Open up your mind and say, ahh...

A hack of our 43rd president’s email account this week netted not state secrets or major scandals–but it did reveal three paintings. We already knew that George W. was an aspiring painter, but until yesterday, none of his work had been publicized (except for a portrait of his recently deceased first dog, Barney). The three grainy shots of his handiwork were released by an anonymous hacker, alongside photos of George H. Bush, Ralph Lauren, and Bill Clinton.

It’s very easy to mock these paintings given their context. And plenty of people already have. Dubya is an easy target for reasons entirely outside of his skill or ambition as an artist. And certainly, when I first saw them, I laughed along with the rest of the Internet. But the more I look at them, the more interesting they become.

The two paintings, which seem as though they were painted in acrylic, show Bush in the shower and bathtub. In one we see his toes sticking out of the murky water as the faucet runs. The former is more interesting: It shows us Bush’s back as he faces the shower, while a reflection of his face stares from a hanging shower mirror. It’s a startling effect, and it immediately made me think of Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini Portrait, which shows a posing couple reflected in a nearby mirror. I’m not arguing that Bush’s work is on a par with the 15th-century Flemish genius, but he is using a mirror in the same way van Eyck did–to point out his presence and reject the gaze of the viewer at the same time. There’s also something of David Hockney here, in the luxury bathroom trappings and the gridded tile background.

Write off the other leaked works as crude acts of stress relief if you will, but these two paintings are fascinatingly blunt. We’re seeing a man who’s thinking about his image, his role in public life, and his legacy. Wonderful New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz explains:

I love these two bather paintings. They are “simple” and “awkward,” but in wonderful, unself-conscious, intense ways. They show someone doing the best he can with almost no natural gifts–except the desire to do this. The reclusion and seclusiveness of the pictures evoke the quietude (though not the insight, quality, or genius) of certain Chardin still lifes. These are pictures of someone dissembling without knowing it, unprotected and on display, but split between the promptings of his own inner drives and limited by his abilities. They reflect the pleasures of disinterestedness. A floater. Inert. The images of a man who saw the entire world from the inside but who finds the smallest, most private place in a private home to imagine his universe. Of almost nothingness. Sweet, sublime, oblique oblivion. The visibility of invisibleness.

Read that as deep satire or sincerity, as you see fit. Either way, there’s some truth in it: these paintings put us in Bush’s shoes (had he been wearing any), and force us to look at life from the perspective of a former president who’s currently wildly unpopular. It’s uncomfortable–and isn’t that what good art is all about?

Data privacy officials in Germany have reopened a probe to look deeper at Facebook’s face recognition technology and determine if the social networking giant was collecting member photos without their knowledge.

In June, an investigation into Facebook’s database of pictures — led by data protection commissioner Johannes Casper in Hamburg, was suspended after he said he would give Facebook time to update its policies. After several attempts and no updates, Casper is now reopening the investigation according to The New York Times. He believes that Facebook has been illegally collecting face-recognition data about its members in order to populate its photo tag suggest feature.

However, Facebook told Mashable that the feature is in line with the protection laws in Europe.

“We believe that the photo tag suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest.”

Facebook’s facial-recognition software can sense who is in your pictures and make tagging suggestions. Rather than opting in to the feature, it is rolled out to all accounts and must be opted out if the user chooses to do so.

This was one of several features under scrutiny last year by data protection officials in Ireland. It underwent an audit to see if was legal to obtain this information. Facebook agreed to notify its users in Europe about the photo suggest feature.

Following Facebook’s acquisition of facial-recognition software company Face.com for an undisclosed amount of money in June, some users have expressed concern that the expansion of this type of technology on the social network could encroach on their privacy rights. Facebook hasn’t said what its future plans are for Face.com or its technology.

Image courtesy iStockphoto, youngvet

I had an interesting comment from someone at an event recently. We were picking apart my Twitter stream and I was explaining my philosophy around it. He raised his hand and said, “Well, to be really honest, I wouldn’t be all that interested in seeing your pictures of bacon.” In this case, he meant quite literally the picture above, but in the larger sense, he was saying, “I want a business-focused person to follow.”

