How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds.
cala-te puta foi o nbew york times q1ue disse 1º ao trump e agora ao menino zuckerberg
cala-te puta foi o nbew york times q1ue disse 1º ao trump e agora ao menino zuckerberg
cala-te puta in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero, and
by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to
interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular:
“Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate,” Rivero says. The rise of
Occupy Democrats essentially mirrored the rise of Sanders’s primary run.
On his page, Rivero started quoting text from Sanders’s frequent email
blasts, turning them into Facebook-ready memes with a consistent
aesthetic: colors that pop, yellow on black. Rivero says that it’s clear
what his audience wants. “I’ve probably made 10,000 graphics, and it’s
like running 10,000 focus groups,” he said. (Clinton was and is, of
course, widely discussed by Faceboo cala-te puta k users: According to the company, in
the last month 40.8 million people “generated interactions” around the
candidate. But Rivero says that in the especially engaged, largely
oppositional left-wing-page ecosystem, Clinton’s message and cautious
brand didn’t carry.)
Because
the Sanders campaign has come to an end, these sites have been left in a
peculiar position, having lost their unifying figure as well as their
largest source of engagement. Audiences grow quickly on Facebook but can
disappear even more quickly; in the case of left-leaning pages, many
had accumulated followings not just by speaking to Sanders supporters
but also by being intensely critical, and often utterly dismissive, of
Clinton.
How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds.
Open
your Facebook feed. What do you see? A photo of a close friend’s child.
An automatically generated slide show commemorating six years of
friendship between two acquaintances. An eerily on-target ad for
something you’ve been meaning to buy. A funny video. A sad video. A
recently live video. Lots of video; more video than you remember from
before. A somewhat less-on-target ad. Someone you saw yesterday feeling
blessed. Someone you haven’t seen in 10 years feeling worried.
And
then: A family member who loves politics asking, “Is this really who we
want to be president?” A co-worker, whom you’ve never heard talk about
politics, asking the same about a different candidate. A story about
Donald Trump that “just can’t be true” in a figurative sense. A story
about Donald Trump that “just can’t be true” in a literal sense. A video
of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid with text, shared from a source
you’ve never seen before, viewed 15 million times. An article
questioning Hillary Clinton’s honesty; a headline questioning Donald
Trump’s sanity. A few shares that go a bit too far: headlines you would
never pass along yourself but that you might tap, read and probably not
forget.
Maybe
you’ve noticed your feed becoming bluer; maybe you’ve felt it becoming
redder. Either way, in the last year, it has almost certainly become
more intense. You’ve seen a lot of media sources you don’t recognize and
a lot of posts bearing no memorable brand at all. You’ve seen
politicians and celebrities and corporations weigh in directly; you’ve
probably seen posts from the candidates themselves. You’ve seen people
you’re close to and people you’re not, with increasing levels of
urgency, declare it is now time to speak up, to take a stand, to set
aside allegiances or hangups or political correctness or hate.
Facebook,
in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly
ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news
consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site
is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each
month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found
that 44 percent of Americans
read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior
dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these
facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political
conversation in America.
The
Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive.
Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and
posted by established media organizations large and small, local and
national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new
and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss:
political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook,
uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences
exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that
essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never
heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry
Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal;
Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some
of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of
thousands.
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Using
a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages
across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and
commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election
topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the
activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and
hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least
understood, force in media.
Individually,
these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience
is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the
reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media,
whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly
ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional
media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to
lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these
new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has
created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the
company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media.
But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of
the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already
reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great
deal of America’s political discourse.
In 2006,
when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college to run his rapidly
expanding start-up, Mark Provost was a student at Rogers State
University in Claremore, Okla., and going through a rough patch. He had
transferred restlessly between schools, and he was taking his time to
graduate; a stock-picking hobby that grew into a promising source of
income had fallen apart. His outlook was further darkened by the
financial crisis and by the years of personal unemployment that
followed. When the Occupy movement began, he quickly got on board. It
was only then, when Facebook was closing in on its billionth user, that
he joined the network.
Now
36, Provost helps run US Uncut, a left-leaning Facebook page and
website with more than 1.5 million followers, about as many as MSNBC
has, from his apartment in Philadelphia. (Sample headlines: “Bernie Delegates Want You to See This DNC Scheme to Silence Them”
and “This Sanders Delegate Unleashing on Hillary Clinton Is Going
Absolutely Viral.”) He frequently contributes to another popular page,
The Other 98%, which has more than 2.7 million followers.
