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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, South Korea, North Korea and Vatican City.

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Sunday Column: A Mind of Their Own, and the Freedom to Speak It

A Mind of Their Own, and the Freedom to Speak It

SEVERAL years ago, the columnist Paul Krugman veered from his usual practice of writing about the economy and began writing columns about the war in Iraq.

“Management let me know that I might make some people happier if I wrote less about that and more about economics,” Mr. Krugman recalled recently in an e-mail.

His response

“I said thanks, and went on doing what I was doing,” he said. “Then Wall Street blew up the world economy, which moved me into comfortable terrain for all concerned.”

The Krugman anecdote is notable because it is rare.

Readers ask me about this on a fairly regular basis: How much freedom do The Times’s star columnists have Are they edited or directed at all Given their stature, would anyone dare

Robert Manson of Marlborough, Mass., posed the question recently in an e-mail:

“I know that Times columnists are free to choose to write what they please, and I certainly consider that to be a good thing. However, I am writing to ask whether there is any type of check on columnists with respect to the subjects they choose, or the tone and content of their pieces.”

Mr. Manson wrote to me just after the publication of a column, “It Takes One to Tango,” by Maureen Dowd. It portrayed President Obama as an introvert who failed to socialize with Republicans and others in ways that would help his cause. It is something Ms. Dowd has written about before, and Mr. Manson thinks it’s enough, already.

“Ms. Dowd is famous for deploying sharply critical remarks about the personal foibles of presidents, and I suppose she should be commended for being nonpartisan about it (she was equally harsh with respect to Presidents Clinton and Bush, although for other reasons),” he wrote. But, describing himself as “an introvert in my own right,” he wondered, “If Ms. Dowd chooses to devote every column she writes over the next four years to ripping the president for failing to schmooze sufficiently,” is she free to do so

To explore the issue, I interviewed Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, and I surveyed the Op-Ed columnists, including Gail Collins, who was the previous editorial page editor. The response was unanimous: Columnists have almost inviolable free rein on subject matter. But that “almost” is important.

One recent exception was Mr. Rosenthal’s directive that columnists not all write about the Newtown school massacre within a day or two of one another.

Another constraint is still more rare: deciding against publishing a column that has been written. Mr. Rosenthal said he had done it only once.

“I had to say, ‘We’re not going to print that column,’ “ he recalled, declining to provide specifics, other than to say it was “inappropriate.” Some time later, the columnist wrote on the same subject in a different way, and the piece was published.

But for the most part, columnists write as they see fit for as long as they are granted the platform, which for most of them is a very long time. While they all appreciate their freedom, a few said they wouldn’t mind having a regular sounding board. Ms. Dowd was among this group.

“All writers can use an editor,” she said, “especially those of us charged with ‘stirring the beast,’ as the political cartoonist Pat Oliphant used to call editorializing.”

These writers usually send their columns directly to copy editors, who may raise questions of word choice, clarity and the logic of their arguments. And many of the columnists praise the ability and judgment of those copy editors.

Bill Keller, the former executive editor and now a columnist, thinks the autonomy is good: “The last thing you want is a stable of columnists who conform to a party line; or who sound the same; or who are timid about saying something provocative. You do want columnists to be fair, to deal in facts, to be reasonably civil, and to be clear and readable.” He does not think the columnists are untouchable on those grounds.

But, as the Krugman story suggests, trying to direct The Times’s columnists can be an exercise in humility. Mr. Rosenthal offered an analogy: “I can tell my cat to sit, and sometime within the next six months the cat will sit, and I can take credit for it.”

But he agrees that it is important to “tell people what you think and give feedback.” This happens, he said, in many ways, including regular (at least annual) dinners that he and the Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., have with each columnist.

Still, the writers are largely on their own. As Ms. Collins put it, “You are on a tightrope without a net â€" but you get used to it.”

-

My blog has featured two recent posts about a much discussed and contested test drive of the Tesla Model S electric car, which was described in a review published on Feb. 10. Many readers, prompted in part by a protest from the Tesla chief executive, objected to the reporting and methodology of the piece, and said it raised journalistic integrity issues.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 24, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mind of Their Own, and the Freedom to Speak It.

Prize-Winning Photos and Lingering Questions

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Top honors in the 70th annual Pictures of the Year International contest went to Paolo Pellegrin of Magnum Photos for freelance photographer of the year and Paul Hansen of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyhete for newspaper photographer of the year.

The Denver Post received the prestigious Angus McDougall Overall Excellence in Editing Award. The New York Times was named best newspaper.

The awards were overshadowed by controversy over a photograph (below) that was included in Mr. Pellegrin’s winning entry.

There were inaccuracies in the submitted caption of one image of a former Marine combat photographer, Shane Keller, holding a rifle that was part of a photo essay on the Crescent â€" a rough part of Rochester. In addition, a description for the series was lifted from a decade-old article in The New York Times. The disputed caption and story summary have been removed from the POYi site and replaced by different information provided by Mr. Pellegrin.

On the Web site BagNewsNotes, Mr. Keller, a former photography student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said that the photo misrepresented him, and he raised questions about whether the image was a directed photo, made to look like a found moment. Mr. Pellegrin has vigorously denied the charges of misrepresentation and of staging a photograph, although he admitted mistakes in captioning.

