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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Central African Republic, Gaza Strip, West Bank and India.

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The Human Toll of Europe\'s Economic Statistics

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An interactive presentation of how the debt crisis has affected five European countries accompanies this post. We urge you to view it.

The numbers are grim.

After three years of grinding austerity, the Greek gross domestic product has shrunk by 25 percent. The unemployment rate among young people is now at 50 percent, and over all about one fourth of Greeks are out of work.

Ireland has a debt burden of 117 percent of its annual G.D.P. Spain's unemployment rate is more than 25 percent, and the Portuguese government is predicting a third consecutive year of recession in 2013, with unemployment reaching nearly 16 percent.

But statistics cannot show the full impact of the European debt crisis on the countries most affected. That is what David Furst, the foreign picture editor for The New York Times, was thinking as he orchestrated his section's coverage of the economic crisis over the past year.

“From the beginning for me, this was a story about people,” said Mr. Furst, 33. “The difficulty was to somehow translate a story of statistics into images that expressed the meaning of those statistics. The problems in these countries are largely rooted in complex financial instruments that are hard to understand - and bloodless - but the fact is that they play out in the lives of ordinary people that don't know what hit them.”

Often, the images of the debt crisis in the news media are of demonstrations or homeless people. While these are important aspects of the story, they are also the most obvious visual signs of the crisis and and provide little depth or nuance to coverage. So Mr. Furst decided to have The Times's photographers look else where.

“From the outset I steered our resources away from the demonstrations and pushed the shooters to focus their energy on the impact on people's lives - the demonstrations were often an expression of the anger people feel and part of the political struggle, but they don't illustrate how people are living the crisis,” he said.

DESCRIPTIONAdam Ferguson for The New York Times Greek police rounded up suspected illegal immigrants in Athens on Aug. 31.

Over the last year, The Times published a series of photographic essays, by Samuel Aranda, Andrea Bruce, Adam Ferguson and Mauricio Lima that explored the human toll behind the numbers. The photographs have now been collected in a single online interactive slide show with text by Suzanne Daley. She writes:

When the economic crisis first hit in 2008, many Europeans assumed they were facing a couple of bad years. But the crisis, now in its fifth year, seems to go on and on, using up unemployment benefits, eating through savings accounts and dashing dreams of an easy retirement. European Union officials have struggled to turn things around - debating new treaties, shoring up banks, securing more funding. Yet, they have little to show for it. Looking ahead to 2013, the European Commission off ered nothing close to good news. “The economic and employment outlook is bleak,” the commission said in a statement.

For Mr. Aranda, who covered the Arab Spring and won a World Press Photo award last year, the assignment was unexpectedly challenging.

“When I received the assignment about the economic crisis in Spain, my first thought was that it would be nice to work in my home country. I was totally wrong,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think I faced some of the most difficult situations of my career photographing my neighborhood, friends, people that speak the same language that I do. It was hard to see people from my own country suffering and losing their homes and being evicted by police. But the big difference this time was that, unlike other assignments, I couldn't take a flight back, because I was already at home.”

Mr. Lima, who has spent much of his career covering conflicts and war, tried to to convey the size of the problem in his native Portugal, and “the lack of hope” that he found on long daily walks through Lisbon.

“I tried to give them, the people that I've met, at least dignity and respect when I held up the camera and pressed the button to capture an unpleasant scene,” he said.

Andrea Bruce, who won the first Chris Hondros Award last year, had a complex story to cover in Latvia, a country that has been heralded as a European success story. Four years ago, it was an economic basket case, but today some experts are hailing Latvia as demonstrating the healing properties of austerity measures. It laid off a third of its civil servants, and its economy has shrunk by more than 20 percent. This year, its economy grew by 5 percent, but that was not enough to improve the lot of the average Latvian.

Ms. Bruce found that residents in the capital, Riga, “still battle everyday corruption, disillusionment and a harsh economic climate.” Whereas in the countryside, she found that most people “live a very self-sufficient, farm-centered life.”

