Africa's big photo show is asking some big questions.

What does it mean to be an artist in Africa? And what does the future hold for the continent?

"The Bamako Encounters," the 11th African Biennale of Photography, explores the heady topics of identity and possibility through the theme of "Afrotopia."

"What I wanted to do with Afrotopia is let the artists describe or analyze or [imagine] what is for them the reality of Africa today," says Marie-Ann Yemsi, curator of the Biennale.

"Everybody is saying Africa is a continent of poverty, of diseases and nothing works," says Yemsi. "But this is absolutely wrong. Sure, the issues are big. But it's probably from that continent that will come new ideas, new economic systems."

At the same time, Yemsi is all too aware of the problems the continent faces: "Afrotopia is not only about utopia, it's also dystopia. A lot of things failed. The artists are questioning: Can Africa can learn from that failure?"

For the Pan-Africa exhibition at the National Museum of Mali, the heart of event, there were more than 300 applications. The 40 selected come from across the continent, from Morocco to Ethiopia, Tunisia to South Africa.

But Yemsi stresses that she doesn't want to pigeonhole the artists, as the West often does, in her opinion: "I don't want them to be always considered as African artists. They are contemporary artists from Africa."

Yemsi, a Paris-based "cultural consultant," is herself bicultural: Her mother is German and her father is from Cameroon. The family moved to many different countries in Europe and Africa, and had to flee Cameroon after they received death threats because her father opposed the government. These experiences taught her, she says, that "your identity is not always defined by where you come from but also what you've learned in the country where you are. This is a very important point in the way I'm looking at the artists."

Co-organized and co-produced by Mali's Ministry of Culture and l'Institut Français, the Biennale opened December 2 and remains open until January 31. Yemsi spoke with NPR from Paris and the conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about an artist who really stood out to you.

Teddy Mazina from Burundi. He is the one of the only photographers who has been in Burundi between 2015 and 2017, when the country was completely closed. They were doing terrible things — killing people. He was there secretly and he took photography. We were super proud to have him come [to Bamako] and speak with other artists and explain his work. And it's crazy because the series is beautiful, the aesthetic is beautiful, and he had no time [to work because of fears for his safety]. He explained the role of documenting what this government would like to hide. Through the image, he will keep record. For me, he was one of our heroes.

Tell us about a noteworthy work of art?

A video channel installation. You had all the screens in a line, and you saw these faces. Women who are transgendered who have been raped in South Africa were telling their stories to Gabrielle Goliath, but she erased the words. You were feeling how difficult it has been for them to speak. You felt all this pain by the fact that she erased most of the words.

Do you think art from Africa is misunderstood?

I would say it's underrated. We have very few examples of artists that are in the top 100. But there is a new generation coming. I think it will take time, but step by step things are changing. There is a growing number of collectors. The future is on the continent.

You have a special interest in displaying the work for women photographers.

I'm promoting women artists because it's very difficult everywhere in the world for them, and it's even more difficult for women artists in Africa. Sarah Waiswa had a series, "Stranger in a familiar Land," a photographic essay on the theme [of albinism]. In Africa, those people are persecuted because they are supposed to have magical powers. She's changing the way we are seeing them — making beauty from their difference.

Do you think the photos will really change people's minds about what Africa is really like?

I think that artists cannot change the world but they can allow us to see a reality from a different perspective.

And an example would be...

Musa Nxumalo has been documenting his township. So many years after the end of apartheid, still there are townships in Africa. He is documenting the life of youth, his generation, in the township, during parties and happy moments but also during struggles. What's interesting is the way he's documenting those two aspects. Like every young [person] in the world, dancing but at the same time very preoccupied by their future.

Sasha Ingber is a multimedia journalist who has covered science, culture and foreign affairs for such publications as National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazine and Smithsonian. Contact her @SashaIngber

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A lot of very hard work is going on at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

A muscled guy in an undershirt tightens a big bolt with his wrench; a farm worker bends almost in half, filling his sack with cotton; Rosie the Riveter rolls up her sleeve to tackle her factory job. They're all part of an exhibition called "The Sweat Of Their Face: Portraying American Workers."

But not all the laborers are big and burly.

A forlorn young girl — she can't be more than 11 or 12 — stands at a long row of spools of thread mounted on a big piece of complicated machinery. Photographer Lewis Wickes Hine wrote her name and height on the back of the picture: "Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high, has worked half a year." She had a job in 1908 at the Lancaster Cotton Mills in South Carolina. You can almost hear the noise, feel the heat.

"And there she is, this little girl, alone, facing an enormous machine," says Dorothy Moss, who curated this show with David C. Ward. She says Hine was a crusader, and his cause was to abolish child labor. "He would often disguise himself as a Bible vendor or newspaper deliverer, other professions, to get into these mills."

Hine put himself at risk to take these pictures, and, with the camera as witness, reforms and regulations were enacted. This exhibition showcases centuries of American workers. They are, as Moss says,"the people who were building this country, who may be on the sidelines, who are not always the focus of our attention. But because artists often identify as workers, artists felt strongly to bring these peoples' stories out and to honor them."

In this century, Los Angeles painter Ramiro Gomez honors his parents (his mother is a janitor; his father is a truck driver) by adding workers onto copies of iconic American paintings. In his version of David Hockney's Man in Shower in Beverly Hills, Gomez deletes the man and inserts a cleaning woman; we can't see her face — just her hands squeegee-ing the shower tiles. Gomez is making the invisible visible; he and others in the show take workers we never notice, and make us notice.

A food worker in a Subway sandwich store gets the full treatment from photographer Shauna Frischkorn. She puts him against a black background, and lights his face to look sculptural. The black and green Subway cap sits on his red hair like a crown. It's like a Renaissance portrait, but with a little smile — a twinkle.

"She's restoring his humanity through the pose and lighting," Moss says.

While the workers aren't known, some of the artists who portray them are famous. The exhibition includes photographs by Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Ansel Adams, and it has paintings by Winslow Homer and George Bellows.

Other artists are less familiar. John Neagle was fashionable in his day, less so now. Still, his 1829 portrait of Pat Lyon is a marvel. It shows a big, beefy guy in a leather apron — a blacksmith at his anvil. The muscles strain in his right arm. In real life, Pat Lyon was falsely accused of theft and jailed for three years — then he became a wealthy businessman. Yet the painter shows him sweating at his anvil, at Lyon's request.

"He said he wanted to be shown as a working man because the working people of this country are the most honest people of the country," Moss says.

For an image of someone actually enjoying their work, Moss points to Dawoud Bey's 1976 photo Mr. Moore's Bar-B-Que, 125th Street. The owner beams from behind his Harlem lunch counter. He's looked up from talking with a customer who's waiting for her food. (She's smoking, and better flick off the long cigarette ash pretty soon.) Mr. Moore's apron is stained, probably with barbecue sauce, and he looks welcoming and proud.

"It looks like a wonderful place to spend an afternoon," Moss says.

Workers of the world — well, the United States, anyway — unite at this Portrait Gallery exhibition. "The Sweat Of Their Face" reminds visitors of the range of vital work we do — and the ways we feel about it.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Plastic surgery, private jets, toddlers in designer clothes, magnums of champagne — Lauren Greenfield's 500-page photo collection,Generation Wealth, shows all of that. But this book isn't just about people who are wealthy, it's about people who want to be wealthy.

