Southampton sculptor James Ding strives to create work that expresses the dynamic and transformative power of love.
James Ding: All You Need Is Love (and Art)
Alexander Coggin and his long-suffering muse/husband discuss life in front of the lens
INT: What were the first few days with the camera like Alex?
AC: Well, I guess it was around Christmas time. I don’t like to read instruction manuals, I’m not that kind of person. So the first moments with it, just going shot-to-shot were super organic, and I figured out how different settings can mediate reality differently.
INT: So at what point did you realise you were particularly drawn to photographing Michael? What made him a good muse?
AC: Well he was there, firstly. He handed me my camera which I immediately turned around and pointed at him. But I also instantly noticed how, when I pointed the camera at Michael, there was no, like, changing of behaviour on his part, he seemed a little bit unflappable. Not feeling the need to smile.
INT: Michael, how did you feel in front of the camera? Did it take some getting used to or is it something that came naturally to you?
MN: Um, I don’t remember ever having a time when I resisted having my photo taken. There have been like maybe one or two moments that I can remember where I would specially tell Alex, ‘Don’t take a fucking picture of me right now’.
AC: But I do have those pictures.
MN: I think it felt pretty easeful from the beginning. He’s not going to ask me to do anything differently, every once in a while maybe like a slight adjustment. But I think really Alex is more interested in capturing whatever essence you’re experiencing in that moment. Maybe you remember differently Alex but I remember from the beginning I was pretty available to be looked at.
AC: Well you were making theatre, making performance – so, of course.
MN: When Alex started Brothers and Others, started photographing my family, he would bring out his camera around family events, and for a lot of them it was really difficult to avoid, you know, putting on a face. Alex takes very confronting, oftentimes, objectively, demeaning images of parents yelling at kids, or parents on iPhones or people drunk, things where it’s not the most flattering. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
AC: I think you were a good example in showing them that it’s best to not do anything. It’s much more simple than you think, just don’t change your behaviour.
Man Who Killed Photographer Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison
The man who fatally shot photographer Tyler Gerth during a protest following the death of Breonna Taylor has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Earlier this year, Steven Lopez pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and 22 counts of wanton endangerment for the shooting that killed 27-year-old photographer and activist Gerth.
On Tuesday, a judge sentenced Lopez to 30 years in prison following the prosecution’s recommendation.
Gerth was killed by Lopez as protestors gathered in Jefferson Square Park in downtown Louisville, Kentucky during the height of protests in the wake of Taylor’s shooting on June 27, 2020.
When Louisville Metro Police officers arrived at the scene around 21:00, they found Gerth in the middle of the park and the photographer was pronounced dead on the scene.
Video surveillance footage and several witnesses identified Lopez as the shooter who fired into a crowd.
According to WHAS11 News, Lopez spoke during the hearing and apologized for the shooting. He told Gerth’s family that it should have never happened.
“I cannot find enough words to convey how sorry I am,” Lopez says.
“To say how remorseful I am. Truly from the bottom of my heart, I am sorry,”
Lopez said he was convinced that he was about to die. He said he was “being bullied at the rally” but the prosecution disagreed with that statement.
During the hearing, Lopez said he hopes to turn his life around and live up to the man that Gerth was.
On his Instagram page, Gerth had described himself as a world-traveling photographer who captured beauty as he journeyed through life.
In the weeks before his death, Gerth turned his attention from capturing the world’s beauty to using his camera to document the movement against racism and police brutality. Gerth had been at Louisville’s Jefferson Square Park to document the protests.
“While nothing will ever bring Tyler back and we will never truly have justice for him being taken from us, it’s an important step for Mr. Lopez to take responsibility for his actions and plead guilty to his crimes,” Gerth’s family said in a statement.
“We remain focused on carrying on Tyler’s memory through the works of Building Equal Bridges, the Tyler Gerth Foundation, by continuing in his legacy of compassion and generosity.”
My 13 Dreamy Photographs Of Santa Monica Pier
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Spanning Seven Centuries, ‘Judging a Book by its Cover’ Celebrates an Enduring Art
The Whole Booke of Psalmes. London: Company of Stationers, 1643. All images courtesy of The Grolier Club, shared with permission
Critics have been lamenting the conformity of contemporary book coves for more than a decade, railing against the same abstract blobs and bland stock imagery gracing many titles. The designs are often chosen for their marketability and ease of mass production, two unavoidable, economic factors in today’s literary landscape.
An exhibition at The Grolier Club in New York, though, veers in the opposite direction, countering the monotonous, machine-printed images we’re all too familiar with for bespoke designs. Titled Judging a Book by its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s-2020, the show scans the club’s vast archives to highlight a wide array of elegant, handcrafted designs from the last seven centuries.
