When Katlyn Burbidge's son was 6 years old, he was performing some silly antic typical of a first-grader. But after she snapped a photo and started using her phone, he asked her a serious question: "Are you going to post that to Facebook?"

She laughed and answered, "Yes, I think I will." What he said next stopped her.

"Can you not?"

That's when it dawned on her: She had been posting photos of him online without asking his permission.

"We're big proponents of bodily autonomy and not forcing him to hug or kiss people unless he wants to, but it never occurred to me that I should ask his permission to post photos of him online," says Burbridge, a mom of two in Wakefield, Mass. "Now when I post photos of him on Facebook, I show him the photo and get his okay. I get to approve tags and photos of myself I want posted — why not my child?"

When her 8-month-old is 3 or 4 years old, she plans to start asking him in an age-appropriate way, "Do you want other people to see this?"

That's precisely the approach that two researchers advocated before a room of pediatricians last week at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting, when they discussed the 21st century challenge of "sharenting," a new term for parents' online sharing about their children.

"As children's-rights advocates, we believe that children should have a voice about what information is shared about them if possible," says Stacey Steinberg, a legal skills professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville.

Whether it's ensuring your child isn't bullied over something you post, that their identity isn't digitally "kidnapped" or that their photos don't end up on a half dozen child pornography sites, as one Australian mom discovered, parents and pediatricians are increasingly aware of the importance of protecting children's digital presence.

Steinberg and Bahareh Keith, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine, say most children will likely never experience problems related to what their parents share, but a tension still exists between parents' rights to share their experiences and their children's rights to privacy.

"We're in no way trying to silence parents' voices," Steinberg says. "At the same time, we recognize that children might have an interest in entering adulthood free to create their own digital footprint."

They cited a study presented earlier this year of 249 pairs of parents and their children in which more than twice as many children than parents wanted rules on what parents could share.

"The parents said, 'We don't need rules — we're fine,' and the children said, 'Our parents need rules,' " Keith says. "The children wanted autonomy about this issue and were worried about their parents sharing information about them."

She pointed out that the American Academy of Pediatrics offers guidelines to parents on monitoring their children's social media use, but not the other way around, something David Hill, chair of the AAP Council on Communications and Media, expects will become an important part of AAP's messaging.

Although its current media guidelines do recommend that parents model appropriate social media use for their children, it does not explicitly discuss oversharing by parents.

"I think this is a very legitimate concern, and I appreciate their drawing our attention to it," Hill, a father of five, says. He sees a role for pediatricians to talk with parents about this, but believes the messaging must extend far beyond pediatricians' offices. "I look forward to seeing researchers expand our understanding of the issue so we can translate it into effective education and policy," he says.

There's been little research on the topic, Steinbert wrote in a law article about this issue. While states could pass laws related to sharing information about children online, Steinberg feels parents themselves are generally best suited to make these decisions for their families.

"While we didn't want to create any unnecessary panic, we did find some concerns that were troublesome, and we thought that parents or at least physicians should be aware of those potential risks," Steinberg says. They include photos repurposed for inappropriate or illegal means, identity theft, embarrassment, bullying by peers or digital kidnapping.

Parents aren't oblivious to these possibilities. A March 2015 survey of 569 parents of children ages 4 and younger, conducted by C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan, found that 68 percent worried about their child's privacy and 67 percent worried their children's photos might be reshared — a concern grounded in reality.

For example, an unscientific survey of an online child pornography site by an Australian government official found a significant chunk of the photos had initially been shared by parents on sites such as Facebook and Instagram. The photos themselves were mostly innocent, everyday scenes of kids playing, but they were accompanied by explicit, inappropriate comments. The Australian official estimated that "about half" of the 45 million images "appeared to be sourced directly from social media."

But that's the sordid side, with risks that must be balanced against the benefits of sharing. Steinberg pointed out that parental sharing on social media helps build communities, connect spread-out families, provide support and raise awareness around important social issues for which parents might be their child's only voice.

The same C.S. Mott survey found among the 56 percent of mothers and 34 percent of fathers who discussed parenting on social media, 72 percent of them said sharing made them feel less alone and nearly as many said sharing helped them worry less and gave them advice from other parents. The most common topics they discussed included kids' sleep, nutrition, discipline, behavior problems and day care and preschool.

"There's this peer-to-peer nature of health care these days with a profound opportunity for parents to learn helpful tips, safety and prevention efforts, pro-vaccine messages and all kinds of other messages from other parents in their social communities," says Wendy Sue Swanson, a pediatrician and executive director of digital health at Seattle Children's Hospital, where she blogs about her own parenting journey to help other parents. "They're getting nurtured by people they've already preselected that they trust," she says.

"How do we weigh the risks, how do we think about the benefits, and how do we mitigate the risks?" she says. "Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves, and everyone can have a different answer."

For mom Karen Koy, of Platte City, Mo., avoiding nudity or posts about bodily fluids is a given, but for things she's uncertain about, she asks herself a series of questions.

"Who does this serve? If it's anyone other than the kid, no go," she explained via Facebook Messenger. "Is this something people would enjoy hearing or seeing? If the answer is no, no go. Is this something I would love to see pop up as a Facebook memory on a bad day? If not, no go."