I met up with Greenfield at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, where there's an exhibit to accompany the new book. She says some of her early work was photographing kids here in LA, where she grew up. This project, about wealth and striving for wealth, developed from there, even though she didn't know it was about that at the time.

"I started it as a kind of looking back at the culture I grew up in," she says. "And then I went on to do other things, about gender, about fashion, about consumerism, about how our values have been exported. It wasn't until the 2008 financial crash I realized that the stories that I'd been doing for a couple of decades were all connected, and kind of formed a morality tale."

So Greenfield went back through her old work to see "how the pieces of the puzzle fit together." She also identified what was missing, and began filling in the holes to see "what it all added up to."

It added up to a massive collection of images. It's organized into sections with titles like: "I Shop Therefore I Am" and "The Princess Brand." It's in chronological order, and at the exhibit we start in the early 1990s, with images of private school kids, seventh graders, each flashing a $100 bill.

If you're doing a story about growing up in LA, the kids told Greenfield, you have to show money. Then there's the photo of high school kids who've skipped school to cruise the beach in their convertibles. But, she says, these kids actually aren't rich.

"The thing about this project is: It's not about the rich, it's really about our aspiration to wealth, and our needing to show it off whether we have it or not," she explains. "So, with the rich kids, I was looking at how they were growing up quickly, and how they were influenced by the values of Hollywood. But they were really influenced by the media, and MTV and ... hip-hop culture for inspiration. So then I also photographed kids from East LA and South LA who, on the other side, were emulating the trappings of wealth."

It's like a feedback loop, she says. The rich kids want to look like the poor kids, and the poor kids want to look like the rich kids. We look at another picture of a kid in a pin-striped suit and rose boutonniere, paying for a limo outside his prom date's house.

"Enrique was living in South Central, his mother was a seamstress, and he spent two years saving the $600 that he spent on prom," Greenfield says. "His mother thought money could go to better use, but she knew how important it was to him, and he said it was completely worth it. They had a limo, it picked them up in South Central, everybody was looking, and he said he 'felt like the king that day.' I think it's really important to understand that these values go beyond the rich, they go beyond the poor. They cross class and race and even border."

There's a section in the exhibit called "The Queen of Versailles," about a wealthy couple that builds a huge mansion, and another section called "Cult of Celebrity," with early images of the Kardashians. Greenfield has captured famous people learning how to be famous.

"Fame has been an important driver in the work ..." Greenfield explains. "With the rise of reality TV and social media, everybody can be a celebrity and fame has currency. And so, in a lot of my interviews, when you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up they say: rich and famous."

People will also pay to have the trappings of wealth — there's a "fake it 'till you make it" mentality. In the images — of lavish pool parties and the like — it looks like people are having fun ... but are they happy?

To answer that question, Greenfield quotes David Siegel, from the Queen of Versailles, who said, "Money doesn't make you happy. It just makes you unhappy in a better section of town."

"There's a striving that kind of continues among rich," Greenfield says. "The Queen of Versailles was a perfect example — they lived in a 26,000-square-foot house and then built a 90,000-square-foot house. ... There's kind of a theme of addiction and the addiction of consumerism. And so with addiction, you never have enough and there's no satisfaction and eventually you hit rock bottom."

Which brings us to a section called "The Fall," in which Greenfield captures the damage done by the 2008 economic crash. The pictures are different here: There are no pool parties; this is wealth pursued and taken away — people who reached up and discovered they reached too far. Her images depict a GM worker who lost his job and ended up in foreclosure; a real estate agent who became a phone sex operator; an empty home where a child's trophies were all left in the garage.

Finally, there's a section called "Make it Rain" — where dollar bills float down as naked women crawl on the floor to pick them up at a famous strip club in Atlanta. In another image, a T-shirt simply states: "Being broke is not an option."

Greenfield says, now, decades after she started taking these pictures, projecting wealth is more important than ever.

"I think the backdrop of these 25 years is that we've never had more inequality and we've never had less social mobility," she says. "So, in a way, fictitious social mobility — bling and presentation — has replaced real social mobility ... because it's all you can get."

Greenfield believes there's been a shift in values — from "hard work, and thrift, and frugality and modesty" to "bling and showing off and narcissism."

Materialism, she says, is the new spirituality.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

On April 28, the magazine LensCulture posted a photo of what appeared to be a man raping a girl who looks like a young teenager.

The magazine — which has nearly a million Facebook followers — was using the photo to promote a competition in partnership with Magnum Photos, which cost $60 to enter 10 photos. "Don't miss out!" the post said, a few sentences above the photo.

The caption said the girl is 16 and is being forced to have sexual interactions with a "client" in the red-light district of Kolkata, called Sonagachi.

The girl is on her back, looking up at the camera, with a naked man on top of her. Her face is in full view. Her identity is not concealed.

Based on the content of the photo and its caption, the photo violated UNICEF's ethical guidelines on reporting on children by showing her face, which makes her identifiable, according to human rights activists.

The agency writes: "Always change the name and obscure the visual identity of any child who is identified as a victim of sexual abuse or exploitation."

The photo infuriated human rights activists and photojournalists.

"I've seen some moral bankruptcy in photojournalism, but this is the most extreme," says Benjamin Chesterton at Duckrabbit, a film production and training company, who first wrote about the photo. "This is a photo of a child sex slave being used to promote a for-profit competition by Magnum — the most prestigious photo agency in the world."

The incident also brings attention to a broader issue in photojournalism, Chesterton says: How the Western media depicts — and often demeans — young women and girls in poor countries.

"This is the elephant in the room: how we view the suffering of distant others," says human rights activist Robert Godden of Rights Exposure, which helps nonprofits and governments create effective and ethical campaigns. "What if this photo series was taken in the U.S. or the U.K. — would the girl have been presented this way?"

He adds, "Another good question to ask is: If this was a family member of mine, would I want them portrayed like this?"

Amid a barrage of protests from readers, photojournalists and human rights activists, LensCulture took down the photo hours after it was posted.

"But at this point, the magazine said nothing," Chesterton says. "There was no statement, no acknowledgment of the absolute human rights abuse of that young woman, of that child."

Two days after the image first went up, LensCulture issued an apology on Facebook for making a "serious mistake in judgment" in presenting the photo "out of context."

But the magazine defended the photo and its photographer, Souvid Datta:

We'd like to emphasize that we believe the work of the photographer was carried out with great ethical care and in close collaboration with the subject portrayed; by contrast, our own posting was hasty and presented the situation without proper context.

Datta did not respond to NPR's email request for an interview.

Within a few days of the controversy's start, the validity and ethics of some of Datta's other work came under fire.

Datta has been a highly regarded photojournalist since starting his career in 2013. He has won several prestigious awards, including ones from Getty Images and Magnum Photos. And his work has appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic.

On Thursday, Datta admitted to Time to doctoring images. The photo of the girl led to a closer look at Datta's other work, which led to accusations of plagiarism.

