages to create the same sort of joyfully demented aesthetic as Lisa Frank.

The account has only been active for a few months, but there are plenty of zany images to enjoy. I personally think the backgrounds are the lynchpin to the whole series; they make the food and Meryls float in a pastel sea that feels like a surreal elementary school portrait. Check out some of my favorite posts below, and the entire account here. 

A photo posted by taste of streep (@tasteofstreep) on Jan 10, 2016 at 10:41am PST

A photo posted by taste of streep (@tasteofstreep) on Jan 19, 2016 at 8:55am PST

A photo posted by taste of streep (@tasteofstreep) on Jan 10, 2016 at 10:29am PST

A photo posted by taste of streep (@tasteofstreep) on Jan 21, 2016 at 1:14pm PST

A photo posted by taste of streep (@tasteofstreep) on Mar 7, 2016 at 5:10am PST

Austin Radcliffe organizes the internet, one pristine photo at a time. The curator of the tumblr “Things Organized Neatly,” Radcliffe takes extremely satisfying photos of, well, things organized neatly.

If the all-too-literal title makes you think more about your sock drawer than fine art, check out some of these photos. These aren’t insta-pics of your closet after ironing; these are visual delicacies capable of quieting any private despair that order can't exist in our chaotic world.

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Instruments neatly organized

(All images reprinted with permission from (c) Things Organized Neatly by Austin Radcliffe, Universe Publishing, 2016)

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A neatly organized watermelon slice

(reprinted with permission from (c) Things Organized Neatly by Austin Radcliffe, Universe Publishing, 2016)

Radcliffe founded the blog in 2010 when he was a student at the Herron School of Art + Design in Indianapolis. Since then, the site’s grown to around half a million followers, earned him a stint at the Tate Museum in London, won him Webby awards, and now led to a newly published book.

Both the book and the tumblr showcase pictures from all over the world, as well as some of Radcliffe’s own photography. While the book features photos from 13 of Radcliffe's favorite artists, the blog accepts submissions — so if you, too, wish to sort burnt toast or delicately stack Spaghetti-Os, this could be your star turn. Many of the images use a style known as “knolling” where objects are placed at 90 degree angles from one another, leading to a pleasing, neatly organized effect. 

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Bike parts neatly organized

(Reprinted with permission from (c) Things Organized Neatly by Austin Radcliffe, Universe Publishing, 2016)

It’s this neat effect that keeps followers returning to "Things Organized Neatly" after six years online. And while Radcliffe didn’t start “Things Organized Neatly” to create a therapeutic outlet, he’s glad to hear that viewers use the site to decompress. “I think there’s a calmness and sort of clarity to see everything that’s been neatly laid out, and clutter’s been erased,” he told CNN. “It’s just a very peaceful, serene way of organizing objects.”

We agree.  

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Ties neatly organized

(Reprinted with permission from (c) Things Organized Neatly by Austin Radcliffe, Universe Publishing, 2016)

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A map of the U.S. in "Things Organized Neatly"

(Reprinted with permission from (c) Things Organized Neatly by Austin Radcliffe, Universe Publishing, 2016) 

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Locks organized neatly

(Teprinted with permission from (c) Things Organized Neatly by Austin Radcliffe, Universe Publishing, 2016)

Artist Robert Mapplethorpe was as controversial as he was celebrated. In 1989, his photographs depicting nude men and sexual fetishes helped ignite the culture wars. Now, an upcoming HBO documentary, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, examines the artist's life and work. He's also the subject of a major retrospective spanning two L.A. museums — the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

With his Hasselblad and Polaroid cameras, Mapplethorpe worked out of his East Village studio. He photographed lovers, friends, models and himself. And like his frenemy Andy Warhol, Mapplethorpe did fashion shoots and made portraits of patrons and socialites.

At the LACMA exhibition, a video clip of Mapplethorpe choreographing a model plays on a loop. It gives a glimpse into his intimate studio sessions and his world; a world that also included downtown luminaries like Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, and, of course, his muse, Patti Smith.

In 1978, Smith and Mapplethorpe made an experimental film, which is also on display at LACMA. So are Mapplethorpe's art school ink drawings, his collages, paper dolls and jewelry he fashioned out of scavenged objects. Mapplethorpe even framed his own underwear.

"That was, I think, from very early on, a part of his aim in art-making — is to generate a certain kind of feeling that was visceral and erotic," says LACMA curator Britt Salvesen.

Though his subject matter was explicit, Mapplethorpe viewed his work as artistic, not pornographic.

"I certainly think that had Robert lived 400 years ago, 500 years before, he would have been a Vatican artist," says Brian English, who was one of Mapplethorpe's studio assistants through the final years as the prolific artist was dying of AIDS.

English says his mentor captured perfect moments of beauty and transcended many boundaries — of gender, sexuality and societal norms.

