Renowned photographer leaves Ford foundation board after Cheney passed over for award | The Hill

Throughout the school year, I have been the only sports photographer for The Times-Delphic. Nearly every issue of the TD this year has featured a photo captured by me.  

As we near the final stretch of the school year and the conclusion of the spring sports season, it has become increasingly apparent to me that I will always be treated differently at sporting events because I am a woman. 

At the beginning of the school year, I contacted my photo editor. My very first assignment? Covering Drake men’s soccer. Arriving at the event, I was nervous. To my surprise, a fellow photographer approached me; she took me under her wing to show me the ropes. She was excited to help me as a new photographer, and it felt like a great start. I assumed this level of friendliness would be the norm at every event. 

However, as the year rolled on and I covered more games, I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. Not everyone I encountered was as welcoming or supportive.  

There was specifically one male photographer employed by Drake Athletics who consistently ignored my presence at events. It wasn’t a matter of being focused on his work; rather, it was a deliberate disregard, evident in his greeting of all other male press members except me. This served as a stark reminder of the challenges I face as a woman in sports photography.

Players would often run into me, seemingly disregarding my presence, while my male counterparts were given the utmost respect. In one particularly stressful game in September, the situation escalated to the point where a football helmet was thrown in my direction. I had to lunge out of the way not to be hit.

After these experiences, I remember calling my mom almost in tears and saying that I thought sports photography wasn’t for me. She told me to stick with it and that it would get better. 

This semester, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Omaha, Nebraska, for the NCAA men’s March Madness tournament. I had a press pass and was able to be on the floor for the game. As I headed into the CHI Health Center press area, I realized that the room was mostly full of men. 

I noticed another female reporter I had previously seen at past Drake events. Going up to introduce myself, she looked at me with the face of “Don’t you mess this up for me” as well as, “I’ve worked harder than you to get here.” It was as if she were silently warning me not to jeopardize her position while also asserting her superiority. 

Very curtly, she introduced herself and then turned back to talk to the other press, leaving a lingering sense of tension in the air. This encounter highlighted to me the unfortunate reality where female journalists are pitted against each other.

On the other hand, I met this wonderful woman who covers basketball in Pittsburgh. As a recent college graduate, she knew what I was going through and offered me her support. She reminded me that while women in sports journalism may be rare, we are typically a resilient and supportive community.

To my male photographer counterparts, I extend an invitation to support female photographers, even if it is just engaging in conversation with someone other than one of your “bros.” Together, we can create a supportive and empowering environment for all photographers, regardless of gender. 

In 1997, Jamie Livingston, an artist and film-maker, died on his birthday at the age of 41 in the hospital in New York where he was born. By then, Livingston had taken and saved more than 6,700 Polaroid photos, one every day for 19 years.

His project Photo of the Day (or POD)—self-portraits, candids, landscapes, celebrity snapshots, circus pictures, nudes and even memento mori shots of Livingston’s final hospital days—eventually became a no-budget exhibition in 2007 that snaked through the halls of a building at Bard College, where Livingston began the project.

Surging on the internet after that, POD resurfaced as an overnight sensation in China, recalls Hugh Crawford, a photographer and college mate who mounted the Bard show. “There was this whole thing in China about the auspiciousness of what happened on the day you were born, so everybody in China wanted to see that,” he says.

The enigmatic story of Livingston and his pictures is now the subject of a musical performance for the stage, Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, with orchestra, soloists and choruses, which premieres this week at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York (12-14 April). Images from POD, gigantic blow-ups of the Polaroids, will be onstage behind the choruses.

The libretto, “elicited and distilled” by David Van Taylor, who is also credited with the oratorio’s concept, is drawn from interviews with people whom Livingston photographed. Its title comes from a passage in Psalm 90 of the Book of Psalms in the Bible, an exhortation to live a good life every day: “Teach us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

The oratorio’s composer, Luna Pearl Woolf, says taking the pictures was “something of a spiritual practice, which turned out to be important to people around him, and to people all over the world. We’re not exactly making art about an artist. We’re making art about a phenomenon.”

Livingston’s pictures, like the oratorio’s choruses, can evoke camaraderie and community. They can also feel like ephemera caught in a time capsule. While the pictures capture the spirit and memory of a single second—and no more than one second—the same Polaroids, sometimes frayed and faded, can seem like meditations on our inherent impermanence.

