Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gaza and New York.

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Photo Caption Should Have Been Better. But \'Orwellian\'? No.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Girls at a Gaza school were stunned to find it closed. An emboldened Hamas may lead Israel to harden its stance.

The image is moving and emotional. As great photography does, it takes readers someplace, puts us at the scene.

In this case, the destination is Gaza City, where seven schoolgirls â€" clad in their backpacks and blue-striped uniforms with white-eyelet collars â€" have arrived at school only to find that it has been severely damaged by Israeli bombs and therefore closed. They look shocked â€" one girl's hand covers her mouth, another has her hand at her throat .

The photographer Tyler Hicks shot the picture on Saturday, and it appeared at the top of the front page of Sunday's New York Times. Like much of Mr. Hicks's photography, it is evocative, capturing circumstances memorably.

By Sunday afternoon, I had heard from a number of readers and media writers who were critical of the caption, which under a headline that read “Prospects Worsen for Mideast Peace Talks,” said “Girls at a Gaza school were stunned to find it closed. An emboldened Hamas may lead Israel to harden its stance. Page 12.”

Greg Mitchell, a media blogger for The Nation, went so far as to call the caption “Disgraceful, some might say Orwellian.”

“Why closed? You had to go to other photos way over at the NYT site to find out that the school was completely destroyed by an Israeli air strike. The caption might even suggest to some that Hamas had shut down a lightly damaged school. While pro minent placement of the photo might draw criticism from Israelis, the caption seemed aimed at softening that.”

The caption certainly could have been better. But after gathering information from the photographer and an assistant foreign editor, looking at the photographer's original description of the photograph, looking at other photographs from the same shoot and thinking about the caption's multiple purpose, I think that criticism is overstated.

Douglas Schorzman, an assistant foreign editor, told me that it wasn't clear to editors in New York how damaged the building was. “If it was leveled, we just should have said so,” he said. But “on deadline and in the moment, we may not have known that.” And in fact, it wasn't leveled, so it made sense to be cautious.

I exchanged e-mail messages with Mr. Hicks, who wrote that the school was not “completely destroyed.”

“The building was still standing but not safe or in any con dition to be occupied by students,” he said. His original written description, provided to editors on Saturday, said only that the school was damaged.

In addition, the brief caption was serving a second purpose â€" as a way to direct readers to an inside page where several articles were displayed, including one about the prospects for peace talks and the role of Hamas.

Meanwhile, some readers, including Jonathan Blank, saw a different problem with the photograph. They thought that choosing it for the front page showed anti-Israeli bias:

So once again, the Times has opted to editorialize against Israel and in favor of Hamas. I know many people and organizations have long told the Times of its anti-Israel stance, but nothing depicts this better than today's selection of Gazan girls over (Hamas leader Khaled) Meshaal's declaration of war. Perhaps you, as an independent Times insider, can explain to the public why the Times would side with Hamas - an inference that the picture of innocent Gazan girls certainly conveys - over Hamas' reiteration of its intention to destroy Israel.

I have two conclusions: 1.) The Times's coverage of this conflict cannot begin to be judged by the choice of one photo on one day. It has to be put in context over time. (I haven't done that kind of long-term study, though I am paying careful attention to the coverage.) I reject the idea that the choice of this photo indicates an anti-Israeli bias.

2.) The caption could have been clearer and more informative â€" even in a short space, and even with its multiple purpose in mind. It could have briefly described the damage to the school and how it happened. It could have avoided the confusing juxtaposition of the sentence about the school and the one about “emboldened Hamas.” But it was not disgraceful and it was not Orwellian.

A Reckoning at the Frontier

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Mexico's northern borderlands have a dry, rugged feel in Eros Hoagland's photographs - bathed in hot, pale light, with details emerging from the sepia-toned shadows. From quiet moments of mourning and foreboding to wide vistas of a landscape that has challenged generations, he purposely chose this arid palette to illustrate how the drug war has played out along the border.

He acknowledges that he was influenced by the look of the movie “Traffic.” But what he really wanted was the feel - in both his pictures and, more important, among viewers whose emotions have been numbed by the flood of graphic images from the lingering conflict.

“I wanted to develop my own desert look,” said Mr. Hoagland, 43. “I was unsure how the journalistic community would take it. It was a form of manipulation. They'd say, ‘That's not how things look.' But to me, the way things felt kind of trumped that concern.”