“People are private and rarely want something for free,” she wrote in an e-mail. “They value work, and they live with the belief that speaking out against the government or drawing attention to themselves doesn't help. Nearly a generation of Latvians were sent to Siberia or killed. The average person in Greece is more well-off than most Latvians, but Latvians rarely take to the streets.”

In the interactive published today, Ms. Daley wrote:

Over the past year, the countries hit hard est by the crisis -Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland - have struggled to bring down their debts. They have raised taxes, laid off workers, reduced services and charged for medical care that had been free for decades. Each country had its own formula. But they were joined in the misery of trying to make do on less - and then even less. No amount of cutting seemed to be enough. Businesses continued to fail at a rapid pace. Even those who thought they were safe lost their jobs. Those who had work saw their salaries reduced. Parents watched their children fly off to other countries looking for employment. Or welcomed them back to their childhood rooms because, unable to pay their own mortgages, they were losing their homes to foreclosures.

DESCRIPTIONAndrea Bruce for T he New York Times A college-educated Latvia woman who lives with her brother and parents on their dairy farm just outside Cessis, Latvia, on Dec. 19.

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It Was a Big Year for Long-Form Journalism at The Times

As George Harrison once sang, it's “been a long, long, long time.” I'm talking about 2012, when many long, long, long stories appeared in The Times.

One reason for that is that The Times published a lot of great journalism over the past year. Hugely ambitious projects often take a lot of space to tell (though length certainly is not synonymous with greatness).

And while greatness is subjective â€" though one thinks of Wal-Mart's abuses, “Donna's Diner” and the wealth of the Chinese prime minister's family in that context â€" length is not.

So here are th e numbers:

In 2012, 33 articles of more than 4,000 words originated on the front page. (Six of those were in December.) That's up â€" a lot â€" from 16 the previous year; 21 in 2010; and 23 in 2009.

The longest of all of those that originated on the front page? Clyde Haberman's masterly obituary of The Times's publisher Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger clocked in at 7,725 words. (“Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” a separate section but all one article, was much longer still at 16,537, but did not technically begin on the front page, which is what we're measuring here.)

The Sports section joined in the long-form fun, too, with 15 stories that were more than 4,000 words â€" only one of which began on A1, the rest appearing in the Sports section. In 2011, by comparison, there were only five, and in 2010, there was one; in 2009, none at all.

Thanks to my excellent assistant Joseph Burgess, for his research on these numbers and his invaluable help throughout my first four months as public editor.

Times readers, I look forward to representing your interests in the new year. Thanks to all of you for your correspondence, your comments on my blogs and columns, and your passionate interest in The Times and its journalism.



Israel\'s Flourishing Russian Culture

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It's fair to say that Oded Balilty knows Israel. He grew up in Jerusalem and has been covering the country as a photographer for The Associ ated Press since 2002.

But this year, as he photographed the Russian community there, he learned - to his surprise - that he still had a lot to learn. At least about the Russians that make up more than 15 percent of the population of Israel.

In a country full of Jewish immigrants, children of immigrants, and grandchildren of immigrants, Israeli Russians have retained a sense of their culture, language and identity. Yet they remain slightly apart.

Mr. Balilty set out to explore the community precisely because he, and his friends, knew so little about them. He photographed boxing matches, chess games and Russian nightclubs and often found that not a word of Hebrew was spoken all night.

“Some days, I felt like I was in Eastern Europe, but five minutes from my house,” Mr. Balilty said.

DESCRIPTIONOded Balilty/Associated Press A Russian-speaking Israeli security guard in the V.I.P. room of a nightclub where he works in Tel Aviv.

Israel has the third-largest Russian-speaking population outside of Russia, after the United States and Germany. As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s into the 1990s, a flood of Russians with Jewish ties, sometimes tenuous, departed for Israel. They were leaving a land that historically had been less than welcoming to Jews for a land where they would be in the majority.