My response was that it was perfectly fair to feel that way, but that it also meant that he wasn’t likely my buyer. In my very specific case, I tend to work with companies that value personality as well as professional ability. It’s every bit as important to me that my kind of customer have an interesting personality, a quirkiness, and a tolerance for the atypical. That’s a choice, though, and it’s something I encourage you to consider.

We Choose Our Customers

Look, when we’re hungry for business, we just want to see the cash register ring. I’ve been there, and I’ll be there again. But when we do have the opportunity to consider our ideal client, it’s important to take a moment and work through that, to really determine what it is that will help you qualify who works with you or not.

In the case of media making and your online presence, what you put out there for the world to see on your social channels and your blog is what people are going to weigh into other equations when determining whether to buy from you. At the moment I’m writing this blog post, my last 20 tweets say nothing about what kind of business I’m in. My Facebook account is completely personal and not for business. My last few posts on Google+ are actually more business-focused, but that’s just happenstance. Why? Because I use social networks as a kind of liner notes for the personality behind the business.

Why Choose Your Customers?

Hold on there, Brogan. It’s a barely recovering economy and my kids have to eat. Why should I choose who my customers are? Why should I go out of my way to disqualify potential buyers?

Because customers that aren’t a fit create friction.

Simple. The deal you make when you take on a customer that doesn’t fit your personality or work style is that you’re asking for their money and signing up for however you will clash with them. This, in turn, may (will!) cause procrastination, may (will!) cause a less-than-stellar effort on your part, and will detract from the kinds of customers and clients you have more in common with. Those, by the way, are the people who will spend more with you over the long term, and who will form the core of your business relationships, not these folks you accept because you “need the money.”

Is This Crazy Talk?

I’ll let you tell me. Jump into the comments. Tell me about the times you’ve taken that customer who wasn’t really down with your particular kind of crazy. Hey, if you’ve had the opposite experience, that’s cool, too. I know someone out there wants to share some Kumbaya story about how working through one’s differences is a rewarding experience. My take? Life’s too short.

“So, listen,” I told him. “This will be the weirdest call you’ll get today.”

“Today?” he said.

“Probably all month.”

Then I explained: My goal was to draw a straight line from a Twitter bot to the real, live person whose face the bot had stolen. In the daily bot wars–the one Twitter fights every day, causing constant fluctuations in follower counts even as brands’ followers remain up to 48% bot–these women are the most visible and yet least acknowledged victims. And it’s almost always women, isn’t it? Bots are like a sorority party at 3 a.m.–a massive compilation of young, pretty faces who talk a lot of nonsense. But the women they portray are actual people, somewhere in this world. Who are they? And how were their photos dislodged from their original place?

This is a mostly pointless exercise, I knew: The story behind every photo would be different. And what would one of these women say–that she’s flattered to find her face spamming everyone on Twitter? Clearly, no. But it seemed worth doing, if only to tell one story, to have one answer. So I asked Elizabeth’s old friend: Did he still know her? He did, he said, though she’s since gotten married and changed her name. He promised to pass my message along. After four days of silence, though, I did more sleuthing and found her on Facebook under her married name. Then I emailed my plea: You’ve become a bot, Elizabeth. Can we talk about it?

Silence. Can’t say I blame her.

So I started over.

Bots are cheap. The company Buy Real Marketing will sell you 1,000 of them for $17, or 25,000 for $247–meaning the value of each is about a penny. And who’s buying them? Anyone. A brand’s social media manager will never admit to it, but chances are, gigantic companies have invested in this cheap form of image building. Why wouldn’t they?

Athletes definitely do it. A publicist for some major players–people at the top of their game–told me it’s common in his world. He once tried it himself, just to see what happens. He ordered the $17 package from Buy Real Marketing, via its website buytwitterfollowers.org. “They didn’t come in right away. I thought at first I’d been scammed,” he said. “But sure enough, within three days, they just poured in. It was exactly 1,000. To me, it shook the whole foundation. It made Twitter meaningless.”

The publicist gave me the names of a few people who also bought from Buy Real Marketing, and I dug into their followers. The bots were easy to spot–and these bots, no surprise, follow plenty of other celebrities and big brands. There’s no way to know if these were purchased follows or just pure coincidence, of course, but the list is wide-ranging. One bot from this batch followed Kelly Osbourne, former Formula 1 racer Tiago Monteiro, the Huffington Post, and an “Internet marketing consultant” named Trent Partridge, among 2,000 others.