Occupy
got him on Facebook, but it was the 2012 election that showed him its
potential. As he saw it, that election was defined by social media. He
mentioned a set of political memes that now feel generationally distant:
Clint Eastwood’s empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention
and Mitt Romney’s debate gaffe about “binders full of women.” He
thought it was a bit silly, but he saw in these viral moments a language
in which activists like him could spread their message.
Provost’s
page now communicates frequently in memes, images with overlaid text.
“May I suggest,” began one, posted in May 2015, when opposition to the
Trans-Pacific Partnership was gaining traction, “the first 535 jobs we ship overseas?”
Behind the text was a photo of Congress. Many are more earnest. In an
image posted shortly thereafter, a photo of Bernie Sanders was overlaid
with a quote: “If Germany, Denmark, Sweden and many more provide
tuition-free college,” read the setup, before declaring in larger text, “we should be doing the same.”
It has been shared more than 84,000 times and liked 75,000 more. Not
infrequently, this level of zeal can cross into wishful thinking. A post
headlined “Did Hillary Clinton Just Admit on LIVE TV That Her Iraq War
Vote Was a Bribe?” was shared widely enough to merit a response from Snopes, which called it “quite a stretch.”
This
year, political content has become more popular all across the
platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a
growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in
general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create
and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and
reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism,
advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new
class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is
especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The
point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further
with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in
front of them. Everything else is secondary.
While
web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of
Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any
allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance,
of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have
a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with
Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users
straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way
around.
From
a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of
speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people
want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news
curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many
more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what
they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style
story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose.
But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an
ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.
Rafael
Rivero is an acquaintance of Provost’s who, with his twin brother,
Omar, runs a page called Occupy Democrats, which passed three million
followers in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero, and
by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to
interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular:
“Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate,” Rivero says. The rise of
Occupy Democrats essentially mirrored the rise of Sanders’s primary run.
On his page, Rivero started quoting text from Sanders’s frequent email
blasts, turning them into Facebook-ready memes with a consistent
aesthetic: colors that pop, yellow on black. Rivero says that it’s clear
what his audience wants. “I’ve probably made 10,000 graphics, and it’s
like running 10,000 focus groups,” he said. (Clinton was and is, of
course, widely discussed by Facebook users: According to the company, in
the last month 40.8 million people “generated interactions” around the
candidate. But Rivero says that in the especially engaged, largely
oppositional left-wing-page ecosystem, Clinton’s message and cautious
brand didn’t carry.)
Because
the Sanders campaign has come to an end, these sites have been left in a
peculiar position, having lost their unifying figure as well as their
largest source of engagement. Audiences grow quickly on Facebook but can
disappear even more quickly; in the case of left-leaning pages, many
had accumulated followings not just by speaking to Sanders supporters
but also by being intensely critical, and often utterly dismissive, of
Clinton.
“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”
In retrospect, Facebook’s takeover
of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social
media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a
dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines.
By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million
users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and
publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce
substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers
could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools
were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion
users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to
publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s
previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked
on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.
This
was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned
with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to
make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was
intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of
smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’
daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source
of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.
Facebook,
from a publisher’s perspective, had seized the web’s means of
distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a social-media
network became an intermediary between publishers and their audiences.
For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally
altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a
dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple
media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and
sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and
celebrities.
From
the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook as a resource
to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing
businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others
embraced it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue
sharing and video production, as The New York Times has done. Some
new-media start-ups, most notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a
comprehensively Facebook-centric production-and-distribution strategy.
All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can
claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than
a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted
access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you
cannot control.
The
news feed is designed, in Facebook’s public messaging, to “show people
the stories most relevant to them” and ranks stories “so that what’s
most important to each person shows up highest in their news feeds.” It
is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where
value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement.
Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses
have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the
incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.
Any
sufficiently complex system will generate a wide variety of results,
some expected, some not; some desired, others less so. On July 31, a
Facebook page called Make America Great posted its final story of the
day. “No Media Is Telling You About the Muslim Who Attacked Donald
Trump, So We Will ...,” read the headline, next to a small avatar of a pointing and yelling Trump.