The last question is the reason she did not share photos when her daughter was hospitalized.

"She looked adorable in the oversized hospital gown, which she was wearing because she was vulnerable, and I feel like posting that takes advantage of that vulnerability to gain attention for us, her parents," Koy says. "Her being in the hospital shouldn't be about us, it should be about her and what she needs in that moment."

Some parents find the best route for them is not to share at all. Bridget O'Hanlon and her husband, who live in Cleveland, decided before their daughter was born that they would not post her photos online. When a few family members did post pictures, O'Hanlon and her husband made their wishes clear.

"It's been hard not to share pics of her because people always want to know how babies and toddlers are doing and to see pictures, but we made the decision to have social media, she did not," O'Hanlon told NPR via Facebook Messenger.

Similarly, Alison Jamison of Fairport, N.Y., decided with her husband that their child had a right to their own online identity. They did use an invitation-only photo sharing platform so that friends and family, including those far away, could see the photos, but they stood firm when they received pushback about not using other social media platforms, she told NPR via Facebook Messenger.

"For most families, it's a journey. Sometimes it goes wrong, but most of the time it doesn't," says Swanson, who recommends starting to ask children permission to post narratives or photos around ages 6 to 8. "We'll learn more and more what our tolerance is. We can ask our kids to help us learn as a society what's okay and what's not."

Indeed, that learning process goes both ways. Bria Dunham, a mother in Somerville, Mass., was so excited to watch a moment of brotherly bonding while her first-grader and baby took a bath together that she snapped a few photos. But when she considered posting them on Facebook, she took the perspective of her son: How would he feel if his classmates' parents saw photos of him chest-up in the bathtub?

"It made me think about how I am teaching him to have ownership of his own body and how what is shared today endures into the future," Dunham says. "So I kept the pictures to myself and accepted this as one more step in supporting his increasing autonomy."

Tara Haelle is the co-author of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years. She's on Twitter: @tarahaelle

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A big blue rooster has appeared on top of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It's part of the museum's renovated East Building, which recently opened to the public with several new exhibitions — including a handful of pictures by the highly regarded German art photographer Thomas Struth.

The pictures belong to Robert Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, a couple who began collecting photographs nine years ago. Their very first purchase — Struth's Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait, Munich 2000 -- is now hanging in an East Building gallery. In it, Struth is seen out of focus and from behind, inspecting a self-portrait by German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer. Struth shot the photo so that Dürer's painting looks life-size.

Becker always loved Dürer's self-portrait. She says that when she saw Struth's double self-portrait, "I was so fascinated by the idea that someone was doing what I had just done. This wasn't a photograph of the Dürer; it was a photograph of ... someone looking at a great work of art."

She shared the experience with Meyerhoff, who was already a major collector. As Becker remembers it, "[He] was the one who said, 'It would be fun to see if we could get that.' "

Struth is known for large pictures of people looking at paintings, sculptures and art in museums. He also makes massive architectural images. His photo of the facade of Notre Dame — part of the Meyerhoff-Becker collection — is 6 feet by 8 feet, the largest photographic paper Kodak makes. In it, the looming cathedral fills the photo space, and visitors below are as small as the sculptures that adorn it. It's as if the photo was taken from the high window of a tall building across the way — but there's no tall building there. For the elevated, head-on perspective he wanted, the photographer needed a place to stand with his big, 8-by-10-view camera. So he ordered a very tall, moveable platform. "It came on a gigantic truck on a Saturday morning at 7 o'clock," Struth says.

He had to remove the platform every evening, and take it back to the front of the cathedral every morning. He also had to ask a souvenir hawker to move his wares so as not to get in the picture. "He said, 'Well that makes like 500 euros less profit on one day,' " Struth remembers. "So we paid him some money to move it."

The photographer then waited for just the right number of tourists to walk by. In the enormous photo, not one tourist is blurred. It took two days to get the image he wanted — some 120 shots.

Struth spent considerably less time making another photo in the Meyerhoff-Becker collection. It's very different from his architectural and museum work, and much less dramatic. A curator at the National Gallery in London wanted to commission him to photograph Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. It wasn't exactly his style, so the photographer spent days making pro and con lists. Con: He could fail, and that would be bad. Pro (but also sort of con): "If it succeeds, then I have to talk about it all the time," he says.

So Struth set some conditions. First, he would pick the dress — nothing fancy, no fur-trimmed robe, no crown. He chose a simple pale blue, silk dress, a small pin on the shoulder and black patent pumps. Three weeks before the shoot, he scoped out Windsor Castle and picked a room with gold trim, chandeliers and a rich green brocaded love seat that he angled back so a bright natural light made the queen more prominent.

The royals sit facing the camera. Her expression is pleasant; his stare is intent. "He's like an old eagle," Struth says of Prince Philip. Struth took 17 photographs in 25 minutes.

"They were actually quite nice together," the photographer recalls. "While I was dealing with the camera and stuff like that in between, they were talking to one another and I thought, They're great. I like them."

To collectors Meyerhoff and Becker, they look like a fairly ordinary suburban couple in a fancy room — the kind of couple you could have "over for a Johnny Walker Black."