On Wednesday morning, a statement was posted on the POYi contest site next to Mr. Pellegrin’s images from the Crescent, which also won second place for issue reporting stories. It reads:

The spirit of Pictures of the Year International is to honor photojournalists and celebrate their outstanding documentary photography. We do not probe for reasons to disqualify work. POY understands that errors may occur in captions submitte by photographers. We are happy to make corrections and acknowledge the errors. Story summaries and captions are “published” when posted on the POY website. Any misunderstanding regarding self-authorship for “published” captions or story summaries will be corrected by the photographer. POY affirms the awards.

Mr. Pellegrin’s pictures from Rochester also took second prize in news stories in the World Press Photo contest. That organization affirmed the award in a statement on Tuesday.

Rick Shaw, the director of Pictures of the Year International, said in a telephone interview that the quality of the captions on contest entries vary widely and that he received e-mails every year from photographers asking if â€" and why â€" they need to provide captions for the contest.

“It’s photojournalism,” Mr. Shaw said. “It’s the mix between words and pictures. It provides context for the image. It’s the balance between aesthetics and content.”

The conte! st’s ru! les require that all photographs include a caption. Mr. Shaw says he intends to update the entry rules for next year, adding language about self-authorship and accuracy, in captions or story summaries.

“It has to be to the level of being published material,” he said. “Part of that is probably a mistake on our part, in not being diligent about explaining that when a caption or story summary is submitted to POYi, it needs to be to the standard of published work.”

DESCRIPTIONPaolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos Mr. Pellegrin’s image of Shane Keller has sparked controversy. Mr. Pellegrin was photographer of the year in the freelance/agency category; he won second place in the issue reporting picture story category, the entry for which included this photo as well.

POYi, a progam of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, wrapped up its three-week judging period on Tuesday with the announcement of the winners of the most important awards. Winning entries are posted on the POYi Web site piecemeal as the judging of each category concludes. While the photos are posted, the photographers’ names are withheld until the judging is finished.

The Los Angeles Times won for best Web site. Ezra Shaw of Getty Images won sports photographer of the year, and Liz O. Baylen of The Los Angeles Times was named multimedia photographer of the year.

The New York Times won for best e-project for “Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.â€!  The Tim! es also won first place for feature multimedia story for “The Vanishing Mind Series, in Love and Loss.”

Damon Winter, staff photographer of The New York Times, won second place for newspaper photographer of the year. Tomás Munita
 was second in the freelance photographer of the year category, for a portfolio that consisted mainly of his work for The New York Times. And Becky Hanger of The Times won first place, second place and third place for sports story editing.

David Alan Harvey’s “Based on a True Story” received the award for best photography book.

Mr. Hansen also took top prize in the2012 World Press Photo Contest for a dramatic image, of a funeral procession in Gaza. He was previously the POYi newspaper photographer of the year in 2009.

This year’s photography contests have been tinged by scandal. On Sunday night, the White House News Photographers Association announced that it had stripped the Washington Post photographer Tracy Woodward of an award of excellence that he had received in the association’s 2013 Eyes of History photo contest in the sports feature/reaction category because of digital manipulation.

Though POYi has received some criticism for the way it handled Mr. Pellegrin’s entry, Mr. Shaw said he welcomed the conversation.

“It is an important dialogue,” he said. “The question of digital processing in today’s world is an important dialogue. Accuracy ! in the te! xt that accompanies your images is an important dialogue.”

DESCRIPTIONPaul Hansen/Dagens Nyheter Mr. Hansen’s photo of the funeral of Suhaib Hijazi and his brother Muhammad in Gaza was part of a portfolio that won him photographer of the year in the newspaper category.

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Pictures of the Day: Bangladesh and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bangladesh, Mali, Syria and the Vatican.

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Land and Loss in Colombia

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Land is no small thing in Latin America. Dynasties flush with wealth and power have arisen from plantations and cattle ranches owned by a select few families. For those left on the margins, taking over a tiny, fallow plot long forgotten by its owners may be the nly thing keeping their family alive.

Until someone pushes them out.

Gustav Arvidsson has been following the plight of landless peasants in Colombia, where bureaucracy, chicanery and deadly force have been used to dislodge entire villages of subsistence farmers. Where families once grew rice, cassava and other basic crops, large corporations have swept in with palm oil plantations, cattle ranches and mines. The result has been devastating, Mr. Arvidsson said, in a country where armed conflict and economic hardship have displaced four million people â€" the second-largest number of such internally displaced people after Sudan.

DESCRIPTIONGustav Arvidsson A cow tied to be slaughtered in Camelias, in northwestern Colombia. “Pea! ce villages,” where weapons are banned, seem to work, but their leaders are constantly threatened, and it is difficult to stay neutral.

Resolving the complexities of land tenure in the developing world has been seen by some policy experts as critical to uplifting the most impoverished sectors of society. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has long argued that finding ways to grant land titles to subsistence farmers and others can set them â€" and their country â€" on the path to stability and growth.

