Click the link in the description below to see the new merch on our website. Hello, Bidgets. My name's Frederick Chin, and today's a little bit of a different video. If you came here expecting me to ruin my hair, don't worry, I'm doing that in two weeks. But this video's kinda special to me. It's my 200th video, and I had no idea I was reaching that until someone tweeted at me. And I thought it'd be more appropriate if I made a video that's more sentimental. I'm not really the sentimental type. I usually like suffering on YouTube more. And that's gonna happen today because we're going to be looking at my old videos on YouTube. And I mean old, because I've done this for five years now, four? I'm losing track of time. It's already summer break. I don't know where I am. Currently, this is my channel. I'm almost at 600,000 subscribers, which is so much more than what I expected. I don't think anyone goes back to these old videos. Well, 25,000 of you have done the first video. I think it's because I talk about it so much because it's that terrible. I don't think a lot of people realize that I have a lot of videos. I mean, this was uploaded four years ago. And there's a lot to go through before you start seeing the videos that I actually liked. And there's no point in reacting to those videos because I don't hate them yet. So we might as well do the ones from far back. All right, I have not watched this in a while. You'll see why. It's monetized. Oh, we love. Hey guys, my name is Frederick Shin. And for my first video, I thought I should tell them. Some people try to tell me my voice hasn't changed since then.  My voice is so much deeper. And I'm so glad I went through puberty because oh my God, this is ninth grade in my old bedroom before I moved to New Jersey. Cringy is an understatement. Oh, look at me. I already have my social links. I thought I should tell you guys some things about me. Now. The music. This is before I learned about color correction, but the reason why I'm so orange is because my only lighting was this lamp in front of me. And it's like that crappy yellow light that everyone has in their room. I thought it'd be a good idea. I thought it made me look tan.  I said, I'm not putting the work into this video. I literally thought I would go viral from this. That's how delusional I was four years ago.  My eyebrows are also questionable. Guys, the eyebrows, I'm so sad. So a fair amount of people asked me why I started YouTube in the first place. I've always liked YouTube. I've watched Jenna Marbles and everyone since they were OGs. I even had a Minecraft channel before this, but the reason why I started making my own YouTube channel was because my parents told me we were moving to New Jersey and I used to live in South Carolina. And ninth grade Fredrick was so convinced that he could make enough money within three months to prevent our house from being sold and everyone can stay in the same house. I literally thought I could make enough money for the whole family. It was a cute idea at the time, but it obviously didn't work out. I've never won. I gave them a no. Why? What was I thinking? Why did I say that? Broken a bone. So it's the next day. My camera was so bad. My camera couldn't record more than 11 minutes and I only found out about that when I started making this video.  So we have a cut and this lighting is better than the last one, honestly. I can't watch this anymore. I can't torture myself. I was also trying to figure out my aesthetic at the time. I wanted to figure out how to make these thumbnails cohesive. So I went through a lot of different stages before settling on this one for a while. Ooh, look at, oh, Fredrick had stories. Wait, I wanna know. Okay, before I start, please excuse this lighting because it's really bad right now. Please excuse my hair because it's really bad. Ah. Let's face it. I'm feeling like so much secondhand embarrassment right now because this is so meta. I have a rule in stated in this household and whenever I'm around my friends, you were not allowed to play one of my videos in front of me. Maybe my newer ones, but these ones, oh, absolutely not. My parents know me. Jesus, Fredrick, you're so angsty. Oh my God, look at that. I was already DIYing at the time. That was a wooden F that I painted a piano on. Here are some of the things. What's the point of the black screen? Oh, look at this comment. Oh my God, Fredrick, I love you. You're so relatable and funny. Bitch, not this video. No, ma'am, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think this is when I got 100 subscribers, right? 100 life lessons, part one. Guys, 100 subscribers, that's, dot, dot, dot, amazing. I never thought this would skyrocket so fast in just three months, but thank you for helping me through everything. Let's shoot for 1,000 subs next. Hope you enjoy this video because it's a good one.  Ooh! I thought I was such a good editor already. To be fair, this is Windows Movie Maker. Give me a break. I can't work with a lot. Let's see, what does Fredrick have to say? Obviously, that's a big milestone, but I never got it. The voice? It's a very high frequency. Could you just lower it down by 20 Hertz, please? From my own personal experience, and this is not. What personal experience, bitch? What have you gone through? At this point, I only had a month before I moved, and I also came out to my parents around this time, so you do as my escape. Obviously, my parents come from a very conservative background, and it took them a while to understand my sexuality. They eventually came around, don't worry about it, but it's just weird to see myself because I can see the insecurities in myself, but I don't really think anyone else can. Like, if I didn't tell you, I was in the middle of moving.  Would you believe it? Like, I don't see it on the screen. By the way, my thumbnail's terrible. Ooh! I really hate it. But this was the gap that I took. The first video I made when I moved was homophobic racist sexist camper. That got demonetized, by the way. Okay, so why was that frisbee camp? I'm very tan. That's because of frisbee camp. This was the apartment I used to live in, and it had really good lighting.   So the first day when I- Ooh! Frisbee was a savage. Obviously, homophobic and racist and sexists are not a good mixture, but I did not have to make a whole video about it. I just thought it'd be, like, funny at the time. We're all immature. Like, he was a freshman. I'm sure he's a better person now. There's a trend in these older videos where I only do, like, rants and very angsty videos. It's because I had a lot of built-up anger inside of me, and obviously that you have to get it out in some way, and YouTube was my only way at the time. Not the most healthy mindset, but you guys asked me, like, would you still make these rant videos today? No. I don't have a reason to. I'm not angry anymore. I don't have, like, angst inside of me. I just have a bunch of scars from painting. Like, look at this.  These are all rants. Ranting about school, kitchen tears. Totally plagiarized Emma Blackery, by the way. That's... What was I thinking? Oh, you're so sly. Yeah, totally didn't see the camera. Totally didn't set it up like that. Need again. No! No! I did not do that! I did not do that! I blocked out all these memories, guys. This was a dark time.  What? Cinnamon challenge. It's like strawberry milk. It's not that. What? Gatorade, tomato sauce, coconut water, and cough syrup? Strawberry milk? I think my taste buds were off back then, too. Oh my God. No, no, no, no, no. No wonder my acne was so bad back then.  Full face of makeup using only food products. The videos I used to make were just trying to, like, fit the YouTube algorithm. I thought people just wanted to see these videos. I didn't really figure out what I wanted to do with YouTube yet. Now I have. Oh, see, now I finally made my 50 things about me. We meet. Oh, that was my intro back then. That's so weird. Why would I say that? I am currently 15 years old, believe it or not. 15? I identify as a homosexual. And if you don't like that, get off- Whoa, whoa, whoa, that transition. That preset, though. Oh my God.  What's levita? Oh yeah, I went through a gray skill phase. You know, Frederick was emotional. Frederick was depressed and he decided to wear only gray colors for, like, three months straight. My style was questionable at the time, too. Worst English teacher ever. Oh. We meet again. Please stop saying it, Frederick.  Probably? By the title of this video, you can probably tell that this is going to- You can see my mustache. To be a big rant. I do not get mad very often anymore. Liar.  The string lights. Dude, I still have those. I am positive that she is a good person. Her morals are good, but her teaching skills are absolute trash. Okay, at least I stated that she's a good person. This was such a risky video to make because I was literally still in class with her. Like, I could have been expelled probably. I was still lucky. Oh, 1,000 subscribers.  This was a weird trend on my channel. I would always multiply my subscriber amount by 10 every year. I had 1,000 by the end of 2016, 10,000 by the end of 2017, and then 100,000 by the end of 2018. I was coming to terms with myself and basically that was, this went through a serious time. Liar. My therapist confirmed I did go through it. I was a very honest person. I don't really like hiding stuff on the internet. I've always wanted to just be myself. So I did talk about like my parents not accepting me and having to move and the people who did subscribe at the time, I don't know if you still are, but they understood what I went through. But you can definitely see how much I've changed since my old videos. Like I'm not that insecure anymore about myself. If anything, I'm delusionally confident, arrogant and conceited. But I also thought I was a lazy person back then in terms of editing. Like I don't feel like I put a lot of effort in these videos. I compare myself to a lot of YouTubers still to this day. And I always thought I didn't deserve any of the views or any of the love that I got because I didn't put work into them. Like this video for 2,000 subscribers was 35 seconds long and it's just me putting hot water in a panda cup. Why did I even get views for this? But I would always be myself down saying you're not good enough. You're never gonna gain a following on YouTube. Like stop trying. But this was also the only thing I could do because it was a whole summer of doing nothing. Dying my hair for the first time. So that's when I went crazy. Boom. Ah! Y'all thought my hair was green last week? No, this is green. My hairstylist just bleached it and then toned it without putting red in the dye. So I had green hair at the end and it cost me a hundred dollars and my parents got really mad at me. Oh, I did react to my first video. See, like this is the thing. I didn't put effort, I feel like. I made a whole video reacting to one video. These videos were also under like five minutes long because I don't know why. My videos are so much longer now and I can't imagine editing it down to six minutes only. Just proves I just talk a lot. Oh, I love this video. This was one of my favorite videos I've ever made. My agony. When you guys say, Fred, do you have perfect skin? Just look back at this video. I still love this video. I don't know why more people didn't like it. This was during the full face challenge, obviously. Guys, go watch it. Give it some love. I love it when I shave my friend's head. Also, do you see how I changed my aesthetic again?  