Mamadou Kouassi pictured on the beach of Castel Volturno, Italy. Kouassi inspired and co-wrote the film Io Capitano which is about Mamadou’s terrible journey from the Ivory Coast to Italy and was nominated for the 2024 Academy Awards.

Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Observer

DULUTH — Daniel Cox was home in Bozeman, Montana, for a few days in mid-March, between one of his regular trips to the Arctic to document the plight of polar bears and a trip to the Galapagos Islands where he was leading a photography tour.

“It’s a pretty good life,’’ Cox said during his brief downtime. But I am on the road a lot.”

Cox, 64, has been a professional photographer for more than 40 years, focusing on wildlife and wild places worldwide. You may have seen his work on the covers of National Geographic, Audubon, Nature, Sierra and numerous other magazines. Or maybe you have his first book, “Whitetail Country,” on your coffee table.

For the past 25 years, he’s been organizing tours of budding photographers to all seven continents, leading adventure travelers who have big camera lenses, taking them to places to capture incredible wildlife photos and then showing them how to do it right.

Cox received the 2013 Outstanding Nature Photographer of the Year and the 2023 Environmental Impact Award from the North American Nature Photography Association. His work has been featured in several galleries, including Nikon House New York, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the Natural History Museum in London.

Cox is a member of The Explorers Club, an international professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the idea that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore. He supports nonprofits and conservation groups including the National Wildlife Federation, Owl Research Institute, World Wildlife Fund, Smithsonian, ARKive, International Wolf Center and more.

But his real passion for nearly two decades has been polar bears, and more directly, the organization Polar Bears International and the impact climate change has on the Arctic and worldwide.

“I’ve always lived in a northern state. … I am drawn to the north and to the cold, I guess,’’ Cox told the News Tribune. “Unfortunately, we’re losing some of that.”

It’s hard to imagine that a kid who grew up in Twig in the 1970s and graduated from Proctor High School could have known where his passion for photography would take him. But Cox says he realized decades ago that his photographs could be more than just awe-inspiring — they could be instruments to help conserve wildlife and the wild places they need to live.

That philosophy inspired him to get involved in the Arctic Documentary Project in 2005. His passion has taken him across the Arctic — Alaska, Canada, Norway — photographing the far north’s people, landscapes and wildlife while witnessing firsthand how warming temperatures threaten the region.

His photos of the Arctic are used by Polar Bears International, the nonprofit group trying to push for action by people and governments to cut greenhouse gasses and reduce our carbon footprint that’s warming the north.

“People love polar bears. It was clear that my photos could strike a chord with people all over. They (the bear photos) are a hook to get people interested in climate change,’’ Cox said. “As we say, save the polar bears, and we are going to save ourselves.”

Cox was born in Spokane, Washington, but moved at age 7 with his family to Twig, just outside Duluth, where they had a small hobby farm.

“It was out on Highway 7, Industrial Road. We had horses. I grew up haying and doing chores and playing hockey on the local rink, hunting grouse and deer with my dad. … It was a great experience,” Cox said.

At Proctor High School, Cox credits drama teacher Bruce Watkins and a role in a school play for instilling confidence to do public speaking, and teacher Glen Sorenson (later Minnesota Teacher of the Year in 2005) for helping fertilize the seeds of his fascination with photography.

“Glen Sorenson was very instrumental in my early years,” Cox recalled. “I was 16 when he gave me an assignment to go photograph the homeless people in Duluth. His comments were something to the effect, ‘Go inspire change with your photography.’ Glen is also an avid outdoorsman which was also inspiring.”

Just last month, Cox was the keynote speaker at an event sponsored by the foundation for Proctor schools that raises money for better educational efforts in the district. He regaled a sold-out Greysolon Plaza ballroom with tales of his travels and the story of polar bears.

“It’s our biggest fundraiser of the year. We sold out, 250 tickets,” said Sherman Carlson, retired Proctor school superintendent and president of the foundation. “I’ve kept in contact with Daniel over the years and he’s always said he would come back for this. … We just had to book him two years in advance because he’s so busy.”

Cox graduated high school in 1978 and attended the University of Minnesota Duluth, where he majored in communications and took photos for the school newspaper, the Statesman. His college job was working at Grandmaison Photography, a Duluth photography studio. At first, he made prints in the darkroom and was eventually assigned to photograph weddings.

“He came in asking for a job,” said Dan Grandmaison, founder of the business. “He was just a college kid, but he offered to clean out the darkroom, take out the garbage, anything to get into the darkroom and learn. I was so impressed with his aggressiveness, his willingness to do the work, it wasn’t a hard decision to hire him.

“I always tried to hire people with personalities,” Grandmaison said. “You can teach anyone to do the technical work. But you can’t teach personality. Dan just seemed to have that kind of personality.”

Grandmaison suggested Cox attend a photography convention in South Dakota, where Cox met noted wildlife photographer Pete Czura. From there on, Cox, who was just 20 at the time, was hell-bent on being the next great wildlife photographer.