“A farmer once told me, ‘a farmer without land is not a farmer,’ ” Mr. Arvidsson said in a telephone interview from his native Sweden. “This is all about inequality.”

He started his project in 2010, when he was living in Bogotá while freelancing for Swedish publications. He read an article in The Guardian about a palm oil platation whose owners had evicted 120 families from the land they had farmed for more than 10 years. Outcry over the eviction, which had been carried out by the police in riot gear, led the Body Shop cosmetics company to drop the firm as a supplier.

Soon, Mr. Arvidsson traveled to the area to track down the displaced families, who had moved to a spit of land along the Magdalena River, about an hour away on horseback. Where they once fed themselves, they had to rely on foreign relief groups for basic nourishment.

DESCRIPTIONGustav Arvidsson Misael Payares, the leader of an organization formed to regain a village’s land from which inhabitants were expelled in 2006. Oil palms were planted! where mo! re than 100 families used to live, and the space where they were moved is not enough for residents to continue their subsistence farming.

“It’s so tiny they can’t grow anything,” he said. “They don’t have space to grow their crops or be self-sufficient. To make it worse, they’re on this peninsula which gets flooded every year when the river rises and kills their crops.”

Mr. Arvidsson’s project has expanded in subsequent trips to look at other communities of displaced people. In the country’s western region he visited “peace villages,” settled by people who have declared their community off-limits to firearms and violence. Last August he went to a region where a huge open-pit coal mine is set to expand â€" but only after having to relocate several communities.

Even for long-established communities, convoluted contracts and bureaucracy have often made it difficult to sort out who the rightful owners are. And for those who acceded to pressure â€" either financal or physical â€" what they get in return often is never enough to make up for what they once had.

The Colombian government has passed legislation to help people who have been dislodged from their land. But human rights groups have voiced concern that the law is insufficient in its scope and benefits. People may get papers saying they own a particular plot, but that means little if those who pushed them out in the first place are still there, or nearby.

“If you want to be cynical, you can say this law was created to make all these land takeovers valid,” Mr. Arvidsson said. “People have papers, but many of them will be forced to sell the land anyway because they dare not return. Then everything gets validated.”

DESCRIPTIONGustav Arvidsson After several years on the run, Don Petro Hernandes returned to Curvaradó. In 2006 he founded the region’s first peace village.

Follow @GustavArvidsson, @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Land and Loss in Colombia

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Land is no small thing in Latin America. Dynasties flush with wealth and power have arisen from plantations and cattle ranches owned by a select few families. For those left on the margins, taking over a tiny, fallow plot long forgotten by its owners may be the nly thing keeping their family alive.

Until someone pushes them out.

Gustav Arvidsson has been following the plight of landless peasants in Colombia, where bureaucracy, chicanery and deadly force have been used to dislodge entire villages of subsistence farmers. Where families once grew rice, cassava and other basic crops, large corporations have swept in with palm oil plantations, cattle ranches and mines. The result has been devastating, Mr. Arvidsson said, in a country where armed conflict and economic hardship have displaced four million people â€" the second-largest number of such internally displaced people after Sudan.

DESCRIPTIONGustav Arvidsson A cow tied to be slaughtered in Camelias, in northwestern Colombia. “Pea! ce villages,” where weapons are banned, seem to work, but their leaders are constantly threatened, and it is difficult to stay neutral.

Resolving the complexities of land tenure in the developing world has been seen by some policy experts as critical to uplifting the most impoverished sectors of society. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has long argued that finding ways to grant land titles to subsistence farmers and others can set them â€" and their country â€" on the path to stability and growth.

“A farmer once told me, ‘a farmer without land is not a farmer,’ ” Mr. Arvidsson said in a telephone interview from his native Sweden. “This is all about inequality.”

He started his project in 2010, when he was living in Bogotá while freelancing for Swedish publications. He read an article in The Guardian about a palm oil platation whose owners had evicted 120 families from the land they had farmed for more than 10 years. Outcry over the eviction, which had been carried out by the police in riot gear, led the Body Shop cosmetics company to drop the firm as a supplier.

Soon, Mr. Arvidsson traveled to the area to track down the displaced families, who had moved to a spit of land along the Magdalena River, about an hour away on horseback. Where they once fed themselves, they had to rely on foreign relief groups for basic nourishment.

DESCRIPTIONGustav Arvidsson Misael Payares, the leader of an organization formed to regain a village’s land from which inhabitants were expelled in 2006. Oil palms were planted! where mo! re than 100 families used to live, and the space where they were moved is not enough for residents to continue their subsistence farming.

“It’s so tiny they can’t grow anything,” he said. “They don’t have space to grow their crops or be self-sufficient. To make it worse, they’re on this peninsula which gets flooded every year when the river rises and kills their crops.”

Mr. Arvidsson’s project has expanded in subsequent trips to look at other communities of displaced people. In the country’s western region he visited “peace villages,” settled by people who have declared their community off-limits to firearms and violence. Last August he went to a region where a huge open-pit coal mine is set to expand â€" but only after having to relocate several communities.

Even for long-established communities, convoluted contracts and bureaucracy have often made it difficult to sort out who the rightful owners are. And for those who acceded to pressure â€" either financal or physical â€" what they get in return often is never enough to make up for what they once had.

