Chatting the Pictures: Race and Trump’s Fast Food Feast at the White House

Reading The Pictures
Vantage
Published in
1 min readJan 19, 2019
Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters Caption: A server places hamburgers in the State Dining Room of the White House.

Welcome to the latest edition of Chatting the Pictures, a weekly, micro-edition of the Reading the Pictures Salon. In each webcast, co-hosts Michael Shaw, publisher of Reading the Pictures, and writer and historian, Cara Finnegan, discuss prominent photos in the news.

The photo this week was taken by Joshua Roberts for Reuters. In the picture, we see mostly African-Americans, both White House servers and Clemson University football players, at a White House fast food dinner. The event, honoring the college champions, was held during the government shutdown (as the White House employees worked without pay). The event and photos of the scene garnered huge buzz, but the attention mostly centered on Trump’s state of mind or the banality of the scene. Our discussion, consistent with the photo, focused on the racial context.

Find all the Chatting the Pictures videos here.

Originally published by Reading The Pictures, the only site dedicated to the daily review of news and documentary photography. Sign up for the Reading The Pictures Week in Re-View email. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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Reading The Pictures
Vantage

Official feed of the visual politics + photojournalism site, ReadingThePictures.org. (Formerly BagNewsNotes.)