He dropped out of the University of Minnesota Duluth — even his adviser said he was ready to go and didn’t need the degree — started traveling to photograph wildlife and eventually moved with his high school sweetheart to Bozeman. He had fallen in love with the area on an earlier bicycle trip from Glacier to Yellowstone national parks.

“I figured it was so close to the park (Yellowstone) and so many great animals around that I wouldn’t have any problem selling photos to traditional outdoor magazines,” like Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and Sports Afield, Cox said.

For many years, Cox did just that, earning a good living and pursuing wildlife with his camera. He published his first book, “Whitetail Country,” which included more than 130 of his photographs and was popular with hunters and deer enthusiasts, selling 150,000 copies before going out of print. (Since then, he’s been the sole photographer for more than 20 more books.)

His business, Natural Exposures, took off, although much of his work shifted to more conservation-based publications and wildlife that is endangered or rare, rather than hunted.

Eventually, Cox found it increasingly hard to sell photographs for a fair price, especially as the internet became increasingly popular for commerce. It seemed everyone had a camera, and many of them were willing to sell photos cheaply or even give them away. So, he pivoted to become a professional photo tour guide.

His trips are often sold out years in advance, including excursions in 2024 and 2025 to Brazil, India, South Africa, Norway, Alaska, Patagonia, France and Hudson Bay. His second wife, Tanya, a professional travel planner, helps run the business and lead the trips.

“I don’t advertise at all. Somehow, people find me,’’ Cox said.

In 2019, before COVID-19 shut down travel, Cox led 17 photography tour trips abroad. Most last about two weeks. He’s got nine tours on the schedule this year and more than a dozen set for 2025.

“I’m still making a living with my photography,’’ Cox noted. “Just not at all like I planned.’’

In 1989, he made his first trip to Hudson Bay and had his first real encounters with wild polar bears. He’s been returning to the Arctic to see them nearly every year since, especially to Churchill, Manitoba.

“They are the rock stars of the climate world,’’ Cox said of the bears.

In February and early March, Cox spent 20 days in the Arctic photographing bears, scientists, Inuit people and much more. Polar Bears International covers the cost of his airfare and lodging, but his time and photography are all donated to the causes. Years worth of his photos are available to scientists, teachers and media around the world through the Arctic Documentary Project.

Climate scientists say the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, bringing profound changes to the ecosystem. Cox hopes the Arctic Documentary Project will help preserve a record of that change and stir awareness and then action by the people who see his work.

Research has shown that polar bears can’t support themselves by hunting only on land. They need their traditional source of food, which are seals that they catch through sea ice in winter. But as the amount and duration of ice cover shrinks, the bears aren’t getting out to enough seals.

Recently, for the first time, scientists quantified a direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear survival. The report was published in the journal Science and, experts agree: Unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, most polar bear subpopulations are expected to disappear by the end of this century.

The Arctic Documentary Project began with the donated still images of the late Dan Guravich, a professional photographer and founder of Polar Bears International who began working in the area in the 1950s. Guravich’s visual record of the North served as the project’s foundation, with photographs by Cox and others building on the legacy. Cox now serves as project director.

Cox’s images donated to the group have “had a huge impact on our mission, which is to conserve polar bears and the sea ice they depend on,’’ Krista Wright, executive director of Polar Bears International, told the News Tribune. “His photographs help connect viewers to polar bears and the fragile Arctic ecosystem, inspiring them to care. We feel fortunate that we’ve had such a long relationship with him and are grateful for the role he plays in conservation.”

Cox said he could see himself someday retiring from full-time photography and maybe even moving back to northern Minnesota. But, for now, he’s happy doing his home stints in Bozeman, his frequent trips to the Arctic and continuing his photography tours worldwide.

“I’ve always loved to travel. I always wanted to see the world. I’m lucky I have a partner who loves to travel,’’ Cox said. “And the tours keep selling out. … I guess if I’m going to go all over the world taking photos, I might as well keep getting paid for it.”

“Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, is viewed as the spiritual capital of India,” photographer Svetlin Yosifov says. “It’s also known as the city of death. While many Hindus undertake pilgrimage to see its temples and ghats, and bathe in the sacred river, some come when they feel death is near. Hindu scripture says dying and being cremated there frees a person from the cycle of rebirth and grants them salvation.”

In 2022, Yosifov, from Bulgaria, had already visited India four times, including one trip to Varanasi. This time he traversed the city on foot for hours, looking for the perfect shot. “The streets are so crowded,” he says. “Any empty space is filled instantly.”

Finding a pause in the crowds, he took this shot. “Under a bright umbrella the vendor was selling tender pears and apples, beautiful pomegranates and persimmons, oranges, lemons and pineapples. The smoke comes not from a fellow market-seller, but from a large cremation site, just out of shot.”