He admitted to taking a portion of a photo from influential photographer Mary Ellen Mark and inserting it into his own work without attributing it to her. He also admitted to taking other people's photographs and submitting them in photo competitions.

At that point, LensCulture changed its view. On Thursday, May 4, the magazine's CEO Kamran Mohsenin told NPR that they no longer believed the photo was "taken with great ethical care."

"Clearly that picture, in particular, is not appropriate in any context," Kamran says.

Shortly after LensCulture spoke with NPR, the magazine issued a new apology on Facebook:

"We condemn the lack of ethical standards used to create the photograph in question, and we apologize for publishing the photograph (which should never be published anywhere)."

Renowned photojournalist Donna Ferrato agrees that the photo is not appropriate in any context.

"There's no editorial value at all to this image. It's sensational, and it's incredibly damaging to the victim," says Ferrato, who did groundbreaking work documenting domestic violence in the U.S.

"When I first saw the photo used in the ad by LensCulture, I was really devastated," she says. "It disgusted me that there are two men in the room with this young girl. There's the 'client,' paying to have sex with her. And behind the client, stands the photographer, who has been paid, through grant money, to take photographs of the girl being used.

"All this photo says is, 'We men are in power, and we can do anything we want. The photographer can do anything he wants,' " Ferrato adds.

Last week, Datta, the photographer, posted a comment about the photo and the controversy to his Facebook page, which has been taken down.

In the statement, he said he was "horrified" that the photo was used to promote a competition. And the girl in the photo "is now an adult and has given her consent to use her photo."

Datta also defended the image of the girl:

She asked me to photograph this interaction — fully aware of my intention to publish this story widely in an attempt to create constructive awareness ... Where some see the image and point to the anonymity of the client and apparently undignified exposure of an underage girl, I see the astounding resilience of a young woman who takes ownership of her reality — unlawful, deplorable and bleak though it is — and determines to be more than what her circumstances have forced upon her. I see a woman who wants to speak directly to viewers, saying if you actually want to understand my perspective "then look into my eyes and see what I feel."

Human rights activist Godden doesn't agree with Datta's choice of showing the girl's face in the photo. He says that shocking photos such as this one aren't helping girls in Sonagachi, trapped as child sex slaves.

"Protection of children is always top priority," Godden says. "If this photo was exposing a practice that was unknown or hidden, then you could possibly justify exposing a child's identity to document what's happening."

Such an exception was made recently with child and adult slavery issues in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia and construction in the Middle East, Godden says.

Another example is Nick Ut's iconic war photo, showing a 9-year-old girl, naked, running away from a napalm attack in Vietnam. Historians credit that photo with changing the public's opinion about the war.

In the case of child slaves in Sonagachi, Godden says, the problem has been well known to activists and governmental officials for years.

"Human rights activists have been working on this issue for decades," he says. "Awareness is not the problem, in my opinion. Now it's about technical support to these girls and countering corruption in those country. It's not about shocking photos."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A team of engineers at Dartmouth College has invented a semiconductor chip that could someday give the camera in your phone the kind of vision even a superhero would envy.

The new technology comes from Eric Fossum, a professor of engineering and his colleagues at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering.

This isn't the first imaging technology Fossum has worked on. Twenty-five years ago, while working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he invented CMOS image sensor technology.

"There's about 4 billion cameras made every year with that CMOS image sensor technology," Fossum says.

The CMOS sensor chip turns light into electrical signals that can be processed to form digital images.

Fossum calls his new technology QIS, for Quanta Image Sensor. Instead of pixels, QIS chips have what Fossum and his colleagues call "jots." Each jot can detect a single particle of light, called a photon.

"What this chip can do because it's sensitive to single photons is it can see in the dimmest possible light," Fossum says.

A regular light bulb produces more than a billion-billion photons per second. So a single photon is pretty dim.

Other inventors have come up with chips that can see single photons, but these usually require special cooling equipment and are expensive to make.

Fossum's chip works at room temperature and uses standard manufacturing tools. He describes his new chip in the journal Optica.

Fossum envisions QIS will permit a new approach to creating digital images. Fast electronics allows each jot to be sampled 1,000 times per second. To build an image from the chip, the individual samples are added together and, using image processing software, a single image is produced.

It also could be useful to astronomers interested in collecting light from distant objects, or to military forced to work in low-light environments.

"It's really cool," says Sara Jensen, a microelectronic engineer at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. "I went and showed the paper around with some of the people I worked with in the camera field, and they were really excited about it. So I think it's a really big deal."

As impressive as it may be, don't expect to see the new chip in your cellphone any time soon. Fossum says it was more than two decades before his CMOS chip was in common use. He says the new chip is probably on a similar track.

"Maybe even a slower track, because strangely I'm trying to compete against myself with this new technology," he says. "The existing technology, my technology, is still pretty good."

Fossum is betting his new technology will become popular. He's formed a company called Gigajot Technology to start marketing it.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Today is Ash Wednesday.

For many of us, the smudge on people's foreheads signifies the first day of Lent.

Photographer Greg Miller has been documenting this ritual on the streets of New York City for the past 20 years.

His upcoming book, Unto Dust, features 40 portraits from his decades of work.

Here is what he told us about the project.

Why did you decide to do this project?

I've always been a street photographer. It just so happened that I was out photographing on Ash Wednesday in 1997. Out of only maybe six sheets of film, I had two really good pictures that day, which are amazing odds and it felt lucky. After the second year of doing it (when I photographed the police officer) I realized I had something. Because it's only one day of shooting a year, it never makes me feel like it is enough, I feel compelled to do it again and again each year. It's like an addiction. 


Is there one Ash Wednesday that stood out more than the rest?


The second year seems to stick out because that's when I realized I had to keep doing this. In the more recent years (since 2014) it's felt good for other reasons. As the project has gained popularity, people want to come out to either help me or be photographed by me. I have assembled a regular team and they give me energy that helps me keep going on the marathon day. In this way, Unto Dust has taken on a life of its own. I feel compelled to show up and keep going. It's like I work for my past pictures. 


What surprised you the most?


Especially early on I was surprised that people were willing to be photographed. Even though I am used to photographing strangers, I felt a little apprehensive about asking them to stop and be photographed because the ritual seemed so deeply personal and private to me. ... But then, most just said, "Sure." In fact, they were upbeat. There's a difference between what the ashes look like to someone else and the way people feel about having them. Out on the street, after having been to church, they are still wearing this mark of repentance, which looks striking perhaps to others, but actually they are feeling the relief of that and going back about their lives. It's just a part of their day to them, but visually it seemed so out of time and place to me. 


Do you have a favorite?


I have a few, but probably the one that resonates the most for me is the one of a woman looking up toward the sky smiling. That is Ilona, a sister. When I met her, she was walking west away from St. Patrick's Cathedral. I asked her, "Can you look past the camera?" Without missing a beat and without an ounce of irony, she said, "OK, I'll look at the Lord." At that moment, the sun came out and reflected off the windows of the different buildings. It was like Hollywood. Of all the people I have photographed, and I am not questioning anyone's faith, but it seemed, at least in the picture, that she really saw God. It was really mystical. Then there's the police officer. He told me he wasn't supposed to be photographed on the job, but sometimes people's pride gets the better of them. His is one of the most honest faces I've ever photographed. He's wearing the uniform, he's a regular guy, yet he's a complete mystery. 