Livingston’s pictures, taken on a Polaroid SX-70 up to the day of his death—ten years before the iPhone launched—mark a moment in image-making somewhere between Andy Warhol’s signature Polaroid snapshot and the near-infinite profusion of photos on Instagram.

Linda Shaffer, Livingstone’s widow, eager to donate the images to an institution, rejects any connection between the POD pictures and Instagram. For one thing, Livingstone had an actual camera. “I’ve read that he was the godfather of Instagram,” she says. “He really was the opposite, because it was so rule-based. It was a ritual.”

Why Livingston began the project is unclear, A few years into POD, presenting a short film about the project, Livingston said his expanding Polaroid trove, taken one per day, “continues until my death or the death of the medium, whichever comes first”.

“Jamie was an artist who believed in practice, not in theory,” says Van Taylor. “The meaning of Photo of the Day, even to him, changed over time. Whatever his intention was as he got into it, I don’t think he could have conceived what it would mean if he continued doing it, and I don’t think he did.”

Others can make up their own minds, aided by the self-published volume Some Photos of That Day; 6754 Polaroids Dated in Sequence. The 11-pound POD visual “bible” was planned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Livingston’s death. With logistical delays, it became available in 2018. It is the closest thing to a POD catalogue raisonné, including annotated reverse sides of many pictures.

“The whole point was its completeness,” says Hugh Crawford, who edited and published the book, and created a website for Livginston’s project. “I sold about a quarter of them so far,” adds Crawford, who had 2,000 copies printed in China. “I have 12 tons of books sitting at home.”

• Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, 12-14 April, Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York

A celebrated photojournalist who was the chief White House photographer during Gerald Ford’s administration resigned on Tuesday from the foundation that bears the former president’s name, accusing it of succumbing to the “tidal wave of timidity and fear” created by Donald Trump.

David Hume Kennerly said in a letter that the organization’s board of trustees had rejected Liz Cheney for its top annual honor, the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, over “agita” that Trump might retaliate should he win re-election.

“Some of you raised the specter of being attacked by the Internal Revenue Service and losing the foundation’s tax-exempt status as retribution for selecting Liz for the award,” he wrote in the letter, which was first obtained by Politico. “The historical irony was completely lost on you.”

Kennerly pointed out that Ford had ascended to the presidency because his predecessor, Richard Nixon, left office after the Watergate scandal, during which it was revealed he had ordered his underlings to retaliate against his enemies, sometimes through the IRS.

“That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump. Did LT Gerald Ford meet the enemy head-on because he thought he wouldn’t get killed?” Kennerly asked. “No. He did it despite that possibility. This executive committee, on the other hand, bolted before any shots were fired.”

The 77-year-old said that Cheney, a fierce Trump critic, had been the obvious choice for the medal this year. In his letter, he outlined how he’d fought for her nomination, only for his fellow trustees to beat him back three times.

“When you rejected her again in favor of a third person, it became crystal clear to me that something else was going on,” he said. “The process for honoring President Ford by recognizing his virtues in others was being undermined by the same pressures weakening Republican institutions and many conservative leaders.”

Kennerly called the decision to spurn Cheney “inexplicable” and “short-sighted,” decrying it as a missed opportunity to send a clear message that the foundation stands against tyranny.

“If the foundation that bears the name of Gerald R. Ford won’t stand up to this real threat to our democracy, who will?” he asked.

Politico reported that Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, would receive the 2024 medal in June, citing an email that the Ford Foundations’ executive director sent to trustees after the publication of Kennerly’s letter.

The executive director, Gleaves Whitney, told Politico in a statement that the organization’s executive committee had decided, under legal counsel, it wouldn’t have been “prudent” to award Cheney the medal.

“At the time the award was being discussed, it was being publicly reported that Cheney was under active consideration for a presidential run by No Labels,” the statement said, referring to the nonpartisan organization that had flirted with the idea of a third-party ticket before mothballing it last week.

“Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Cheney in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the IRS,” Whitney added.

After Politico’s report was published, Kennerly tweeted that his resignation had been “a painful decision,” but necessary. “I hope more people around the country will follow @Liz_Cheney’s example and speak out about the threat to our democracy,” he added. “Time to step up.”

A longtime staff photographer for United Press International, Kennerly also worked for Newsweek and Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1972 for his “dramatic photographs of the Vietnam War” the year prior, as the organization puts it on its website.

He joined the Ford Foundation’s board in the early 2000s.