How a commercial release of a documentary about a historical investigation ruptured the photojournalism community. https://malcolm-ryder.medium.com/shoot-the-messenger-475f18818cee Given the unholy combination of Social Media and AI as top corrosives of truth, it's important to remember that people are more of a threat than either of those. My analysis of the controversy over the documentary The Stringer is a long-form piece in my growing collection of articles about visual culture on the ...

Pre-Screening Photography There are many ways in which history and philosophy mythologize each other. But one overt pattern is that a philosophy acts as a filter of historical pursuit, while history makes arguments about what value a given philosophy has. In art this dynamic most often appears as a pairing of an artist’s motivation to change how to work, with a subsequent discovery of how a change influences what we recognize as being art. Artists are credited with innovation, but the value...

Thinkers about photography sometimes work on the problem of whether a photograph is experienced in the way it was intended by the image maker. In some contexts, a mismatch is deemed a failure, but in others it is simply another dimension of experience in communications. The image may have what we often call "its own life" independently of the imagist, with no presumed value judgement of being good or bad. But implicit in viewing is that there will be a reaction to what is seen, and that...