In Israel, they have become successful in academia, technology, sports and politics. Yisrael Beiteinu, a nationalist political party with a secular, Russian-speaking base, has become a powerful force in Israeli politics.

Mr. Balilty's journey starte d a year ago, at a large Russian New Year's Eve celebration. In Israel, most people celebrate the Jewish lunar new year, Rosh Hashana. Mr. Balilty said that he can appreciate continuing one's culture, as his parents had emigrated from Morocco to Israel.

“The Russians are totally Israeli. They work like everyone else, often in high-tech jobs, but at night they can live in a different world,” Mr. Balilty, 33, said. “They came here with a beautiful culture, but the culture didn't open to the Israeli people. I hope someday that Israel will be able to fully experience it.”

DESCRIPTIONOded Balilty/Associated Press A Russian folk music festival in northern Israel.

Mr. Balilty, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his memorable photograph of a West Bank settler holding off a phalanx of Israeli security forces, was featured on Lens earlier this year for his images of a Hasidic wedding.

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Pictures of the Day: Kashmir and Elsewhere

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Photos from Kashmir, New York, Germany and Nepal.

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Summing Up a Year in Pictures

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In 2012, The New York Times brought its print and online readers comprehensive, immediate and intimate visual coverage of news around the world and in the New York region, including: brutal urban warfare in Syria, Hurricane Sandy's destruction, a hard- fought election victory for President Obama and the mass murder of adults and children at a Connecticut elementary school.

A collection of the best of The Times's photographic coverage - the 2012 Pictures of the Year - will be published in The New York Times on Sunday and an expanded version is viewable in an elegant online display.

The multimedia and print package, edited and produced by Whitney Dangerfield, Rodrigo Honeywell, Jon Huang, Meaghan Looram and Jeffrey Henson Scales, features 91 photographs and text by the writer Colum McCann.

Introducing the Year in Pictures, Mr. McCann writes:

“As 2011 slid back into history - dragging along the false dawn of an Arab Spring, the rolled-up tents of Zuccotti Park, the sky grown nuclear over Fukushima - a lean promise of optimism fell over 2012. An election year. The London Olympics. And there was always the vague hope that we would not become hostage to the catastrophe of weather yet again. The images burned their way into our minds.”

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Babies, Beasts and the Bizarre From Times Contests Past

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A dog, standing tall and proud on its hind legs, pushes a wicker carriage along a sidewalk. Inside, a spotted rabbit plays the role of infant. The two actors stare directly into each other's eyes.

“Let's Go Places,” wrote Vincent Stelcik, an amateur photographer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who submitted the picture to a New York Times photo contest in 1936.

The image was published in The Times's Mid-Week Pictorial, a rotogravure publication sold separately from the newspaper. The extra feature, which cost 10 cents, was published between 1914 and the year that Mr. Stelcik won a $10 prize for his submission.

In the 1930s, the Pictorial often included photos by the winners of these monthly picture contests. Recently, some of the winning photographs were discovered tucked away in a handful of manila folders in the morgue, the newsroom archive. For more than three years, Lens has been unearthing photos from the rows of filing cabinets found there. In February, the series, “The Lively Morgue,” found a second home on a Tumblr blog of the same name.

These photos are the first we have discovered within the collection that were submitted by readers, in the days before crowd-sourcing was a digital transaction.

So what did Times readers of the 1930s photograph?

Helen Louise Barham received $15 for an image from Mexico (Slide 17). “Picture taken a few minutes before the beginning of heavy rain,” the text on the back of the photo reads. Ms. Barham, of Nashville, took the picture at 3:30 one afternoon the previous October using a Rolleiflex 6-by-6 camera. It was printed with the caption “Mexican Pastoral.”

Pictures of children won hearts, of course. Cherie French of Seattle did well - first prize, $15, in September 1934 - for her photograph titled “Lunch Time.” A blond toddler in her Sunday best appears to be feeding a banana to a turtle (Slide 14). The following year, a picture of boxing babies by Ray Hamilton of Denver won $3 - no matter that the boxers don't look very pleased to be in front of the camera (Slide 11).