The Colombian government has passed legislation to help people who have been dislodged from their land. But human rights groups have voiced concern that the law is insufficient in its scope and benefits. People may get papers saying they own a particular plot, but that means little if those who pushed them out in the first place are still there, or nearby.

“If you want to be cynical, you can say this law was created to make all these land takeovers valid,” Mr. Arvidsson said. “People have papers, but many of them will be forced to sell the land anyway because they dare not return. Then everything gets validated.”

DESCRIPTIONGustav Arvidsson After several years on the run, Don Petro Hernandes returned to Curvaradó. In 2006 he founded the region’s first peace village.

Follow @GustavArvidsson, @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: Vatican City and Elsewhere

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Photos from the Vatican, Scotland, Egypt and Syria.

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When Violence Is Against Domestics

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Photographing young Englishwomen training to be nannies, Gratiane de Moustier couldn’t help laughing as she watched the students cradling and feeding dolls as if they were children with toys.

“All the girls were super-cute and nice, with nice unifoms,” she said in an interview. “It was kind of funny to hear those fake plastic babies crying. They were so serious taking care of those babies. The baby cries, the baby needs food, they walk around the city with those babies crying in the street.”

But when Ms. de Moustier encountered village girls training in Indonesia to be maids, she found herself closer to tears. “They don’t train in a nice mansion,” she said. “There’s no daylight. And I imagine those plastic dolls were bought 30 years ago. Fake baby, fake rice cooker. For some of them it was the first time seeing a washing machine or a microwave.”

In her first major photo project, Ms. de Moustier followed those Indonesian girls from their training camp on the island of Java to Hong Kong, where they join 300,000 maids cooking, washing, cleaning and caring for real babies. And too often â€" like maids in Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere â€" they encounter! a singular form of domestic violence: the abuse of maids.

“They leave their homeland with high hopes and aspirations,” Ms. de Moustier said of the young Indonesians. “But more often than not, the reality at their destination turns their dreams in to nightmares.” Talking with them at their training camps, she said, “I kept getting the feeling that these girls are not prepared for this life.”

DESCRIPTIONGratiane de Moustier Future maids are introduced to agency recruiters from Hong Kong. If chosen, they will have to pay the agency a fee of more than $1,700 American. Because they do not have that money upfront, they sign a loan agreement with a financial institution in Indonesia. The money is then shared by the training camp, the Indonesian government and the agency i Hong Kong.

Reports of abuse are a staple of journalistic coverage of foreign domestic helpers, with accounts like one from Singapore in 2007 of a family that was accused of extracting their maid’s front teeth, pouring hot wax on her head, hitting her with an iron rod, pouring hot water on her private parts and restraining her by tying her hands with a bathrobe.

The sadistic and sometimes bizarre abuses, often by the woman of the house, seem to show that the powerless maids offer an outlet for explosions of suppressed anger and frustration.

“I’m illustrating what I consider a modern version of slavery and human trafficking,” Ms. de Moustier wrote in an essay accompanying her still-unfinished project.

Ms. de Moustier came to photography in her mid-20s after earning a master’s degree in European and international business at the Sorbonne in Paris and working in a bank. She studie! d for a y! ear at the International Center of Photography in 2006-7 and graduated from the London College of Communication in 2009 with a master’s degree in photojournalism and documentary photography.

She has been working for three and a half years, she said, as a freelance photographer, mostly for French publications. Like many young photographers today, she cut her teeth in Afghanistan and in Iran, where she said she produced essays on people her own age â€" “what it is to be 30 in Tehran” â€" and on what she calls “corrective rape.”

DESCRIPTIONGratiane de Moustier Lis, 24, photographed in Bethune House, a shelter for migrant women workers in Hong Kong. Lis came from East Java in January 2012.

“But t wasn’t me,” Ms. de Moustier said. “It was something I needed to do. But you know, what I love about this story and what I want to do for the rest of my life if I can, it’s long term, it’s investigation. I want to dedicate weeks of time to a single work, something that really fulfills me today, rather than doing news, where I don’t feel at ease visually or intellectually.”

Her work on maids has so far focused on Hong Kong, where foreign domestic workers are a visible presence and where Indonesians have in recent years surpassed Filipinos as the most numerous group. Some parts of town reflect this, with shops and groceries displaying Indonesian signs and selling Indonesian goods.

The next step in her project will be more difficult, documenting the lives of Indonesian maids in Malaysia, where abuses are some of the worst in the region and where it may be more complicated to gain access to the young women at work.

Then, Ms. de Moustier said, “the icing on the cake,” ! and perha! ps the biggest challenge, would be to work in Saudi Arabia, possibly focusing on one maid and one family. Saudi Arabia is known as a harsh destination for maids, and the Philippines has placed restrictions on employment of its nationals there.

To round out the project, she said, she plans to follow a recruiter on his tour of Indonesian villages to portray the families and living situations of future domestic workers and to document the recruiting process, which she said sometimes includes payments of “pocket money” to parents in return for their daughters.

Finally, Ms. de Moustier wants to show their lives after they return home. “Some manage to start small businesses thanks to their income,” she wrote in her essay, “while others struggle for the rest of their lives.”