This was when I went through my purple face on YouTube. I was like, I love looking like an alien on YouTube. I actually thought I looked cute with a purple tint over my face. Oh, that was my other intro at the time. This video is kind of controversial. It was supposed to be lighthearted and just a way to rant because I thought middle schoolers were cringy at the time. And you know what? Every middle schooler is cringy and I was that to take a look at my old videos as proof. I guess I hate it at the time because it has 1.6 thousand dislikes and I know it's because I probably offended the people I talked about. But also, it was just a hateful video. You don't have to make videos targeting an audience to feel better about yourself. It's not required. I'll keep the video up. I don't feel like deleting any of these videos because I think it shows how much I've grown as a person. Every middle schooler is cringy, Frederick, of course. You can't get mad at them. Just let them do their thing. I made another rant about people I hate. The keyboard tapping? That's me actually tapping and recording the sound. So since fall is here and all the trees are dying.  No one will notice it. There'll be some warm on the inside. I actually really like this video but it's totally inspired from General Marvel's. You guys are right. This is when the sarcasm really started going up. Fruity Poppin, copycat video. Hey y'all, I'm Frank the farmer and welcome back. So what we're gonna do is cut off the top of this pumpkin because we gotta get inside the innards. I mean, it's funny in its own way but like, come on. The whole idea is that I had a cousin named Farmer Frank and we were secretly dating because in the South, it's the joke that everyone dates each other even though you're family and I thought it was funny. My apology to the K-Pop video I made. How many of you guys remember this video? For all of you who don't understand where this video is coming from, let me tell you what happened today.  I'm gonna let me speak now. For those of you who don't know, I did make a video called Why I Hate K-Pop and it was just like another one of my rants. And it was supposed to be satirical because it had a lot of sarcasm in it. The main reason I did it was because a lot of people would ask me, Frederick, why don't you like K-Pop? Or Frederick, are you Korean? Do you like K-Pop? And it was so overwhelming because I didn't want people to follow me for the sake of me looking Korean or acting Korean or trying to pass as a K-Pop star. I didn't want my audience to just like me for the way I look. Like, you guys know that.  So I made this video and I said I didn't like K-Pop because at the time I didn't like listening to music that wasn't English, but I can handle it now so that already shows I changed a lot. And then the most offensive thing I said was everything in Korean music is just ching chong ching chong. And that should not be still on the internet. Like it's a dark joke that you would say to your friends and like in a group and believe me, that joke is used at NYU every goddamn day because 60% of us are Asian. And I thought it'd be okay because I thought everyone would understand my sarcasm but then the video kind of blew up.  And it hurt because I didn't want to be racist towards Asians. I thought that was so kind of productive to what the point of my channel is now but it did upset me a lot at the time and that is why I'm really scared of the community. I like K-Pop songs now but like I'm scared to like it still because I'm afraid that people will be like, what about that video you made three years ago where you said ching chong ching chong? What about that, Frederick? And it wasn't like everyone hated it. It was like half and half. But I think the most important thing about being a YouTuber and what I do love about my community and you guys is that you let me grow as a person. Like I've changed so much through these years and I would be lying if I said, guys, I'm never gonna change for you. I'm gonna be the same person as always.  I think it's so wrong to say you're never gonna change because that's not how you grow as a person. Maybe I have an immature personality on YouTube but I'm an immature person but it doesn't mean I don't know right from wrong.  I became the person I hated.  I was literally a bad Netflix movie but thank you guys for letting me grow as a person. I really do appreciate it. And the person who did make that K-pop tweet did take it down after I asked. So like they were also very understanding of it too. This was my first viral video that got to a million views. It's so out of tune. Listen, I never said I was a good violin player. This is what started it all. It helped me try to become more passionate about YouTube and it made me like have hope that I could do this as my career. And the lighting is still awful after two years even with the ring light. I don't know what I'm thinking. You know I read books, played games, hung out with guys, all of them guys. The cut! Oh I tried to do it in one cut and it didn't work. This was my final project for junior year English. I don't know what the prompt was but it happened to be my 100th video and I think that's very, very nice. I love this video and it made my teacher cry and then she played in front of like all her other classes and I was like please don't let them know I do YouTube. I had 35,000 at this time. I was a baby. I always wondered why I never had more dislikes on my videos.  I took a little break here because I went through a breakup and it was not fun. It was the worst breakup I ever went through. I took two breaks here actually. I took a break after my discord server. I deleted it because it was pushing all my mental health.  I think this was the closest I was to crying. This video is not as trying. See how I couldn't look at the camera? Cause I knew if I did, I would cry. I guess that's another reason I don't look at these videos is because I just see someone totally different.  Oh my God. This is when senior year started. I had a lot of vlogs. This was another viral video. Started to lose my mind and this is when I started getting into pain. This hair makes me look five years younger. You sure it's the hair? This video started my passion for painting and I'm really glad it did. I love you guys and everything is less than three. You guys still don't know what that outro means. It makes a heart. And the whole reason I started saying it was because when I was moving at a math teacher who was not only my friend, my coach, my teacher but like a therapist too. So I made a funny quote. I was like, if there's anything I learned from your class, it's that everything is less than three. And it was like a mantra. It became like the thing I said all the time to make me feel better. But half of the people here don't understand what it means.  This one's kind of fun though. Oh, you wanted to know what a high schooler's Christmas is like? Well, let me show you. On the first day of Christmas, my high school gave to me another year of end of suffering. I love this video. I think I reached 100K around this point and I said, yeah, this was it. This is when I started on my merch and I promised you guys a singing video and that was it. And this one is also here but I will never look at that video again because I don't think I can sing. Piano medley, getting into college, throwing a fit about it.  You miss these edits. Like that's so annoying. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Justin. Some people ask like, why I change my name every video? It was an inside joke because a lot of people couldn't spell my name. And then they started purposely misspelling it to the point where it was like refrigerator, freeze dried ice. Like I just crazy things that started with F. It was funny, but like now I'm not gonna do that cause I don't feel like doing it. Some of you guys didn't understand the point of this video. You were like, why would you Photoshop yourself? You looked perfect before. Bitch, that was the whole point of the video. It's the show that you don't need Photoshop. And this was Pride Month. All these before and after Pride Parade videos. Now I wouldn't make a video that has the word gay in it or just like it centered around sexuality unless it's informative of course. But I think at this point I wanted to become more of a well-rounded person instead of like being known for one thing.  I didn't want to be the painter. I just had to be Frederick online. And that's something I'd still talk about to this day. You know people compare me to the K-pop people and like other Asians and even like people who aren't Asian. Korean, Chinese and Japanese aren't the only cultures in Asia. But I still debate whether or not people like me for how I look or do they come just for the piano videos or just for the painting videos, et cetera. And yeah, there's always gonna be that one person who like only watches the piano videos I make. But sometimes I feel like I wouldn't be known for me. I would just be known for resembling someone else or like acting like someone else. Like me being Eugene's son, that's a funny joke. Like I got it. That's an inside joke we've had for years. But I still don't like being compared to every popular Asian because it would just make me insecure and feel like I'm not worth enough. Unique enough, not my own person. Take it however you want. After this video I started liking the videos I made. Maybe not that one. Maybe not that one actually. I think I've tortured myself enough. But thank you guys for going on this journey with me. I still don't know where I'm going in life and having your support means a lot. I'll always feel like I don't thank you guys enough but just know every day I'm thankful for you. And if you've stuck around since the beginning of those videos, thank you for putting up with me.  So I'm glad I could improve the content for you guys. And if you enjoyed this video, give it a like, leave a comment down below or subscribe for more videos every week. Turn on my notifications, social medias are right here. And as always, I love you guys and everything is less than three. I'm gonna go rinse my eyes out now.