What did you learn?


I've learned something about time. I feel like a time traveler, setting up this parameter every year and doing it. And when I look back at all the pictures, time compresses. The project makes it look like I knew what I was doing from the start. The truth is that all I did was show up every year.
 Also, this project confirmed for me that you can't tell who a person is by what they look like. I know that the portrait makes you feel something and, yes, you do know something about the picture , but you don't know the person at all. The most beautiful thing about it to me is that even as far as the photograph can go, it doesn't tell you everything. 


What is your next project?


I always have several ongoing projects. The most current is Morning Bus, photographs of children waiting for the school bus in and around where I live now in northeastern Connecticut. The project started developing after the Newtown shooting, which made me feel, intensely, the vulnerability of all of us, children and my own child included. I had seen kids waiting at the end of their driveways in the early hours lit by passing car lights — they were there, but I didn't see them. It all took on a new urgency after that.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Joel Smith, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at The Morgan Library & Museum, discusses the new exhibit Peter Hujar: Speed of Life at the Morgan. It runs through May 20th and features 140 photographs with a focus on portraiture. They chart Hujar’s career from the mid-1950's through the next three decades and reveal his profound influence on the East Village art scene during this time.

This segment is guest hosted by Kai Wright.

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Benn Steil discusses his new book The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, which looks at the legacy of the Marshall Plan in the context of today’s world order. Howard Bryant, a senior writer for ESPN, discusses his story, “A Protest Divided,” about the movement started by NFL's Colin Kaepernick. Joel Smith, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at The Morgan Library & Museum, discusses the new exhibit Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, president of Policing Equity and professor in Policing Equity at John Jay College, and Dr. Carla Shedd, Associate Professor of Urban Education and Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, talk about the enduring legacies of NYPD's practice of stop-and-frisk.  

This episode is guest hosted by Kai Wright.

Peter Hujar, the subject of a riveting retrospective at the Morgan Library and Museum, deserves to be better-known. A photographer who specialized in tender black-and-white portraits of his friends along with the less likely subjects of cows and other farm animals, he was one of the essential chroniclers of the East Village scene in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Many of his photographs pay undisguised homage to taut male bodies, reflecting a time of when Stonewall had brought a sense of freedom and AIDS had not yet descended. You can say that he made beautiful, optically pristine photographs about a scene on the verge of vanishing.

Hujar had his share of female muses, mostly artists and writers, and his portraits of women represent some of the most charismatic works in the show. His first muse was Daisy Aldan, a poet who taught his English class in high school, in Manhattan. His portrait of her from 1955, the earliest work here, emits a whiteness, an ethereality, that soon faded from his work — in the place of light, a raft of grays settled in. In what is probably his best-known portrait, Susan Sontag is shown from the waist up, lying pensively on her back in a ribbed turtleneck sweater. She is arched, striped and sensual. The picture, as much as Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, is a symphony of grays.

More amusing is a portrait of the writer Fran Lebowitz as a dark-haired 24-year-old. She is shown half-reclining in bed, propped up on her elbows, boldly meeting the viewer’s gaze. She can put you in mind of Manet’s daring model, Olympia, except that she is on polka-dot sheets that clash loudly with her op-art wallpaper. Clearly, artistic genius unfurled in the ‘70s not only in the under-furnished lofts of the East Village, but also in the oddly decorated suburbs.

Hujar’s life story is heartbreaking. He died of AIDS on Thanksgiving Day 1987, at the age of 53. Despite his achievements, he told his friends that he felt like a failure, and he looked with envy upon the success of Robert Mapplethorpe, his fellow exalter of male beauty.

The Morgan show gives Hujar his full due. It is late in coming, and naturally it’s sad that he can’t enjoy the inevitable acclaim. On the other hand, his work is precisely what we need right now to remind us of what authenticity looks like. Hujar displayed great tenderness in his work for underdogs and what he called the “all-in people” — people who lived their lives without holding back, without trying to cut their losses and be like everyone else. He himself was clearly all-in — especially in the empathy department, which adds additional appeal to his work in our singularly un-empathic era.

Fran Lebowitz reclining at home in Peter Hujar's photograph.

(© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

The Morgan Library and Museum

through May 20, 2018

A good photo can let you see the world in ways you never dreamed of.

That's what struck us about the nominees for the 2018 World Press Photo contest, an annual competition that highlights the best photojournalism of the year. The finalists were just announced.

As a blog that focuses on the developing world, we looked with special interest at photos that focus on life in the countries we cover, from Nigeria to North Korea. They give us a glimpse into both the beauty and pain of daily life, from women learning to swim in Zanzibar to boys carrying trash in Nigeria.

World Press Photo contest director Micha Bruinvels says the judges look for content, technique and aesthetics. The photos also need to meet journalistic standards like accuracy and fairness.

In some cases, these photos can help upend stereotypes we may have, Bruinvels adds.

"This is a window to our world by photojournalists who actually are working in not very easy environments these days, to show us really what's happening," he says.

Photographers from 125 countries submitted more than 73,000 photos for this year's World Press Photo contest. Jurors narrowed that number down to six pictures that have been nominated for the World Press Photo of the Year.

Altogether, more than 40 photographers are nominees for awards in categories like environment, people and general news.

The winners will be announced in April.

Courtney Columbus is a multimedia journalist who covers science, global health and consumer health. She has contributed to the Arizona Republic and Arizona PBS. Contact her @cmcolumbus11

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Journalist Howard Blum discusses his new book, which argues that to address Russian intervention in America today, we need to understand the history of Russian espionage dating back to the Cold War. Photographer Stan Honda talks about photographing the remnants of one of the darkest chapters in America's history: Japanese internment camps. Journalist and historian Amy Bass discusses how the arrival of 7,000 Somali immigrants transformed a post-industrial town in Maine.

This episode is guest hosted by Arun Venugopal. 

Photographer Stan Honda talks about the book, Moving Walls: The Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps, which was written by Sharon Yamato and features his black and white photography. This book is follow-up to a book published in 1995 about a project initiated by the Japanese American National Museum to preserve two barracks from the Heart Mountain confinement center. The book explores the fate of these barracks after the end of World War II, which went from housing Japanese prisoners to being used by homesteaders in the years after the war.

This segment is guest hosted by Arun Venugopal. 

When photographer Lorenzo Vitturi first visited Lagos, in 2014, he expected to find the same sort of gentrification he'd seen happening around him in London, where he's based. He imagined he'd find colorful neighborhoods being dismantled, razed and replaced with sterile skyscrapers. He anticipated chain stores and shopping malls where there were once mom-and-pop shops.

And for the most part, his instincts were right. In Africa's most populous, fastest-growing city, mass evictions have become almost commonplace.

But on Lagos Island, one of the oldest parts of the city, Vitturi was delighted to discover what he calls "reverse gentrification." Connected to the mainland by bridges, the island is the overcrowded home to the local government as well as the sprawling Balogun street market, where vendors hawk plastic furniture, cleaning products, bed linens, baskets, lipsticks and hair baubles. Over the last two decades, the stalls have steadily expanded and pushed out all of the international banks, airline companies and real estate firms that used to inhabit that part of town.