In addition to Struth's work, Rheda Becker and Robert Meyerhoff's photography collection includes pieces by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Catherine Opie and John Baldessari. All those contemporary photographers, and more, are on display in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art until early March.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in Northern England and also serves as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism. He also runs the popular Herdwick Shepherd account on Twitter (@herdyshepherd1). He joins us to discuss his second book, The Shepherd’s View: Modern Photographs From an Ancient Landscape, a collection of photography that chronicles the timeless rhythm of farm life in the Lake District.

Event: On Tuesday, November 1 at 7 p.m. James Rebanks will be appearing at House of Speakeasy's "Seriously Entertaining Razor's Edge" at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street) alongside Phil Klay, Elizabeth Alexander and Madeline Thien. 

Three-time James Beard Award winner and longtime WNYC afternoon host Leonard Lopate makes audiences salivate – and taste new things – with Lopate & Locavores, the popular live event series back for a seventh year of spotlighting New York City’s local food scene.

Join him tonight as he explores the magical art of making food look ravishing with photographers Liz Clayman and Michael Harlan Turkell and stylist Rebekah Peppler. 

Leafing through a cookbook or a food magazine can really get our digestive juices flowing, especially when the photos make it all look so delicious. Leonard sits down with these stylists to learn what's behind their art of seduction and share their secrets to making images pop. 

Watch live beginning 7pm ET 
Join the conversation on Twitter using #LopateLocavores 

Poet Anis Mojgani appears in a portrait based on his poem “we were horses.” It reads: “I was in a dream country. You were there. / And all those little blonde hairs that run up your legs / and over your shoulders.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

In 1860, writing the third of six editions of his book “Leaves of Grass,” behemoth of American poetry Walt Whitman proclaimed what would follow him.

“I announce greater offspring, orators, days, and then depart,” he wrote in the book’s final poem, a tribute to everything he would never live to witness.

Now, generations later, photographer B.A. Van Sise— who descended from Whitman’s oldest sister and also his first cousin — has set out to create a portrait of his legacy. “Whitman’s Descendants” is a striking set of portraits documenting the heart of American poetry today, one that bears an urgent connection to Whitman and the issues of his day.

Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo appears in this portrait based on his poem “Epicurus.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

Gregory Pardlo, reading in a sailboat, lets the oars drift alongside him. Anis Mojgani stares at us from darkness. Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s gown pools on a wooden floor. These are the many faces of Whitman’s poetic descendants, their writing and origin stories as diverse as the America that his writing reflected, Van Sise said.

“I am a tremendous fan of the cultural change that he brought about in this country, of the way he changed literature, of the way he changed American culture, the way we talk about what being an American is,” Van Sise told the NewsHour.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil appears in this portrait based on her poem “Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill,” a found poem composed of e-mails from high school students. It begins: “If I were to ask you a question about your book / and sum it up into one word it would be, ‘Why?’ / I think I like Walt Whitman better than you.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

Some of those poets had been writers-in-residence at Whitman’s birthplace in Long Island, New York, the group that Van Sise originally sought to photograph. He soon expanded to include other poets whose writing engages with Whitman’s imprint on American literature.

“[Whitman] had different views — they were very much out of step with everyone else in America — about what it meant to be a man. What it meant to love people. What it meant to be an American. What it meant to think about your sexuality. What it meant to be literate. What it meant to have a newspaper. What it meant to be autobiographical,” he said.

Each photo begins with a piece of writing from the poet, which Van Sise mines for visual elements to create an initial concept. “I almost always pick a piece that has some sort of autobiographical value to me,” Van Sise said. Then, he and the poet will work together to settle on a final concept and complete the final image.

Kim Addonizio appears in a portrait based on her poem “First Poem for You.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

Whitman came from a working-class family on Long Island, left formal schooling at the age of 11 and held jobs as a teacher, newspaper editor, government clerk and others over the course of his life. He belonged to “a Jacksonian lower middle class undergoing the transition from an agrian, artisinal culture to an urban, market economy,” Andrew Lawson wrote in “Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle.” This position situated him at the crux of the major social changes taking place in mid-19th-century New York City, which echo in his celebration of the working class along with “the endless races of working people and farmers and seamen” (“Leaves of Grass,” 1855).

This diverse background resonates with many poets who have come after Whitman, according to Cynthia Shor, executive director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association.

“I think the poets in today’s age who have gone through the ranks and who were not necessarily born into the intelligentsia family … feel that kinship with Whitman,” she said.

Adrienne Su appears in this portrait based on her poem “Escape from the Old Country.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

In 1855, Whitman self-published the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” in Brooklyn against a backdrop of political discord over slavery. Whitman himself supported the Free Soil Party, which sought to stop the spread of slavery in the country’s newly-added western territories, a position for which his employer at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle fired him.

In New York City, this tension was compounded by a rapid rise in the immigrant population, as “ethnic ghettos like Kleindeutschland appeared alongside such exclusive refuges of the rich as Astor Place,” scholar Thomas, M. Wynn wrote in a commentary.

Discussions of race and immigration are as urgently important today as they were in the 1850s, as is the art that engages with those issues, Van Sise said.