Founded in 1884, the organization is the oldest and largest society dedicated to bibliophiles and graphic artists in the U.S. Along with its enormous library of 100,000 titles, the club maintains a network of hundreds of antiquarian collectors, dealers, librarians, printers, binders, designers, and more dedicated to preserving and sharing the art of books and paper.
Josephus. ‘Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War’ (Latin). Augsburg: Johann Schüssler, 1470. Bound with Eusebius. ‘Ecclesiastical History’ (Latin manuscript). Füssen, 1462.
As the exhibition’s curator H. George Fletcher writes in a statement, The Grolier Club was established under some of the same anxieties about printing practices that many of us are feeling today:
Current productions employed acidic paper with trade bindings reflecting only too well the heavy-handed styles of the era. The treatment of rare books and manuscripts was essentially worse—style overcoming substance, bookblocks encased in straightjackets that discouraged or deterred use of the contents, often unsympathetic décor.
Judging a Book by its Cover highlights some of the more unique editions within the collection. Included is the pigskin- and brass-bound Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War created for a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria around 1473, making it the oldest in the club’s library. Several other religious texts are on view, like the miniature book of psalms shown above, made by women at the Royal Exchange in London with a variety of silk and gold threads.
Secular works include a delicate cloth volume from May Morris, the daughter of the famed textile designer William Morris. Cloaked in elegant floral embroideries, the green silk book resembles her father’s ornate naturalistic motifs.
If you’re in New York, you can see the hand-crafted designs up close through April 13. Otherwise, check out the online exhibition for a deeper dive into the collection. (via Hyperallergic)
Ernest Lefébure. ‘Embroidery and Lace: Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest Antiquity to the Present Day.’ London: Grevel, 1888.
Bernardino Ridolfi. ‘In funere Caroli III Hispaniarum Regis Catholici oratio habita in sacello pontificio.’ Parma: Giambattista Bodoni, 1789.
Joseph Glanvill. ‘Seasonable Reflections and Discourses in Order to the Conviction, & Cure of the Scoffing, & Infidelity of a Degenerate Age.’ London: Henry Mortlock, 1676.
Book of Hours, Use of Paris (Latin). Paris: Michaël Dauplet, 1673
‘Kalendario Manual y Guia de Forasteros en Madrid para el Año de MDCCLXXXII. Bound with Estado Militar de España Año de 1782.’ Madrid: Imprenta Real de la Gazeta, 1782.
Lynd Ward. ‘Gods’ Man: A Novel in Woodcuts. New York: Cape & Smith, 1929. Lynd Ward. Madman’s Drum: A Novel in Woodcuts.’ New York: Cape & Smith, 1930.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Spanning Seven Centuries, ‘Judging a Book by its Cover’ Celebrates an Enduring Art appeared first on Colossal.
National Archives Showcases Historical Coal Mining Communities with
Washington, DC
Through photographs from a 1946 survey, the National Archives is highlighting the diverse lives of coal miners and their families in Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey, a new exhibit opening on March 16, 2024. The exhibit, which shares more than 200 photographs of renowned documentary photographer Russell Lee, is free and open to the public at the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, through July 6, 2025.
“Power & Light serves as an example of how records can impact the lives of Americans,” said Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan. “These valuable photographs held by the National Archives helped change the narrative around the coal strikes at the time. Today, they provide us a glimpse into the rich history of coal communities across the country.”
Following the 1946 labor strikes that had been held across the United States, photographer Russell Lee gained unprecedented access to remote coal communities. As part of a survey conducted by the federal government, he documented miners in 13 states. Lee recorded detailed captions with his wife Jean, which are presented without edits in this exhibit alongside the images they describe. This 3,000-square-foot exhibit calls attention to spaces that were typically inaccessible to outsiders.
Visitors will be able to:
- View a handwritten note from President Truman regarding the coal strike
- Interact with a map displaying survey photographs from various states
- View the final survey report from 1947
- Learn about the company-dependent home lives and conditions of workers
- View protest notes on coal bags sent by citizens to President Truman
Lee’s photographs served as visual evidence of the miners’ plight and helped build support for the workers whose strikes had alienated many Americans. The images tell the story of laborers who helped build the nation, of a moment when the government took stock of their health and safety, and of a photographer who recognized their humanity.
The survey’s digitized images can be found in the National Archives’ online Catalog and photographs from the exhibit on Flickr. Follow the conversation online using the hashtag #ArchivesPowerAndLight.
The National Archives Building is located near the National Mall on Constitution Ave. at 9th Street, NW, in Washington, DC. The exhibit galleries are open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, except Thanksgiving and Christmas.
For media inquiries, please contact the National Archives Public and Media Communications Office at 202-357-5300 or public.affairs@nara.gov.
Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation through the generous support of The Mars Family & Mars, Incorporated and Anonymous.
