
Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio
May 25, 2021
S9E2: Melanie Keen
Melanie Keen is the director of Wellcome Collection
Before she interviewed for the job, Keen visited the permanent exhibition and noticed a set of ethnographic photographs:
They’re sort of hidden in a corner discreetly, but the images themselves aren’t discreet at all. I found them offensive, you know. In no other space in that building where the images of naked black women, of semi-naked black men, and the person that was attributed was a white male photographer. They were attributed as being from a particular community or tribe of people.
And when I started the job, I walked around one with one of the curators and I was like, “That’s just got to go. It’s got to go. It’s not — until we can find out more about those people that are represented in the photograph. It has to go.”
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