If you click on a profile photo in Twitter, the photo will open in a tab of its own–and oftentimes will be larger, or more broadly cropped. I’d drag that onto my desktop, then run it through two image search engines: Tin Eye and Google Images. Each one scours the web for visual matches. After dozens of searches, a pattern emerged: Most bot photos had a long digital tail, having been posted on dozens of sketchy porn sites or blogs devoted to the barely legal. Occasionally, I’d be able to track a photo back to what seemed like an original source–like when a bot’s photo showed up alongside many others of the same woman, all posted to the fratboy site Barstool Sports. The site claimed her name is Aurora. But when I reached out, as was always the case, nobody cared to explain where the photos came from.

Then, finally, a reliable source: I tracked two bots back to the 2009 SUNshine Girls calendar, a lingerie showcase produced by the Toronto Sun. (I guess newspapers have to make money somehow.) The calendar only offered the models’ first names, and the paper’s photo editor wouldn’t connect me with them. But after a little Internet stalking–this is how reporting works, people!–I found a connection.

One of the bots, @Karriehga, which went by the name Maralyn Estes, showed a photo of a beautiful blond with dark eyes and hair poofed back like a Kentucky prom queen. This was Amanda the SUNshine Girl. And some clever Googling led me to a blog that included her full name. That allowed me to find her Facebook page, which didn’t list an email address, but did show that she recently clicked “like” on an events planning company. I figured that’s where she now works, so I called. Amanda, it turns out, was on maternity leave. “You can leave a message, and she’ll call you back in a few weeks,” her boss Darlene told me.

I didn’t have time for that, I said. Darlene asked why. So I began to explain.

“Wait, wait, Amanda was a SUNshine Girl?” Darlene yelped, and started laughing. “I didn’t know that!”

Oh, boy. Sorry Amanda.

But after that, Darlene said she’d help me get in touch. I hung up, relieved. Then I looked at my computer screen, which still had @Karriehga up. It had just tweeted something, as these things regularly do. Usually they’re just snippets of text yanked from websites, just something to keep their profiles active.

This time, though, the tweet seemed like a warning: “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.”

In the meantime, I contacted Buy Real Marketing. I expected this to be equally difficult, given the sketchy nature of what a company like this does. But its work is perfectly legal–in the name of viral marketing, big brands have done far worse–and so all I had to do was call a toll-free number and hit a few buttons. Then I reached a tired-sounding woman named Judy, who spoke to me on a scratchy phone connection. I identified myself as a reporter and asked to interview someone, but she volunteered herself for the task. So I asked her: Judy, who are the faces on your bots?

“These are not bots that we have on Twitter,” she said. “These are real people.”

Me: “So there are no bots?”

Judy: “No bots. Not even spam.”

Me: “I mean, I see a lot of what certainly look and function like bots. But they’re not bots?”

Judy: “They are real people. They just log in, like, once a month so they are considered active.”

Me: “I see. Are the profile faces them?”

Judy: “Yes, exactly.”

Me: “So, the pictures of the people who are on a…”

Judy: “Some of them are. We can’t really control them. These are real people, and they have their choice of freedom on what picture they place there.”

And that’s all she was giving me.

Amanda’s email showed up the next morning: “I heard you contacted my employer Darlene yesterday and would like to talk to me. I’m interested in knowing what this is all about.”

She gave me her number. I called immediately.

Amanda lives in Bowmanville, Ontario, just outside of Toronto. Her husband is a police officer there. The night before, as they puzzled over Darlene’s message to call me, her husband began telling Amanda about all the facial recognition software that’s becoming available to law enforcement. It freaked her out.

Truth be told, she’s been trying to distance herself from the SUNshine Girl thing. (We’re helping out by not publishing her last name. That’s one less Google result to worry about.) It’s not that she’s embarrassed; back in the day, she even did live promotions for the calendar. But these days she has to worry about what employers think. Darlene doesn’t care–thankfully–but Amanda used to work for the government. She figured it was best not to flaunt her past.