“There’s been a distinct, for me, reaction to what is happening in politics and doing this specific project,” Van Sise said. “I don’t think our world has changed a lot from … the world that he was facing when he wrote ‘Leaves of Grass’ in 1855. I think that the topics that we’re talking about haven’t changed a lot.”

Kaveh Akbar appears in this portrait based on his poem “Some Boys Aren’t Born They Bubble.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

Poet Kaveh Akbar, whose portrait draws on his piece “Some Boys Aren’t Born They Bubble,” called Van Sise’s work “totally unprecedented.”

“There have been other photographers who set out to capture the poets of their day, but I don’t know of any who worked so hard to fully inhabit the conceptual realm of the poets’ work, to create photos that seem to exist within the same psychic ecosystem as the poems themselves,” he wrote in an email to the NewsHour. “B.A.’s photos seem to vibrate at the frequency of his subjects’ poems—that, to me, is the true miracle of his work.”

See more of Van Sise’s photos below.

Jeffrey McDaniel appears in this portrait based on the poem “The Quiet World.” It begins: “In an effort to get people to look / into each other’s eyes more, / and also to appease the mutes, / the government has decided / to allot each person exactly one hundred / and sixty-seven words, per day.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

Dorianne Laux appears in this portrait based on the poem “As It Is.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky appears in a portrait based on his poem “Antique.” It begins: “I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned / In the river of not having you, we lived / Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms /
And we were parted for a thousand years.” Photo by B.A. Van Sise

The post In ‘Whitman’s Descendants,’ photographing some of America’s greatest living poets appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

In the 1980s, Athens, Georgia, rock band R.E.M. was the epitome of the artful "alternative" band— producing a string of beautiful, if occasionally inscrutable albums, and slowly evolving over time. But then came Out of Time, the band's true arrival as global rock stars, riding largely on the strength of “Losing My Religion,” which was in constant rotation on TV and radio throughout 1991. It was the moment the band snapped into crisp pop focus—and lead singer Michael Stipe stepped with somewhat more gusto into his role as frontman. Stipe led the band through twenty more years of bold experimentation, massive success, and the occasional misstep—but never insincerity. R.E.M. disbanded in 2011, and, for the last five years, Stipe has channeled his new time and energy into photography, teaching, and politics. And while his songs will almost certainly last in the cultural memory for a very long time, Stipe himself has even broader ambitions. Like living until he’s a hundred and twenty, for starters. He talks to host Alec Baldwin about his long-term plans, as well as more immediate concerns, like voting.

Can you find beauty in a life of hardship?

If the photos from the Siena International Photo Awards are any indication, the answer is yes. Last month, the winners and runners-up in 11 categories, including travel, nature, people and portraits, were announced.

Many of those top images were taken in the developing world, depicting lives affected by poverty and adversity — but not in the way you might expect.

A Vietnamese woman making a fishing net looks as if she's swimming in a sea of green fire. Girls from a Mongolian tribe fetching water in Chinatrek across shadowy sand dunes that dip and curve like the human body. A lone fisherman in Iraq sails across the Euphrates River in a haze of silver light.

"I can feel how people live," says Gabriele Venturi, a contest organizer.

The Siena International Photo Awards, an annual contest organized by a group of photographers and enthusiasts from Siena, Italy, is only 2 years old, but it's already made quite the mark. This year, 5,000 people from 130 countries submitted more than 45,000 photos — double the number from last year.

The contest culminates in Siena's Art Photo Travel Festival, running through the month of November. The winners, who came to Siena for the awards ceremony, were encouraged to stick around, share ideas with their fellow photographers, add each other as friends on Facebook and keep in touch.

For Venturi, that's the whole point. "Our main aim was to create a community. People just participate in photo contests and it all ends," he says. "We wanted to create something continuous."

Take a look at a selection of photos from the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions below:

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The photographer and author documented life in Nazi Germany and in Josef Stalin's gulags, as well as the arrival of Jews in Israel. She died Thursday in New York, at the age of 105. You can see several of her photographs here.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Your posters. The color of your walls. The size of your bed. Where you sleep says a lot about who you are.

That's the idea behind photographer and filmmaker John Thackwray's photo series My Room Project.

Six years ago, Thackwray started photographing his friends in their Parisian bedrooms to capture their style, interests and hobbies. He slowly expanded the project to include the rooms of young people from Nepal to Romania to Mexico. He wanted to document the diverse lifestyles of the millennial generation — people born in the '80s and '90s — and show how they express themselves.

With support from groups like UNICEF and Gautier, a French furniture company, he was able to travel to 55 countries over the past few years, where he captured the portraits of 1,200 individuals ages 18 to 30. Thackwray, who was born in South Africa, has visited a Buddhist temple in Nepal, a jail in Mexico and the cold reaches of Russia's Siberia. He has profiled artists, students, engineers, shepherds and filmmakers.

Although the subjects come from very different places, the photos are alltaken from the same perspective: the millennial sits in the center of the room and locks eyes with Thackwray's camera high above.

Convincing people to let him into their bedrooms for a photo shoot was 95 percent of the work, says Thackwray. He found young people to photograph through local organizations and social media. Sometimes he went into the street and asked strangers.

