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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.



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