Thank you everyone for coming out today for this lunchtime talk. I think I'm supposed to be about halfway through a major research project, so I've tried to give you a taste of today. It's been generously funded by the Liverpool Trust, the British Academy, and I've also had support from Ossol's College in Oxford to help give you a home base while I've been doing research in archives. I'm working on an academic book in various publications like that, and there will also be public events like this one at an exhibition about the photography that will open in Lincoln next year, and I hope we'll tour from there. So we're giving a preview. I could talk for hours about this, but don't worry, I won't. We've got to finish within an hour, so I'm going to try to talk for about 45 minutes and then I'm happy to take questions at the end. I hope that will be interesting. I hope there's something for everyone here today. Let me start out by removing all the bump here from my slide. Now we can have a look at the image I wanted to start with, which is to make a point that I think is important when we think about photography. Photographs are much more than what they show or what they seem to show. We're looking here at a picture of a picture, a photo of a photo. Can you make that out? Anybody else? For anybody under the age of 35 in the audience, you're probably thinking that's weird whether they just slap them on a scanner or a photocopier, right? But this was a standard practice until quite recently. If you needed to create a new negative to help circulate an image or make a print of an image, you took a photo of a picture. Now the picture that's in the picture is the road, leading to the Valley of the Kings. If you've ever been a tourist in Egypt, you probably have spotted that. It's quite a recognizable mountain peak in that drop there. The Valley of the Kings is a course where the Tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in November 1922. This photograph appears in the first book that Howard Carver, the excavator, ever published about the tomb. It was rushed into production in less than a year until 1923. We can't publish anything, I can't make them in that kind of speed today. So this book included this photograph. Is it a photograph that he had taken? And is it a photograph from 1922 or 1923? Well, yes and no. The photograph that's in the picture, the photograph that's been photographed, was actually taken in 1910. And then re-photographed probably in 1923 to make the picture that was needed for this book that was being rushed into printing that would want to become a bestseller. It was a matter of convenience how Howard Carver needed a picture of the Valley of the Kings for his book to show roughly where the tomb was located. And he asked his colleague, a man named Harry Burton, to help out, and Burton provided one. It was Burton who had taken the original photograph, not in 1922, but in 1910. And finally in love, I don't know if it was a coincidence or not, it was Carter who, in his previous job, had been responsible for making a little wooden shelter there, which is where the donkeys and donkey drivers who carried tourists into the Valley of the Kings progressed in the shade while a crazy tourist went round and looked at royal tombs. I'm starting with this picture for picture, as I said, to make a point. I think it's an important point that people aren't or aren't just about what they show. They're about relationships between people, and as they circulate between people or appear in publications, or get filed away in drawers or photographs, photographs take on different meanings and different roles. Archaeologists, and I'm one of them by training, are used to thinking about photographs from what they show, what the photograph is of, it's a photograph of the Valley of the Kings. But in this project what I've been doing is looking at the photographs as photographs and as a complete archive of photographs, because asking questions about what kinds of photographs were taken, why, how, by whom, and how they were used, all of these questions that can help us look at something as famous as well known as the Two of Two are Common in a different light. How many of our ideas about the tomb and about King Tut go back to the photographs taken at the time? How did photography play up or down the roles of different people who contributed to the excavation? And what happens when an excavation ends? Where did photographs wind up and which photographs and photographers have been overlooked or yet tests? In the context of the tomb and its discovery, let's go back to that first season, November 1922, the discovery of the tomb, the sealed entrance, it's an underground tomb, so reach down five steps and then the sealed entrance, which was uncovered by Carter's chief chief foreman, Vice, in early November. That was the kind of moment of discovery and quickly backfilled to awake the arrival of the man who was paying for the whole thing, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon who had to get out to Egypt from Downton Abbey. So, Carnarvon had, for about 15 years, he'd been bankrolling Howard Carter to excavate in the Valley of the Kings. This was something that the Egyptian Antiquities authorities had been encouraging because they themselves came forward necessarily the kind of large-scale clearance work, so they occasionally would let a wealthy duet man like Carnarvon pitch in and then give him an experience to excavate like Howard Carter to do the work. Carter is the third man on the right here with the walking stick in the bowtime and for most of the time, Carter had his team of experienced Egyptian workmen with a couple of informant who had been working with for 20 years or so in Egypt and also would have been using as needed local labor including boys and girls we see here in photograph from 1920 so earlier in the work and this is a photograph probably taken by Carter and later on it gets turned into a sort of narrative of the successful search for the team of two archaic and that's how it's currently archived so a lot of hard work had been involved leading up to 1922 what that meant though that we're actually faced with this sealed tomb and Carnarvon had an initial look into it into the first room leading up to sort of looking into that was sort of oh gosh what are we doing now this was an unprecedented find and so Carter realized that he was going to need more help he and the Earl of Carnarvon already had a very good relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York if you've ever been to New York or been to New York and have been there so a rather relatively new museum at that time but a very well-baked world museum and Carter and Carnarvon had a good relationship with him because they were very old antiquities from in years so everybody was very friendly with each other and when the museum in New York got in touch to congratulate Carter they offered you know can we do anything carry out my help and Carter said yes could they lend Burton so Burton's the third man on the left there the plus fours holding his little jotterie holding his cigarette Harry Burton was an Englishman but like Cannes another Englishman Mace they were employed by the Metropolitan Museum by the American institution they were employed to exhibit in Egypt basically the next valley over now all these men had known each other for years 10 or 20 years so they were very friendly and Carter in asking for our help specified these two men especially Burton because Burton was known, was considered to be about the best photographer who was working on Egyptian sites at the time photography in the 1920s might seem a long time ago to us now but it wasn't early photography by means the technology had been around since the 1830s and it really took off around 1880 when pre-coated glass negatives hit the market so photography by the 1920s would absolutely be ubiquitous and have been for some time this slide here I'm going to show you it's a copy it's a reproduction of a painting then in around 1890 we see at the left we see a German Egyptologist Emile Grouch looking at his pocket watch because he's timing an exposure in the camera that's straddling the tripod is straddling a coffin lid and this is the sort of photography that Grouch actually did at Degren's Museum in Cairo or at Giza as it was in 1990 Grouch is wearing a troupage because he was an employee of the Egyptian government Egypt at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire and although at this time from 1882 I'm going to go into a bit of history now because I find when I speak to British audiences they don't know the history so bear with me so from 1882 the kings of the Egyptian government had been pulled by Britain and military troops were occupying Egypt having invaded in the summer of 1882 so there was this veiled protectorate a Lord Cormac called it where Egypt technically is part of the Ottoman Empire and answers to Turkey but in fact is effectively governed and is occupied by Britain the as an aside to cruise where in central Cairo the Egyptian Museum is today right next to that was a huge military barracks for the British troops right up until the 1950s so a bit of background which is going to become important the kind of camera that we see in this painting reproduction of the painting isn't that dissimilar from the kind of camera a view camera, a stand camera that Britain would have used unfortunately Britain's other cameras don't survive today in his hilarious mentions the cameras that he owned but there's no background about what happened to them afterwards so you get a kind of square or a rectangular body of bellows that can expand and the tilt mechanism as well so you could, the lens on the front is interchangeable, you can have different lenses and then you tilt or angle the camera because anyone's ever used a camera like this which helps you with distortion to go about things that are square if you thought otherwise you would have things that are angles excuse me, could you use your mic? sorry, is the mic okay? oh okay, so I'm talking about the camera mechanism right, is roughly similar right, on the tripod of the kind of camera that Britain would have used is that correct? I don't know by the 1920s when Burton is photographing there were film negatives available, so that's one difference in the technology but like a lot of photograph photographers who worked in archaeology, Burton didn't use film negatives he preferred glass negatives large format, 18 by 24 cm or 7 by 9 inch if you prefer imperial he was working with metric negatives, so glass negatives that you could fit into a slide and expose for as long as you need to and take out, what's that? I've actually got an example of a dark side with me which I'll get out afterwards if anybody wants to see what a negative folder at the time looked like so right, so that's just a bit of the technological the technical background to the use of cameras and the use of photography that we'd be dealing with in Egypt in 1920s now the reason somebody like Harry Burton preferred to use large glass negatives is twofold really, first they offered the sharpest detail and secondly you could put them directly, you didn't need to enlarge them so this