DESCRIPTIONGratiane e Moustier Wakit, 25, arriving in Hong Kong from Madiun, a 12-hour journey. She does not yet know for whom she will work. “I don’t know them, but they know me, they chose me out of a video and photos,” she says. She speaks English, having worked for two years in Singapore, but speaks hardly any Cantonese. She hopes her employer will talk to her in English.

Seth Mydans covers Southeast Asia for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. Follow Lens on @Twitter and Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: West Bank and Elsewhere

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Photos from the West Bank, Mali, Thailand and Kuwait.

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Pictures of the Day: West Bank and Elsewhere

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Photos from the West Bank, Mali, Thailand and Kuwait.

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A Mexican Photographer, Overshadowed but Not Outdone

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The year 2007 was a pretty good one for rediscovering long-forgotten images in Mexico. Most people already know about Robert Frank’s Mexican suitcase, a trove of his work from the Spanih Civil War. But that same year an unknown archive of vintage prints by Mexico’s greatest photographers was also discovered, left behind in the longtime home of Lola Álvarez Bravo.

The find, known as the Gonzalez-Rendon archive, had prints and original photomontages by Lola, as well as some beautifully printed images by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to whom she had been married for several years. The find also included work by some of Lola’s students who had gone on to become noted photographers, Mariana Yampolsky and Raul Conde, among them.

Though overshadowed by her more famous partner, who had resisted her foray into photography, Lola ranks among Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, having done portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals as well as work among the indigenous and poor, whom she portrayed with a sense of compassion and social criticism. Her images provide a window in what! she â€" a working photographer and teacher most of her life â€" valued as an artistic statement.

“It’s what an art historian dreams about, finding the missing pieces,” said James Oles, a lecturer at Wellesley College who was among the first to inspect the images in Mexico. “The material fleshes out some aspects of her work, giving us original titles and dates that radically change the meaning and interpretation of a work of art. And the original photomontages give an idea how she created them.”

Born Dolores Concepcion Martinez in 1903, she grew up in a wealthy family, although she had to move in with relatives when her father died. She first met Manuel in her youth, marrying him in 1925. As an accountant, he was sent to work in Oaxaca, where the couple began to take pictures, Mr. Oles wrote in his recently published book, “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era.”

The area’s poverty struck her, and it elicitd a compassion in her work that was different from her husband’s more complex images.

“Lola was maybe a little more natural,” Mr. Oles said. “She was interested in more candid and less intrusive images. She was certainly more interested in people than things.”

The couple separated in 1934, divorcing in 1949. Throughout, she kept his name and did not remarry. She supported herself as a photographer working for government agencies, as well as teaching, where she influenced many.

“I think Lola was a remarkable photographer, especially given all the challenges she faced,” said Elizabeth Ferrer, who published “Lola Álvarez Bravo” with Aperture. “There were women artists, though women were not supposed to be working in the street but in the studio. But the kind of photography done at the time involved a greater public interface, and the fact that she did that show! ed her in! credible strength and desire to photograph the world around her.”

Although she found her own path apart from her more famous husband â€" she was more gregarious, enjoying the company of artists, writers and intellectuals â€" work and circumstance worked against her. It was not until the 1980s, Mr. Oles said, that her work as an artist came to the fore.

DESCRIPTIONLola Álvarez Bravo/The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Manuel Álvarez Bravo, circa 1930s.

Mr. Oles visited her in the early 1990s, around the time when the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired an archive of her work. Lola was moved by her son to another apartment, and she died in 1993.

Fourten years later, Mr. Oles got a call from a museum in Mexico City. Relatives of one of Lola’s friends, who had purchased her old apartment, had been safeguarding several boxes that had been left behind. One of them had taken the time to preserve and order the prints.

“She didn’t sell anything or have it framed in her apartment, but just organized it,” Mr. Oles said. “When I went there, it was amazing. It showed what had been separated at some time by Lola, and God knows when or why, there were a lot of her own photos. Many were by students of hers as well as a group of extraordinary vintage photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.”

Her photos â€" including some vintage prints that were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1943 â€" shed new light on her work. In some cases, original titles gave new meaning to old images. One shot of an indigenous woman seated against a wrought-iron fence that had long been titled “By the Fault of Others” turned out to have “Death Penalty” (Slide 7) as i! ts origin! al title..

“That changes how we interpret this photo of this woman who looks trapped by this grille,” Mr. Oles said. “You can go into the archive of any major photographer and find images they never printed and exhibit them after their death without knowing what they mean. Finding this material tells us these are the photos she chose which she thought were the key images that she was interested in during that era.”

While her photomontages are well known, the archive has the originals, which she made by gluing together cut-out images she would later photograph for the final montage.

“In Mexico, photomontage was mainly a strategy of media and advertising, not an artistic project,” Mr. Oles said. “What Lola was trying to do was elevate it to the realm of high art and view it as equivalent to muralism. The multiple perspectives of photomontage and the fragmented images resolved into a whole are what a muralist like Diego Rivera does when he shows multiple perspectives of a factor and resolving them together. Lola understood that.”