One of the last remaining vestiges of the area's corporate past is the 27-story Financial Trust House. The skyscraper — which was once lined with cubicles and buzzing with business executives — now lays empty. Gray-pink Sahara sand has swirled in through the paneless windows of the abandoned building, gradually blanketing every surface. "I loved the contrast of this gray internal landscape with the colorful chaos of the market outside," Vitturi says. "It's incredible, because these Nigerian street vendors have sort of reclaimed their land from the big corporations."

Of course, the corporations didn't go away altogether. "They've just moved to another area," Vitturi explains. But Balogun, its enterprising vendors and its unabating crowds had captured his imagination.

Vitturi's book Money Must Be Made is an ode to the market, featuring portraits of the vendors, taken over the course of several visits to Lagos, juxtaposed with photo collages that Vitturi made by cutting up his pictures of the products they were peddling.

We spoke with Vitturi about what drew him to Balogun, and how he put his book together. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What brought you to Lagos in the first place?

I was invited to do an artists' residency there by the African Artists' Foundation, which is an arts nonprofit in Lagos. They had seen my previous book, Dalston Academy— which is based around Ridley Road Market, which is a very, multicultural, largely Afro-Caribbean food market in east London. I had never been to Nigeria, or even to the continent of Africa, but I had actually grown very familiar with Nigerian culture, with Nigerian foods, from just living for a long time in this part of London.

It seems like you have a thing for markets.

I guess so! I had not at first intended on focusing on another market. But then I discovered this incredible story of Balogun. Whereas in London, the market was fighting a losing battle against gentrification, in Lagos it was just the opposite. The market had won.

What struck you the most about Balogun?

The crowd is unstoppable. There's continuous movement. I love the feeling of being there. For some people, this might feel a bit stressful. But for me, I just love the energy.

And then the other thing is the creativity, the ingenuity of the vendors. Every day they invent new ways to sell things, to get an edge in business. The one thing I wish I could have captured in the book is the audio techniques different vendors would use. For example, there was a tailor who would walk around with a sewing machine balanced on his head. And in one hand, he was carrying these big scissors that he actually played like an instrument. He would open and close them to make this sort of tch-tch-tch-tch kind of sound in a fast pattern or rhythm. So in this crazy chaos of the market, you can hear that noise, and you can find the tailor.

What you can see in my book is how some vendors invent a new art installation every single day with the way they display their goods. You see, for example, a man selling simple things like different soaps and toothpastes. But the way he has arranged all these items, to me it looks like an altar.

Interspersed with portraits of the vendors, you've included images of collages and sculptures that you made, using materials you bought at the market. Why is that?

My ideas for the collages and the sculptures come from the vendors. I was inspired by their artistry. But the point of these is to show a mishmash of all the items being sold and take different items out of context so that you can look at them in new ways.

What were some of the most common items being sold?

I was really interested in observing how there's an invasion of Chinese-made products.

Take the fabrics, for example. Nigeria has a long and important tradition of producing textiles. It used to be a big part of the Nigerian economy. But now the Chinese have arrived with their cheaper alternatives. These are just copies of the traditional African patterns, but the price is just incredible — super cheap.

I also bought several prayer mats. These are made in Ghana and are made of plastic — because they are used on the street. So they have to be cheap, light and durable. But I liked how beautiful and colorful they are, so I used them as a makeshift backdrop when I took portraits of people at the market. And later, I deconstructed them and used them in some of my sculptures.

In many of your portraits, you can't actually see the vendors' faces. In several cases, they're obscuring their faces by holding up the items they sell. How come?

I started posing them that way because most of the women I photographed were Muslim. And they'd tell me, 'I want to be photographed, but I don't want to show my face.' But this approach really worked to my advantage, because these vendors are so connected to the objects they sell every day. This is their livelihood and their life.

How did you come up with the title Money Must Be Made?

A man I met at the market was actually wearing a shirt that said "Money must be made." When I asked him about it, he told me this should be the unofficial Lagos motto. People from all over the country go there to do business, to make money, to make their dreams come true.

What did the people in Balogun think of your book?

I have yet to show off my final product in the market. Although, I did an exhibition in Lagos at the African Artists' Foundation.

I really don't like it when photographers, especially Western photographers, go to foreign places to click photos and then just leave. The people who are actually in these pictures never get to see their own images, or see how they've been represented.

So to avoid that, I printed a series of dummies or mock-ups as I was putting the book together, and I presented them to different people at the market. I was interested to see their reactions, both good and bad, and I actually have published some of these [reactions] at the end of the book.

One woman, she said, 'I don't understand why you left so much white space.' Which I think is quite funny, because of course, in Lagos it's so crowded and every inch of space is occupied. So the idea of a white, unused page just doesn't make sense in that context.

Anyway, I am thinking about how to do another show where I can present my finished book to the vendors at Balogun.

Have you considered setting up a stall there to sell copies?

I did think about it. But the thing is, there is absolutely no space for a new stall!

Maanvi Singh is a freelance writer. Contact her @maanvisings

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

If National Geographic's April issue was going to be entirely devoted to the subject of race, the magazine decided it had better take a good hard look at its own history.

Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg asked John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, to dive into the magazine's nearly 130-year archive and report back.

What Mason found was a long tradition of racism in the magazine's coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.

"[U]ntil the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers," writes Goldberg in the issue's editor letter, where she discusses Mason's findings. "Meanwhile it pictured 'natives' elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché."

Unlike magazines such as Life, "National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture," Goldberg says, noting that she is the first woman and first Jewish person to helm the magazine – "two groups that also once faced discrimination here."

To assess the magazine's coverage historically, Mason delved into old issues and read a couple of key critical studies. He also pored over photographers' contact sheets, giving him a view of not just the photos that made it into print, but also the decisions that photographers and editors made.

He saw a number of problematic themes emerge.

"The photography, like the articles, didn't simply emphasize difference, but made difference ... very exotic, very strange, and put difference into a hierarchy," Mason tells NPR. "And that hierarchy was very clear: that the West, and especially the English-speaking world, was at the top of the hierarchy. And black and brown people were somewhere underneath."

For much of its history, the pages of National Geographic depicted the Western world as dynamic, forward-moving and very rational. Meanwhile, Mason says, "the black and brown world was primitive and backwards and generally unchanging."

One trope that he noticed time and again was photographs showing native people apparently fascinated by Westerners' technology.

"It's not simply that cameras and jeeps and airplanes are present," he says. "It's the people of color looking at this technology in amusement or bewilderment." The implication was that Western readers would find humor in such fascination with their everyday goods.

Then there's how the magazine chose its subject matter. Mason explains that National Geographic had an explicit editorial policy of "nothing unpleasant," so readers rarely saw war, famine or civic conflict.

He points to an article on South Africa from the early 1960s that barely mentions the Sharpeville Massacre, in which 69 black South Africans were killed by police.

"There are no voices of black South Africans," Mason told Goldberg. "That absence is as important as what is in there. The only black people are doing exotic dances ... servants or workers. It's bizarre, actually, to consider what the editors, writers, and photographers had to consciously not see."