About 100 bodies are cremated in the city each day; afterwards, the ash is swept into the river. “One photo is not enough to reveal the secrets of this city, but I do think it shows the atmosphere on the streets,” Yosifov says. “When I look at this now, I remember the heat, the smell of smoke, the constant dust in the air. Varanasi is not an ordinary place – it’s an experience.”

THE boss of a photography firm which offered to remove additional support needs (ASN) children from a class photo has apologised to parents.

Families of pupils at Aboyne Primary School in Aberdeenshire complained after they were offered a choice of pictures with or without pupils with complex needs.

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The move sparked widespread outrage with one devastated mum accusing the firm of “erasing her child”.

The council claimed the decision was not taken by the school and the link was immediately removed.

Cornwall-based Tempest Photography boss Terence Tempest said he is “heartbroken” over the blunder and is in crisis talks with staff at his business.

He told the Daily Mail: “We have released a statement but at the moment I’m just trying to find out what stimulated this and what the hell happened.

“It’s just unacceptable, I don’t know what’s happened. It’s certainly not a policy of ours.

“We had a crisis meeting this morning, we are having another one this afternoon.”

“Of course I understand how upset the families must be, I would be too.”

Mr Tempest said a probe is underway to establish why the blunder happened.

He added: “I’m not sure what the current policy is frankly, it depends what we are asked to do. We just respond to what we are asked for.

“We have got another meeting coming up and will find out whether the photographer was asked to do it. Did they do it off their own back?”

Mum-of-two Natalie Pinnell, 38, said her nine-year-old daughter Erin felt “erasable from society” following the “disrespectful” move.

Parents of children in two classes were sent two links to official photographs – one including children with ASN and one without.

Natalie said: “The photographer gave the parents the option to delete members of their class.

“Finding out the only classes that got two links was an ASN-related class just blew my mind.”

In one class, two people were removed from the photograph and in the other only Erin had been removed.

Natalie added: “We should not be providing an option to delete one human or in the other class two humans from history.

“It was like ‘would you like Erin in it or not?’

“It’s disrespectful, it’s harmful, it’s ableist, it’s discriminatory and the photography company have a lot to answer for.”

Lisa Boyd’s daughter Lily was also left out of the photographs.

Lily, who uses a wheelchair, was one of two kids in her class who were removed.

Lisa said she was in “utter disbelief” when she saw the photo.

She said: “I was devastated and furious all at the same time.

“I thought there must be a reason. 

“The school have never ever excluded Lily from anything, in fact they go to extra lengths to ensure she’s included 

“I couldn’t believe it 

“I actually contacted Tempest and they were unbelievably unhelpful they wouldn’t really talk to me about it and the school were just heartbroken. 

“I was devastated for Lily really.” 

First Minister Humza Yousaf waded into the row saying it was “shameful” to omit children with complex needs from some school photographs.

The First Minister was asked about the reports as he visited a soft play centre in Cumbernauld.

He said it was “shameful, really dreadful”.

He told the PA news agency: “It should never have happened at all.
“I don’t want to see another single example of that anywhere in Scotland. It’s not acceptable, not right.

“And I’m pleased the council responsible has apologised.”

Following the incident, a spokesperson from Tempest Photography said: “Recently, after capturing a class group photograph, one of our photographers took additional images of the class group which mitted some members of the class from the photograph.

“We deeply regret any upset this has caused and would like to sincerely apologise to the parents and children affected.

“We are a family run business and photograph at schools across the UK and would like to reassure our customers that this is not standard procedure for our company and we are taking this matter very seriously.

“We are committed to implementing meaningful changes to prevent such an occurrence in the future.”

Aberdeenshire Council said: “We are aware that following Aboyne Primary School’s recent school class photographs, links to purchase the pictures included images with and without complex needs provision pupils.

“Whilst this was not a decision taken by the school, we absolutely appreciate the distress and hurt this has caused some parents and carers and we are sincerely sorry.

“The issue has been taken up with the photography company directly as this is totally unacceptable.”

That community would be South Philadelphia, where Lemons was born and raised. Aptly titled “Quiladelphia”, the young photographer’s most recent solo exhibition pays tribute to his hometown, as well as fellow members of the Black queer community who inhabit it. “Photography has always been a space for me to claim queer identity, especially with my last body of work,” Lemons says about the exhibit’s origins. Shot entirely on film, the series features his own friends and creative contemporaries – worlds away from the splashy celebrity portraits he’s become more widely known for.

“‘Quiladelphia’ challenged me a little bit more with intimacy because we were including nudity,” Lemons continues. “It’s really fun to have that level of trust from people that you just respect, like, oh, I’m respected enough that you guys trust me with your nude body. When doing nudes you have to be very careful, because I see so many people abuse that relationship and abuse that power. I’m very careful about navigating that conversation. I hope that it just empowers everyone to let your freak flag fly. Freak flag in the sense of, just be who you are.”