"He did push culture, and it's important for people to understand him as an artist," says English. "His skills in finding that perfect angle to look at something is like what painters would do. His pictures became ethereal in the way that they would glow."

Even when Mapplethorpe was photographing someone else, English says, his portraits were also self-portraits.

Both LACMA and the Getty shows include an infamous shot of Mapplethorpe with a strategically placed bullwhip. He's bent over and looking back, staring at the viewer.

"He is defiantly saying: I'm a participant here, this is my world and my life and my desire," says Salvesen.

Both shows also include homoerotic and sadomasochistic images that shocked and polarized viewers. In 1989, a few months after he died, the Corcoran Gallery canceled a retrospective of Mapplethorpe's work, titled The Perfect Moment. The show traveled to Cincinnati, where it sparked an obscenity trial. During Congressional hearings that summer about funding for the NEA, then-Senator Jesse Helms declared, "this pornography is sick."

Several years ago, LACMA showed some of these images without incident, and Salvesen says the time is right to show them again.

"I do expect they will have a very strong impact. And I think that's part of what he wanted to do," she says. "I wouldn't want it to become too safe or too comfortable because it was intended to provoke."

By contrast, the Getty Museum has saved Mapplethorpe's most controversial photos for the end of its exhibition. Rather than mount the photos on the walls, curator Paul Martineu chose to display them in a glass case, labeled with an advisory.

"I wanted them to be shown in a more discreet manner," he says. "So they were actually made to be seen in a more intimate way."

The photos from Mapplethorpe's so-called "X portfolio" include a man in rubber sensory deprivation suit, and close-ups of various S&M scenarios and sex acts: men in leather and chains, wearing jock straps or nothing at all.

"These are people that were involved in the sadomasochistic bondage and discipline scene in New York City the 1970s," says Martineau. "He wanted people to understand that he was part of that scene, and that these people were his friends. And that they had great deal of trust between them. That made these pictures possible."

These most challenging and controversial photos are shown in a gallery with Mapplethorpe's iconic floral photos. The exhibition ends with a ghost-like self-portrait Mapplethorpe made as he was dying.

After his death, Mapplethorpe's foundation searched for years to find the right place to store his vast archive. They found it at the Getty Research Institute and its cold storage facility. It will be the permanent home to more than 1,900 photos, letters and other objects that belonged to Mapplethorpe. The collection's value was appraised at $38 million.

Attorney Michael Ward Stout, a board member with The Mapplethorpe Foundation, says the Getty had the best facilities to store the photographer's archive.

"He wanted photography to achieve the level of respect that painting and sculpture had," says Stout.

The Foundation agreed to entrust Mapplethorpe's archive to The Getty and LACMA in 2011. This new retrospective is the culmination of this unprecedented partnership, says LACMA director Michael Govan.

"When I talked to some of my friends in New York, they said: Oh my god, Robert Mapplethorpe is a New York artist, the legacy should be in New York," recalls Govan. "And one of the cases I made about Los Angeles was that Robert Mapplethorpe is already well known in New York. He is a New York artist. That is a global city. But if you look at the future of where artists are moving from all over the world, that LA is one of the up-and-coming art centers."

At a press preview of the exhibition, Edward Mapplethorpe, who was his brother's studio assistant and an artist himself, said he also questioned whether his brother's photos should be stored in Los Angeles.

"Yes, he was a real New Yorker," says Mapplethorpe. "But now that I've met the curators, I've met the archivists, and I've seen the facilities, and understand, it's where he should be. To see them now, exhibited the way they were intended to be exhibited and looked at, and presented in such a nice way is extremely, extremely heartwarming."

And he notes, the archive forever has a home at the Getty, next to the vast photo collection of Mapplethorpe's beloved benefactor and lover, Sam Wagstaff.

The HBO documentary airs April 4, and the photos will be on display at both museums until the end of July.

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Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episodeHidden

About Abe Davis' TED Talk

Computer scientist Abe Davis explains how you can turn a plant or a bag of chips into a microphone, and capturing the hidden sound vibrations on a high-speed camera.

About Abe Davis

Abe Davis is a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a musician.

In 2014, he revealed the "visual microphone," an algorithm that samples the vibrations of ordinary objects — such as a bag of potato chips — from high-speed video footage and transforms them into intelligible audio.

Davis also created Caperture, a 3D-imaging app designed to create and share 3D images on any compatible smartphone.

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When Martin Luther King Jr. made his "I Have A Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Bob Adelman was standing just a few feet away with a camera to his eye.

From the March on Washington to Dr. King's funeral, he captured some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement.

The photographer was found dead on Saturday in his home in Miami Beach. Ernesto Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Miami Beach Police Department, said his death is still being investigated.

Adelman was 85.

One of Adelman's best known photographs shows four civil rights activists holding hands. It was taken in Birmingham in 1963. The protesters were walking toward a confrontation with police officers who are using water cannons to clear the streets.

