Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio
May 25, 2021
S9E2: Melanie Keen
Melanie Keen is the director of Wellcome Collection
Before she interviewed for the job, Keen visited the permanent exhibition and noticed a set of ethnographic photographs:
They’re sort of hidden in a corner discreetly, but the images themselves aren’t discreet at all. I found them offensive, you know. In no other space in that building where the images of naked black women, of semi-naked black men, and the person that was attributed was a white male photographer. They were attributed as being from a particular community or tribe of people.
And when I started the job, I walked around one with one of the curators and I was like, “That’s just got to go. It’s got to go. It’s not — until we can find out more about those people that are represented in the photograph. It has to go.”
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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt
Jessica Helfand is an artist and writer based in New England. A former critic at Yale School of Art and one of the founding editors of Design Observer, she is the author of several books on visual culture including Self Reliance, Design: The Invention of Desire, and Face: A Visual Odyssey. jessicahelfand.com
Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.
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