Among the greatest finds in the archive are works by her students. Even in death, though, Lola’s own images prove to affect a current generation. Mr. Oles said her photos of prostitutes, titled “Triptych of the Martyrs,” has a powerful element of feminist criticism.

“Their faces are obscured with wound-like shadows,” he said. “There is this undercurrent of social critique. Whenever my students see those pictures, they are moved sometimes to the point of tears. I don’t think any of Manuel Álvarez Bravos’s photos move them to tears.”

DESCRIPTIONLola Álvarez Bravo/The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Untitled, circa 1949.

Th! e exhibit “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era” will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson from March 30 through June 23.

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A Prize-Winning Ethics Lesson

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A dramatic image of a man described as a former Marine sniper clutching a shotgun in the Crescent â€" a rough part of Rochester â€" helped the Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin win honors as Freelance Photographer of the Year fromPOYi.

Except the man in the photo, Shane Keller, was never a sniper, but a former combat photographer. And he lives in a part of Rochester where he says he can go to sleep at night with his doors unlocked.

Mr. Keller’s questions about how and where he was portrayed were at the heart of a post on BagNewsNotes that called Mr. Pellegrin’s ethics into question. The post also noted that a description for the series was taken from a decade-old New York Times story. Mr. Keller, who graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology last year, said he felt what had been originally described to him as a portrait looked more like a staged, faux-documentary image. He shared his unease with Loret Steinbe! rg, a former journalism ethics professor of his and co-author of the BagNews Notes article.

“I have a deep belief in journalism and documentary work that we have an understanding, an agreement, with the audience that we speak to,” Ms. Steinberg said in an interview Friday. “We tell them that we’re showing them something that is authentic, that we’ve seen and found, so that we can understand something about the world we live in. And clearly if Shane is misrepresented, if the context of the Crescent is changed, then we’re not doing that.”

Mr. Pellegrin was not asked for comment by the post’s authors, however.

“I didn’t want to call Paolo,” she said. “I wanted to write this from the vantage point of raising a discussion.”

Mr. Pellegrin, who spoke with Lens on Friday, said he could not understand how he could be accused of an ethical breach and not be given the chance to efend himself. “It seems somewhat strange to me that while mounting a purported journalistic high horse they themselves did not follow the basic tenets of fair and professional journalism,” he said in a statement.

Later, in a telephone interview, he said he stood by the photograph and never claimed that it was taken in the Crescent, but that it was part of an attempt to explore gun culture within the larger context of his project. He said the information for the description for the series that was taken from The Times was never meant to be published, but had been provided as background information. He also said he was unsure if he misunderstood Mr. Keller’s military background, but had done a portrait of him while he was going to a local shooting range.

Despite the controversy over the images, Mr. Pellegrin, an Italian native who lives in Rome and New York, remained resolute.

“I took formal portraits in the house, then we’d go to this shooting place, so I took some more pi! ctures do! wnstairs, in what is a garage area,” Mr. Pellegrin said. “Then, things start to blend, so it’s not a formal look-at-me, I’m-taking-your-picture kind of portrait. We’re in the same space, I’ve been accepted, I’m there, so I’m taking pictures. Which is how that picture was taken. What I have to say is that I stand by the pictures.”

Rick Shaw, director of POYi, said in a statement that his organization “respects the integrity of all the photojournalists” and “will not presume any lapse of ethics or review any situation until we get a position statement from the photographer and review all the allegations.”

DESCRIPTIONScreenshot from POYi, photo by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos Screenshot of Paolo Pellegrin’s image of Shane Keller on the Pictures of the Year Interational Web site. Mr. Pellegrin won first place in the Photographer of the Year â€" Freelance/Agency category. The photo was included in more than one award-winning contest entry.

The origins of this debate date to a brief encounter last year when a group of Magnum photographers descended on Rochester to document parts of the city, whose main employer â€" Kodak â€" has been such a central part of their own professional lives. Students at R.I.T. helped some of them as fixers and guides. Brett Carlsen drove Mr. Pellegrin around town.

“The thing is, someone was going to do George Eastman, someone was going to do this, someone was going to do that, someone was going to do Kodak, someone was doing architecture â€" stuff like that â€" so he wanted to be the guy who did the underbelly of it,” Mr. Carlsen said. “So that’s what we were lo! oking for! when we were driving around for two or three days, and I helped him.”

They concentrated on the Crescent, where Mr. Pellegrin said he was shocked by the crime and violence. He said he asked Mr. Carlsen how he could get at the “larger issue” of violence and gun culture.

That is when they paid a visit to Mr. Keller, a military veteran and a gun owner.

“They wanted to come over and do a portrait photo of me with my firearms,” Mr. Keller said. “He ended up photographing Brett by himself and me by myself. This is in my apartment, white walls, a clean apartment. He wanted us to fire some of the firearms at a shooting range. One of the first things I thought was that’s strange, asking us to do something. I’m a student, he’s Magnum. I not going to question him.”

As they went to the garage, he said Mr. Pellegrin wanted to take another picture.

“When he saw what it looked like in the garage, he wanted to be able to shoot more portraits of me downstairs,” Mr. Kelle said. “I agreed, and we talked about which firearm he wanted me to hold. The shotgun was the one he wanted. I had shotgun shells I could put over my shoulder.”

