Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="370" caption="Churchill High School Pep Rally, 1978, Geoff Winningham, Gelatin silver print on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1983.63.1667."][/caption] Years ago, when the National Endowment for the Arts had a Visual Arts Program to give out individual artist grants, a week
Description: John Waters’s 1998 movie Pecker is the coming-of-age story about a young man who can’t stop himself from taking pictures. “Man, everything always looks good through here!” Pecker exclaims, squinting through his viewfinder and throughout most of the film, it does. Photography is all about looking, and when it was time to invite someone to address the subject of voyeurism for
Description: While we at the Photography Initiative like to argue that photography changes everything, it’s not always the case. On June 2nd, in a controversial ninth inning call, baseball umpire Jim Joyce denied Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga a shot at making history for pitching a “perfect” game. Joyce—from his point of view behind first base—saw a batter hit a ball, make it
Description: Known lovingly by the public as the “Panda Lady,” Lisa Stevens cultivated a rich thirty-year career at the National Zoological Park as the senior curator of mammals.
Description: On what better day than Election Day to follow up on that tidbit I dropped a couple weeks ago regarding a consultation about then-candidate Barack Obama’s dry-erase boards, a recent acquisition by the National Museum of African American History and Culture? These artifacts, along with archival material and other realia (in archives terms: a man-made three-dimensional object)