Then there's the way women of color were often depicted in the magazine: topless.

"Teenage boys could always rely, in the '50s and '60s, on National Geographic to show them bare-breasted women as long as the women had brown or black skin," Mason says. "I think the editors understood this was frankly a selling point to its male readers. Some of the bare-breasted young women are shot in a way that almost resembles glamour shots."

Mason says the magazine has been dealing with its history implicitly for the last two or three decades, but what made this project different is that Goldberg wanted to make reckoning explicit — "That National Geographic should not do an issue on race without understanding its own complicity in shaping understandings of race and racial hierarchy."

For those of us who have spent long afternoons thumbing old issues of the magazine and dreaming of far-off lands, Mason wants to make clear that looking at foreign people and places isn't a bad thing.

"We're all curious and we all want to see. I'm not criticizing the idea of being curious about the world. It's just the other messages that are sent--that it's not just difference, but inferiority and superiority."

So where does the storied publication go from here?

One good step would be to invite the diverse contributors to the April issue to become part of the magazine's regular pool of writers and photographers, Mason suggests.

"Still it's too often a Westerner who is telling us about Africa or Asia or Latin America," he says. "There are astonishing photographers from all over the world who have unique visions – not just of their own country, but who could bring a unique vision to photographing Cincinnati, Ohio, if it came to that."

He notes that the magazine's images have so often captivated, even when they were stereotypical or skewed. Mason says a number of African photographers have told him that it was magazines like National Geographic and Life that turned them onto photography in the first place.

"They knew that there were problems with the way that they and their people were being represented," he says. "And yet the photography was often spectacularly good, it was really inviting, and it carried this power. And as young people, these men and women said, I want to do that. I want to make pictures like that."

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published on November 26, 2017 and has been updated.

This week, an Instagram user who goes by the name of Jossa Johansson has come under fire for the caption of a post with a photo of herself embracing a little girl from Kibera, Kenya.

"One of the happiest moment in your life was probably when you met me and my friends," wrote Johansson. "I am sorry to tell you that there is a very slim chance we will ever meet again."

Johansson went on to write, "In two years you are going to meet a grown man that you have never met before and you two are going to have a child ... if you are lucky ... he will probably leave you alone ... in your small home made of mud and tree's. You will probably sell your body to someone else to earn money for your child."

She concluded: "I just want you to know there is hope, there is. Dreaming could be your saviour, dreaming could keep you alive. Dear child, keep safe."

Kenyans and other Africans and members of the African diaspora have called the post "pathetic" and "disgusting."

A tweet with screen grabs of the post has gone viral, with more than 37,500 retweets and 82,100 likes in just four days. "People in Kenya are not all desperate," wrote one Twitter user.

Johansson has since deleted the post and made her account private.

The uproar reinforces the message of a joint campaign aimed at volunteers in developing countries: Think before you snap that photo (and write that caption).

The campaign, launched just last fall, offers guidelines and a cheeky video to first-time travelers or young volunteers eager to capture every moment of their vacation or mission on Facebook or Instagram. It was created by Radi-Aid, a project of the Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund (SAIH) that fights stereotypes in aid and development, and by Barbie Savior, an Instagram parody account.

According to the campaigners, the selfie takers may not realize that their posts, from the photo to the caption to the hashtags, can perpetuate stereotypes and rob the subject of dignity or privacy.

A seemingly innocent selfie with African kids, for example, can perpetuate the idea that only Western aid, charity and intervention can "save the world," says Beathe Ogard, president of SAIH in Norway. These children are portrayed as helpless and pitiful, Ogard says, while the volunteer is made out to be the superhero who will rescue them from their misery.

Both Radi-Aid and Barbie Savior have gained a cult following for using satire and humor to tackle poverty porn, voluntourism and the white-savior complex. Radi-Aid, for example, made a viral video in 2016 titled "Who Wants To Be A Volunteer?" about a reality show whose grand prize is the chance to "Save Africa!" It has more than a million views.

Barbie Savior spoofs volunteer photography by recreating popular images using Barbie dolls and Photoshop. A recent entry portrayed Barbie sitting on a pit toilet. The caption: "Did you know that 112 percent of the people living in the country of Africa don't have access to toilets? #squatitlikeitshot." The account has more than 120,000 followers.

Despite their efforts, Barbie Savior and Radi-Aid have continued to observe "simplified and unnuanced photos playing on the white-savior complex, portraying Africa as a country, the faces of white Westerners among a myriad of poor African children, without giving any context at all," Ogard says. The proliferation of these posts, she suspects, is the result of social media becoming a big part of how we communicate.

That's what makes the guidelines so crucial, says Adeela Warley, CEO of CharityComms, a network of communications professionals working in U.K.-based nonprofits. "In the age of instant communications, it's too easy to press 'go,' " she says. "You still see so many images that make [impoverished people] look passive and helpless as opposed to empowered. People need to take the time to think about the stories their [social media posts] are telling."

Ogard and the co-founder of Barbie Savior, Emily Worrall, hope that the guide will make young volunteers and travelers more aware of what they're posting. Advice in the ten-point checklist includes: Be respectful of different cultures and traditions, avoid sweeping generalizations, challenge perceptions.

The campaigners also want photo-takers to question their own intentions. Are they just posting the photos for "likes"?

Worrall recalls her own experience a decade ago. When she was 17, she went on a volunteer trip to Uganda. She shared photos of herself and the orphans she was helping with her family and friends. They showered her with praise. "They told me, 'Wow, you're doing such amazing work.' They put me on a pedestal," she says. At the time, she didn't consider the children's privacy or vulnerability. Years later, it became inspiration for this Barbie Savior post:

That image is one of many cliched visual tropes that Ogard and Worrall have observed. They shared examples of the kinds of photos volunteers should avoid when traveling to the developing world:

Photos of volunteers giving candy or high fives to children.

These can give the viewer the impression that such small gestures can change a child's life when "in reality it has no impact. A lot of these people make empty promises and never come back to the community," says Worrall, who has worked in Uganda as a development consultant for seven years. She recreated the image for Barbie Savior in August 2016.

Photos of children on playgrounds.

"We're constantly reproducing these images that have no respect for informed consent," Ogard says. "In Norway, I would never show up at a school and take a selfie with kids playing."

Photos of sick children in hospital beds.

The campaigners illustrate this point in their animated video. The young volunteer takes a selfie with a sick child in a hospital bed while bored hospital staffers look on. "It completely disregards the child's needs," Worrall says.

For years, communicators in the field of global development have been working to fight stereotype-reinforcing images in charity ads through awareness campaigns and codes of ethics. But few specifically address social media or are geared toward young people.

Susan Krenn is the executive director of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Communication Programs, and her work centers on global development and public health programs overseas. While the university has a cultural orientation program for students traveling abroad, there are no hard and fast rules for how to portray their experience on social media. "I have not seen a resource like this," she says of the guidelines. "We'd use it. It's quite helpful, clear and easy."

Ogard and Worrall don't want the guidelines to discourage volunteers from posting photos on social media. They just want photo-takers to reflect on what they're sharing. Ask for a subject's consent, they say. Show your social followers something different.