Thackwray hopes his project will help viewers become more conscious of the world. "I'm not here to judge. I'm just here to document and understand," he says.

Next year will be busy for Thackwray. His photos will exhibit in art galleries in France, Spain and Russia. And his book,My Room: A Portrait of a Generation, featuring 100 portraits from his travels, comes out in February 2017.

Bolivia

China

India

Lesotho

Nepal

Romania

Rwanda

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

It was in 1974 that William Christenberry found the little red house.

The photographer and painter, a vital chronicler of rural Alabama, came across the building standing alone among the pine trees, deep in the Talladega National Forest. All he had with him was his tiny, no-frills Brownie camera — a long-cherished gift that "Santa brought my sister and me."

"I was just infatuated with it proportionally," Christenberry said during a 2006 interview with All Things Considered. "The fact that they took this artificial brick siding, which you can buy in rolls and staple or tack it up there, and somebody who must've had a great sense of humor, or was totally ignorant of what he or she was doing, covered the front door and made it look like a brick door!"

Christenberry died Monday at the age of 80, from complications related to Alzheimer's disease, according to his daughter Kate. And among the many pillars of his legacyis the odd, little house that so fascinated him.

Though he had moved to Washington, D.C., in 1968 to take up a position at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Christenberry returned every year to rural Alabama, where he had spent his summers as a child. It was a pilgrimage he made for decades. There, he photographed the house — which he later learned was once a one-room schoolhouse — along with small churches and roadside businesses, as they changed with age.

"I'd go into that landscape, what I call the landscape of my childhood, and make these snapshots," he told NPR. "Never did I dream that years later the world of fine art photography would see something in these."

And the world of fine art did indeed take notice.

"What was really spectacular about [his work] is that he made that subject matter universal," Margaret Lynne Ausfeld, senior curator of art at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, told Tuscaloosa News. "When you look at his work, what you see is basically the transitory nature of our life and our world and how things are inevitably going to change over time."

Christenberry, who also worked in abstract painting and sculpture, forged an enduring friendship early in his career with another photographer, Walker Evans. Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of photographs that recorded a trip he took with poet James Agee to Hale County, Ala., in 1936 — the year of Christenberry's birth. After the two photographers met in the early 1960s, Walker's work and advice helped shape Christenberry's development.

"Walker was a great influence. We exchanged ideas until his death, and I like to think there was a lot of cross-influencing," Christenberry told Afterimage magazine in 2005.

Yet, despite the fact they shared a subject at times, Christenberry said his relationship to Alabama was always different.

"His view was objective. My stance is very subjective," he told the magazine. "The place is so much a part of me. I can't escape it and have no desire to escape it. I continue to come to grips with it."

And even as he won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Christenberry said the long-beating heart of his art remained the same.

"I don't want my work to be thought of as maudlin or overly sentimental. It's not. It's a love affair — a lifetime of involvement with a place. The place is my muse."

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Photographer Harry Benson, the subject of the documentary, “Harry Benson: Shoot First” discusses the film along with director Matthew Miele, who co-directed it with Justin Bare. Benson has been there to photograph the most monumental figures of the 20th century, from The Beatles to Michael Jackson, from the Kennedys to the Clintons. The film tells the story about how a young photographer from Glasgow ended up giving us the definitive portraits of some of the most important people of our time. 

Opens Friday December 9th at the IFC Center (323 6th Avenue). There will be Q&As with Harry Benson, Matthew Miele, and producer Heather Silverman for the 7:20 p.m. show both Friday and Saturday. 

Journalist Christopher Leonard and senior fellow at the New America Foundation investigated the recent Colonial Pipeline explosion in Alabama that disrupted the energy supply along the Eastern seaboard. Kira Pollack, the director of photography and visual enterprise at TIME magazine, on 100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time. Photographer Harry Benson, the subject of the documentary, “Harry Benson: Shoot First” discusses the film along with director Matthew Miele. Today's Please Explain takes a deep dive into insomnia and sleep disorders with Dr. Rafael Pelayo of the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine. 

For all the pain, anxiety and devastation caused by the widely circulated video footage of black lives being literally extinguished, we are also bearing witness to a pronounced moment of black cultural ascension. 

Join photographers LaToya Ruby Frazier and Carrie Mae Weems and Harvard University art history professor Sarah Lewis for a discussion on celebrating and advancing visual literacy around race, and what it feels like to be American and black during this dichotomous time of triumph and tragedy. Hosted by Rebecca Carroll, WNYC producer for special projects on race. 

Watch live beginning 7pm ET
Join the conversation on Twitter using #HIGO

About the Series 

This event is part of How I Got Over, a project to reinvent language around race through a series of conversations and performances that explore, express and examine what it means when a social construct becomes the social order. We want people to get personal. We want provocative dialogue. We want to generate new language to execute real change. We want to talk about fear – and how it’s different if you are black or white.

→ See full series schedule

This year, I loved trying to learn from dialect coach Amanda Quaid how to speak with a British accent, and joining Mary Harris of Only Human at a "laughter yoga" session. I really enjoyed my conversations with the actors Frank Langella and Jeff Daniels, the novelist Samantha Hunt, and the film director Alejandro Iñárritu.

