Jeu de paume (English: "palm game") is a ball-and-court game that originated in France. It was an indoor precursor of tennis played without racquets, though these were eventually introduced. It is a former Olympic sport, and has the oldest ongoing annual world championship in sport, first established over 250 years ago. Originally spelled jeu de paulme, it is sometimes called courte paume or "real tennis".

In the earliest versions of the game, the players hit the ball with their hands, as in palla, volleyball, or certain varieties of pelota. Jeu de paume, or jeu de paulme as it was formerly spelled, literally means "palm game". In time, gloves replaced bare hands. Even when paddle-like bats, and finally racquets, became standard equipment for the game by the late 1600s, the name did not change. It became known as "tennis" in English (see History of tennis), and later "real tennis" after the derived game of lawn tennis became the more widely known sport.

The term is used in France today to denote the game of tennis on a court in which the ancient or modern game might be played. The indoor version is sometimes called jeu de courte paume or just courte paume ("short palm") to distinguish it from the outdoor version, longue paume ("long palm"), played on a field of variable length.

Lorna Simpson (born 1960) is an African American artist and photographer who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the High School of Art and Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then the University of California, San Diego. Her earliest work was as a documentary street photographer, before moving her observations of race and society into her studio. Simpson began exploring ethnic divisions in the 1980s era of multiculturalism. Her most notable works combine words with photographs of anonymously cropped images of women and occasionally men. While the pictures may appear straightforward, the text will often confront the viewer with the underlying racism still found in American culture.

Simpson's 1989 work, Necklines, shows two circular and identical photographs of a black woman's mouth, chin, neck, and collar bone. The white text, “ring, surround, lasso, noose, eye, areola, halo, cuffs, collar, loop”, individual words on black plaques, imply menace, binding or worse. The final phrase, text on red “feel the ground sliding from under you,” openly suggests lynching, though the adjacent images remain serene, non-confrontational and elegant.

Lisette Model (born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern; November 10, 1901 – March 30, 1983) was an Austrian-born American photographer.

Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her father was an Italian/Austrian doctor of Jewish descent attached to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army and, later, to the International Red Cross; her mother was French and Roman Catholic, and Model was baptised into her mother's faith. Two years after her birth, her parents changed their family name to Seybert. According to interview testimony from her older brother, she was sexually molested by her father, though the full extent of his abuse remains unclear.

She was primarily educated by a series of private tutors, achieving fluency in three languages. At age 19, she began studying music with composer Arnold Schönberg, and was familiar to members of his circle. "If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg," she said.

Model left Vienna for Paris after her father's death in 1924 to study voice with Polish soprano Marya Freund. It was during this period that she met her future husband, the French-Jewish painter Evsa Model. In 1933 she gave up music and recommitted herself to studying visual art, at first taking up painting as a student of Andre Lhote (whose other students included Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Hoyningen-Huene). She also took up photography, taking basic instruction in darkroom techniques from her younger sister Olga Seybert (herself a life-long professional photographer), although Parisian portrait photographer Rogi Andre was the person Model credited with providing her primary instruction in camera techniques.

Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924, Zürich), is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. His mother, Rosa, was Swiss, but his father, Hermann, had become stateless after World War I and had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo.

Barbara Hammer (born May 15, 1939) is an American filmmaker in the genre of experimental films and a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.

Hammer was born in Hollywood, California. She is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles with a Bachelor's degree in psychology. She also holds two Master's degrees from San Francisco State University, one in English literature and one in film. She also took postgraduate classes in the field of digital media.

In her early thirties, Hammer was married and teaching at a community college in Santa Rosa, California. Around this time she came out as a lesbian, after talking with another student in a Feminist group.

Hammer is known for creating groundbreaking experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. Hammer is responsible for some of the first lesbian-made films in history, including Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976).

She received the first Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award in October 2006, the Women In Film Award from the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2006, and in 2009 Barbara Hammer received the Teddy Award for the best short film for her film 'A Horse Is Not A Metaphor' at The International Berlin Film Festival.