About the National Archives
The National Archives and Records Administration is the nation’s record keeper. It safeguards and manages the official records of the U.S. Government, ensuring the documentation of our nation’s history. For more information, visit www.archives.gov.
About the National Archives Foundation
The National Archives Foundation is an independent nonprofit that increases public awareness of the National Archives, inspires a deeper appreciation of our country’s heritage, and encourages citizen engagement in our democracy. Learn more at www.archivesfoundation.org.
‘Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s To The Present’ – An Interview With Telfair Museum’s Erin Dunn
Mastering the art of goal setting in marketing operations
As we step into a new year and quarter, marketing operations teams face the perennial challenge of setting new annual goals that are both ambitious and achievable. Goal setting for marketing operations teams isn’t just about hitting numbers but crafting a roadmap for growth and innovation. When setting goals, Marketing Operations teams should consider crafting different sets of goals for two audiences: your public goals, which will be shared with your marketing and sales partners, and your team’s internal goals, which will only be shared within your MOPs team.
Approach your MOps with a “product management” mindset
When creating your goals, it’s important first to understand if your Marketing Operations (MOPs) teams have adopted a “Product Management” mindset. This product-first approach involves thinking of your marketing operations team and platforms as a product, continuously evolving to meet the needs of your organization and customers. By doing so, you can create a more agile, responsive, and effective MOPs function. One way to adopt this type of mindset is by building a roadmap of planned work for your MOPs team, broken down into monthly sprints. Jessica Kao recently highlighted the success she’s had with this approach on the RevOps podcast.
Designing Monthly Sprints for Continuous Improvement:
- Monthly Sprints. Just like a software product, your MOPs should be developed in monthly sprints. Each sprint should focus on delivering specific features and capabilities that align with your overarching goals.
- Capability Building. Each sprint should not only aim to achieve immediate goals but also build capabilities that lay the foundation for future initiatives. This approach ensures sustained growth and adaptation of your MOPs.
- “Quick Wins” = Rapid Prototyping and Feedback Loop. Implement a rapid prototyping approach. Roll out beta versions of new features or improvements, gather feedback, and iterate. This process enables you to refine your operations continuously and adapt quickly to new insights or changes in the market.
Once your team has adopted the approach of building a roadmap around monthly sprints, you can start to align both of your sets of goals around that roadmap.
Why two sets of goals?
There are many different types of goal-setting frameworks and methodologies, but at a fundamental level, goal-setting usually falls into two approaches: top-down or bottom-up. The top-down approach is often led by upper management and passed down through the hierarchy of the organization, with each subsequent level of management aiming to align their goals with the organization’s overarching objectives and vision. Think of your public goals as your “top-down” goals.
On the other end of the spectrum, “bottom-up” goal setting is led by employees at lower levels of the organizational hierarchy. These goals are often more practical and immediately relevant to the “on-the-ground” challenges of daily operations. Think of your internal team goals as your “bottom-up” goals.
Public “top-down” goal setting
When planning your public goals, talk to your internal stakeholders about what their objectives are for the year, map those objectives to what capabilities your MOps team requires to deliver against those objectives, and then break each capability down into what “quick wins” you can deliver for that stakeholder. For example:
- Stakeholder objective: Increase sales in the automotive sector by 5%.
- Marketing operations capabilities: Sales enablement, personalized content, lead management.
- Long-term vision: Inbound and outbound multi-channel campaign targeting the automotive industry.
In the example above, the long-term vision might be to launch a holistic multi-channel campaign targeting the automotive industry. But that might mean developing new lead management and personalization capabilities within your MAP platform that you know could take six months or more to build out. But if you go back to your stakeholders and tell them that you need six months to build those capabilities out, they are going to be frustrated and view the MOPs team as a roadblock to achieving their goals rather than an asset that can help them win.
So, how can you break those capabilities down into smaller “quick wins” to satisfy your internal partners that you’re supporting their objectives? Identifying quick wins is critical, and you can often measure their success in a binary way -did they launch or did they not? That’s the type of product-focused, “rapid prototyping” mindset that can help your team plan each monthly sprint. Deliver a quick win each month while continuing to work on the long-term capabilities in the background.
Month 1. Create an email template that the sales team can send on their own to their automotive prospects.
Month 2. Build upon that single email template to launch a three-email “nurture sequence” that sales can enroll their automotive prospects into.
Month 3. Launch a webinar targeting the automotive industry.
Month 4. Launch paid search and landing page.
Month 5. Etc., etc.
Communicating these monthly accomplishments to your internal stakeholders is vitally important to keep them engaged and supportive of your team. How you choose to communicate it might vary — it could be in a monthly email or one-pager, but the most important aspect is to show that your team is delivering value quickly and consistently.
That consistency is going to build confidence in your team from your stakeholders and ultimately buy you more time to not only improve upon the substance of these “quick wins” to deliver more full-fledged capabilities within your platforms but, perhaps even more importantly, it will provide the goodwill necessary to give your team the space to continue to advance your own internal goals.