And I was hugely proud of our terrific segment about the extraordinary picture of the Baton Rouge protests last summer, featuring the woman pictured, a civil rights photography historian, and the poet Tracy K. Smith, from whom we commissioned a poem.

But interviewing the Broadway theatrical impresario Jack Viertel was a remarkable, surprising, enlightening delight. I have come to be a musical theater fan fairly recently, so I thought I'd ask Viertel, a friendly, civilized world-class fan-critic-historian-dramaturge-producer, to give me kind of a master class in the genre.

Listen to all the segments below:

MIKE PINAY, Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School, 1953-1963. “It was the worst ten years of my life. I was away from my family from the age of 6 to 16. How do you learn about family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even known by names back then. I was a number.” “Do you remember your number?” “73.” Photo and interview by Daniella Zalcman

In the late 19th century, Canada began its residential schools program — a violent system that aimed to decimate the cultures of indigenous people.

The system mimicked what the U.S. had done just several decades earlier, when it built schools outside of Native American reservations to forcibly assimilate indigenous people.

Children were kidnapped and brought to live at schools across Canada, which were often operated by churches. They were punished for speaking their native language, separated from siblings and forced to do unpaid labor for the facilities. Some students were physically and sexually abused and their health ailments were often neglected. A government medical inspector noted in 1907 that “24 percent of previously healthy Aboriginal children across Canada were dying in residential schools,” and this number did not account for children who died after returning home, according to the University of British Columbia.

The last residential school in Canada did not close until 1996.

Nine years later, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology to survivors of the schools, saying that “we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.” In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which the Canadian government established to investigate this history, called the residential schools an attempt at “cultural genocide” within Canada.

“These measures were part of a coherent policy to eliminate Aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into the Canadian mainstream against their will,” the report stated.

Photographer Daniella Zalcman has photographed this legacy in a series of portraits and interviews with survivors for a project supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. For many of them, this marked the first time they had spoken about their experience in the schools. She spoke with the PBS NewsHour Weekend about the project, which was recently released as a book.

VALERIE EWENIN, Muskowekwan Indian Residential School, 1965-1971. “I was brought up believing in the nature ways, burning sweetgrass, speaking Cree. And then I went to residential school and all that was taken away from me. And then later on, I forgot it, too, and that was even worse.” Photo and interview by Daniella Zalcman

Have you done any research on indigenous Canadians before?

What brought me to Canada to begin with was I had been at the international AIDS conference in [Melbourne] in 2014 for a completely different project that I worked on for several years on the rise of homophobia and anti-gay legislation in Uganda. And while I was there, I read a U.N. report about how one of the demographics with the fastest growing rates of HIV in the world was First Nations Canadians.

And that made absolutely no sense to me from a public health perspective. Canada has an incredible health care system; they pioneered harm reduction strategies like free needle exchanges and safe injection sites and all these things that are meant to reduce health crises, and yet there is this massive epidemic and this group of people being completely left behind. So I spent a month in 2014 driving through British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. And almost every single HIV-positive First Nations person, almost all of them, referenced residential schools. And I’d never heard of residential school; it’s not something that’s really part of mainstream U.S. history curriculum. It’s only barely becoming part of mainstream Canadian curriculum as we speak. So to me, it became obvious that the public health crises and all these other systemic issues that First Nations Canadians deal with are part of this much bigger legacy of coercive assimilation.

The only road from Beauval Indian Residential School (at least 50+ years ago, at the darkest point in the school’s history), led straight to the Beaver River. Students regularly tried to run away, but either were too small to try to cross or drowned in the attempt. Photo by Daniella Zalcman

How did the project begin from there?

I spent that month largely focused on documenting the HIV aspect of the story. I came home with a lot of images of people dealing with drug addiction and injection drug use, the primary means through which HIV is spread in First Nations communities in Canada. And I got home and realized that I’d kind of failed. I was starting to realize this was part of a bigger story, but I’d photographed it in this very two-dimensional way. And even though I was accurately representing what is reality for many indigenous communities in Canada, they were still images that were really going to do much more to stigmatize the population than they were to shine a light, than they were going to shine a light on this much bigger, largely undiscussed issue, touching on settler colonialism and intergenerational trauma. So I decided that I actually needed to go back. All of my work on this project has been funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in D.C.

So a year later I went back and I focused on Saskatchewan, which is the province that is home to the last residential school to close in Canada in 1996, and to some of the most infamous schools in the country. I spent two weeks focused just on interviewing residential school survivors and making those multiple exposure portraits, which to me was the most truthful way to tell this story.

ELWOOD FRIDAY, St. Phillips Indian Residential School, 1951-1953. “I’ve never told anyone what went on there. It’s shameful. I am ashamed. I’ll never tell anyone, and I’ve done everything to try to forget.” Photo and interview by Daniella Zalcman

I can’t photograph in the schools anymore because the last one closed in the ‘90s. I tried to photograph the visual legacy, and that, to me, had been very reductive and unsuccessful. So it became about figuring out how do you photograph memory? How do you photograph the things that we pass from parent to child? Each multiple-exposure portrait is a photo of a survivor combined with an image that is directly related to their memory of residential school.

How did you meet the subjects of these photos?

