Links for the week
That killer above is Cloudy. She is a small, sweet as pie cat passionate about guarding her raspberry bush and serving a near-daily dead rodent for our inspection.
The oceans are warmer than ever, there was a massive storm in Zagreb (my family is okay), and there is just now one unfolding in Switzerland, British tourists are evacuated from Rhodes, Greenland is rapidly melting and Antarctica is not refreezing even thought it’s the middle of the winter - all of that and more last week. In Distraught about climate change? Get disruptive, Chris Hatch points out that it is time to act and stop waiting for somebody else to do something. Protest in a form of social disruption is effective, but so are other things like publicly acknowledging that climate crisis is real and pushing your elected officials to actually do something about it. All of it is much harder to do than you would think. There is a relatively recent paper from 2019, by academic standards this is just hot off the press, that deals with individual, institutional and societal barriers to climate action. It’s an academic paper so don’t expect it to be riveting, but it is certainly worth your time to understand why so little is happening.
William Deresiewicz in Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity makes a passionate case for the arts and the strange and inexplicable process that leads to original and surprising work that furthers our experience of the world as human beings. And if you are concerned, interested or curious about AI and its impact on documentary photography this conversation between Thomas Van Houtryve and Fred Ritchin is EXCELLENT. Really worth your time.
Moises Saman’s new book Glad Tidings of Benevolence looks at over 20 years of his coverage of the Iraq conflict. In this interview with Colin Pantall, Moises reflect on all those years with humility and renewed commitment to what he is trying to do: “As a photographer, you are given a platform where you have power as a narrator. A lot of people get to see your images through the platform that you’re given. And I think that comes with a responsibility. I can’t say with all honesty that I understood that responsibility early on. I wish I had.”
And I am going to leave you with these incredible origami portraits/masks made by Portuguese artist João Charruna. They are just beautiful