In many of the images, a sense of humor prevails. This was an amateur contest, after all, so we can be fairly certain that the photographers were not professionals. In most cases, these weren't attempts at photojournalism, but intricately arranged projects.

L. Dibert of Philadelphia won first prize for a noir photograph of a model seen from the back beneath an imposing shadow - a ghoulish hand moving in from the darkness (Slide 4). Ronald L. Ives of Boulder, Colo., called his moody photo of Fern Hough, “'Santo Cristo, en Cielo--' a portrait study by candlelight” (Slide 19).

There is one obvious exception. H. S. Ulan - whose portrait printed with the caption “Cynic” (Slide 12) - appears to have worked as a professional photographer, having shot similarly pensive portraits of A lbert Einstein around the same time. For the Cynic, H. S. won $15.

The going rate for a portrait of Einstein has yet to be determined.

Kodak

The New York Times's photo contests were not unlike those hosted by Kodak. Some of those photos, which live at Rush Rhees Library in Rochester, appeared on Lens earlier this year.

Research contributed by Andrea Rice. Follow @kerrimac and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. The Lively Morgue is also on Tumblr, and Lens is on Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, West Bank, Pakistan and India.

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\'Snow Fall\' Tells a Story About an Avalanche and a Newspaper\'s Digital Progress

With its spectacular graphics and photography, and its beautifully written narrative, “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” was a compelling project, even for those who might not have been particularly interested in the topic.

The effort, which appeared last week, received around 2.9 million visits, and the visitors shared some qualities that are much desired by The Times. First, many of them â€" maybe as many as one-third - were new visitors to The Times. Second, they spent a lot of time with the project, about 12 minutes, which amounts to eons for a single digital story.

In an e-mail to the newsroom, Jill Abramson, the executive editor, called it a “wildly new reading experience.” She summed it up by noting that “rarely have we been able to create a compelling destination outside the home page that was so engaging in such a short period of time on the Web.”

Clearly, this is something The Times hopes to do more of, and others will undoubtedly do it, as well. The Web site PaidContent wrote about it at length in a piece this week on a major media trend of 2012, “The Rise of the E-Single.”

Not every Times reader was happy with every aspect of the project, though. John Ray of Fairfield, Conn., objected to its being treated as a “breaking news alert,” which was one of the ways The Times let its readers know of its existence. He wrote that wording of the alert, “The Avalance at Tunnel Creek,” created anxiety:

Considering what we in our region, especially here in Connecticut, have been through lately, another possible disaster or horrible story made me jump. I shortly learned this was an evergreen p iece someone at The Times decided to promote in a very inappropriate way.

Bob Dowling of Rowayton, Conn., recognized its unusual quality but would prefer The Times to spend its efforts on meatier topics:

As a skier and mountain climber I care a lot about avalanches. But even I needed to reserve an hour the next day to read the section and wondered why. Wonderfully written and reported but so what!…

So I wondered: what if they spent six months and 14 pages with that kind of detailed reporting on the kids killed in Newtown. Asking “How does it feel at the moment when a .223 Bushmaster dum-dum bullet enters the forehead? How about 11 of them? How do you squeeze off six rounds a second?

Have the reporter try it, have a pro try it. Give us the visual. Even better, set up the classroom with dummy kids and do the scene in print and visual with sound. Compare it to a video game that Adam Lanza played. That kind of detailed reconst ruction could change the terms of the gun debate.

Clearly, The Times is experimenting with new forms of storytelling â€" and new ways to thrive in the digital age.

Another reader, Asa Pefferman, offered effusive praise and a hint of its important appeal to a new generation:

I was blown away by the avalanche text-video piece you guys did and I just wanted to let you know that it was great. I'm 24, get all my news online, and have never considered subscribing to any news service but that whole presentation made me reconsider. Please do more of that and don't let it be just an experiment. Also, as a graphic designer, I really appreciate a nice layout, and that was a big part of the appeal. So thanks for the good experience!