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Growing up as the child of teen parents, commuting between home in South Philly and school in the city centre, Lemons knows a thing or two about code switching, trying to figure out who you are. I wonder openly whether this has given him that innate instinct which is hard to find in even the most seasoned of photographers – an ability to recognise people for who they are; to afford them the level of understanding and respect required to create genuine, sincere portraiture; to not only see others, but allow them to feel seen.

“It’s different because ‘Quiladelphia’ democratised who gets to be shot by me. For a long time a lot of people thought it was just gonna be like Billie, these larger-than-life people,” says Lemons. “But anyone that I shoot, I really just respect as a person – and I’m interested in giving them a photo that they just enjoy, and really get to see themselves. That’s my first goal as a photographer. I just naturally want to be interested in you.”

If consuming honest and authentic imagery feels rare in our attention economy, that’s because it is. It’s what makes Lemons’ ability to bring out the humanity of his subjects all the more special, resulting in work that is equal parts probing, introspective and inspirational. “I think great art makes people uncomfortable, and I’m happy there’s so much conversation around this work. Because I don’t want silence. Historically, too, silence equals death.”

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Just as artists like Lyle Ashton Harris and Robert Mapplethorpe did with their groundbreaking work, Lemons has refused to stay silent throughout his career, making noise with thought-provoking imagery which makes queer identity the main focus. “Every time I have this new idea, I go, ‘No, there’s a gay artist that was talking about this in the 70s’”, says Lemons. “Thinking about my work on the largest scale of this country, how can I keep putting things forward that are taboo, that are from the communities that I embody?”

Lemons’ lens doesn’t search for the shock factor, but seeks – and in fact, demands – thoughtful, in-depth engagement with his work. To an admirer, it’s fascinating how his deeply personal point of view can translate into something so much larger. That same rawness with which he captures subjects who were once strangers in the most intimate of moments, is also a refreshing depiction of queerness and Blackness in all its forms.

“Photography for me has always been a way to preserve my own memory,” says Lemons. But seeing his artwork evolve over the years reflects like a running document of the times we’re living in. Look at the optimism of 2017’s “Glitterboy”, a glowing series of portraits where men proudly wear glittery make-up – captured right after Barack Obama’s presidency, when Lemons was just 19. “I feel so much younger when I look at ‘Glitterboy’,” he says. “I grew up in the Obama era, a young, Black gay man, just being like, ‘I can do whatever I want because my president is Black.’ I felt joyous.”

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Fresh on the heels of Trump-era chaos, the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, “Quiladelphia” is a more mature and somewhat sombre chapter of Lemons’ work. “With ‘Quiladelphia’ you see me grow up,” he says – a now 26-year-old’s perspective. “It’s a documentation of my queer journey and becoming. Now, when I think about my photography, I think about preservation of queer identity. There’s a tenderness that remains but you start to see me really question the world, how the world sees me and how I want to be perceived.”

Lemons speaks with the conviction of a socially conscious, politically focused member of Gen Z. “I think about people who really became pioneers of New Queer Cinema, and I’m bringing those undertones into my practice,” he says. “How do I become a part of that canon of people that just kept pushing queerness to the forefront?”

Lemons’ imagery indicates maturity beyond his years. Reflecting again on the buzz generated by his Vanity Fair cover, Lemons says, “It’s systemic racism on a maximum level when it comes to being a photographer, because a lot of these covers were only shot by white men before. For me, that cover was just a moment where I was like, this is the beginning. I still have to work my a** off because I know the colour of my skin. I know how I’m gonna be treated, no matter if this should be a moment.”

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Lemons’ aim is to make images that not only challenge views of gender, sexuality and race, but make us think about how those views came to be. “I definitely could’ve played it safe with ‘Quiladelphia’,” he says. “But I have my entire life to rebound from any situation that I’m ever in. If I do this, something that is so controversial that could blacklist me, then I’ll just spend the next part of my life figuring out how to get back on the good side,” he laughs. “But I’m not gonna stop making the work.”

“I have to take a moment to process my own celebrity,” Lemons muses. “It’s been unnerving to not know what’ll happen next in the sense of, ‘what will they say?’ The idea of infamy, it’s not as damning as it once was. So why not be ballsy?”

This is, after all, a photographer who commands respect. “Fame is very fleeting,” Lemons says, “but respect is forever.”

The seven-seat chef’s counter looks into the kitchen proper.

Justin De Souza

It speaks volumes that the kitchen takes up almost a third of the restaurant. There are, remarkably, only 35 seats available here. Twenty-eight are spread across eight tables on the ground floor and exclusively available to reserve via phone, while upstairs, at the chef’s counter, seven have been set aside for walk-ins. Naturally, no expense has been spared when it comes to the décor; even the lighting has been carefully installed so as not to cast shadows on tables, while the serving station has been carved in Italy from a 1,800kg piece of Devon stone, and a hand-painted mosaic inspired by the works of Guido Mocafico adorns the floor upstairs. Jayasekara and Jefferies’s joint masterpiece, however, might well be the 14-seat private dining room, complete with gold latticework and a Saracen fireplace.