If you need inspiration, Worrall says, check out some of the positive imagery from charities that received a Golden Radiator award in Radi-Aid's annual contest for the best and worst charity ads. These ads, like those from an NGO called Mama Hope, show local people actively engaged in helping others in their community.

If you're staying with a family in a low-income environment and they allow you to take a photo with their children, use it as a "great opportunity to challenge stereotypes," Worrall says. That might mean providing details and context — names, locations, personal stories — in an extended caption on social media.

And if a child gets excited when they see you pull out your tablet or smartphone and ask to take a photo with you, that doesn't mean it's OK to do so. "It's a cop out to say, well, they want it," Worrall says. "A child can't make that kind of decision."

"Think of how they would view the photo if they found it at 25 years old," she adds. "How would it make them feel?"

Your Turn

Have you ever felt conflicted about taking a selfie with children in low-income countries? Share your experience with @NPRGoatsandSoda on Twitter.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

When Phejin Konyak was a girl, she'd sit on her grandfather's lap in front of a roaring fireplace, with a pot of black tea simmering. He'd tell her folk tales. She was entranced by the stories — but even more by the jet black tattoos that curved over his eyes, nose, upper lip and chin. His neck, chest and body were filled with geometrical shapes and patterns.

When she went to boarding school at age 4, she began to realize that her grandfather's tattooed body – and indeed, the tattooed bodies of his fellow tribesmen – were quite extraordinary.

"All sorts of tribesmen would pass by our home or halt here for the night. All of them were elaborately decorated with tattoos. I always believed that tattooed bodies were the norm," she says.

And now, Phejin has written a book, The Last Of The Tattooed Headhunters(Roli books), documenting the tattooing traditions and the headhunting rituals of her ancestors. She collaborated with photographer Peter Bos to explore the changing ways of life and culture of this warrior clan.

The Konyaks are an ancient tribe, living in over 120 villages in India's North Eastern state of Nagaland, bordering Myanmar.

Fiercely individualistic, they once believed in settling disputes by headhunting — decapitating their enemies. They also hunted the heads of animals — cows, wild boars and monkeys.

"For hundreds of years, our people were completely isolated, even from mainland India," she says.

And then, change and modernity swept through Konyak territory at an alarming pace. There were mass conversions to Christianity.

"I don't deny that change is good, especially when it ushers in education, but in the case of the Konyaks it was too much, too soon," says Phejin. When she visited the National Museum of Kolkata in August 2014, she realized how much of India's rich cultural history was on display — and how there was barely any information about her own people. One reason, she says, is that people have been afraid to go into the territory of these fearsome warriors. "It struck me that even within India, the Konyak identity wasn't as well-known," says Phejin. "I knew our voices needed to be heard."

If Tattoos Could Talk

The Konyaks were once warriors who believed that the human skull held magical powers. It was deemed the place where the Yaha or the soul resided. A Konyak warrior believed that if he captured a head, it would bring his tribe good fortune.

And that's where the tattoos came in. A warrior who decapitated an enemy would be decorated with a prized neck tattoo. If he were only part of a larger hunting group and didn't actually cut the head of his prey, he would be given a facial tattoo. Rattan palm cane needles were bound into "tattoo combs" to etch the design, using the sap from the kong tree for the dark ink.

In addition to the headhunting-related tattoos for men, the patterns were indicative of their clan and represented bravery, status and achievement. "For women and girls, tattoos marked a transition in their lives from one phase to the next," adds Phejin. Women also had special tattoos signifying the achievements of male members of their family.

Then things began to change. In 1935 the British banned headhunting (although it persisted until the '70s.)

Today, the younger generation dresses in traditional clothes during festivals, but they paint their faces instead of undergoing the painful process of tattooing.

Last Of The Warriors

In March 2015, Phejin met Peter Bos, a 46-year-old Netherlands-based portrait photographer. She asked him to help with her book, he readily agreed. They both invested from their personal funds to cover their research.

"It was an intriguing project," says Bos. "I was always painfully aware that I could be the lastto document the Konyaks.

"I shot a picture of an old frail man who was standing outside his bamboo hut, with a bag of monkey skulls. Back home I printed the photo out and sent it to his family. By the time they'd received it, he had passed away."

Phejin and Bos had to contend with leech-infested forests and pouring rain to reach subjects in remote villages. In April that year, they set out to photograph a warrior with a neck tattoo. (Though headhunting was banned in 1935, it persisted until the '70s.)

Seventy-five-year-old Chingham Chatrahpa lived in Chen Loishu village in a remote part of Mon district. "Our pick-up truck couldn't go on because of the bad roads and heavy rain. We hired a four-wheel drive that took us a bit further, but we had to cover the rest of the five mileson foot," says Bos.

Chatrahpa refused to allow them to photograph him at first. "Thankfully, we were able to convince him," says Bos — partly because a Konyak woman was behind the project. Their photo of him is at the top of this post.

Winds of Change

In some of the photos in the book, it is evident how the changing times have affected the Konyaks. There is a picture of an old warrior posing with his grandchild, holding him close just outside their long house. The child is dressed in western clothes.The contrast, Bos says, caught his eye immediately.

Another startling image is that of 82-year old Pennga of Hunphoi village. His chest tattoos were a stark contrast to his western clothing. "He wore old gym pants, a beret cap on his head and dark glasses," says Bos. "He posed for me with such confidence."

Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist based in Madurai, South India. Her work has appeared in The International New York Times, BBC Travel and Forbes India. You can follow her @kamal_t

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

We snap a selfie with the tap of a finger. We're used to preserving smiling moments.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, there's an exhibit right now which goes to darker places with a camera. The images in "Real Worlds" are from three major photographers, taken over half a century.

There's Brassaï, a French-Hungarian who made his reputation revealing secret Paris nights between the World Wars. There's Diane Arbus, American, who said in the 1960s, "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them." And there's Nan Goldin, another American, who stunned the 1980s with her series "The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency."

All three picture-takers are revolutionary: They photographed, with profound intimacy, the undersides of life. Their images are stunning, sometimes shocking, often provocative.

In nighttime Paris, Brassaï stalked the underworld — brothels, streetwalkers. But at MOCA, there's a Brassaï shot of a happy night at an Afro-Caribbean club in Montmartre. Black and white people smoke together, sip Perrier or stronger stuff, dance. And there's an intriguing woman on the left.

"She's wearing this white hat that's just off to the side, a kind of kerchief hat, and she's staring directly at the camera," says curator Lanka Tattersall. "And this is the thing that I find so remarkable in this image. It's taken in 1932. She's looking at Brassaï and she's very aware of her image being taken by this photographer."

It didn't happen that much in 1932 — people roaming around, unannounced, taking your picture. What might she have been thinking?

"She's probably thinking — you know, this scene is being preserved," Tattersall says. "I think that's what makes this photograph absolutely contemporary, is an awareness of what it is to be photographed, and to really think about having your image distributed across time and space."