In a 2008 interview with NPR, Adelman said those hoses were so powerful that they could "skin the bark off trees."

"A single individual could not stand up [to the cannons]," Adelman said. "But as a group, they could. And it became emblematic. That picture was used actually as part of the recruiting for the march on Washington."

Adelman was there for the lunch counter protests in Alabama and at Malcom X's funeral. His photos appeared in national newspapers and magazines, but Adelman was an artist and activist first.

Bonnie Clearwater, who put on a retrospective of his work at the NSU Museum in Fort Lauderdale, says that made him unique.

"He was part of the movement, so he had access into both big moments and intimate moments that most photo journalists wouldn't," she said.

Adelman, who was white, said he became interested in African American life after watching Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker perform in the late '40s. When he heard about the student sit-in movement, he offered to help.

In his interview with NPR, he quoted the author Ralph Ellision. He said that the black experience is part of the experience of all Americans.

"Ralph emphasized in our conversations that a special sensitivity to African Americans was incumbent on all americans because this country was torn apart by the race question and resolved it in favor of equality," he said.

Beyond the civil rights movement, Adelman photographed women's liberation and the gay rights movement.

"He felt passionately about injustice and what could he do as a photographer to make change," she said.

Ultimately, she added, Adelman "helped change the world with his photographs."

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Incubating common guillemots in island of Stora Karlsö. Photo by Aron Hejdström/Hentati-Sundberg and Olsson, Current Biology, (2016).

Instead of throwing away those old vacation photos, consider saving them for science. Swedish ecologists collected nearly a century’s worth of tourist photos to trace the history of a single seabird, the common guillemot. Pulled from myriad sources, the photos tell a single tale of ecological hardship, caused by man-made destruction, but also of the guillemot’s renaissance.

The researchers behind this study relied on these amateur photos because, in general, the scientific record for many ecosystems is incomplete or incoherent. In many case, standardized methods for examining ecology didn’t exist until 30 or 40 years ago.

“Based on this experience, we encourage scientists to think ‘outside the box’ in order to generate data valuable for use in ecosystem-based management,” Jonas Hentati-Sundberg and Olof Olsson of Stockholm Resilience Centre write in their study.

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Common guillemots in the island of Stora Karlsö in 1960. Photo by Gösta Håkansson/Gotland museum collection/Hentati-Sundberg and Olsson, Current Biology, (2016).

The common guillemot is an Arctic, fish-eating seabird that dwells in subarctic portions of the Northern Hemisphere. In fact, two of every three common guillemot live on a single island in the Baltic Sea, Stora Karlsö. This island has a unique conservation story. In the late 1880s, Stora Karlsö was purchased by a private company to create a nature and hunting conservatory. But since the 1920s, the island has primarily served as a hotspot for nature tourism.

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Tourist group looking at the common guillemot colony in island of Stora Karlsö in 1975. Photo by Lars-Erik Norbäck/Hentati-Sundberg and Olsson, Current Biology, (2016).

For the birds, these events meant their colonies would be largely unbothered by hunting, construction or other disruptive activities. For scientists, it meant a trove of amateur photos documenting the evolution of Stora Karlsö’s bird colonies.

To create an ecological scrapbook for the common guillemot, Hentati-Sundberg and Olsson dived into national and regional archives. They made requests to magazines and asked for submissions via a local radio station. In the end, the pair collected 113 amateur photographs, covering 37 individual years between 1918 and 2005. Next, they counted the number of breeding pairs within each photo to provide a rough estimate of the population size.

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Common guillemots in the island of Stora Karlsö in 1960. Photo by Gösta Håkansson/Gotland museum collection/Hentati-Sundberg and Olsson, Current Biology, (2016).

The team expected numbers to be low early on, given that common guillemots were heavily poached for food and eggs until the late 1800s, and that’s what they found in the pictures. Photos from 1918 to the 1940s show the lowest number of breeding pairs. These numbers start to then steadily rise for 20 years, until the birds hit a bump in the road. Their population drops between the mid-1960s until mid-1980s — a time period that corresponds to the introduction of DDT pesticide and PCB coolant.

“It is reasonable to expect that contaminants had a role in the decline,” Hentati-Sundberg said in a statement. “It has not been known previously that seabird populations were affected by the contaminants.”

Atlantic salmon fishing boomed during this time period, which may have hurt guillemot populations. The birds often get trapped in fishing nets.

But the story has a happy ending. The authors suspect that policies to curb environmental pollutants, hunting and driftnet fishing are responsible for the common guillemot’s rebound.

“We found that the population is currently increasing at an unprecedented rate of about 5 percent annually,” Jonas Hentati-Sundberg said. “This is interesting in that many common guillemot populations are decreasing worldwide.”

The authors findings, along with a list of the contributing photographers, were published today in the journal Current Biology.

The post Tourist photos trace the fall and rise of Swedish seabirds appeared first on PBS NewsHour.