Dig deeper: Megan Michuda: Spotlight on the expert
Internal “bottom-up” goal setting
When thinking about the goals that you set for your internal marketing operations team, you want to think about what success really means for your team. Success in these terms might not be the traditional metrics that initially come to mind for a marketing operations team, like “increase marketing qualified leads.” Instead, true success may be things that are harder to quantify but are more impactful to your team’s day-to-day work.
Success in these terms might be things like:
| What success looks like | How do we know we’ve achieved this? |
| Marketing Operations is viewed as a strategic partner | MOPs are included in upfront planning meetings consistentlyThe CMO regularly includes bullet points about the MOPs teams’ progress in their own goals and status updates |
| Decreasing the number of urgent requests that come to the team | Track your team’s work by tickets, hours, story points (etc.)… what percent of work is urgent? What percent are “ad hoc” requests vs planned work on your roadmap? |
| MOPs team members have time for professional development | Create a list of skills or topics the team wants to develop, and keep track of what activities have been done to improve knowledge in those areas (webinars or conferences attended, free product trials to test, etc.) |
| We build the necessary documentation around systems and processes that always get put to the backburner | List out the documentation that needs to be created, and regularly schedule updates/reviews to keep it up to date |
These types of goals take time to show progress against, and therefore, reviewing progress against them every quarter will make more sense than a monthly cadence. At the beginning of the year, schedule these quarterly reviews with your marketing operations team and hold the team accountable for reviewing the goals that you set and the progress that you’ve made against them.
Each quarter, you can assess if these are still the right goals and the right priority for your team and also develop tactics and plans for how you can make more progress against them.
As we embrace a new year, the importance of taking a strategic, structured approach to goal setting is critical to enhancing the reputation of MOPs across your organization as well as fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation within your team. This type of goal-setting strategy ensures that MOPs teams are not just operational backbones but also key contributors to strategic initiatives and growth.
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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
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Contributor
Megan Michuda is currently the SVP, director of marketing operations and innovation at BOK Financial. Prior to joining BOK Financial, she served as global head of marketing technology at Janus Henderson Investors. Janus Henderson was a Stackie Award winner in 2018. Megan is currently responsible for BOK Financial’s marketing technology stack, marketing automation, digital analytics, and marketing operations. In 2020, Megan’s startup Stacktus was acquired by CabinetM, a leader in martech management. Megan is now both a user of CabinetM as well as an advisor. Megan received her bachelor’s degree from Brown University and her master’s of science in technology management from University of Denver.
Former NYC News Photographer Performs One-Man Show About Traumatic Past Life
Being a news photographer can be incredibly stressful: tight deadlines, grisly murder scenes, and grieving families can take its toll.
One ex-press photographer who used to cover New York during the city’s violent period in the 1990s has channeled his experience into a one-man show entitled If it Bleeds it Leads.
Sean Allison is performing at the Park Theater in Hudson, New York where he reflects on his time covering New York during a period when someone was killed every few hours.
”I didn’t realize how much psychological and emotional trauma the violence had actually done to me,” Allison tells CBS 6.
During his time documenting crime, Allison would attend “four or five” violent crime scenes per night even witnessing a horrific death.
“We’re sitting there and I hear ‘pop pop pop’ and I say, ‘Those are gunshots’,” Allison tells CBS 6. “A guy got into an argument with somebody at a strip club and on his way out the door somebody shot him in the head and I got there before the ambulance was there so I have seen a lot, up close and personal.”
He left the profession after a year and a half but was later diagnosed with a form of PTSD known as a moral injury — something that is usually experienced by war veterans.
“I’d be watching TV with my girlfriend at the time, and I would have very emotional reactions to depicted violence, especially if it was similar to something I had seen and I would become uncontrollable, so I realized there’s something here I need to look into,” Allison tells CBS 6.
After attending therapy, he felt the strength to put on the show to exorcise the things he experienced as a photographer 30 years ago as a way of “processing the trauma.”
The title, If it Bleeds it Leads, is a macabre saying in the news industry referencing how violent incidents often dominate the headlines and airwaves.
“People have been conditioned to what they think violence is, which is that you get shot in the leg and can still run around and save the day,” he tells Times Union.
“I’ve seen people who have bullets in their leg and can tell you for one thing — they die. And for the other thing, the only thing they’re thinking about is getting that bullet out of their leg.”
If it Bleeds it Leads is showing at Park Theater in Hudson on Sunday (Feb 18). Limited tickets here.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
8 lusty photo books for Valentine’s Day
Whether you’re loved, lovelorn, lovely or loveless, here are a selection of longing-filled, sex-saturated photo books for Valentine’s Day
14February 2024