Those feelings - haunting, lonely and heartbreaking - suffuse the images in “Reckoning at the Frontier,” a result of his seven years of photographing in and around the border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. He intends to publish a book of those images, financed through a Kickstarter campaign that ends this month. His work along the border is also the subject of “Witness: Juarez,” the ini tial installment of an HBO documentary series about conflict photography.

“These people and places are so familiar to us,” Mr. Hoagland said. “We have such an intercambio with Mexico. It's not some far-off exotic conflict in Africa, and yet people can't relate to it very well. It's on our doorstep. We share our country with them. We vacation there. I wanted to put a sense of place to the news headlines.”

Having started in photojournalism in 1993, he tried early on to do a border series, but whether it was because he was green or lacked a solid vision, the project never gelled. Professionally, he followed a path familiar to his generation, working in El Salvador, Colombia and Mexico, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He returned to Mexico in 2005, photographing whatever caught his attention within a mile of the border. He showed some of his initial work to Susan Meiselas, who encouraged him.

“I thought it was important for him to dig into o ne place that could be his own,” Ms. Meiselas said. “I think the danger for a lot of young photographers is they move around lots of places and don't get to know any place well. What I was feeling - not just seeing - was it was a place he had some real kinship to, rather than a place he just passes through.”

Eros Hoagland Members of a Juarez church group sometimes dress up like angels to protest the city's violence.

Over the period of his project, Mr. Hoagland's attention shifted from immigration and people-smuggling to out-of-control violence of the drug wars, where it is sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad. He made that conflict the focus of his project, though keeping the other visual elements that had draw n him to the region.

“It all felt pretty organic,” said Mr. Hoagland, who lives in Tijuana. “I was still interested in the land itself, the geography and how the geography plays into all the politics going on there. You're butting up against the U.S. There's something about this harsh land where over the generations people have somehow eked out a living.”

His palette - warm, desaturated and high contrast - was one way he tried to convey the gritty and unforgiving emotional feel. So, too, was the distance he kept in some shots. It reflected the emotional distance he encountered among his subjects, who were cautious, if not paranoid, and for good reason.

“One of the themes running through my head is everyone is scared, no one knows who anybody is,” he said. “I wanted to convey that with the actual physical distance. Like you're not supposed to be there. Like I'm not supposed to be there.”

There is a searing moment in “Witness: Juarez† in which that sentiment resounds stunningly. Mr. Hoagland and a Mexican colleague respond to the scene of a triple homicide, where a mother sobs for her dead son. A man in the crowd urges him to leave the woman alone.

“Respect the pain, my friend,” the man says. “Would you like your kids to be killed also?”

“I know what it feels like,” Mr. Hoagland replies. As he walks off into the night and back to his car, he mutters to himself. “Don't tell me I don't know what it feels like. … There were cameras all over my dad's funeral, too.”

His father was John Hoagland, a photojournalist who was killed in 1984 while covering the civil war in El Salvador for Newsweek. His son recalled in the documentary the counsel his mother, Nancy, gave him when his father's death drew international news media attention.

“Don't get mad, Son,” he recalled her saying. “They're just doing their job, just like your dad did.”

Doing that job has bec ome increasingly difficult in places like Mexico, where journalists face terrifying levels of violence and intimidation. He credits Mexican colleagues like Julian Cardona with helping him learn how to read - and feel - a crime scene, knowing when it's O.K. to shoot or better to leave.

To some extent, Mr. Hoagland knew that already from his father's fate.

“I realized how quickly you can get zapped out there,” he said. “It made me really cautious. I don't run into things. I walk in and figure things out.”

That back story informs his images, said David Frankham, the co-executive producer of “Witness” with Michael Mann.

“He relates on a human level,” Mr. Frankham said. “He's not just there taking pictures, for the visuals. He relates to the struggle and to the pain. It's visual information and also emotion. It's both. It's the external and the internal. He's very strong and holds a lot in. But you feel it in his work.”

Although h e said his own loss could never compare with what others in El Salvador or Mexico have endured, Mr. Hoagland said it gave him a bond of sorts with his subjects.

“I've found this common ground trying to deal with people's pain because I've been dealing with the pain for years,” he said. “It helps me not to get too sentimental or caught up in death. My mom for years was a hospice nurse, and I talked to her about these things. It's always been there in my life, dealing with death. That's the way of things. People die. It can be sad and heartbreaking. And life goes on.”

Eros Hoagland An altar's shadow near a highway that is often used to ship drugs to and from Tijuana, Mexico.

Follow Eros Hoagland, handle @GueroFantasma , David Gonzalez - @dgbxny - and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.