And now, this. In the past day, I’d found five other bots using the same photo of her.

“It’s kinda of creepy, to be honest with you. The whole thing,” she says. She’s on Twitter but rarely uses it, and had never heard of bots. “I’d like to find the source and tell them to stop using my photo, you know? Because you never know who’s going to see it, and I don’t have control over what someone’s saying. That could ruin who-knows-what.”

I told Amanda that she could report the bot as spam, and hope for the best. She said she’d do that, but that she likely wouldn’t do any more. After all, what’s there to do–sue? Sue who? She doesn’t even own the photo; it’s the Toronto Sun‘s property. But she appreciated knowing. She thanked me.

Four days later, Amanda’s bot @Karriehga was still live. It tweeted, “Let’s commit the perfect crime… I’ll steal your heart, and you steal mine.”

To say nothing of a face.

Namsa Leuba is a young photographer who grew up in Switzerland with a European father and a Guinean mother. As a student, she studied the rituals and cosmology of her mother’s native country, and received a grant to visit Guinea-Conakry in her final year at the University of Art and Design Lausanne. In early 2011, Leuba spent three months living and working in a village that had been founded by her great-grandfather. Ya Kala Ben is the award-winning thesis Leuba shot during those months.

Leuba says that her fieldwork was a chance for her to discover her origins, and she knew she wanted to explore the traditional spirituality of Guinean tribes. In Guinea, Islam is the majority religion followed by Christianity. But like many cultures where mass conversion has taken place, devotion to an earlier religion is still common, and 7% of the population practices the traditional Guinean animist faith.

In Guinean cosmology, says Leuba, ritual statuettes are used symbolically to represent “modesty, luck, fecundity or a channel for exorcism.” The statuettes are typically used in ceremonies to represent the yearnings of the worshippers–they are “not the gods of this community,” she writes, “but their prayers.”

Working with members of her mother’s community, Leuba staged portraits where humans play the parts of the traditional statuettes. She asked her subjects to dress in complicated garments representing the ritual tools. According to Leuba, this was interpreted as a fairly sacrilegious act: “I had to deal with sometimes violent reactions… While some were afraid and were struck with astonishment.”

There’s (obviously) a complicated colonial subtext to Ya Kala Ben. European depictions of African identity have ranged from the British exploitation of Sara Baartman to artist Phyllis Galembo’s recent tribal portraiture. As a Westerner photographing tribal community members dressed in garb based on ritual tools, Leuba plays a game of cultural telephone. “When we look at my pictures,” Leuba recently told Andrea Diaz, “it makes us think of statuettes and we look at the statuettes, we think of a human figure.” In this way, Leuba’s photos are a visual ethnography. By reimagining the ritual artifacts and capturing them in images, she’s documenting her own biases.

“I brought them in a framework meant for Western aesthetic choices and tastes,” says Leuba. “The photographic eye makes them speak differently.”

Since 2009, Hamburg photographers Andre Giesemann and Daniel Schulz have been waltzing into German nightclubs just before close, as the last few sots and pie-eyed candy kids trickle out, to snap pictures of what remains. And let us tell you, it’s downright apocalyptic.

Giesemann and Schulz photographed the last night of “Rechenzentrum,” before the building, an old East Berlin communications center, was torn down.

The absence of the sweaty masses coupled with all the crap strewn on the floors–bottles, cigarette butts, mysterious liquids that may or may not be someone’s regurgitated dinner–evoke the eerily quiet aftermath of some horrific blast. (An appropriate analogy for how a lot of club-goers feel the morning after.)

Giesemann and Schulz use a 4×5-inch large format camera, and have shot the series Vom Bleiben in Frankfurt am Main, Offenbach, and, of course, Berlin, where nightlife is something approaching organized religion. “We are interested in the marks and emptiness in these kinds of rooms,” Giesemann tells Co.Design. Though the clubs aren’t always as empty as he’d like: “Sometimes it’s funny when wasted people try to be a part of our pictures.”

To buy photographs from the Vom Bleiben project, go to www.schulzdaniel.com and www.andregiesemann.com.

Images courtesy of Andre Giesemann and Daniel Schulz; h/t Visual News