While I don't dismiss the concerns of some readers, the project was an impressive new way to tell a compelling story. Its popularity bodes well for a newspaper company that is reinventing itself â €" because, like all newspaper companies, it must.



Capturing a Childhood Idyll in France

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You're piggybacking on your brother's shoulders, the wind on your face as you run through the grass. You're messy, climbing, hair astray. You're belly-down on a swing. Flying.

DESCRIPTIONAlain Laboile

In his series of carefully composed black-and-white images that make up “La Famille,” the French photographer Alain Laboile has captured a sense of youthful freedom through the exploits of his six children.

Mr. Laboile publishes his photos in serial form, sharing them with the world from the user name “lab oil” on Flickr. They are simple, beautiful moments.

A sculptor by trade, Mr. Laboile bought a sm all digital camera to photograph his work in 2004. He became interested in macro photography and later began documenting the children: Four girls - Olyana, now 16; Luna, 14; Dune, 5; and Nil, 4 - and two boys - Merlin, 12, and Eliott, 18, a student who now lives in Bordeaux.

DESCRIPTIONAlain Laboile

Theirs is a family photo album thrown before the world. Taken as a whole, the images do not evoke anything specific, so much as a feeling. Mr. Laboile's constant presence has rendered his lens nearly invisible; the children continue their games, rarely acknowledging the camera. He never asks the children to pose, but if one of them doesn't like a picture he has taken, he won't publish it online.

He originally joined an online photography community seeking com ments and criticism from other photographers. “When social networks appeared,” he wrote in French via e-mail, “I continued to share this with my friends, then gradually with strangers around the world.”

The reception, he said, has been a pleasant surprise â€" comments from people whose own childhood memories are stirred by the images. The feedback encouraged him to continue sharing the work.

DESCRIPTIONAlain Laboile

When one commenter noted that the photos have the feel of street photography, Mr. Laboile happily adopted the idea. “I really liked the analogy,” he said.

Most of the viewers are drawn to the nostalgic quality of the work. “That's a sweet reminder of youthful delight,” one commenter wrote on a photo posted to Flickr last week.

Mr. Laboile was born in Gironde, in the southwest of France, in 1968. He never left. He likes to think of the stream that borders his family's property as a boundary between the realm that is theirs and the world everyone else inhabits. “The stream on the edge of the world,” he said.

Despite his careful documentation, Mr. Laboile has only one picture from his own childhood. “The practice of photography isn't a family legacy, but a personal passion,” he said.

What happens when the children grow up?

“I think I will continue, as long as there are children at home,” Mr. Laboile said, but he added that while he had other types of photography to explore, the family album remained a constant.

And maybe, he mused, there will be grandchildren down the road.

DESCRIPTIONAlain Laboile

Mr. Laboile's images from “La Famille” are on display through Feb. 8 at the Centre Communal d'Action Sociale in Bordeaux. They were exhibited at the Salon de la Photo in Paris and Galerie L'Area in Nice, and, more recently, were projected at the Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia.

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Pictures of the Day: Nigeria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Nigeria, Syria, Mexico and Israel.

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The Images of 2012: Sports

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The year started triumphantly for New York sports fans as the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI with a narrow last-minute victory over the New England Patriots. In addition, the Nets moved to Brooklyn and returned major professional sports to the land the Dodgers had forsaken.

Despite the concerns of a United States presidential candidate, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London were successful, producing stirring moments like the U.S. women's soccer team's defeat of Japan for the gold medal. The swimmer Michael Phelps increased his career total to a record 22 medals, including 18 golds.

DESCRIPTIONDarryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated Pres s Mike Bolt, keeper of the Stanley Cup, retrieved it from the ice after a surprise visit to a youth practice game Dec. 7 in Vancouver. During the N.H.L. lockout, five hockey teams in Canada were randomly chosen to receive a surprise appearance by the Stanley Cup as part a hockey sponsorship program.