The story was accompanied by a photo of Khizr Khan, the father of a
slain American soldier. Khan spoke a few days earlier at the Democratic
National Convention, delivering a searing speech admonishing Trump for
his comments about Muslims. Khan, pocket Constitution in hand, was
juxtaposed with the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. “It is a
sad day in America,” the caption read, “where we the people must expose
the TRUTH because the media is in the tank for 1 Presidential
Candidate!”
Readers
who clicked through to the story were led to an external website,
called Make America Great Today, where they were presented with a brief
write-up blended almost seamlessly into a solid wall of fleshy ads.
Khan, the story said — between ads for “(1) Odd Trick to ‘Kill’ Herpes
Virus for Good” and “22 Tank Tops That Aren’t Covering Anything” — is an
agent of the Muslim Brotherhood and a “promoter of Islamic Shariah
law.” His late son, the story suggests, could have been a “Muslim
martyr” working as a double agent. A credit link beneath the story led
to a similar-looking site called Conservative Post, from which the
story’s text was pulled verbatim. Conservative Post had apparently
sourced its story from a longer post on a right-wing site called
Shoebat.com.
Within
24 hours, the post was shared more than 3,500 times, collecting a
further 3,000 reactions — thumbs-up likes, frowning emoji, angry emoji —
as well as 850 comments, many lengthy and virtually all impassioned. A
modest success. Each day, according to Facebook’s analytics, posts from
the Make America Great page are seen by 600,000 to 1.7 million people.
In July, articles posted to the page, which has about 450,000 followers,
were shared, commented on or liked more than four million times, edging
out, for example, the Facebook page of USA Today.
Make America Great,
which inhabits the fuzzy margins of the political Facebook page
ecosystem, is owned and operated by a 35-year-old online marketer named
Adam Nicoloff. He started the page in August 2015 and runs it from his
home outside St. Louis. Previously, Nicoloff provided web services and
marketing help for local businesses; before that, he worked in
restaurants. Today he has shifted his focus to Facebook pages and
websites that he administers himself. Make America Great was his first
foray into political pages, and it quickly became the most successful in
a portfolio that includes men’s lifestyle and parenting.
Nicoloff’s
business model is not dissimilar from the way most publishers use
Facebook: build a big following, post links to articles on an outside
website covered in ads and then hope the math works out in your favor.
For many, it doesn’t: Content is expensive, traffic is unpredictable and
website ads are both cheap and alienating to readers. But as with most
of these Facebook-native pages, Nicoloff’s content costs comparatively
little, and the sheer level of interest in Trump and in the type of
inflammatory populist rhetoric he embraces has helped tip Nicoloff’s
system of advertising arbitrage into serious profitability. In July,
visitors arriving to Nicoloff’s website produced a little more than
$30,000 in revenue. His costs, he said, total around $8,000, partly
split between website hosting fees and advertising buys on Facebook
itself.
Such news
exists primarily within users’ feeds, its authorship obscured, its
provenance unclear, its veracity questionable. It exists so far outside
the normal channels of news production and distribution that its claims
will go unchallenged.
Then,
of course, there’s the content, which, at a few dozen posts a day,
Nicoloff is far too busy to produce himself. “I have two people in the
Philippines who post for me,” Nicoloff said, “a husband-and-wife combo.”
From 9 a.m. Eastern time to midnight, the contractors scour the
internet for viral political stories, many explicitly pro-Trump. If
something seems to be going viral elsewhere, it is copied to their site
and promoted with an urgent headline. (The Khan story was posted at the
end of the shift, near midnight Eastern time, or just before noon in
Manila.) The resulting product is raw and frequently jarring, even by
the standards of this campaign. “There’s No Way I’ll Send My Kids to Public School to Be Brainwashed by the LGBT Lobby,”
read one headline, linking to an essay ripped from Glenn Beck’s The
Blaze; “Alert: UN Backs Secret Obama Takeover of Police; Here’s What We
Know ...,” read another, copied from a site called The Federalist Papers
Project. In the end, Nicoloff takes home what he jokingly described as a
“doctor’s salary” — in a good month, more than $20,000.
Terry
Littlepage, an internet marketer based in Las Cruces, N.M., has taken
this model even further. He runs a collection of about 50 politically
themed Facebook pages with names like The American Patriot and My
Favorite Gun, which push visitors to a half-dozen external websites,
stocked with content aggregated by a team of freelancers. He estimates
that he spends about a thousand dollars a day advertising his pages on
Facebook; as a result, they have more than 10 million followers. In a
good month, Littlepage’s properties bring in $60,000.