is one of my photographs of one of Burton's photographs of print from the 1920s in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum in New York as he printed it and mounted it in an album about so big so to give you a sense of that direct printing of a large negative and the kind of detail it let you see it's a photograph, it's one of the first photographs taken in the first room, the so-called anti-chamber of the tomb of Tutor Ghan with alabaster vases lined up and stacked up against a wall of the tomb and you can see the number cards in place you make those up 57, 60, 140 went back and those were cards to number each object in sequence as it was found and we'll see how those cards stayed with the objects as work proceeds from the tomb so it's a cataloging system that's imposed I'm sorry it's not a great photograph partly because it's by me partly because the album's leaves are in plastic so there's a bit of reflection there now Britain also used a smaller negative, it's known as a half plate it's about 13x18 cm 4x6 5x7 that kind of thing but again those would be printed directly so it's just a way to have another camera or a photograph of small objects sometimes and this is an example of those again in the albums in New York where now three prints fit on the page and these are all bits of chariot chariots that were found disassembled in the first room of the tomb so dozens of individual chariot parts get cataloged and photographed we actually have a photograph of a team taking one of these photographs so there he is in his postboards again and he's working here looking at my values the camera is upside down the camera is fixed in a stand so that it can photograph vertically instead of being on tripod and photographing out we're upside down I'll come back to this setup later and talk about the reason for it and what kinds of photographs it produced for now I wanted to use this picture to follow up a couple of other points about photography at the Tomb of Tudor Common so first, where are we this is not the Tomb of Tudor Common this is a neighboring tomb much larger also much later belonged to King Saidid I and the Egyptian Antiquities authorities gave Carter this tomb to use as a place to store and to work on and conserve the artifacts and to photograph them before they were created up and shipped to Cairo telling me it was known as the laboratory tomb and I'll come back to that so this tomb is also we'll see later it's where the unwrapping of the mummy takes place in 1925 and this is indeed where Burton did a lot of the photography of individual objects once they've been repaired because they let him have a lot of daylight and some electric light so he does a lot of photography using just the sunlight second point in this photograph how many people are there in the picture thank you, yes there are two there's Burton and there's an Egyptian man waiting to one side possibly one of the bais there are several, it's usually translated as the senior experienced Egyptian excavators I ask the question though because very often and I've seen this happen quite recently as well when photographs like this are reproduced in books or used on TV or in museum exhibitions only the white guy gets identified and often the Egyptian guy isn't even mentioned now there's one reason I could say is that we don't know the names really we don't have the way these photographs were published and recorded at the time no one made notes of names of the Egyptian workmen we do know some of them we know them before senior guys Ahmed Gergar Gathe Sam Hussain Ahmed Salih and Hussain Abu Awad why don't we know their names as well as we know Pervertons or Howard Carter's and why can't we identify them specifically in the photographs that's a big gap in our knowledge but to not even mention as I've seen happen if there is an Egyptian workman archaeologist in the picture is quite an oversight and quite telling it wasn't only the experienced excavators who kept the excavation going and there were also a team of local carpenters that we see here in a photograph probably taken by the old carmaran himself and so it's the man and boy on the right are part of this team of local carpenters all three by the way are Christians and still are in this part of Egypt and then the man in the the topay hat is a friend of Carter's who pitched in for a couple of years he was a retired engineer named Arthur Calender and I've actually just heard that his great-nephew possibly I'll be able to check he might be working here but Calender had been an Egyptian engineer so he could stake railways because it was the British who built the railways in Egypt at the time Burton himself also had Egyptian men who worked with him again for 20 years more as assistants as photographers assistants we only know the name of one of them his son Burton and we know about him from letters of Burton's widow afterwards during the Second World War but here's a picture of these three of the assistants that are behind Burton Burton there and he's plus fours outside looking down outside the tomb and in this instance using a film camera a million picture camera which is a story in itself so all these Egyptian workers tried to think of as being part of the team seen at the time as second class and not named but I think that's something that we now need to challenge in terms of how we think about who excavated the tomb of Tehran and took the photographs so when we're gone thinking about the photography so Burton gets lent as it were by the Metropolitan Museum to Carter to partake in this find of the century in 1922 they were talking about that way this is the great discovery and photography was so important to the work of Tehran in the tomb that the schedule of work was actually adjusted to accommodate Burton to accommodate what he needed in practical terms the times of day which were best to shoot all those kinds of things there's a huge public interest in the tomb and this photograph gives you some idea of that because all the other people around there are not working, they're tourists so if you have already booked a tour to Egypt in the winter of 1922 to 1923 you really hit it lucky and people are pressing in they're looking down they're at the road level looking down at the tomb entrance and watching the work that's being done so there's huge public interest in the museum why Burton also takes publicity shots and tries to take some movie picture film snippets of which apparently have been digitized and preserved in the Metropolitan Museum he'd never used a film camera before but he sort of had to because one of the wealthy American patrons of the museum in New York bought the expedition a movie camera so he just kind of had to get on with it and there's lots of letters to the curator in New York saying he broke again I don't know how to develop the work but the first footage is really disappointing and actually the same patron then paid for Burton and his wife to go to Hollywood in between the first and second season and gets in training at the movie studio and the other thing is the post office it's all a bit more Trump really but it's all just sort of over the top we're going to take him to Hollywood and we're going to show this nice English photographer from Lincolnshire how to make a movie about the tune of tune on common which never actually happens for reasons which will become clear but again I think as a kind of side element of the photography we're working photography that Burton is there to do it tells us about the press interest, the public interest and the ambitions of the people who are involved in this project publicity have been orchestrated from the start of the discovery by Lord Carnarvon who signed a deal with the London Times giving them exclusive access to news about the tune interviews with the workers with the staff and with Burton's photographs this probably seemed like a good idea about Carnarvon at the time because it would help defray his expenses and give him a math piece give him an official way to present the tune but it immediately caused problems for two reasons first of all, this is an image from the illustrated on the news from sort of the other direction of the previous photo we saw all those tourists looking down the tune are taking pictures themselves so it was a struggle from the start to try to control the public presentation of the tune and photographs of the tune all they could control really was what Burton did inside the tune the second reason this was about the deal it was 1922 and either to have just one kind of call that one it's independence from Britain there's a long messy backdrop to that was a revolution 1919 and the British then acted in 1922 they acted unilaterally to call Egyptian elections while maintaining British control of the Suez Canal so it wasn't really what Egyptian politicians wanted but it was better than nothing so there's a newly elected national government in Egypt and they take a great source of pride as do many of the Egyptian population and cultural figures, literary figures newspapers in Egypt they're immensely proud of this fine of tune and common and the timing coming as it does he becomes a symbol of the resurrection of the whole country so for Egyptian papers to find themselves being told by a British lord that they have to talk to them in times to get news about the Egyptian discovery didn't go over very well as you can imagine and these are the kinds of photographs that the times had the first lived on so these are the first photographs that Bertrand took in the first chamber of the tune before everything was disturbed and was supposed to feel that this was just as it was completely untouched this is actually about six weeks after the initial discovery the tune has since been ripped up for electric lighting so this is made this photograph is only possible because there's electric lighting the basket there is propped up just so to hide a hole, an ancient hole which was perhaps hopefully made a bit larger so that Carter and Carnarovan and a couple of other people could get through secretly and have a look at what lay beyond so this photograph is but not if it seems but this is the kind of photograph that Carnarovan and Carter could control and Bertrand is the only person who takes the photographs inside and there we have it and that's what makes the real impact in the press is when these these are first published in January, the final year I think in early January of 1923 and I'll just show you the back of that same so that's an actual print I guess Bertrand was printing them and giving them to the times that they were posted to London so there's always a couple of weeks delay by the time they appear in the press and the back of the photograph and these things and objects really matter, the back is covered with copyright stamps and credit lines and not to be published for such and such a date it's all about what we call PR today so why was there so much press and public interest and that's pretty much who don't comment we tend to take it for granted that ancient Egypt is interesting we're probably all here today because the same ancient Egypt is interesting and I actually don't think anything is necessarily interesting I think it's always worth asking