Mr. Keller said he found it odd that Mr. Pellegrin never asked for his full name or any other information that could have been used to identify the photograph or location. He also said he had no idea what larger story the photographer was pursuing in Rochester. Not did he wonder how the picture would be used.

Until last week, when he saw the photo on the World Press Photo Web site.

When he saw the image among a prize-winning portfolio â€" it also took second place for the general news stories category in the World Press Photo contest â€" Mr. Keller was uneasy. He said he thought the image was staged to give the impression it was a candid moment in an ominous location.

“I spoke with one of my friends this morning who ! was also ! a combat photographer and Iraq veteran,” said Mr. Keller, who now freelances for The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania. “He looked at it and didn’t see it as a portrait. He sees like a ride-along. It doesn’t look like a portrait. That’s where it turns into this gray area.”

Mr. Carlsen, who was driving Mr. Pellegrin, said he did not think the photographer set out to misrepresent his friend. He said there might have been some problem because of language that made Mr. Pellegrin misunderstand Mr. Keller. And even the question of which neighborhood they were in could be explained as an outsider’s unfamiliarity. (At the same time, critics of Mr. Pellegrin’s project have said it was his very nature as an outsider that produced a distorted view of the area.)

Mr. Pellegrin said he might have made an honest mistake by not identifying Mr. Keller properly. But he said his own basic information for the image was Rochester, not the Crescent.An assistant, he said, put the image into a contest entry, as well as the series description that had first appeared in The Times, which he never had intended to be published.

“I find this all a little bit ridiculous,” Mr. Pellegrin said. “I don’t understand what the big controversy is about. He mentions that I didn’t mention his name. I forgot his name. I don’t know how many people â€" how many situations, that day, that week, those two weeks that I was there â€" when I went back home, yes, I forgot his name. What I remember was that he was a former soldier.”

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Pictures of the Day: Greece and Elsewhere

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Photos from Greece, Mali, Syria and Bangladesh.

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Pictures of the Day: Greece and Elsewhere

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Photos from Greece, Mali, Syria and Bangladesh.

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Taking a Stand for 46 Hours

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I was driving my daughter home from college last year when we stopped at Penn State to visit a couple of her friends. I treated them to breakfast when they urged me to do a story on Thon.

What

With passion and excitement, they told me about

I knew I had to go cover it this year.

Thon is the capstone to a year’s worth of fund-raising, in which students rely on everything from direct-mail campaigns to standing on corners with a can. Since 1977, students have supported the work of the Four Diamonds Fund, which helps the families of children with cancer meet the needs that insurance will not, as well as finance research.

Every February, about 700 couples â€" as well as boosters, volunt! eers and even children with cancer and their parents â€" pack the Bryce Jordan Center for the dance-a-thon.

They are not really dancing the whole time. The rules are that they must stay awake for 46 hours and stay on their feet. It is a test of endurance. Of course it and uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but when they start to buckle and hallucinate, they remind themselves that if children can go through cancer therapy, they can tough it out.

When I got there this year, it looked like March Madness; the Bryce Jordan Center, Penn State’s basketball arena, was filled to the rafters and the floor was covered with people. Each dancer has what is called a “moraler,” somebody who is responsible for that person’s morale and monitors his or her energy level. Some moralers give their dancers piggyback rides just to spell them.

The whole time, there is this incredible ebb and flow of activity among the 15,000 other people who are making this work. There are a bunch of kids running aroundwith squirt guns, playing music and doing line dancing and all sorts of other things. The stands are filled with student organizations like fraternities and sororities cheering their team down on the floor and making sure they do not get physically or psychologically exhausted. The arena is pumped up with noise and cheers, so when you walk in it is totally chaotic and doesn’t make any sense.

But as you immerse yourself in it, you begin to realize what is going on: these youngsters are being broken down slowly â€" and then are being brought back up emotionally, so it is like an incredible bond with everyone on the floor. That’s when you start to understand it.

DESCRIPTIONFred R. Conrad/The New York Times Rebekah Tuckey, 7, and her father, Nat, came from Biglerville, Pa. Rebekah h! as acute ! lymphoblastic leukemia.

By the second day, couples are starting to fall apart from fatigue and cramps. Volunteers â€" massage therapists and physical therapists â€" give rubdowns, tape their ankles and put ice on their knees. Later there is a pep rally at which the football team, the volleyball team and the golf team perform skits to entertain the crowd and make sure nobody crashes and burns before the big reveal â€" the announcement of how much money was collected.

Before that happens, there is a tribute to the Thon kids who did not make it the previous year, and that gets really emotional. Families give testimonials about how their child’s cancer was diagnosed and how the charity helped them. Over the years, the students have bonded with some of the young cancer patients and their families. Sororities and fraternities have “adopted” some of them, like Tucker Haas (Slide 15), who led cheers this year perched atop a big buddy’s shoulders.

Later, a band gets everybody psyced for the announcement of how much money was collected. This year’s take was more than $12 million, nearly $2 million more than last year. The place goes crazy.

