Philip Perdue Archives
63 Posts
Culture Focus Photo September 22, 2015

What Lesson Suspending Kids for Wearing Confederate Flag?

Does the suspension of Christiansburg, Virginia teenagers actually undermine academic discipline and miss a perfect teaching moment?

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Culture Focus Photo September 8, 2015

Colbert: Fit to Be Untied

What we're seeing in this photograph is the look of a person who's reached a tipping point.

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Culture Focus Photo September 3, 2015

Christian Conservative “Counter Logic”: That Kim Davis Photo and God’s Law

This photograph of Kim Davis denying gay people equal treatment under the law by appealing to the dictates of her own conscience is a picture of the snake eating its own tail.

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Philip Perdue Photo August 2, 2015

On Light, God, Photography … and That Moment Just Before the Bad Thing Happens

The point isn't that photography is God, or that God is a photograph. But we are in fact dealing with a mode of communication that freezes time and space, obeys its own laws, is both visual and grammatical, and does more to generate meaning—and generates more meaning—than we can...

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Philip Perdue Photo July 20, 2015

Good Cop, Bad KKKOP

"White racists aren't racist because they hate blacks; they're racist because they don't know who they are without blacks."

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Business Focus Photo July 14, 2015

Photojournalism on Acid? — Google’s Neural Networks and a Post Deleted after WaPo's Armadillo- and Dog-Faced Treatment of the GOP Pack

Here we see GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump addressing reporters in an Alice in Wonderland world where loud bursts of patterns and color turn faces and neckties into dogs, ears into eyeballs, and hair into turkey vultures and armadillos.

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War & Militarism Photo July 7, 2015

More Drama, Less Reality: The Case for Fake War Photography

The staying power of US war culture depends on a citizenry that keeps its distance from actual warfare.

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Campaign '16 Photo June 22, 2015

On Pointing a Handgun Directly at Ted Cruz's Head

These photographs make a point by turning the gun lobby's central argument back onto itself. If "more guns" is your only response to rampant gun violence, then at some point a law of averages dictates that innocent people are going to end up in the line of fire.

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Philip Perdue Photo June 18, 2015

Charleston: For My Soul Is Full of Troubles

Time and time again, the psalmist asks God a simple but difficult question: Why?

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Campaign '16 Photo June 10, 2015

Scott Walker and the GOP's Biker Pose

The Mad Max aesthetic lets the GOP project tribal and libertarian instincts at the same time.

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International Focus Photo May 21, 2015

Migrant Other: The Rohingya Crisis and the Tendency of News Photos to Confuse Compassion with Patronization

I worry that newswire photographs during humanitarian crises have a way of exposing their subjects to a not-so-subtle mode of international brow-beating.

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International Focus Photo May 15, 2015

Human Jetpacks Over Dubai’s Artificial Islands

It's as if this photograph catches humanity admiring its own awesome powers of creation.

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Photo May 1, 2015

Beyond My Pet Goat: Race, Education and the President's Long Game

If you’re a politico and you want to make a point about education, you need to sit or stand in front of a wall of books. That’s the first rule. The second rule is to make it about the students. And like all the smart kids in school, President...

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International Focus Photo April 25, 2015

Armenian Association

Rituals of public memory have always been about forming the community through public display—using cultural materials to fashion and shape how "we" want to remember ourselves.

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Business Focus Photo April 14, 2015

Watch This Digital Life

When it comes to organizing daily patterns of mobility and interaction, our machines steer us around just as much as we do.

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Culture Focus Photo April 5, 2015

Indiana's March Madness

This odd notion that we can bracket our politics from the wide world of sports is getting harder and harder to embrace.

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Business Focus Photo March 28, 2015

Photojournalism and Public Trauma: Safe Travels

If we can't even trust our own pilots, is there anyone or anything left that we can depend on to assure our safe travels?

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War & Militarism Photo March 20, 2015

Meta of the Military Photography Awards: You’re Either Flying High or Laid Low

While these two photographs aren't the only ones recognized as award winners, their place at the top does offer some insight into a limited range of human experience.

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