why then, why there so I mentioned earlier that political background right of the British occupation and the Revolution of 1919 which Bertrand had actually witnessed who was doing war work at the time for the British passport office and then it was only really 1920, so less than two years before the discovery that tourists had started to go back to Egypt Thomas Croke I think when they started its tours again in 1920 so there had been a few years when Egypt was just a place of bad news so I think the discovery of Tirocon in 1922 gives the British and the Egyptian press something positive to cover and something to claim for different purposes going back here's another spread from the illustrated London news which was a sort of sister of Italian so they had a reciprocal arrangement to use Bertrand's photographs so the discovery of an intact tomb in the Valley of the King was big news, yes it was a rare and astonishing find but the tomb and the photographs of the tomb became the arena for conflict that developed and was played out between Carter and the Egyptian antiquities authorities who for the first time were answering to the Egyptian government and I should explain, there's not a simple kind of nationalistic alliance here the Egyptian antiquities authorities it actually was run by a Frenchman and many of the lead employees were British so it's not that there's a simple framework but there's a context that are about what's going to be appropriate in an independent Egypt that you can't have girls and Howard Carter doing what they like any more inflecting and selecting conventions and basically the conflict was about who would own the finds and who had the right to speak for the tomb to speak for ancient Egypt and the Metropolitan Museum staff clearly felt that it was their right and they also felt they had the right to receive some of the finds from the tomb even though their contract if you read it the way I read it means that that wasn't such a rare find that those finds should stay in Egypt and nothing legally should have left the country but it's considered out for a debate that's why the Metropolitan Museum was so willing to help out by a weak experiment for a few weeks a year they weren't going to get a cut of finds and I think we can then see how photographs become part of this institutional narrative discourse of how the tomb is presented in press so this is a good spread for that from November of 1923 the peak of interest and the archaeologists white guys are spoken of as men of science men who use the utmost care and courtesy to remove objects from the tomb and carry them to the laboratory which is the picture that you see right up there that's the laboratory tomb that's the one stuff telling about that work this is a scientific endeavor and you can't argue with science can you and then we see Mace and Alfred Lucas the Egyptian government chemist working on the tombs is nicely kind of almost mirror photographs of them placed across the gutter of the newspaper doing terribly delicate and important things to objects yes the objects did require cleaning repair consolidation usually with wax because there was a fragile but this is really about presenting the work of British experts as science and science is something that only white men do only they have the authority over the fragile remains of Egypt's past let's compare that to a reconstruction done by a British artist but not published in the Times this was something that circulated separately and then gets picked up I found it in an Egyptian monthly magazine the Crescent Hilaal where we see Egyptian working only doing the work the very delicate fragile work of dismantling the shrines in the burial chamber these massive gilded wooden shrines that surrounded the sarcophagus and the coffins and so I think it's interesting perhaps that an Egyptian publication picked up on this illustration as a way to show well who is doing the work of archaeology now dismantling the shrines was a logistical nightmare and we do have Burton's photographs which show that you couldn't actually go up and look at the guys into the space it was a very confined space and it was a space of collective effort so here we have two of the four men Carter mayors were with his heron you know as he's comparing notes discussing what to do next and our calendar in the man that we saw earlier in the good helmet they had to take the shrines apart in order to get them out in that confined space and you could see this very little clearance to the ceiling so this photograph is going to tell us a very different story and we could read them in different ways again who's doing the work what's the nature of the work why take a photograph of it in the first place and how so Burton's had to bounce the electroplot of the ceiling here from the lamp so again electroplot and then a reflector in the back as well to help get this and I think you could think quite these photographs are they're showing they're partly a just in case I think just in case it all goes wrong and we've got photographs of these shrines get the drop of it but really they're also about showing that kind of care and the nature of the work the strain, the effort it's heroic anyway it's like making Carter in calendar that would be the narrative of the use of the British press they're the heroes but we could then look at them again in another way and actually who's doing the work and how are they doing it together two months after this photograph was taken this is the second season so two months later February 1924 Carter downed tools and what he called a strike he claimed that the Egyptian authorities were interfering with the work and so work on the team stopped for a year they locked him out of it in 1925 when a more pro-British Egyptian government had put in place with support from the British so it picks up in 1925 Britain no longer takes those kinds of shots we don't get the heroizing of work in progress in the tomb the mood has changed there's also no longer the contract with time so there's no longer incentive to take photographs like that showing work being done and helping to construct these narratives we do still get photographs as Britain takes this for all the people who had gathered for the start of the unwrapping of the Royal Mami, it's a momentous occasion so it's something to commemorate it's a very different kind of photograph here we've got Harman the Egyptian antiquities officials one of the oldest guys here Carl von Lepp from Robert Chauvin who's trying to train his Egyptologist in the 1870s in Karno and Ben completely shut out so here's a moment, there's a very different moment and then there's Carter looking a little bit chastened and a little bit nervous as well because they're about to unwrap the mummy and the man next to him here, Lako, is the Frenchman he's actually brought them to the service and he's trying to keep the whole thing going so photographs tell complicated stories when you start digging around the next few minutes, the last few minutes here, I want to look at more detail of the kind of photographs the kinds of photographs that Rotary took and we could start with the mummy unwrapping itself so they're quite, I think again if you just think, oh it's a photograph of such and such, it's quite a limited view on the Griffith Institute at Oxford University there are the beholders of how Karno's archives so they've got about half of the photographs the negatives of Burton's material and the way they've that you can search for these online you can really only search by, well what object is it so yes, we could think it is X it is the mummy and search by that, but the photographs are actually quite different and they're doing different things so this is a photograph looking down, you can see the tripod legs so it's not just possible in the burial chamber which won't very big if you remember how close the shrines were to the ceiling but as high as you can get with this camera to get a view of the mummy in its coffin, it's inside two coffins there because they're stuck together with resin so with the lids off and before it's moved out of the burial chamber has to be carried over to the laboratory for the unwrapping again it's a kind of insurance shot just in case something terrible goes wrong but also a bit of a you know, this is the condition as soon as we got the lid off as soon as we started looking at it it's a bit rough and ready you can see the cardboard boxes and brushes, tools lying around it's not a pretty pretty shot, it's not something they would have been thinking of publishing for instance a bit of a contrast then when it gets over to the laboratory too we're prepared for the unwrapping which is really more jiggling than unwrapping and cleaned up isn't it so nice clear space around a sheet draped around the coffin so it's being presented in a much more orderly fashion so again, a different kind of photograph and then photographs likely did in the rooms of the tombs photographs moving through the body as layers and objects are removed the pre-printed cards like we saw on the bases that are put here on bits of jewelry and amulets that are taken off of the body when they get to the point of on the last day decautating the body they take the head off in order to remove the gold mask and then they want to take photographs of the head and study the head so I think Burton had at this point a publication in mind he takes two photographs of the head lying on this nice clean square of a cloth and those are published cropped so that you only see the white background what that cloth is doing we know from photographs of the work in progress it's hiding the scissors and the scalpels and the flakes of linen textiles and rags that have come off of it so those I think have taken thinking that we might publish these and they look nice but he takes other shots which I think weren't to make the publication at all where the head is cropped up it's actually the handle of paintbrush on a rough wooden board and these photographs are taken full face taken for the back and taken left and right profile which is a very well established very long running on a century of history behind this visual trope bringing measuring skulls, studying skulls to pick these skulls and heads as part of race science so there's a way in which photography replicates and engages with earlier forms of visualizing the engine past in contrast to the 10 or so shots he takes of the head he takes almost 20 shots of the gold mine mask and regrets afterwards that he didn't take more that he didn't have more time so he pressed for time to get the gold mask and solve the gold coffin repair and conserve and ship to Cairo for security so he takes views from pretty much every angle that he can get of the gold mummy mask without its beard obviously being not attached if you remember that ridiculous news story from last year I wanted to then talk about the background that he's using in his backdrop we didn't have it in the first season but from the second season onwards you can see it better in this photograph he's using a round table with a round cloth covered board and then a stiff paper backdrop that goes halfway around it and again I know he's doing this in the daylight so one of the