Usain Bolt doubled down on the gold and emphatically demonstrated that he is the fastest man ever.

But the biggest story in American sports was not on a field, but in a courtroom. On June 22, Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was found guilty on 45 counts of sexual abuse of young boys. In July, an independent investigation concluded that the most senior officials at Penn State, including the legendary coach Joe Paterno, failed for more than a decade to take any steps to pro tect the children victimized by Mr. Sandusky. Mr. Paterno died last January.

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims,” said Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the F.B.I. who oversaw the investigation.

On July 23, the N.C.A.A. imposed penalties on Penn State, including a four-year postseason ban.

Despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's original insistence that the race must go on, the 42nd New York City Marathon was canceled after Hurricane Sandy killed 97 people in the metropolitan area and ravaged the coastlines of New York and New Jersey. Some marathoners ran the course anyway, passing long lines of people waiting to buy gasoline for their cars and generators.

DESCRIPTIONDaniel Ochoa De Olza/Associated Press The Spaniard Juan Jose Padilla during a bullfight in Olivenza, Spain, on March 4. Padilla, who lost sight in one eye and sustained partial facial paralysis after a terrifying goring, returned to the bullring five months after his injury.

Hockey fans are still waiting for the N.H.L. season to start after 100 days of a lockout by the owners over a labor dispute with the players union.

R. A. Dickey became the first Met to win 20 games since 1990 and the first to win the Cy Young Award since 1985. So, of course, the Mets traded him - and his knuckleball - to the Toronto Blue Jays in December. As fans used to say in Brooklyn, “Wait till next year.”

DESCRIPTIONLaurent Cipriani/Associated Press Competitors in the men's ski cross World Cup event in Val Thorens in the French Alps on Dec. 19.

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, India, Afghanistan and West Bank.

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In Western China, Steep Highs and Steep Lows

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The high-rises of Chongqing, in western China, are built on hills; it is a city of steep ups and downs.

Everything about it seems large and unwieldy - it is home to nearly 30 million people and sits on the third largest river in the world, the Yangtze. It was a seething hotbed of organized crime during the first decade of the new millennium, and then just as renowned for the efficacy of its ambitious crime-busting officials, notably party secretary Bo Xilai and police chief Wang Lijun.

Bo Xilai fell this year from his vertiginous perch as a contender for the standing committee of China's politburo - expelled from the party and his career in ruins - after Mr. Wang revealed that Mr. Bo's wife had m urdered a British businessman. Mr. Wang was jailed in September for defection and abuse of power.

This sprawling megacity, the locus of scandals and political machinations, has fixed the interest of Tim Franco, a Shanghai-based French photographer. With his ongoing series, “Vertical Communism,” Mr. Franco endeavors to show how the political and cultural forces of the area shape the cityscape and how ordinary people are affected as Chongqing elbows its way into modernity.

For Mr. Franco, Chongqing is a “good representation of what's happening in China in general.” Its growing pains are severe, yet it seems to pass into new phases of development rapidly (it only officially became the single, unified municipality we know today in 1997), and it is one of the sites where China' s leaders sought to resettle the millions displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project.

Mr. Franco, though awed by Chongqing's bustle and brio, was keen to focus on its people. He is conversational in Mandarin and speaks English, French and Polish (though he lamented how few opportunities he has gotten recently to speak Polish). He observed a city with a colorful history that is largely populated by people “definitely not used to living in an urban area,” and he was struck by the swiftness with which new constructions went up, even at the cost of destroying sites of cultural value.

“People are so interested in becoming a modern country, that they don't have a self-consciousness of cultural heritage,” he said. “This is on government level, but I feel like when I speak to the peo ple - it's also at the people level.”

