Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Ironically, if anyone could have placed a high value on Jen’s precise and measurable utility at the moment, it might have been Pam, for the hours and hours that Jen couldn’t bear to calculate, the spine-wrenching, muscle-torching weeks that Jen had sunk into those paintings — in a spirit of friendship, in a spirit of creative collaboration for the pure sake of it, but not, as Jen knew now, in a spirit that could be reciprocated by deploying Pam as a means to a different, arguably more mercenary end.

“Hey, did you ever get your paintings back from Pam?” Jim asked.

“I was just sort of thinking about that,” Jen replied.

That night, Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page on her laptop. She considered the instructions for the fifth category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 5: SPACE

How can you challenge yourself to make sure that your home is a reflection of your best self — your creativity, your capacity for forging loving relationships, your inner peace?

Your response here:

I challenge myself to finally find some nice frames for Millie’s drawings and hang them up.

Jen, Karina, and Sunny stood around Donna’s desk looking at photographs. Jen had commissioned an award-winning young photographer and current Agence France-Presse stringer to take no-fee pictures of the teenaged recipients of a higher-education scholarship program in Nigeria that LIFt had helped to fund. Jen had been delighted with the photographs of the five Nigerian scholars, who would be featured in a print and brochure campaign and on the LIFt website; the girls looked at ease in front of Françoise’s camera, smiling in almost every shot — carefree smiles and shy smiles and breaking-into-laughter smiles — against a matte black background.

“Why are they wearing these Western mall clothes?” Donna had asked. “Did we put them in these clothes?”

“No, of course not,” Jen had replied. “They are wearing their own clothes.”

“Who are they laughing at?” Sunny had asked.

“Have these been, uh, airbrushed yet?” Karina had asked.

“Oof, orthodontics, am I right, Karina?” Sunny had asked.

“Françoise can definitely touch them up, but the vibe we’re going for is newsy, casual — a flattering but representative snapshot,” Jen had said. She had anticipated some version of this very conversation, and had rehearsed for it.

“I just can’t get past the jeans and T-shirts,” Donna had said. “It’s confusing.”

“Look, I know it’s awkward, but it just keeps on coming up, so I’ll just keep on saying it — with all of our communications efforts, we always need to think about optics, Jen,” Karina had said, tapping the image of the scholar with the highest body mass index.

Since then, Jules the social-media intern had pointed the team toward a fashion photographer’s black-and-white studio portraits of teenaged girls from Cameroon, uniformly smooth-skinned and high-cheekboned and dressed in traditional garb, and all of whom held the camera with bottomlessly somber, unsmiling expressions. Petra mocked up new print and web pages using these pictures, with inspirational quotes in an italicized script overlaying the edges of the images. Printouts of the pictures from Cameroon now lay side by side with the pictures from Nigeria, fanned across Donna’s desk.

“God, these are just gorgeous,” Karina said.

“Mmmm,” Sunny groaned. Jen imagined Sunny in a terry-cloth robe and towel turban, draping the printouts over her face like a hot, fragrant towel.

“This isn’t even worth discussing,” Donna said.

“Wait, but this quote, ‘I have known since I was a little girl that my future was in my education’—I’d have to check the transcript, but I’m pretty sure that Promise said that,” Jen said, pointing to a quotation overlaying a close-up of a Cameroonian girl, her hands clasped and pressed to her jawline, her giant startled eyes piercing the lens. “Promise, the Nigerian scholar. That’s not Promise.”

“Which one is Promise?” Karina asked. “The one in the Beyoncé crop top?”

“They’re wearing jeans, ” Donna reiterated, her bangles clattering in shared frustration. “Have we forgotten this?”

“Françoise is in Lagos for a few more days — we could ask her for something in a more low-key style, if that’s what we’re going for,” Jen said.

“I would hardly call these images low-key,” Sunny said. “They are arresting. Stunning. You can’t tear your eyes away from them.”

“If anything, they’re high -key,” Donna said.

“No, sorry,” Jen said, “what I meant is that low-key is the technical term for this style of portraiture — that kind of high-contrast, moody, shadowy, brooding effect that you all are responding to so strongly—”

“I know you’re an artist, Jen, but this isn’t a studio visit,” Karina said.

“Don’t get me wrong, the photos from Cameroon are absolutely stunning, and they were a good choice,” Jen said. Jen knew this to be false. Instead of properly lighting the set, the photographer responsible for the Cameroon shoot had illuminated it after the fact using the dodging tool in Photoshop. In one profile shot, a girl’s jawline was lost in darkness, yet somehow light pooled in her collarbone. “It would be so great if we could use these photos, honestly, and I’m grateful to Jules for finding them,” Jen continued. “She has an eye! But the fact of the matter is that we can’t use them, because they don’t represent the story we’re telling, which is about our Nigerian scholars. These girls from Cameroon aren’t the girls from Nigeria. It’s simple?”

Donna stared at her phone. Karina shrugged. “I just don’t see the problem here,” Karina said, glancing around at Donna and Sunny with eyebrows raised. “We’ve never wrung our hands and gnashed our teeth about stock photos in any other cases.”

“And they’ll never know,” Donna and her bangles said to her phone.

“They have the Internet in Nigeria,” Jen said.

“Well, we’ll use these just in the print brochures, then,” Donna said, her voice cresting with frustration. “What is the harm?”

“But to Karina’s point, these aren’t stock photos,” Jen said. “We use stock photos to illustrate ideas, concepts. These girls, these scholars, aren’t ideas or concepts. The image should represent the — the thing it’s supposed to represent.”

“The thing ?” Sunny asked.

“These are all beeeyoooteeeful girls,” Donna intoned.

“They are not things!” Sunny said.

“I’m not disputing any of that,” Jen said.

“We are doing good here,” said Sunny, tearing up.

Jen returned to her desk.

jenski1848: I imagine you can guess how that went.

whatDaisyknew: ON IT

Jen heard Daisy’s grammatically perfect but comically American-accented French over the cubicle wall. “Françoise, do you remember if any of the girls was wearing a head wrap or anything?” Daisy was inquiring. “Something in, like, I don’t know, a batik print or something? Why do you ask? Oh, just because here at LIFt we ascribe a philanthropic value to prejudice and stereotypes about the ‘deserving’ poor and they’re bound up in a specific kind of aesthetics. Which involves head wraps. And flowy garments.” Des vêtements fluides.

Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page on her computer. She considered the instructions for the sixth category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 6: MISSION

How can you challenge yourself in your career to make sure that your work squares with your values and is in harmonic balance with the rest of your life?