As for The Cocochine’s menu: it will be ingredient led and served à la carte, with a single service each for lunch and dinner. Tellingly, Jayasekara toured more than 25 countries to set up his network of suppliers: think reindeer and cloudberries from Norway; single-origin chocolate via a Suffolk specialist; tuna and mirin from Tokyo; and coconut cream from – where else? – Sri Lanka. “Every dish will be a signature dish,” Jayasekara tells me when I ask if there’s any item on the menu that he’s particularly excited about, although he admits to a certain fondness for a dessert juxtaposing caviar and chocolate, which he considers a revelatory pairing. “A successful restaurant is always a question of harmony – in terms of ingredients, in terms of partners, in terms of suppliers,” he muses. “Back of house and front of house. When all of those come together, you have a fantastic marriage. Otherwise, it’s a divorce every night.”

Latest News in Black Art features updates and developments in the world of art and related culture

AWARDS & HONORS

Ingrid Pollard Wins Hasselblad Photography Award
The Hasselblad Foundation announced British photographer Ingrid Pollard is the recipient of the 2024 Hasselblad Award, one of the top photography prizes in the world. The honor includes a cash award of SEK 2,000,000 (nearly US $200,000), a gold medal, and a Hasselblad camera. Pollard “uses photography to question deeply engrained social and cultural constructs behind race, identity, community, and gender. Her work reveals subtle and starkly evident injustices through her engagement with the British landscape, iconography, and identity, as well as challenging the medium of photography and its history.” In 2022, Pollard was nominated for the Turner Prize. She was born in Guyana, grew up in London, and is now based in Northumberland, Northeast England. Pollard will be honored at an Oct. 11 ceremony in Gothenburg, Sweden. An exhibition of her work opens the same day at the Hasselblad Center, accompanied by a new publication. (3/8) | More

Amina Agueznay Wins South African Art Prize
Norval Foundation and The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF) announced Amina Agueznay is the grand prize winner of the 2024 Norval Sovereign African Art Prize. “I’m over the moon and honored more than anything else,” Agueznay said. The Moroccan-born multi-media artist earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Her work will be on view through May 12, along with contributions by the other finalists, in a group exhibition at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa. The honor includes a $35,000 prize and the opportunity to present a solo exhibition at the Norval Foundation. (2/19) | CNN

ALBERTA WHITTLE, “Genealogies of Chosen Family (Sekai Machache),” 2024 (acrylic with water from the Osun River, Nigeria, on linen, painted wooden frame with fretwork, 68 7/8 x 62 1/2 x 2 3/8 inches / 174.9 x 158.8 x 6 cm). | © Alberta Whittle, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects

REPRESENTATION

Alberta Whittle Joins Regen Projects
Regen Projects in Los Angeles announced its representation of Alberta Whittle. Her multidisciplinary practice is “motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-Blackness.” She works across sculpture, drawing, digital collage, film, performance, and writing. “Alberta Whittle: Learning a new punctuation for hope in times of disaster,” her inaugural exhibition with the gallery, opened March 16. The show features “Lagareh – The Last Born” (2022), a single-channel video, with a series of paintings and sculpture. Born in Barbados, Whittle is based in Glasgow, Scotland. She represented Scotland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. (2/14)| More

Mendes Wood Represents Julien Creuzet
Mendes Wood DM added French artist and poet Julien Creuzet (right) to its roster. In April, Creuzet is representing France with a solo exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale. He produces sculpture, installations, and textual interventions that explore his “diasporic experience. Inspired by the poetic and philosophical reflections of Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant on creolization and migration, Creuzet’s work focuses on the troubled intersection of the history of Martinique and the events of European modernity.” Mendes Wood was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, and has locations in New York, Brussels, and Paris. Creuzet’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will be on view in Brussels in 2025. He also works with Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Document Space in Chicago. (2/23) | Artdaily

Mendes Wood Adds Coco Fusco
New York-based, Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco joined Mendes Wood DM. Over the past three decades, her research-based practice has focused on “the complexities of race, colonialism, exile, gender, identity, and the shaping of possible new societies.” Fusco works across performance, video, exhibition practice, archival research, and formal writings. A retrospective of the artist, “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” (2023) was presented at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany. In 2025, the show travels to the MACBA in Barcelona, Spain. Her video installation “Coco Fusco: Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” is currently on view at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, Calif. Mendes Wood was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, and has locations in New York, Brussels, and Paris. Last fall, the gallery presented “With Others in Mind,” Fusco’s first solo exhibition in São Paulo. (2/21) | More