objects have been conserved, cleaned, repaired he's got them up there in the laboratory tomb and he can use that sheltered daylight area to bounce with his assistants that sunlight onto them and take as much of an exposure as he needs and that backdrop then helps minimize the shadows and gives them the light to bounce up of and then if you look at the bottom there's a number that has stayed with the object so we can get for one object we can get several photographs at different stages and sometimes a couple of different different angles and sometimes he plays around and tries a different angle or different lighting, different focus usually he gets the shot that he wants but he does tend to take two negatives, two photographs of each object and that's for a reason which I'll come back to right at the end that's because he's given two negatives to Carter and Carter then divides those roughly half and half keeps about half of them for himself and gives half of them to the Metropolitan Theon in York, so I'll come back to that so here we get this little gold statue of a snake one of mini statues from the tomb which all of which are found wrapped up in linen and kept in shrines so we again get kind of working progress shots, this interim stage of discovery so the objects we're kind of going backwards here now we've got the glamorous view and now we see this interim view looking down into the shrine where the objects are still wrapped up in linen that's with Egyptian art statues like this, that's what they were for they wanted to be seen they were saved projects to be wrapped up and kept out of sight and then in the same day so earlier in the day we go backwards in time again a shot of the same shrine in place of these staged shots of removing objects from the tomb and sometimes Britain will take two versions of that they'll take one like this one before the little number cards are in place but then you'll take another one with the little number cards in place so we're more of a kind of working photograph to help the archaeologists track the object through its different ladders through its stages and work that are going to turn it from an Egyptian object, whatever it was doing in ancient Egypt and turn it into something that archaeologists can use and stick it in a museum and I think these photographs are quite again you can read them in different ways or think about them in different ways one thing that they're doing, yes, is that practical task of helping keep track of objects as archaeologists remove them archaeology as a destructive process in a way it's about undoing all the things that have been done in the ancient past but then these photographs they've also convinced us quite successfully perhaps that we're seeing with ancient Egyptian eyes we're not, we're seeing with Burton's camera lens and it's not the same thing here we are again as we started Burton at that vertical style that I promised to explain just a little bit more about the setup so the camera's looking straight down at a piece of round box that's what we would say today and that's what the object is on that bit of charade there and then there's a white or light colored piece of car underneath it another photograph they're the same setup when he printed this he would have cropped it or you cropped it further down by object but you can see the frame there and the pale surface so and this is to reduce shadows there's still shadows here but photographic thing full of the bracelets that we saw still in place on the arms of the mummy looking very different here when they're isolated and pristine and organized with their cards on this glass background so the whole thing is to isolate the object and look it's just against this kind of clear pristine space that it's again for study or an object that you could put in a museum not every photograph that Britten took was a success and himself was anxious about whether he'd done the right thing sometimes and not every object from the tomb was as carefully catalogued and recorded and preserved as we're supposed to think and this was a long project 10 years it took from start to finish and done under very difficult conditions sometimes in every way by the time Britten actually took his last 20 photos which was around New Year's 1933 he took his last photos for Carter in the tomb and he wrote to his boss at the Metropolitan Museum that he was thrilled to be done and he was fed up with the work and with Howard Carter so isolation like this dead against this clean pale background here printed and mounted against another pale background of the photo album isolation that's certainly what many of the photographs in our collages produce seem to be about as if the more clear and clutter can depopulate in the images the closer it can get us to the real thing to ancient Egypt but as I said at the start of my talk today when we look at photographs as photographs we see that they aren't about isolation at all but about connections between times, places, ideas and most of all between people so I mentioned with the snake statue that Britten tried to take two exposures each time two near identical negatives so that Carter could keep one and the other could go to the Metropolitan Museum Britten's employer by 1928 about halfway through the project there were no objects from the Timothee Gang common we're going to be in Egypt legally instead Carter negotiated for the Egyptian government to repay the dowager counters of Karnarman for the expenses the family had incurred around £3,000 of time just to make that clear as I read it the Egyptian government paid for something legally and morally it already owned Carter also put some of his own money into the work the Metropolitan's contribution in kind through Britten's labour and Mesa's labour had more than £8,000 but the Metropolitan never pursued this with Carter or the Egyptian authorities and just kept seeing the natives and the albums so Britten's natives lived pair of alive between a Manhattan cold store and an Oxford archive room what that allows us to do I mean the importance that I mentioned was more than £3,000 of them although usually because of this duality we're usually seeing people say there's 1,400 or 1,500 there's actually many more what this allows us to do is to compare in some cases which negative did Britten actually print in how he printed so this bed is a good example of that he printed the negative that the Metropolitan Museum owned and that is the print in their albums and he's cropped it in close to the bed and we have a little number that if we look at Oxford's negative we can see is that inside Oxford's negative also shows us that what he cropped out are the two Egyptian youths assistants in the background holding up the bath job behind the bed who speaks for Ancient Egypt who really takes these photographs and who is to easily cropped out I hope in this talk today I've got a lot of material and a lot of different points we can see that the camera tells us a lot the camera tells us a lot about King Tino Common about his tomb in Ancient Egypt that's all quite true but when we look at photographs of what they are not just what they show we see something surely just as important we see art world and its recent histories some of which are more visible than others


My relationship to my body has changed a lot since becoming an amputee. I've always had a bit of a complicated relationship with it. We live in a culture that promotes odd ideas of what bodies should and shouldn't be, and I was not immune to those standards growing up. I developed an eating disorder when I was 13 that morphed into a different eating disorder by the time I was 15 that eventually changed into obsessive exercise in early college. I always have had this narrative ongoing in my mind as many of us have that I am not what I should be, that my body is not what it should be. Now, when you are someone who has dealt with chronic pain, chronic illness, or disease, something that is not right within your body, I think it further complicates our relationships to ourselves. It promotes a distancing because the body is not a particularly safe or easy place to exist in. On top of that, for those of us like myself who have experienced trauma, physical trauma, sexual trauma, the message becomes reinforced that the body is not a safe place to be. I've spent years of my life distancing myself from my physical form. I oftentimes don't feel like I'm really here, right? Like, I don't feel like this belongs to me because why would it? It's not right. I don't like it. It's not safe. It hurts me. I don't want it, right? I think I've punished my body for that for years. I think I've starved it and forced it into different molds of what I thought it should be. In the years immediately before my amputation, I started developing a little bit of a healthy relationship to my body. I didn't hate it quite as much. I was okay not stepping on a scale every day and checking the numbers and seeing if that number was going to ruin my day because if it was a little bit too high, for whatever reason, that really messed with my brain and it would affect my mood the rest of the day, just mentally berate myself for allowing this to happen. It's taken a long time to heal the pieces of how I talk to myself and how I view myself and how I view my body, but it was getting a little bit better. I was really concerned that when I had my baloney amputation, when I permanently looked different from the rest of average people, though I don't like the word when I became disfigured and could no longer fit the standard of the perfect image or the perfect ideal or whatever that is, I was afraid that it would trigger really bad old habits and I probably went in a little overconfident. I realized that there was a risk there that I might start hating my body again or trying to harm it in some way, but I thought, you know what? I've got some confidence now. I've worked through a lot of stuff. I'm sure it'll be just fine. And then I lost my leg and I realized that that was maybe a little bit naive. I did struggle for a while with how I saw myself. I did not like looking at my uncovered amputated limb, my residual limb because that was not attractive. That was just icky to me, right? Even though I could talk about it on camera and show pictures and probably seemed like I was comfortable enough with it to most people, it was a point of insecurity for me. I questioned if my husband could ever, ever be attracted to me. He constantly assured me that he was, but I still wondered because I didn't love how I looked. And that took a couple months, but it began to calm down. You may have heard of the body positive movement.  