Nicoloff
and Littlepage say that Trump has been good for business, but each
admits to some discomfort. Nicoloff, a conservative, says that there
were other candidates he preferred during the Republican primaries but
that he had come around to the nominee. Littlepage is also a recent
convert. During the primaries, he was a Cruz supporter, and he even
tried making some left-wing pages on Facebook but discovered that they
just didn’t make him as much money.
In
their angry, cascading comment threads, Make America Great’s followers
express no such ambivalence. Nearly every page operator I spoke to was
astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to things
like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy. No doubt
because of the page’s name, some Trump supporters even mistake
Nicoloff’s page for an official organ of the campaign. Nicoloff says
that he receives dozens of messages a day from Trump supporters,
expecting or hoping to reach the man himself. Many, he says, are simply
asking for money.
Many of these political
news pages will likely find their cachet begin to evaporate after Nov.
8. But one company, the Liberty Alliance, may have found a way to create
something sustainable and even potentially transformational, almost
entirely within the ecosystem of Facebook. The Georgia-based firm was
founded by Brandon Vallorani, formerly of Answers in Genesis, the
organization that opened a museum in Kentucky promoting a literal
biblical creation narrative. Today the Liberty Alliance has around 100
sites in its network, and about 150 Facebook pages, according to Onan
Coca, the company’s 36-year-old editor in chief. He estimates their
cumulative follower count to be at least 50 million. Among the company’s
partners are the former congressman Allen West, the 2008 election
personality Joe the Plumber, the conservative actor Kirk Cameron and the
former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Victoria Jackson. Then there
are Liberty’s countless news-oriented pages, which together have become
an almost ubiquitous presence on right-leaning political Facebook in the
last few years. Their names are instructive and evocative: Eagle
Rising; Fighting for Trump; Patriot Tribune; Revive America; US Herald;
The Last Resistance.
A
dozen or so of the sites are published in-house, but posts from the
company’s small team of writers are free to be shared among the entire
network. The deal for a would-be Liberty Alliance member is this: You
bring the name and the audience, and the company will build you a prefab
site, furnish it with ads, help you fill it with content and keep a cut
of the revenue. Coca told me the company brought in $12 million in
revenue last year. (The company declined to share documentation further
corroborating his claims about followers and revenue.)
Because
the pages are run independently, the editorial product is varied. But
it is almost universally tuned to the cadences and styles that seem to
work best on partisan Facebook. It also tracks closely to conservative
Facebook media’s big narratives, which, in turn, track with the Trump
campaign’s messaging: Hillary Clinton is a crook and possibly mentally
unfit; ISIS is winning; Black Lives Matter is the real racist movement;
Donald Trump alone can save us; the system — all of it — is rigged.
Whether the Liberty Alliance succeeds or fails will depend, at least in
part, on Facebook’s algorithm. Systemic changes to the ecosystem arrive
through algorithmic adjustments, and the company recently adjusted the
news feed to “further reduce clickbait headlines.”
For
now, the network hums along, mostly beneath the surface. A post from a
Liberty Alliance page might find its way in front of a left-leaning user
who might disagree with it or find it offensive, and who might choose
to engage with the friend who posted it directly. But otherwise, such
news exists primarily within the feeds of the already converted, its
authorship obscured, its provenance unclear, its veracity questionable.
It’s an environment that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to
traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page operator, it’s
mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly sympathetic
audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging, mostly
formed, into the national discourse.
Consider the trajectory of a post from August, from a Facebook page called Patriotic Folks, the headline of which read, “Spread This: Media Rigging the Polls, Hiding New Evidence Proving Trump Is Winning.”
The article cited a litany of social-media statistics highlighting
Trump’s superior engagement numbers, among them Trump’s Facebook
following, which is nearly twice as large as Clinton’s. “Don’t listen to
the lying media — the only legitimate attack they have left is Trump’s
poll numbers,” it said. “Social media proves the GOP nominee has strong
foundation and a firm backing.” The story spread across this right-wing
Facebook ecosystem, eventually finding its way to Breitbart and finally
to Sean Hannity’s “Morning Minute,” where he read through the statistics
to his audience.
Before
Hannity signed off, he posed a question: “So, does that mean anything?”