He was told by residents, “ ‘If you look at where I live now, and in one year the government can give me an apartment in a modern building, what do you choose?' ” Mr. Franco recounted. And he was unable to challenge their logic. “If you can choose between a place with barely no electricity and a place with floor heating and air conditioning, I can understand,” he said.

Mr. Franco said that assessing the area's most famous politician can be complicated for residents. Mr. Bo was popular: he rounded up criminals and his deputy had the city's most notorious mob boss tried and executed. He espoused leftist causes and struck a populist tone that resonated with many. Yet his methods were brutal - there were accusations of torture - and his ascent was characterized by swiftness and ruthlessness.

Swiftness certainly describes the pace of change of Chongqing's landscape. Mr. Franco regrets missing an opportunity or two, arriving too late to photograph some of those cultural treasures. Chiang Kai-Shek's residence, for example - dating back to the 1930s when Chiang made Chongqing his provisional capital - was demolished so quickly that he could not get there before it was gone. The demolitions are speedy.

Mr. Franco recognizes that the city is far too complicated to fully capture with a camera, though he does not intend to stop.

Some have asked why he showed the uglier parts of the city, urging him to photograph the more modern parts. And he intends to, though he says there will be plenty of time for that.

“I try to show what the city is becoming, and remember how the city was,” he said. “And in a few years, it will be more importan t to look at this. You always have the modern part.”

DESCRIPTIONTim Franco People young and old enjoy an afternoon on the banks of the Jialing River, facing the central Yuzhong district of Chongqing.

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The Images of 2012: New York

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For many in New York and elsewhere, 2012 will forever be connected to a pair of devastating disasters: the widespread damage caused by Hurricane Sandy and the wrenching massacre of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sa ndy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Tragedy, of course, lays first claim to attention, and so Metropolitan's Year in Pictures is filled with images of the storm's aftermath, and of grief-stricken families in Connecticut.

DESCRIPTIONRobert Caplin for The New York Times A man who goes by Adam Sandler was escorted from the park by police after an anti-Semitic tirade.

But the year was not just one of sorrow. It was also a year in which the 126th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show was held, and the Barclays Center - and the Brooklyn Nets - arrived in Downtown Brooklyn. It was a year of weekends at the beach, the canceled marathon, an oddly temperate winter and an election-laden fall. It was a year in which one man (the mayor) banned the sale of sweetened drinks larger than 16 ounces, and another (in an Elmo costume) shocked crowds at the Central Park Zoo by preposterously spouting anti-Semitic insults.

In August, the police shot and killed a knife-wielding man named Darrius H. Kennedy as tourists in Times Square recorded cellphone video from the sidewalks. A month later, the police shot and killed a Bronx bodega worker, Reynaldo Cuevas, as he fled from a robbery.
Twelve police officers were shot this year, but all survived; the suspect in one shooting, Luis Ortiz, mugged gaptoothed for the media as he was hauled away in handcuffs.

Which one of these images might come to define the year? Only time and that calm and melancholy len s called perspective will tell.

DESCRIPTIONLibrado Romero/The New York Times McCarren Pool in Brooklyn reopened in June after 28 years.

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Syria, Kenya and Connecticut.

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Pictures of the Day: Russia and Elsewhere

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Photos from Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

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Images of Emancipation

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The portrait for the carte-de-visite of Sojourner Truth, the African-American abolitionist and women's rights advocate, was taken in Battle Creek, Mich., in the 1860s (Slide 5). She wears an elegant silk dress and shawl. With one hand resting on her hip, the other on the arm of the chair, her pose is majestic and determined. She stares resolutely into the camera.

But it is the object in her lap that remains one of the image's most revelatory details: an open daguerreotype of her grandson James Caldwell, a soldier during the Civil War.

The daguerreotype's pride of place speaks not only to Truth's love for her grandchild but also to her passionate engagement with photography. As Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer write in their groundbreaking new book, “Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery” (Temple University Press), Truth was probably the first black woman to actively distribute photographs of herself.