Thirty years later, American photographer Diane Arbus inherited Brassaï's vision. We were used to having our pictures taken by the 1960s. But Arbus' focus was new. In black and white, she documented people on the fringes. Giants, bearded ladies, people with mental disabilities or those who may have been institutionalized. In Tattersall's words: "people whose bodies or sexual identities didn't conform with kind of mainstream narrative of what it was to be an American."

Arbus was accused of voyeurism, of going after what were then called freak shows. But Tattersall, the MOCA curator, says Arbus forged relationships with her subjects, and that there's empathy in the pictures.

"To me, she's photographing these remarkable individuals who want to be photographed," Tattersall says.

There's a remarkable 1969 photo Arbus called "Transvestite at her birthday party."

"And it's just this person lying alone, on a bed," Tattersall says. "She's got some balloons taped up on the wall. It might just be a two-person birthday party. It might just be Arbus and this one woman. They're having a fabulous time."

Transgender people also intrigue photographer Nan Goldin. Twenty years after Arbus, Goldin photographs them — as well as gays and lesbians. Hers are the most provocative pictures in the MOCA exhibit.

She also shows people having sex — friends, who let her photograph them having sex. Her camera is part of their scene. Are the pictures invasive?

"I think they're voracious," Tattersall says.

Goldin is exploring relationships — what happens in love, and when love goes wrong. Her 1984 self-portrait, "Nan one month after being battered" (pictured atop this page) shows the damage her lover did to her. Dark bruises under her eyes — the left eye bloody in her swollen face — she looks right at us. The look is uncompromising.

"I think there's a chilling way in which she's saying, 'This is what it looks like to be battered,'" Tattersall says. "But this is also what it looks like to take control of your own image."

Nan Goldin was 31 years old in that photo. One battered eye was nearly blind. But she's painted her lips carefully. A bright, bright red.

"Even if that moment of violence and abuse is one of victimization, there's a way in which she's saying, "'I am taking my own agency back in this image,'" Tattersall says.

There's a lot of rough stuff in this exhibition — images and ideas that linger long after you've left the building. They trace how great photographers have used their cameras to make us see, understand or recoil, in the course of half a century.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Theaters aren’t merely spaces we associate with wonderful sound — in many instances they are architecturally stunning as well. Continuing our exploration of the world’s most beautiful halls, here are six more of our favorites.

Odeon of Herodes Atticus

Odeon of Herodes Atticus

(Nico Trinkhaus / Flickr)

A musical link to the past, this ancient Roman-style odeon (a venue for the performance and practice of poetry, music and theater) was funded by Athenian philosopher and Roman senator Herodes Atticus, completed in 174 CE, and dedicated to the memory of his late wife, Regilla. Destroyed by fire during an invasion less than 100 years later, it was used variously as a quarry, fort and — after it was filled in — farmland. Excavated in the mid-19th century and restored in 1898, 1900 and 1922, it is again a useable venue, and now a central theater for the Athens & Epidaurus Festival.

Entering the Odeon

(Emiliano Felicissimo / Flickr)

The Bolshoi Theatre

The Bolshoi Theater

(Ekaterina Kuzmina / Flicker)

This historic Moscow theater traces its roots to Prince Pyotr Urusov and Michael Maddox, to whom Catherine II granted a 10-year license to organize entertainment in the Russian capital. The duo quickly built a theater, the Petrovsky, which opened in 1780 and burned down 25 years later. A second, larger theater by architect Andrei Mikhailov opened in 1825 in its place. It came to be known as the Bolshoi (“Big”) Theatre — but it, too, was destroyed by fire in 1853. Three years later the current Bolshoi opened, this time designed by Alberto Cavos, who said he “tried to decorate the auditorium as extravagantly but at the same time as lightly as possible, in Renaissance taste mixed with Byzantine style." 

View from the Bolshoi's balcony.

(nl.monteiro / Flickr)

Teatro Massimo

The Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Sicily

(Public Domain)

Palermo’s opera house is the largest in all of Italy, and the third largest venue in Europe behind Paris’s Palais Garnier and Vienna’s State Opera. First opened in 1897 — after 33 years of planning and building — the building has closed on numerous occasions throughout its history, due at one point to Mafia corruption. One of its more interesting features is its “Symbolic wheel,” an intricately designed ceiling fixture that the theater describes as “resembling a wide flower with eleven petals.” It has a functional purpose, too — those petals open and close, and served as the original ventilation system.

The ceiling (and ventilation system) of the Teatro Massimo

(F@bio S@nfilippo / Flickr)

Cape Town City Hall

Cape Town City Hall

(Martie Swart / Flickr)

Completed in 1915, this large limestone building in South Africa’s legislative capital formerly housed the city’s administrative offices, and is now used for concerts by the resident Cape Philharmonic Orchestra. Among its more stunning features is a 3,165-pipe organ, built in 1905 and designed by George Martin of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and a clock tower that dutifully chimes the Westminster Quarters. 

Cape Town City Hall, with pipe organ visible.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Roudaki Hall

Roudaki Hall

(Wikimedia Commons)

Persian-American architect Eugene Aftandilian took some design cues from the Vienna State Opera when he designed Tehran’s opera house, considered at the time of its 1967 inaugural (at least by Contemporary Architecture of Iran) as one of the “best-equipped” in the world. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the name was officially changed to Vahdat Hall (“vahdat” is Arabic for “unity”).

Ceiling of Roudaki Hall

(Wikimedia Commons)

Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall

Glassy exterior of the Segerstrom Concert Hall.

(Wikimedia Commons) 

This exterior of this concert hall in Costa Mesa, California, uses an entire acre of glass, offset by beige Portuguese Limestone. Inside is Francesca Bettridge's captivating “Constellation,” a lighting-design installation that includes Swarovski crystals and hundreds of Baccarat-crystal-tipped stainless steel pendants.

.Inside the Segerstrom

(Tom Walker)

Nobody’s perfect. And that’s a good thing. It’s also a lesson supermodel and entrepreneur Tyra Banks learned early on from her mother, Carolyn London.

London, a retired photographer, not only supported her daughter through a wildly successful career in fashion, she helped Banks through the pressures and challenges of the industry early on with wise words and honest dialogue.

The only way to live a perfect life is to not take risks, to just sit in a little box and never go after what you want or reach for your goals (because, God forbid, ya could try and ya could fail, and that sho’ ain’t perfect). When you care a lot about someone or something, you’re more likely to do imperfect things. Ya know, like freak out and yell.

So what was I gonna do?

Try to sweep the imperfections under my Kool-Aid-colored red wig, or air it out, even if it got a little messy?

Well, Mama always taught me not be afraid of messy.

Even if it was a hot mess.

— from *Perfect Is Boring* by Tyra And Her Mama

The two have now co-authored a book called Perfect Is Boring, based on London’s advice. It’s written to speak to readers who need grounding or a boost of confidence — and it speaks volumes about the strength of their relationship, even in imperfect times.

GUESTS

Tyra Banks, Model and entrepreneur; co-author, “Perfect Is Boring”; @tyrabanks

Carolyn London, Retired photographer; mother of Tyra Banks; co-author, “Perfect Is Boring”

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

© 2018 WAMU 88.5 – American University Radio.

Copyright 2018 WAMU 88.5. To see more, visit WAMU 88.5.