And I've never really resonated with that movement because I don't love my body. I've spent a lot of years thinking about my body. I've spent a lot of years over analyzing it. I am very aware of my form, though it was a little bit of a rocky start with insecurity and feeling weird and different. And I still have moments of that. Since I lost my leg, how I've viewed my body has really shifted. And I think it's shifted strangely in a positive way. I think a lot of people expect people who are disabled, people with disabilities to be uncomfortable with their skin because people think that they would be uncomfortable given that situation. But I've discovered quite the opposite. The more I've been an amputee the longer I've lived this life, the more I've began to appreciate my body for what it actually is and what it does. It's a vehicle that allows me to live my life and I've heard that message for years, but it never really connected with me. I heard a lot from the sort of body positive movement about loving yourself and loving your body and just being ecstatic about the skin you're in and it doesn't matter what you look like, you're perfect the way you are. And while I appreciate all those messages, I could never quite get on board with them because I don't feel this ecstatic love for my form. I've begun to appreciate it for what it can do. I hopped on a scale the other day for the first time in a very long time, which in itself is an achievement. And the number I saw was concerning to me. It wasn't what I wanted to see. And then I paused for a moment and wondered why I was upset about that. It's an arbitrary number. I am healthy. I'm not concerned about my weight. It's not a health concern right now. Why was I letting that eat at me? Why was that affecting my day?  I get to experience those things and feel those things because I have a body. I've spent a lot of time wishing I didn't have a body wishing I didn't have this body wishing it was different and I certainly have those moments still but what my body can do is incredible. Like it's mind-blowing to me what it can recover from that a part of itself can be removed multiple times and I can walk around on a piece of metal a very well engineered piece of metal but a piece of metal that is tied on to me and experience incredible things. I heard a term the other day called body neutral which I really liked because body positive never quite fit for me but the idea of being body neutral is that you have a body and it's a body and that makes a lot of sense to me because that's what I've started to feel I've stopped thinking so much about what it looks like and started appreciating a lot more what it can do for me I've wanted to take care of it so that I can do the things that I love not so I can look a certain way or not hate myself when I look in the mirror the more I've been able to focus on those things the more I've been able to focus on what I can do on the experiences it allows me to have the less oppressive the thoughts of what I look like have become Now I want to add that I fully recognize that this is not a simple issue I'm not suggesting that I just started thinking better thoughts about my body and now I no longer hate myself it's been a process of, oh you know, a decade and a half but it's funny to me that losing a part of my body has caused me to have this deep appreciation for my skin for what my skin contains for the abilities it allows me to do I absolutely very much still have moments when I'm super conscious of what I look like and I don't like it and my brain is fixated on trying not to think about it but it's right there but those moments are passing now they're much more fleeting I think it's incredible that I can walk not everyone has that privilege and I am so grateful for it for now, I don't know how long it will last for but right now things are going really well it's always felt like a waste to me to spend so much time and effort and energy on how I appear to other people but it's something that I've had a very difficult time getting away from those thoughts have been all I've thought about for some years of my life I live in a society that very much promotes this mindset that promotes always improving what you look like and always improving your body and getting more fit or getting skinnier or whatever it is though we've made them matter a lot it's not what matters what matters at least to me is what our bodies allow us to do the things we get to feel and experience and taste and smell and move in and this is not a journey that's completed for me I don't think it really ever is for anyone but I'm grateful that losing a limb has taught me to really appreciate what I have, like sincerely be grateful not a forced gratitude not like I'm grateful I have a body, yay but I still wish it was different sincerely grateful to have this for now and to be able to sit on my bed and drink coffee to be able to walk downstairs or move downstairs and make myself lunch in a few minutes at least in the societies I've existed in bodies are complicated they're not just complicated for me they're complicated for most people how we view body image is hard but I've begun to think that there is a way to heal that, to balance that I've begun to try to implement that for myself I'm really grateful that losing a limb has taught me to appreciate what I have left


Representing Kenya today which means that different countries but one Africa what country are you representing today? One Africa one African people throughout the world so these Berlin conference fragments I don't call them countries anymore I call them cages so when you try to go from Ghana to Togo they'll ask you if you have a pass from a white man that will allow you to go to a new cage so me I don't deal with these cages because my ancestors even they enslaved long before any of these cages existed so I represent all black people throughout the world regardless of location. Wow this is gonna be an interesting episode my name is Maya and what is your name? I'm also known as Okunini Abadele Kambon so I've given you my traditional title as Bamu Chidom Hene and then also my birth name Abadele Kambon. I feel like you're akin like in Ghanaian culture I do it you've dressed I think somebody see you we think that you're akin are you akin? Yes Chidom Hene so Bamu Chidom Hene had Equipian Mampon. Where were you born? I was where or when? Where exactly. Okay so I was born in Brooklyn New York on 1979 June 16 1979 but I didn't live there long we moved when I was about one year old to North Carolina and my parents plan was one if you're interested in African liberation you can't do much but talk about it if you're living in New York because you're dependent for your water for your food for your transportation on the exact same ones we are trying to get free from so they decided to move to North Carolina to build their own log cabin in the woods to grow their own food to you know have their own water supply and everything else so that's how we grew up in a very rural setting maybe about 30 to 40 minutes outside of Raleigh North Carolina which is a capital their plan was to go from there to the Caribbean because North Carolina is where my mother's side of the family was enslaved and then the Caribbean is where my father's side of the family was enslaved specifically St. Kate's and Barbados and then their eventual plan was to come to Africa so for me to be here I'm actually fulfilling the rest of their initial plan so you move to Africa is Ghana your first destination I've actually been to about 12 or 13 countries in Africa but Ghana was the very first place that I came to in Africa I'm besides Ghana Burkina Faso, Mali, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Gambia, Degambia, Senegal, La Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa I feel like I'm missing something but that should give you okay but you know the way you've dressed I've seen you like the whole of today this is wearing the entire day I have to go and look for my own for this interview why do you dress like this because I'm African right and when we think about things just in terms of the economic warfare that's being waged against African people is that we're given various created tastes and desires and what I mean by that is that the exact same ones who enslave and colonize us tell us that our clothes are no good so once we basically internalize that idea now who you have to go to to get the clothes that are good the same ones who've been enslaving and colonizing you so now they take the money from you financing them just from a taste just from a desire and then they use that to build the prisons the bullets that shoot us down in the streets the bombs that they bomb Africa with and all of it comes not all of it but a good portion of it comes from all the Africans you see walking day by day they've given billions and billions and what's effectively aid to the exact same enslavers and colonizers so for me you know primarily economic but you know in other aspects too by understanding this as actually economic warfare so it's not oh this looks cute is that no I'm supporting my own African people and when I do that now instead of financing my enemies to the tune of billions and billions that that same money can go to other African people Africa for Africans that's right you believe in that exactly yes do you think all black people are from Africa all black people are Africans and all Africans are black people I use I matter of fact when I write it I use the equal sign I say African equals black and I write Africa with a K just so people are not confused because you have all of these fraudsters who are trying to hijack the term pan Africanism now you look at those who invented the word pan Africanism coined the word in the 1900 resolution from that conference that was held in England they actually mentioned specifically countries like Haiti like Liberia Ethiopia and any others that emerged they mentioned so for them they're already talking about not just those who happen to be on the continent but all black people so they use the word African black and Negro interchangeably so for me when you're down with the real pan Africanism out the fraud pan Africanism you're talking about black people regardless of location unfortunately pan Africanism the term has been hijacked by these fraudsters who mean location whether or not you're black and recently we've seen that with the AU when they allowed Morocco in 2016 who applied to join the AU that they were admitted while Haiti who was mentioned by those who invented the word pan Africanism they applied to join and they were rejected on the grounds that they are not located on the African continent so for me that's anti-Africanist anti-black and it's against everything that pan Africanism is about and basically you have these people who are trying to get rid of pan Africanism altogether and come with that idea what they're called all Africanism so it means excluding black people who aren't located on the continent and then incorporating the Arab enslavers and when you look at a place like Morocco they use the exact same word for slave and black person it's Abid for them there's absolutely no difference they didn't mean black they mean slave if they mean slave they mean black but then this is who was allowed into the AU and the only deliberation was how well they're treating other Arabs in Western Sahara not a single discussion about the enslavement of black people there well let me know you see yourself as an African right now you live in Ghana do you have a Ghanaian passport or American passport I actually have a Ghanaian passport and let me show you if you're interested so a couple of years ago 2016 34 of us we had our citizenship restored and I use that in the term that on my opinion Bahama