Why do they do this

It is considered an honor to dance, to be out on the floor. When they are freshmen, sophomores and juniors, most of these students work as volunteers at Thon. They have responsibilities like feeding people, keeping morale up, monitoring the acts that are onstage. They sleep in shifts, although most of them get only two or three hours of rest before they start working again.

For seniors, being chosen to endure this agony is part of a ritual. What they get out of it is an incredible personal bond with each other and a real emotional and psychological lift.

It is graduation into adulthood, but a responsible adulthood, caring for other people. It is the kind of thing you hope your children get in college. That is why I think Thon is unique and why it has continued to be so successful and so large. It! does not! stop when people graduate, either; hundreds of alumni plead to be able to go back on the dance floor.

The last year was a rough one for Penn State, with the child sexual abuse scandal that took down the football coach, Joe Paterno, and led to the conviction of his former assistant Jerry Sandusky. Granted, Thon had been raising money and doing good works long before any of that came to light. But it may be more important now because students need to be reassured that they were good people who do good things.

The fact is, Thon probably has more to do with Penn State students than football does. They are not looking to make someone an all-star; they are doing charitable work. And it wasn’t just one student, it was thousands doing that.

DESCRIPTIONFred R. Conrad/The New York Times Piggyback rides are allowed at Thon.

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Mali, West Bank and Pakistan.

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The Newest and Youngest Americans

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After spending 17 years of my career abroad, photographing immigration issues in America seemed like a natural fit for me when I moved back to the United States. In 2009, I began photographing undocumented workers in the fields of Colorado and the deserts of Arizona as well as eportation flights to Central America. This year, I’ve covered several naturalization ceremonies, ­like when I flew to Tampa, Fla., on Valentine’s Day to photograph 28 married couples who received their citizenship at a special lovers’ day event.

But this week’s photo shoot, with some of the country’s youngest and newest citizens, was even more special.

A total of 300 children, all born abroad, as young as age 4 and others in their late teens â€" even a 41-year-old “kid” (below) â€" came to collect their citizenship certificates at the Federal Building in Downtown Manhattan. All of them were children of naturalized citizens â€" their parents had moved to the United States legally, went through the lengthy naturalization process, then brought their children over.

DESCRIPTIONJohn Moore/Gett! y Images Otis Hemmings, 41, born in Jamaica, said he was brought to the United States by his parents when he was 7, but only applied decades later for his United States citizenship papers.

During my Valentine’s Day shoot, the fluorescent lights had made the recitation of the national anthem and Pledge of Allegiance a little less romantic than it could have been. (And I was just barely able to transmit
and make my flight back to New York City in time for a Valentine’s dinner â€" thankfully without harsh lighting.)

With the children’s event this week, I took a different approach from my normal editorial style and went with lighted portraits. Having spent much of my career in conflict zones overseas, my experience shooting studio style portraiture of children is, let’s say, limited. That said, I have two young daughters, so speaking with children and making them feel comfortable­ â€" quickly â€" now comes naturally.

To help organize the shot, officials with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services approached families in the waiting room and brought them to a makeshift studio â€"­ a cabled strobe with umbrella softbox, a spot on the floor marked for the children to stand, and a black muslin cloth, which was gaffer-taped to the wall.

DESCRIPTIONJohn Moore/Getty Images Darianny Martinez immigrated with her parents from the Dominican Republic.

I hoped the simple setup gave more weight to the subjects â€" ­all of them adorable â€" from a spread of cultures and backgrounds as big as our world. A family from Yemen brought their children over in 2010, just as the country was swept up in the violence of the Arab Spring. I photographed their daughter, Layla (with her brother in Slide 14), age 11, both wea! ring her ! head scarf and without it (Slide 19), which was her preference.

The difference was striking.

An 18-year-old from Nigeria, Bushra (Slide 13), raised her hand as though for the Pledge of Allegiance, which she would make a few minutes later during her citizenship ceremony. She looked ready to start a modeling career.

An excited 5-year-old proudly held up two American flags for his portrait (below), but a few frames later gave me a more nuanced look, as a warm puddle spread out from his dress shoes.

The oldest “kid” of the group, Otis Hemmings, 41, his chin stubbled with gray, finally received his citizenship certificate, decades after his parents brought him over from Jamaica ­at age 7.

Key to the individual photos were the captions. My assistant for the shoot, Melinda Anderson, carefully asked each family not only for nationalities, names and ages, but also what jobs the parents found here and which borough of New York City they live in. This city, after all, has more interntional diversity than any place in the country.

With immigration, much of my work has focused â€" and will continue to in the near future â€" on the tough parts of the story: federal agents chasing thirsty immigrants through the desert, detention centers full of immigrants held on their way to deportation, often penniless, to their home countries. But still, as we often hear, America is a country of immigrants. It would appear that with immigration overhaul by the government at last a possibility, this story will be in front of us for some time. Once in a while we find the joyous part of any tough story, and this shoot of young and new Americans was just that.

DESCRIPTIONJohn Moore/Getty Images Ifeozuwa Oyaniyi, 5, born in Nigeria.

John Moore is an award-winning photographer for Getty Images. Some of his work has been featured on Lens before.

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