It’s a version of the question that everyone wants to answer about
Facebook and politics, which is whether the site’s churning political
warfare is actually changing minds — or, for that matter, beginning to
change the political discourse as a whole. How much of what happens on
the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held
beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be
created, or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is
Facebook doing to our politics?
Appropriately,
the answer to this question can be chosen and shared on Facebook in
whichever way you prefer. You might share this story from The New York
Times Magazine, wondering aloud to your friends whether our democracy
has been fundamentally altered by this publishing-and-advertising
platform of unprecedented scale. Or you might just relax and find some
memes to share from one of countless pages that will let you air your
political id. But for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to
the task at hand. Facebook’s primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the
question of Facebook’s relationship to political discourse is absurd —
they’re one and the same. As Rafael Rivero put it to me, “Facebook is
where it’s all happening.”
Rotting berries, undergoing an uncontrolled process of fermentation,
were loaded with sugar, and therefore calories. Far from fretting about
their waistlines, these prehistoric primates needed to load up on energy
to survive. So the monkeys who were good at finding fermented fruit
spawned offspring who could do the same. Then, eventually, we got keg
stands and binge drinking.
That’s right, next time you’re hungover, you can blame the monkeys.
Robert Evans, an editor at Cracked, fills his A (Brief) History of Vice with
these kinds of anecdotes and history lessons about the human history of
evolution, civilization, and debauchery. Nafutian tribes had their
version of the United Nations by throwing beer bashes. Sumerians made
currency to pay for prostitutes. Plato may have helped popularize the
idea of an afterlife after tripping his face off. The history of people
is a history of unscrupulousness.
So here, we bring you ten choice anecdotes, factoids, and insights from a long history of bad human behavior.
You might not know it, but you have probably put a
prolepsis into play recently. Did you know that a signature isn’t
necessarily a scribbled name on a credit card receipt? You know that
classic character that Gilda Radner played on “Saturday Night
Live” who’d confuse “violence” with “violins”? Do you know what kind of
mistake that is? You probably know what a climax is, and maybe even how
to pronounce denouement, but do you know what part of a plot makes up
the anagnorisis?
If this intrigues you, then our illustrated guide to Ten Literary
Terms to Impress (Or Annoy) Your Friends is for you. And you don’t have
to use it just to be a show-off. (Let’s be honest, this will only
impress a very specific circle of friends.) In working on these
illustrations, in seeing things named that I didn’t know had names, I
started to think about my own favorite stories and poems differently.
Does Humboldt’s Gift have a significant moment of anagnorisis, a
moment of discovery? Yes, probably when Citrine discovers what exactly
makes up Humboldt’s gift. (Okay, that was an easy one.)
The famous opening lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” use the device of
enjambment — which is a much more academic way of describing Ginsberg’s
speed-fueled run-on lines of poetry. Also, I can now stop faking it
when I read or hear the term in media res. I’d always pretended
to know what it means, doing that thing where you glide past it while
reading, too proud to stop and look it up.
And next time I see a title like “Dead Man Walking,“I’ll know that that’s a prolepsis. But I probably won’t announce it.
Cassius Clay from Who Shot Sports by Gail Buckland
Editor's Note:
Gail Buckland has written or been a collaborator on fourteen books of photographic history, including Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography, The Magic Image (with Cecil Beaton), The American Century (by Harold Evans),and Who Shot Rock & Roll. She lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her latest book is Who Shot Sports.
During the NBA Finals, a riveting photo of LeBron James
popped up on social media that captures his greatness, worth way more
than any sportswriter’s 1,000-word-ode to follow. There he is, bathed in
light, levitating high above the rim, an almost spectral vision, ready
to throw down on not just the Warriors, but on the outer limits of the
sport itself. It’s a shot from Game Three, the first Cavaliers victory
in the series, a lifetime before they would overcome a three-to-one
deficit to the greatest regular season team in NBA history. In
hindsight, it looks like the ascension of a basketball god. Had the Cavs
lost, it would be a picture of an unfulfilled king, the most gifted
player of the twenty-first-century crashing and burning yet again.
Sports photography is my favorite photography and not just because I have more or less given my life over to the games of others. There are a million shots that roll around in my head, the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat,
all captured on film (or pixels) for the ages. Like many fans, I’d
never given much thought to the person behind the lens, the geniuses who
toil in general obscurity to cement sporting moments forever. Photographers like Heinz Kluetmeier,
who was the first person to place a camera in the bottom of an Olympic
pool at the 1992 games in Barcelona. In less than the blink of an eye,
he got the immortal shot of Michael Phelps touching the wall after
catching Serbia’s Milorad Cavic in the final meters of the 100-meter
butterfly in Beijing in 2008. Even more than the televised race itself,
it’s the thing I’ll always remember.