use so he said I'm not giving you anything I'm restoring what's rightfully yours so we hold on to that and this is actually it right here we got our passport when you're talking to me I heard you say I'm a man pain What is your name? My name is Chi. What is your name? My Chi is not coming. I speak Fanti. What is your name? My name is Nunes. What is your name? My name is Chi. Yoruba. Wolof. Kiswahili. Kikongo. My name is Nkran. Where are you from? Where are you from? Where do you come from? Can you tell us where you came from? I am from Yoruba, from Yoruba, from Tanzania to Kenya. Why? I am from Yoruba. I live in Yoruba. In Kusá. I came from Yoruba. How are you? What's your name? Zorisana What's your name? Zorisana Okay What's your name? Ask him if he has been to Tanzania before What's your name? Hapana Yes But Do you travel to Kenya? Oh, he says that he has already traveled to Kenya But Ask him how did he manage to learn Swahili? How did you learn Swahili? How did you learn Swahili? What's your name? I'm from Atlanta I'm from the University of Atlanta Atlanta? Atlanta I'm an American What's your name? I'm from Swahili I speak Wolof Wolof I'm deaf Do you speak English? No, no, no That's the only thing I don't know Do you speak Amarik? Amarik? I can order food in Amarik because the main context I've learned in Amarik is in Ethiopian restaurants So I can say things like What do you eat? What do you eat? What do you eat? Like these types of things I'm really impressed Konjo Yeah And this one I forgot I'm a second dollar I'm a second dollar Is that your Mexican? All of those ones But I don't count any of those Okay So if there are languages that I can just do small in then I could count maybe about 50 of those but I don't count those as languages I speak fluently Would you say that Africans would try and embrace their own language? Especially if you go to so many African countries like East Africa some of them have started using Swahili in classroom but when you come to Ghana English is in classroom Is there anything you want to say about that? You know when I was in Kenya I was so impressed because I was like these people are serious because when you look at the sound boards things are in Ki Swahili actually so this is the show this is you know everything So I said wow these people are actually serious about being African I had people who were in Kenya was like it's not so great but you know if I compared you know at least that language policy with what we have in Ghana you know Ghana is light years behind as far as that goes defend themselves and this is my son Kweku as you see he likes to steal the spotlight he'll just hop up in here Kweku, Chiak What's your name? Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kweku Kumi Kumi Sawapongese Tonguera What's your name? Bakon what's the name of your language? I don't know what's your name? I don't know I don't know it's my first ever I don't know I don't know This is the song This is the song What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? Wow Before I remember what happened I wanted you to tell us like There are a lot of black brothers out there or black brothers and sisters out there who are looking forward to move to the borderline Is there any message that you have for them since you're saying Africans for Africans any message you have for your fellow Africans out there? Yeah, so we actually have started an initiative called repatriate to Ghana comm So with this we're actually assisting Africans with everything from just advice to actually on the ground Helping them go to the Lambs Commission, you know go for Citizenship and all the things of that nature So because we started that initiative of African studies There was an elder dr. Maulana who really spearheaded it and it was through the office My office at african studies that the first 34 were able to get their citizenship and then also these This next batch that's about to get it all of their forms came to me initially It's since going on to dr. Maulana and like I said, he's been absolutely You know indispensable for this process and really you know spearheaded it But these are some of the things that we're doing to actually assist Africans It's not enough to just beat people over the head and say oh you should repatriate But it's like well, how do I do it? You know what job will I have how will I take care of myself how I take care of my family and what we're doing is We're answering those questions for them so that we can actually get to the practicalities of doing these things Also, I put myself through school for the PhD by teaching African languages online So Chi Yoruba and Walloff Teaching those through my site a BB to me comm so a BB to me that translates to black power And that's what we're all about black power a BB to me and basically the idea is that You know so many people when they are interested in African liberation They only talk about it in English or in French or in Portuguese It's like why would we have to talk about black power in the languages of our colonial enemies that we need to actually Speak about black power in African languages So that was actually a coinage so that we can have that also a BB for honey, which is actually the name of my cup where our Group a BB for hundia.com that translates to black liberation or African liberation So all of our languages black and African are the same thing So if you look at P or be beneath the BB is the black part So you say or be beneath a BB mine?  I do la war is those who are black in color That's what we call Africans and they illa do law as Africa if you look at Bamanakan Which is the Baman language out of Mali They say farafim and farafina for black person and Africa is the exact same thing and wall of nitkuniul It means black person of real nitkuniul land of black people if you look at Kikongo you have Ndumbe and Bandon be as plural if you want to refer to this land that we call Africa's and see a bandon be now you would think Okay, maybe this is just a modern thing But if you look at chemist this is the ancient what they now call ancient Egypt the land actually it means The exact same thing as a BB mine means land of black people and we call ourselves commit to you Which means black people so this is our identity that regardless of location We are all black people and this is why I even advocate that we need to start using those terms again Because when you say African you can have anyone who hops in there and says look I was born here So I'm African so he's got Chinese as the day he was born. Oh look. I'm African because I was born here So once we understand that commit to you is what we call ourselves commit T singular then we can understand that we're all Commit to you regardless of location. So those Africans in IT those are commit to you and That's who is chemist if we understand what it actually means in IT that too is chemist if we understand It means land of black people. Well, what land is blacker than that is a lot blacker than Morocco So these are things that we really have to get into the system Thank you so much for talking to us. I really appreciate all of to shake your hand and man This is a lot of money. So maybe I might take it and say This is why we do the capoeira You can get your capoeira Wow, this is amazing Okay, I hope you guys enjoyed this amazing episode. It's your boy Mr. Garner baby right there Garner I'll be in Togo on Saturday. So whip with a boy and let's take Togo to the world. I am Maya


Tech Billionaire Elon Musk is a visionary who dreams of moving to Mars. He isn't just one of the planet's richest people. He's one of its biggest recipients of government handouts, according to Lisa Conyers and Phil Harvey, authors of Welfare for the Rich, how your tax dollars end up in millionaires' pockets and what you can do about it. By 2015, companies led by Musk had already gotten billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and other handouts. And he's not alone. There are thousands of other immensely rich people who are constantly milking the government for special perks, carve-outs, and handouts. Here are five of the very worst ways they do that. Since 1933, when Congress passed the first Farm Support Bill, the government has been shoveling billions of dollars in the form of crop insurance, cash payouts, and other subsidies to the smaller and smaller number of American farmers. As Conyers and Harvey document, former Obama Commerce Secretary and billionaire Penny Pritzker received $1.6 million in subsidies between 1996 and 2006. And Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is part of a family business that got over $3 million in subsidies between 1995 and 2008. Because of protectionist tariffs and price supports, Americans pay around triple the world price for sugar, thanks to efforts by billionaires like the Fonnel Brothers, Alfie and Peppy, dubbed the first family of corporate welfare by Time Magazine. Many, if not most, pro-sports team owners are billionaires. Yet between 1997 and 2015, almost half of all construction costs for new NFL stadiums were covered by taxpayers. In the case of Raymond James Stadium, home to Super Bowl champs the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, taxpayers ponied up 100% of building costs, and the team basically gets all revenue generated at the stadium too. The Walt Disney Corporation, with a market cap of $368 billion, is the heavyweight champ among theme park operators when it comes to sweetheart deals. Disney returned $2.3 billion to investors in 2017 alone, and Bob Iger, chairman and CEO, earns north of $45 million a year. So, of course, Disneyland, located in Anaheim, California, needs handouts. 25 years ago, Anaheim built Disney a new parking structure that cost $108 million, and then leased it back to the company for the high price of $1 a year. In 2015, the city agreed to exempt the park from paying entertainment taxes for 45 years, and in 2016, it agreed to a $650 million tax rebate on a luxury hotel that Disney built near the happiest place on Earth. Over the past decade, Peabody, the largest private coal company in the world, pulled in around $275 million in state and federal subsidies, while generating $5.6 billion in revenue in 2017. Exelon, a power company that specializes in nuclear energy, generated $34 billion in revenue in 2017, the year after it gulled New York state into giving it $7.6 billion to keep four aging and underperforming nuclear power plants going. A few years back, New York state shelled out $750 million to build a factory for Elon Musk's renewable energy company, Solar City. Then they said the company would pay no property taxes for a decade, saving them another $260 million. But as Conyers and Harvey argue, in our new information rich world, citizen activists are fighting back. In Louisiana, when one group learned that Exelon and other gas and oil companies were getting away without paying property taxes, it led to a new public accountability law. They also point to websites that track subsidies and handouts, empowering citizens to protest the use of tax dollars to guilt the pockets of mega corporations and the billionaires who own them. If and when, Elon Musk actually makes it to Mars. Let's make sure he buys his own ticket.