IMAGE: Above right, Julien Creuzet. | Photo by Virginie Ribaut

APPOINTMENTS

New CEO at Black Museum Association
Vedet Coleman-Robinson was promoted to president and CEO of the Association of African American Museums (AAAM), a member organization that supports museums and individual professionals focused on African and African American art, history, and culture. Before accepting a staff role, Coleman-Robinson served on AAAM’s membership committee. Previously, she spent 11 years at the National Park Service focusing on grant programs for the State, Tribal, Local, Plans & Grants Division and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. (3/26) | More

Heckscher Museum Hires New Operations Director
The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, N.Y., appointed Evan Waddy-Farr to the newly created role of director of operations and strategic initiatives. Waddy-Farr is a Morehouse alum who brings more than a dozen years of experience, including nonprofit operations and development, project management, grant writing, and a background in K-12 teaching and working with youth. Previously, he was director of curriculum and director of development at 4th Family Inc., in Albany, N.Y., a nonprofit focused on teen mentorship. He started at the museum in January. (2/9) | More

DESIGN

Cookware by Chef Eric Adjepong at Crate & Barrel
Chef Eric Adjepong has a new collaboration with Crate & Barrel, a 60-piece collection featuring cookware, serveware, glassware, textiles, and decor. The designs are inspired by his Ghanaian heritage and New York City, where he was born and raised. The selections include a large-sized ridged wood mortar and pestle (asanka); jewel-toned, organic-shaped dinnerware; and metal trivets in the form of a Sankofa bird and the Nea Onnim symbol. Adjepong is an alum of Top Chef season 16 and has become a regular on the Food Network, competing on “Tournament of Champions,” hosting “Alex vs. America,” co-starring on “Beachside Brawl,” and recently launching a new show, “Wildcard Kitchen.” He is the author of the children’s book “Sankofa: A Culinary Story of Resilience and Belonging” and his first cookbook coming soon. (3/21) | More

FILM

Film Directors Buy Westwood Movie Theater
A diverse group of 36 film directors, including Gina Prince-Bythewood, Steven Spielberg, and Bradley Cooper, purchased a Los Angeles movie theater that has hosted countless premieres over the decades. Jason Reitman led the acquisition of the Village Theater in the Westwood village community adjacent to UCLA. The historic theater first opened in 1931 and last summer was put on the market for $12 million. The directors acted to save the theater out of concern that the big-screen moviegoing experience is in jeopardy and to prevent the landmark from potentially being torn down and replaced by new development. Rian Johnson, Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Nolan, Lulu Wang, Alfonso Cuarón, and Justin Lin, are also among the directors involved. “Once renovated, the Village Theater will showcase a mixture of first-run films and repertory programming curated by the group,” according to the report. “The collective also intends to keep the theater open while plans for a restaurant, bar and gallery are finalized.” (2/21) | New York Times

Travis Kelce is Co-Producing Basquiat Documentary
“Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” a sprawling exhibition of rarely seen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat was organized by the artist’s estate. The show opened in New York in 2022, traveled to Los Angeles, and was accompanied by a catalog. Now a feature documentary of the same name is underway with Boardwalk Pictures and Quinn Wilson, Lizzo’s former creative director. NFL star Travis Kelce is among the producers. He is a tight end on the Kansas City Chiefs, who won the Super Bowl last month. The Basquiat project is Kelce’s second foray into the film world following his executive producer role on “My Dead Friend Zoe.” The dark comedy cost less than $10 million to make and was the first film financed with renewable energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. “King Pleasure” has been in the works since summer 2023. (2/13) | Variety

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Oprah’s WeightWatchers Stock Goes to Smithsonian Museum
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One of the best-known photographs from Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s a Laugh shows his father, Ray, in their Black Country council flat mid-fall, caught between an armchair and the carpet, his head about to crash into a tray and a wooden picture frame. The first time I saw the picture I was struck by the eerie passivity of a drunk’s face. Ray shows no pre-emptive wince, no anticipation of pain. I was reminded of the shocking and sometimes beautiful way that an inebriated person’s body can collapse and fall through the air. This is partly why a drunk person is at greater risk of death from a blow or a fall. They lack tension. They have become an object, vulnerable to the whims of their surroundings.

Ray’s a Laugh was an instant success on its publication by Scalo Press in 1996. Billingham took the photographs while studying for an art foundation course in Birmingham, originally intending them as source material for paintings rather than artworks in and of themselves, as he tells it. When Billingham went on to do a fine art degree at the University of Sunderland, his tutor Julian Germain saw the photographs and recognised their promise as autonomous works. He showed them to his friend Michael Collins, who was then the picture editor of The Telegraph Magazine, and they helped Billingham publish them as a book.

The early images show Ray in black and white and, later, Billingham’s mother Liz, his brother Jason, family friends and relatives in colour. Ray was a chronic alcoholic. He had always been a drinker, and the habit had worsened after he was made redundant from the local engineering factory when Billingham was a child. Liz was not a drinker, but she smoked heavily and appeared to assuage the chaos and frustration of life with her husband through a strong affection for and identification with sentimental nicknacks and pets.