Thanks to Gail Buckland, sports shutterbugs are having their moment in the lights. She’s the author of Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History from 1843 to Presentand the curator of an exhibition currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum, an outfield heave from the old ballpark where Jackie Robinson integrated baseball in 1947.
The literary half of Who Shot Sports is a thorough
330-plus-page coffee table tome, summed up concisely in the intro, “When
the action stops, the still photograph remains.” Images range from the
famous like Nat Fein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Babe Bows Out, to lesser-known shots of unknown jocks such as Ernst Haas’s Handball,
featuring two shirtless 1970s longhairs getting a sweat on in a
graffiti-strewn Central Park. Buckland’s book, which was nearly five
years in the making, is a celebration of the art form, obviously
inspired by her love of sports, right?
“If I had a modicum of knowledge about sports, I would’ve stayed away
from the project,” says Buckland. “My ignorance allowed me to go in
blind. There’s merit in not recognizing the subject because I could really look at the pictures.”
Buckland may not have known Peyton Manning from Man o’War,
but she certainly knows her snapshots. For forty years she’s been a
scholar, curator, writer, and collaborator, examining photography
through her own personal lens of expertise. Throughout her work on fourteen books,
Buckland has delved into early photography, rock-and-roll, true crime,
the White House in miniature, and with historians Walter Evans and Kevin
Baker, The American Century.
Photography is her passion and long-term research projects are the
norm, so she has to be totally committed to an idea to go forward. “I
stopped counting how many pictures I looked at, it’s tens of thousands,”
she says."Thanks to Gail Buckland, sports shutterbugs are having their moment in the lights."TWEET THIS QUOTE
There are plenty of collections of iconic sports photos, but
Buckland’s interest doesn’t lie in Michael Jordan, it’s with Walter
Iooss, the legendary Sports Illustrated staffer who painted a parking lot blue to given the impression his Royal Airness was floating through the heavens.
“Who Shot Sports is something that has never been done
before. I wanted to enlarge the camera and knock down these hierarchies
that certain subjects are more worthy of study than others because the
beauty of sports means so much to people,” says Buckland. “My Eureka
moment came when I realized how sports photographers think, that their
decisive moment isn’t the same decisive moment in the field of play.”
Buckland’s insight comes through at the Brooklyn Museum exhibition
where the photos are displayed according to eight categories — same as
the book — ranging from “In and Out of the Ring” to “Fans and Followers”
and “The Decisive Moment.” The latter manages to weave together brightly tattooed (future murderer) Aaron Hernandez, Willie Mays, a BASE jumper plunging off 400-foot Castleton Tower, and my five-year-old daughter’s favorite, a shot of her number-one athlete Serena Williams in an all-out lunge, calf muscles flexed to make Milo of Croton blanch.
Critics can debate whether sports photography is art. Or, no, they
can’t. It is. The large original print of Neil Lifer’s amazing 1965 shot
of Muhammad Ali — glove cocked, mouth roaring, a gorgeous physical
specimen heralding a changing America — towers over the exhibition.
Arguably the greatest sports pic ever clicked, the photo itself has inspired visual artists galore, creative types who never have to justify their work in the “toy department” as sports sections were once mocked. To wit, Who Shot Sports
includes a few names you may know from work in other mediums: Stanley
Kubrick, Andy Warhol, and going back to an 1859 portrait of a young
English cricket squad, Lewis Carroll. We’re through the looking glass on this one.
While taking in all the photos, I kept coming back to the LeBron
picture that grabbed me. As amazing as it is, it seems to have vanished
into thin Wi-Fi-ed air. Pictures can span the globe in the blink of an
eye, but are iconic images lost when they aren’t suitable for framing,
or being cut out of a young fan’s SI and taped to the wall?
“I do worry we’re losing our communal memory,” says Buckland. “If a
photo goes viral, it’s seen by millions, but you can’t hold onto it and
it disappears in a week.”
Time will tell what lives in our collective sports imagination. For now, Who Shot Sports
is definitive and authoritative, replete with all sorts of
technological backstories for camera geeks. However, if you find
yourself in Brooklyn, I highly recommend strolling through Buckland’s
collection. There’s something wondrous about seeing the mix of
athleticism, history, anthropology, physiology, gender, race, and “Holy
Shit, how did they get that picture?” one-after-another.