When I returned to Saskatchewan, I’d been there the year before. Most of the work I did was in Regina. And there’s a neighborhood in Regina, North Central, that’s kind of [known] in Canada to be the worst for crime, injection drug use, for alcoholism. And so I spent quite a bit of time there staying with and photographing one particular family. And the daughter was actually my main point of entry. She was HIV-positive, had Hepatitis C, was an injection drug user and sex worker. She herself hadn’t gone to residential school, but both her parents, all four of her grandparents, and all of her aunts and uncles had gone.

You think about history and trauma and how they affect populations, but we forget that we pass those things on as well. The first person I interviewed was her aunt. I knew her, and she remembered me, and then from there, every single person I talked to would then say, “Oh, well you should talk to my neighbor, my cousin, my friend.” One survivor would introduce me to the next.

RICK PELLETIER, Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School, 1965-1966. “My parents came to visit and I told them I was being beaten. My teachers said that I had an active imagination, so they didn’t believe me at first. But after summer break they tried to take me back, and I cried and cried and cried. I ran away the first night, and when my grandparents went to take me back, I told them I’d keep running away, that I’d walk back to Regina if I had to. They believed me then.” Photo and interview by Daniella Zalcman

Was it difficult for survivors to describe their memories?

I expected to be rebuffed by half of the people I approached. And I was surprised that almost everyone I spoke to was very willing to talk to me, to be interviewed on the record. I think part of that is because Canada had recently gone through this Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When I was there in 2015 [it] was at the very end of it.

I think people had to give testimony in order to be part of the TRC, so this was something, even though that had been the first time for many people in their lives that they had discussed what had happened to them in residential school, it was something that was starting to come out into the open. So I think that helped facilitate a lot of my conversations. But even then. I still had a lot of people disclose to me for the first time ever a lot of assault and trauma and abuse.

It continues to be shocking to me that this institution that lasted for 120 years in Canada remains so under-discussed. And I think for a lot of people, the idea that someone actually was interested and wanted to listen was enough that it made them really want to share.

How did you structure your sessions with the survivors?

We would speak first, and I told people, we can speak for as little or as much as you would like. On average, I would say the interviews were about an hour to two hours. And then after that I would photograph every single person against a white backdrop, and then on my own would go in search of a second image. Sometimes they were the actual sites of where the school was, the actual building where they had lived, and then sometimes they were a little more figurative, depending on memory, and most of these buildings have been torn down now in Canada, so there isn’t always physical evidence of each school. But it was something that was still evocative of our conversation.

DEEDEE LERAT, Marieval Indian Residential School, 1967-1970. “When I was 8, Mormons swept across Saskatchewan. So I was taken out of residential school and sent to a Mormon foster home for five years. I’ve been told I’m going to hell so many times and in so many ways. Now I’m just scared of God.” Photo and interview by Daniella Zalcman

How did you produce these images?

I shot the entire project both on medium format film and on my iPhone. I actually use my phone a lot in my work, and because while I was interviewing I was on the road for two weeks, I really didn’t want to wait to get home to develop my film and start thinking about how to make multiple exposures. So all the work you’ve seen is actually shot and edited on an iPhone. There’s just a very simple app I use call Image Blender that just allows you to create multiple exposures.

Why did you decide to stylize the photos in this way, with overlaid images? How did that contribute to what you were exploring in this project?

We’re already institutionally not very aware of or willing to speak to the legacy of colonialism in North America. We don’t frame it in that way. Generally speaking, we have excluded much of that narrative from our history books, from mainstream media. Trying to get people to think about how the repercussions of those events remain with Native communities today, are still deeply impacting their lives, I think is usually important. And so that’s what I’m attempting to do with these images.

You can see more photos from the series below.

ROSALIE SEWAP, Guy Hill Indian Residential School, 1959-1969. “We had to pray every day and ask for forgiveness. But forgiveness for what? When I was 7 I started being abused by a priest and a nun. They’d come around after dark with a flashlight and would take away one of the little girls almost every night. You never really heal from that. I turned into an alcoholic and it’s taken me a long time to escape that. I can’t forgive them. Never.” Photo and interview by Daniella Zalcman

This picturesque little village is Lebret, Saskatchewan — home to the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School, which operated under the federal government and Catholic Church from 1884-1969, and under the governance of the Star Blanket Cree Nation from 1973-1998. While most of the original school structures have been demolished, one building remains, visible on the far right side of the photo. Photo by Daniella Zalcman

The ruins of the Muskowekwan Indian Residential School. Photo by Daniella Zalcman

A swingset in Beauval, Saskatchewan, near the former site of the Beauval Indian Residential School. Photo by Daniella Zalcman

The post Portraits show the complex, devastating legacy of Canada’s residential schools appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this segment.

This morning, The New York Times posted its annual "Year in Photos." It's a list of some of the most striking photos that were published in 2016. These pictures also tell the biggest stories of the year.

Jeffrey Henson Scales, photo editor at The New York Times, sifted through around 200,000 photos with his co-editors Beth Flynn and Meaghan Looram to make this list of 130 images. Only 50 of those will be printed in the Sunday Review. He thought this image from the election was "quite moving."