Jason, seven years Billingham’s junior, and described by his brother as a “dosser”, was taken into foster care aged 11. It was Jason who gave Billingham’s book its title, saying of their father: “Ray’s a laugh, but I wouldn’t like to be like him.” The work is now being reissued, comprising not only the images in the 1996 book but dozens more from the same period, using Billingham’s original vision for the sequencing in a kind of extended director’s cut.

Billingham began photographing his father during a period when his mother had moved to an adjacent tower block, unable to tolerate Ray’s alcoholism. In her absence, his life had emptied out even further. “He didn’t eat anything for about 18 months. He didn’t have a telly, he didn’t listen to the radio, he just looked out the window and drank,” Billingham said in an interview for the British Film Institute.

Billingham was interested in capturing the tragedy of this solitude, the airless days in which time-markers no longer seemed to matter, but he was also drawn to the aesthetic arrangement of his father’s body in its various states of collapse. The way he fell this way or that seemed like useful compositional references for the paintings that Billingham has always said were his primary ambition. When Germain, his tutor, had initially seen some of these early photos he had felt a sense of discomfort. “I had the impression that nothing was held back,” Germain recalls to Liz Jobey in an essay published in Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader, which accompanies the reissue, “that he was showing me something the vast majority of people would probably feel uncomfortable about in relation to their parents.”

This would be the first of many ethical queries levied at Billingham, who appears largely to have taken them in his stride. After Billingham’s 1997 show at Luhring Augustine in New York, the artist and writer Martha Rosler wrote of “his greatly enlarged instant-camera colour photos of his drunken father and brother and his rot-toothed mother in their sorry council-house flat”, claiming that “without a sense of the social, only the personal remains, and a look at the merely personal is an invitation to voyeurism”. Her distaste was both aesthetic and moral — not only were the images, in her view, ugly, but Billingham had failed to use their ugliness in support of an argument. And yet the absence of social commentary — that Billingham was not using the pictures to make a point — was what others loved and were fascinated by. The journalist Lynn Barber, in a profile of Billingham for The Observer in 2000, wrote: “I care passionately about the Billinghams, precisely because they are not presented as social problems but as riotously colourful individuals.”

That some viewers are unable to parse anything but tragedy in the photographs, while others comment first on the moments of light that burst through says something about how they have been consumed: as art or, depending on the view, as journalistic documentation. These are not happy lives, that goes without saying — their home is filthy, their horizons extremely limited, their bodies ravaged. There are, though, moments of joy and communion, as there are in any life. A picture of Liz feeding a newborn kitten with a dropper, a look of sheer, exuberant glee on her face. Another of Liz and Ray passionately embracing. Or Ray sitting with his arm around his dog with a look of something near calmness and pride on his face. Then there are the images of bodily breakdown: Ray openly bleeding after a fight with no attempt to stem it, or upright with a dazed expression next to a toilet encrusted with filth. It’s not that there are any images that contradict the general impression of bleakness, exactly. I think, rather, they are all so raw and abject that they convey pure, actual life, and the persistence of actual life is always heartening on some level, even if its specifics are unhappy.

When asked about the ethics of presenting his family as he did, Billingham was sanguine, almost as if confused by the question. That was what his parents were like, after all. It’s not as though he had cynically staged photographs of them to imply false narratives. He was telling a story, though. In an interview, he compared his vision for the series to a play. All narrative building involves creation of a sort, and his closeness to the people he photographed makes for an exhilarating and unapologetic subjectivity. He is not a journalist, after all, and where he considers himself to have failed, it is for producing images that could have been made by a journalist. In the 2000 interview with Barber, he described a photo of his parents eating side by side on the sofa, saying of it: “It looks like any hack photographer could have come in and taken this photograph — it doesn’t show you anything about the relationship I have with them.” When asked in an interview with Robert Yates in 1996 what his family made of the images, Billingham said he’d wondered if they would perhaps force new insight, reveal themselves to themselves. Instead, they laughed, saying, “Don’t we look odd?”

I came across Ray’s a Laugh while researching depictions of alcoholism for a character I was writing in my second novel. I have known many heavy drinkers, myself included, but have never been very close to a person with chronic, late-stage alcoholism. A relative of mine was as close as I had personally come, and that wasn’t especially near. Other family members, closer to the person by relation and in age, had been the ones to give what care was possible. I would only hear second-hand descriptions of the state of the living quarters, of the person’s refusal to hear criticism. I listened to various people who knew them in their long-ago past, of their charisma and beauty and humour, and then to the descriptions of the current detritus and ill health so accelerated it was scarcely health at all any more. Nothing was sustained or nourished; the ailing living corpse was simply being maintained, as it marched towards its demise.