“One of my exhibition goals is to get people who normally wouldn’t
come into a museum,” says Buckland. “Whether it’s baseball cards or
Wheaties boxes, sports photography is part of everyday life, so I hope
the book and exhibit have wide appeal.”
They should. From the early days of Edward Muybridge’s 1878 invention —
a fast shutter to capture a horse in motion (and to help in a $25,000
bet) — through a 2012 Jan Grarup digital collection of women in
Mogadishu, literally risking their lives to play basketball, sport of
the “deadly enemy America,” Who Shot Sports is as captivating as LeBron himself.
The plots in some of Shakespeare’s plays predate the playwright himself. Jean Rhys’s acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea is a response to Jane Eyre. Musicians
use all kinds of techniques, ranging from improvisation to sampling, to
invoke preexisting songs and transform them into something new.
Some draw their inspiration from the artistic traditions in which
they were raised, while others look further afield, crossing
international lines to find work that hits home. This can lead to
memorable works of fine art, music, and literature. It can also lead to
questions of appropriation — of an artist from one culture ripping off
another’s artistic tradition, simplifying it to a fault, or reinforcing
stereotypes in the work they’ve created.
This is not a new debate or area of study. David Toop’s 2001 book OceanofSound addressed these questions early on, with a section on the influence of Javanese music on French composer Claude Debussy."Sampling can forge cultural links just as easily as it can sustain a stereotype."TWEET THIS QUOTE
But in recent years it’s become more of a heated topic. Earlier this summer, New York published a discussion by critics Craig Jenkins and Frank Guan titled “Is Culture Borrowing Always Theft?” In it, they touched on everything from Paul Simon’s work with South African musicians on the album Graceland, to Jesse Williams’s recent comments about appropriation, to the career of Macklemore.
“I think I know acceptable cultural exchange when I see it, and it
looks like collaboration, not costume, like advocacy, not avoidance,”
said Jenkins.
Two new books now raise similar questions about cultural
exchange. One looks back on artists who crossed international borders in
the 19th and 20th centuries, the other examines how technology has
brought musicians from across the globe closer in recent decades. Both
are by American writers who have spent significant amounts of time
overseas.
Jamie James’s TheGlamourofStrangeness: ArtistsandtheLastAgeoftheExotic and Jace Clayton’s Uproot: Travelsin 21st–CenturyMusicandDigitalCulture are
acutely aware of how art that borrows from multiple cultures can
complicate its own reception. In writing about Isabelle Eberhardt, a
Swiss writer who spent much of her time in the Maghreb region of North
Africa, James refers to hers as, possibly, “a unique case of a
successful culture transplant.” And part of Clayton’s book explores the
growth of World Music as a genre, leading to some instances of artists
being popularized “based on what sound and story line is most appealing
to an audience not remotely interested in learning about other cultures
much less challenging their notion of the exotic.”
James has a lot to discuss in The Glamour of Strangeness. In
weaving in his own experiences of living in Indonesia, he explores the
idea of “the voluntary exile who goes to distant lands in search of a
new home with no intent to repatriate.”
Many of his subjects are artists, and in the introduction James notes
that the book was originally going to focus on two of them: Javanese
artist Raden Saleh, who lived in Europe in the 1800s and was influenced
by the art he saw there, and Walter Spies, an artist who moved from
Germany to Bali in the first half of the 20th century. Saleh’s presence
deepens the narrative, as James points out that Saleh brought the
techniques and perspectives that he had learned in Europe to his native
country. “Before Raden Saleh,” James observes, “no Indonesian artist had
ever painted a picture with the forest as its principal subject.” In
other words, this skewed closer to a cultural exchange, rather than a
case of a European artist bringing their own perspective on a
non-European landscape.
James navigates the complexities of these issues. He points out that
Paul Gauguin was an advocate for the Tahitian people with whom he lived,
but was also responsible for some horrifically bigoted statements about
the island’s Chinese population.
In the case of Walter Spies, James takes several pages to dispute the
work of Australian academic Adrian Vickers, who argued that Spies had
gone to Bali “to propagate the canons of Western art among the
islanders.” James cites several examples of Spies’s own writing in which
he championed Balinese art against the influence of European aesthetics
— again, creating a sense of exchange and dialogue, rather than
cultural colonialism. And in a later chapter, James discusses filmmaker
Maya Deren, whose interest in voodoo led her to visit Haiti and write
the book DivineHorsemen: TheLivingGodsofHaiti.