Those pictures were meant to affirm her status as a sophisticated and respectable “free woman and as a woman in control o f her image.” The public's fascination with carte-de-visites, small and collectible card-mounted photographs, allowed her to advance her abolitionist cause to a huge audience and earn a living through their sale. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” proclaimed the famous slogan for these pictures.

DESCRIPTIONCourtesy of the Library of Congress Susie King Taylor, 1902.

Truth was not alone in her understanding of the power of photography. A host of other African-Americans, both eminent and ordinary, employed the medium as an instrument of political engagement and inspiration. “Envisioning Emancipation” argues that photography was not incidental but central to the war against slavery, racism and segregation in the antebellum period of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s.

The book explores how blacks “positioned themselves and were posed by others” in order to advance, question or alter prevailing ideas about race. It examines the ways the national debate about slavery was played out in photographs, for example, from the standpoint of abolitionists, who published them as proof of the brutality and immorality of slavery, and its supporters, who engaged photographs as visual evidence of its “natural order and orderliness.”

Pseudoscientists, like Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born and Harvard-trained zoologist, adapted the medium to further notions of black aberrance and inferiority. Agassiz employed invasive daguerreotypes of naked slaves - the “pornography of forced labor,” as they have been aptly described - to verify his theory of polygenesis, the separate human origins of Africans and Europeans, and emphasize the relative lowliness of the former.

Abolitionists used photographs to convince Northern whites - for whom the prospect of emancipation elicited responses ranging from skepticism to violence - of the unjustness of slavery. They stirred public sentiment by offering visual evidence of slavery's abuses as well as of the wholesomeness of an emerging class of freed blacks. Juxtaposing pictures of hapless children, posed barefoot and dressed in ragged clothes, with images of the same children wearing neatly pressed and undamaged garments, for example, abolitionists were able to convey the idea that a formerly enslaved people, now rendered as attractive and healthy, were worthy of liberation.

DESCRIPTIONAugustus Washington, Courtesy of the Library of Congress Urias Africanus McGill, a Baltimore-born merchant, in Liberia. 1854.

As Ms. Willis and Ms. Krauthamer note, freedom for African-Americans was not instantly achieved with the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863; it evolved fitfully, over many decades. During that time, it was photographs created largely by and for African-Americans that helped an oppressed people to imagine their own freedom. Prominent black leaders, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, routinely turned to the medium, much as Sojourner Truth did, to further their abolitionist campaigns.

Soon, increasingly inexpensive imaging technology, coupled with a growing national network of black-owned photo studios, permitted African-Americans of all economic classes, even “the servant girl,” as Douglass observed, to construct their own versions of themselves. This affirmative imagery served to countermand destructive and pervasive stereotypes, steeling African-Americans against the ruthless forces of intolerance while simultaneously convincing white people of their shared humanity.

In the end, “Envisioning Emancipation” recounts a dynamic history of black self-possession and self-determination, one that challenges the abiding myth of the crusade against slavery and segregation: that of passive black victims who obtained freedom mostly through the benevolence and generosity of their white saviors.

DESCRIPTIONHenry P. Moore, Courtesy of the Library of Congress Sweet potato planting, James Hopkinson's plantation, 1862.

That myth does not die easily. It haunts popular culture, no more so than in Steven Spielberg's just-released film about the 16th president's epic battle against slavery, “Lincoln.” Despite the nuanced portrayal of its protagonist, “Lincoln” is almost devoid of images of active black resistance and protest, ignoring a wealth of research “demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation,” as the historian Kate Masur wrote last month in this newspaper.

“For my community, the message has been clear,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates recently observed, “the Civil War is a story for white people - acted out by white people, and on white people's terms - in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.” “Envisioning Emancipation” brilliantly rewrites this story, insisting that we acknowledge the names and faces of people who have been invisible for too long.

DESCRIPTIONCourtesy of the Library of Congress Two brothers in arms, 1860s.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.” Mr. Berger has worked with Ms. Willis on exhibitions and publications.

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.



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