I saw Billingham’s photographs and understood instantly the feeling that needed drawing: it was one of receding surroundings. The alcoholic’s world is slowly reduced from the moment they begin to need alcohol, and it continues to shrink as the need expands. Some alcoholics have the means to at least portray the idea of expansiveness. A wealthy drunk can more easily conceal their need, for a time, by shrouding it in the social frivolities in which drinking is normal and expected. They can go to restaurants and launches and drink beautiful ice-cold martinis. An impoverished drunk, on the other hand, lacks the artifice. They can only afford the units, not the pantomime of justification. In these cases, like that of my family member by the time I was aware of their addiction, the world becomes horribly whittled down to the small space in which they are drinking. I thought of this lately while taking care of a cat who doesn’t go outside. The cat is obsessed with food because food is the only narrative marker in its day. Time, for the alcoholic, is essentially formless except for the way that drink maps it. In a book of art writing published in 2009, Gordon Burn, another great British chronicler of working-class disintegration, likened Billingham’s interests to those of Raymond Carver, observing that both portrayed “an indoor world”. That was it for me: an indoor world. A world that is vanishingly thin and yet still contains all the variance and complexity of human life.

I have written about my family intermittently in articles and essays over the past 10 years, and when I give workshops and classes, people who would like to write memoir sometimes ask how I have managed to square it with them. Mine is an unsatisfactory response, but one I believe is the only honest one. My family happened to be the sort of people who tolerated my intrusions. They may not have always liked it but they understood it and never resented me for it in ways more significant than could be discussed and resolved. I think they know that my impulse to write about them is not compelled by a desire for cheap revelations or shock value, but by my need to understand them. I don’t always feel fully a part of my family and so I need to look at it from the outside, turn it around as an object in my mind to comprehend it better.

Members of my family have had their different ways of dealing with it, much as they are differently represented in my work. My parents read everything I write and have sometimes been dismayed by the way I present myself or my background. My brothers have never read my novels, nor many of my essays, which I was shocked and upset to learn earlier this year but ultimately understand.

It’s not a useful answer, because it’s pure luck. It reminds me, though, of what I think about the question of auto-fiction (autobiography that allows substantial creative intervention). When asked if auto-fiction is good, or worthwhile, as a form, the only answer I can provide is that when a good writer writes it, it’s worthwhile and when a bad one does, it isn’t. Can you involve your family in your art, expose them and still be in their lives? Well, you can if they’re like mine, and you may not be able to if they’re not. The author Karl Ove Knausgård famously revealed the detritus of his late father’s alcoholism in the first book of his My Struggle series, and was never forgiven by some members of his family.

The photographer Martin Parr described, in alarmingly cavalier phrasing, the people he photographed as the “objects I am using”. By coincidence, as I write this essay, I am also working on an audio documentary about the Irish playwright and novelist Brendan Behan, who once described the Irish people as “not my audience; they are my raw material”. Behan was another artist whose portrayal of his working-class surroundings was simultaneously marvelled at and recoiled from by its middle-class witnesses. He, too, showed people who, by tradition, should be rendered only as naive figures of tragedy as people possessed of actual, complex personhood, mired as they may be in poverty and misfortune and decay. Burn diagnosed Billingham as being in possession of Graham Greene’s “splinter of ice”, and there is no denying that the ability to reveal one’s family in this manner is not usual, but nor is it usual to be able to reveal a world with such totality, as Billingham does here. I am thinking about what it’s like to see an image of Ray’s back, sloped and soft and emerging painfully from bed and, a few pages later, another image of Jason’s back, young and tough but strained, veins popping as though braced for what is coming down the line.

The writer Andrew Solomon once described depression as a disease of privacy, adding that “the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison”. Alcoholism, too, is a disease of privacy. To show it is not disgraceful. To refuse to see it is disgraceful. To perceive its revelation as salacious is disgraceful. Ray’s a Laugh compels us to see what is not commonly seen, and that is the most we can ask of a work of art.

Megan Nolan’s latest novel “Ordinary Human Failings” is published by Jonathan Cape
“Ray’s a Laugh” and “Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader” is published by Mack

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Entries are now being accepted for the Wings Over Muscatatuck photo contest at the Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge near Seymour.

The subject is “Birds of Muscatatuck NWR.” Photos must be prints by non-commercial photographers that are at least 5- by 7-inches and not larger than 11- by 14-inches. Previous winning entries are ineligible. Entries may not be significantly altered from the original image although cropping, lighting and darkening is permitted.

Contest entries must be mounted on a stiff backing (such as cardboard/foamboard) and no frames or hanging wires are permitted.

Two entries are allowed per person and names are not permitted on the front of the entry. Entries will be judged in adult and youth (under 18) categories. An entry form (available at the refuge) must be attached to the back. Entries need to be submitted to the office or Visitor Center by 4 p.m. on May 4 to be included in the contest.

Winning entries will receive ribbons, be displayed in the Visitor Center during Wings Over Muscatatuck, and be shown on refuge media sites and newsletters.

Photography contest entries will be on display at the refuge visitor center from the date judged through the end of May.

For information about the contest, contact the refuge office at 812-522-4352 x 12, or e-mail [email protected].