In looking at its impact in the sixty-plus years since its publication,
James points to its acclaim by academics and adds, “more significantly,
it has been accepted by Haitian readers.” That it ends on that note is
no accident.
In his conclusion, James contends that readers may find evidence via
the artists profiled that “cultural identity can be a personal choice,
made in defiance of the accident of nationality assigned at birth.” It’s
an admirable goal, though it may strike some as overly idealistic.
There’s a similar interest in skirting international cultural
boundaries in Clayton’s book. He is himself a musician, under the name
DJ Rupture. Here, too, he describes surreal visions of places where
borders don’t entirely hold true: the city of Varosha in Cyprus, which
Clayton sees in the distance en route to one international gig, has been
abandoned and off-limits since 1974.
Clayton’s book addresses modern-day questions of appropriation more
directly. He talks about hearing the voices of Jamaican men sampled on
1990s jungle
records, which he initially viewed as “a form of respect.” Over time,
this became more codified, with producers becoming increasingly detached
from the music that they were sampling, which started to venture into
morally grey territory.
“Sampling can forge cultural links just as easily as it can sustain a
stereotype,” Clayton writes, and in the way that he charts how this
moved from dialogue to racist cliche, he neatly summarizes how such an
exchange can turn sour.
Clayton discusses his own musical evolution in light of this,
charting how he moved from sampling North African music, to wanting
something deeper, to collaborating with a Moroccan violinist. This in
turn led to the creation of software that would make such collaborations
easier in the future. By showcasing his own involvement in cultural
dialogues, Clayton also makes his own creative path an educational one,
showing how artists with the best intentions can also go awry.
Near the end of the book, Clayton discusses the Portland, Oregon,
musician and record label-owner Christopher Kirkley. His label, Sahel Sounds,
has released a host of notable music from Mali, Ghana, Niger, and
elsewhere. While Clayton has been critical elsewhere in the book about
Western labels releasing music from across the globe, he hails Kirkley
as someone who’s gotten it right — partially because Kirkley spent time
in those areas playing music himself, and partially because Kirkley is
“not trying to maintain a middleman position.” Alternately: he’s running
this label with a consciousness of the ways that cultural exchange can
go wrong, and is seeking to address it.
“Allowing this awareness of imbalances in access and power to shape
how, and for whom, the Sahel Sounds project operates is what I find so
compelling,” Clayton writes. It’s a self-awareness that seems
increasingly important in today’s cultural landscape.
Both James (in The Glamour ofStrangeness)and Clayton (in Uproot) emphasize
the need for travel, whether literal or metaphorical, to broaden one’s
artistic horizons. “[G]rowth happens when we abandon our comfort zones,”
Clayton writes, and goes on to discuss the need for patience, and of
the importance of waiting and learning when engaging with a different
culture. The deeper you understand another culture’s art, the more
attuned to its nuances you’ll be — and, one can hope, the less likely
you’ll engage in an act of artistic appropriation.
In a time of instant connections and artistic gratification, taking a
longer road might feel counter-intuitive, but the rewards can be both
moral and aesthetic.
Reading Sebastian Smee’s new book The Art of Rivalry, you
see patterns emerge. Younger artists befriend older ones, then
ruthlessly surpass them. Artistic competition serves as a pretext for
the attentions of one person. Tensions between friends mirror critical
assessments of each other’s work. Every happy artist is alike in the
same way, each unhappy one gets really drunk.
Edgar Degas painted a portrait of Edouard Manet and his wife Suzanne,
but may have gotten too close for the older artist’s comfort. Francis
Bacon was self-destructive, alienating his friend Lucien Freud, whose
uneasy artistic realism started to seem childish to his drunk friend.
Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse both went through prolific periods in
order to replace each other on the walls of the Stein family home.
Jackson Pollock wanted to punch everybody, even his late-to-fame comrade
Willem de Kooning. The Art of Rivalry is made up of four distinct chapters,
each devoted to the friendship between two titans of painting. For a
certain kind of reader, this stuff is catnip, and Smee’s adept handling
of context, history, and gossip is enough to make some of us feral with
happiness. To mark the occasion of the publication of this special book,
we bring you an illustrated guide to the four most contentious
friendships in the history of art.