A supporter of Hillary Clinton reacts to her loss to Donald Trump at Jacob Javits Center in New York late Tuesday evening, November 8, 2016.

(Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

TIME magazine released its "Top 100 Photos of the Year 2016" list earlier this month. A photo of Hillary Clinton celebrating her nomination at the Democratic National Convention by photographer Ben Lowy (see below), who covered the election for the publication, made the list.

NBC's "The Year in Pictures: 2016" included a Reuters photo taken by Stephanie Keith. The image (see above) shows police shooting water cannons at demonstrators protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Henson Scales, Lowy, and Keith join The Takeaway to discuss the year in photos, and what it was like to capture 2016. Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear the full conversation.

Hillary Clinton celebrates at Democratic National Convention after accepting the party's nomination for president. Ben Lowy chose this as his top photo of the year.

(Courtesy of Guest)

Which photo from 2016 resonated with you the most? Here's what some other photographers and Takeaway listeners had to say:

Photographer Steve Dykes felt the powerful energy in the room when a bird landed on the podium that Sen. Bernie Sanders was speaking in front of. He described the moment as "hopeful."

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders smiles as a bird lands on his podium when he addresses the crowd during a rally at the Moda Center in Portland, Ore., Friday, March 25, 2016.

(Steve Dykes/Associated Press)

Photographer Louisa Gouliamaki says that these two pictures represent a defining moment of the refugee crisis.

Brian Cassella, photojournalist for The Chicago Tribune, snapped the following iconic photo after The Cubs won the 2016 World Series. He said that after so many years of "heartbreak", this picture can be seen as the capstone of a 108 year wait.

After the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series

(Brian Cassella/The Chicago Tribune)

Takeaway Digital Producer T. J. Raphael chose this photo. "It just feels like this picture captures the energy and movement that was behind the Trump campaign," she says.  

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters after his rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium on August 21, 2015 in Mobile, Alabama.

(Mark Wallheiser/Getty)

Takeaway listener Tony from Texas chose the below photo. He says: "The photo of the boy in the ambulance in Aleppo. It is the face of every other photo I have collected of all of the genocides that mankind has inflicted on one another throughout history. I am ashamed for humanity that, even today after all of the past, we have not learned."

In this frame grab taken from video provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Aleppo Media Center (AMC), 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh sits in an ambulance after being pulled out of a building hit by an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria, on Aug. 17, 2016.

(Aleppo Media Center/  Press)

Listener Jessie from New Jersey: "The photo that resonates most with me from 2016? That's easy: It's the photo from the Hillary camp late in the night of the election — the one with the woman with her hands over her mouth. That's exactly how I felt. Shocked nauseated and frightened out of my mind. I didn't sleep for days after that." 

Supporters watch the election results during Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's election night rally in the Jacob Javits Center glass enclosed lobby in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016.

(Matt Rourke/Associated Press)

Listener Karen from New York: "The picture that resonated with me was the picture of Hillary walking in the woods with her dog the day after she lost the election. This photo finally humanized her as an ordinary woman trying to do extraordinary things. Sadly, this portrait seemed to be displayed a day too late."

A mom ran into Hillary Clinton walking her dog in the woods and it made a lot of people happy https://t.co/FD9RCFcW6ypic.twitter.com/ylaNpmys3h

— BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) November 13, 2016

A listener from Saint Albans, Vermont says: "Donald Trump giving a thumbs up. I'm quite happy Hillary is not the president-elect, but am still a bit leery of Trump and the cabinet picks he's announcing."

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up after speaking at a campaign rally, Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016, in Greenville, N.C.

(Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

A listener from Orlando, Florida says: "Jonathan Bachman's photo of Ieshia Evans standing up to the police state in Baton Rouge has become a metaphor for human rights vs. wealth and establishment in America, for me this year."

Which photo resonated with you the most this year? Tweet us a picture @TheTakeaway, or leave a link in the comments below. 

Street snappers, Instagrammers, on-the-go photogs -- we at the Brian Lehrer Show salute you (as we do every year) with our annual, year-end "Best Picture on Your Phone" contest!

How to play: Send us the best picture (taken in 2016) sitting on your cell phone right now. Post your photo on Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BestInPhone.
Quick note: if your Instagram account is set to private, your post won't show up here, even if you use the hashtag.

The only rules: No pets, no kids. (Your children and pets are obviously adorable, but not for this contest.) For everything else, use common sense and your discretion (photos will be moderated). 

Please only submit one photo per user! 

Submit by: 5pm on Tuesday, January 3. And there will be winners: We'll announce our top photos on the air during the first week of 2017!

Coming up on today's show: 

• New York Times healthcare reporter Abby Goodnough discusses what the Affordable Care Act means for patients, as the Republican-led Congress attempts to repeal the law.
• Jarrett Murphy, the executive editor and publisher of City Limits, asks in The Nation: "Can New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Be The Anti-Trump?"
• The actress Harriet Walter discusses her role in a new production of "The Tempest" at St. Ann's Warehouse.
• WNYC's Only Human team tracks how the flu virus spreads. 
• Photojournalists Michael Kamber and David "Dee" Delgado pick the winners of the annual Brian Lehrer Show "Best Photo (Sitting on Your Phone) of 2016" contest.