The Record Is the Asset
“Get the right person in the room and they can tell you exactly where a record lives.” Adaobi Orajiaku is describing Nigeria’s National Gallery of Art. Its documentation department maintains printed and handwritten catalogues recording how each work entered the national collection. Orajiaku’s company, Atsur, has spent the past two years working with the Gallery […]
Kente and the Politics of Being Read
On June 8, 2020, a group of Democratic lawmakers knelt on the floor of the United States Capitol for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the duration then believed to mark how long a Minneapolis officer had knelt on George Floyd’s neck, later revised at trial to nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Several of them wore […]
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.
Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]
La Vie Est Belle
Makhan Sakho is twenty-six, Guinean and Malian and Congolese by heritage, Parisian by address. He has worked as a model, stylist, producer, and creative director, but the camera is where his vision sits most fully. “I like when the photos speak for themselves,” he says. “The compositions, the colors, the textures — they allow us […]