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Pictures of the Day: Central African Republic and Elsewhere

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Photos from Central African Republic, Iraq, North Korea and Kashmir.

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An Officer’s Secretly Recorded Words About ‘Stop and Frisk’ Cause a Firestorm

Who, exactly, are “the right people” for the New York Police Department to stop, question and frisk

Is that frequently used expression actually a racist code for young black and Hispanic men Or is it simply police shorthand for people whose suspicious activities make them a legitimate target of police attention as they try to reduce the city’s crime rate

That’s one of the questions at the heart of a federal trial that began last week in New York. In recent months, The Times has covered the stop-and-frisk program aggressively, questioning in many articles whether it is enmeshed with the reprehensible practice of racial profiling. And now it is covering the trial.

But one article - a Page 1 story last Friday by Joseph Goldstein - has caused a firestorm of criticism. It has drawn sharp and sustained protests from the Police Department and its legal department, and tough words from sources as diverse as the frequent police critic Leonard Levitt, a former Newsday columnist who writes the NYPD Confidential blog, and Heather Mac Donald, who frequently takes the Police Department’s point of view, writing in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute.

Her assessment: The Times’s article “has twisted the taped conversation into a poisonous indictment of the police.”

Essentially, Mr. Goldstein’s article reported that, in at least one police precinct, race is a factor in the directions that street cops get from their supervisors on whom to stop, question and frisk.

Over the past week, I’ve considered the complaints of the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, and from the N.Y.P.D.’s legal department. I’ve read various articles criticizing the article, heard from readers commenting on it, and talked with the reporter, Mr. Goldstein, and the Metropolitan editor, Carolyn Ryan. I’ve also heard the audio of the secretly recorded conversation between Officer Pedro Serrano and his commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, and I’ve read the transcript.

The essence of the complaint against The Times’s story is that, according to Mr. Browne, “The article provided a distorted picture of what the interchange between the inspector and a disgruntled, race-baiting cop was all about.” Officer Serrano had been criticized for making only two stops in a year, while working in the high-crime 40th Precinct in the South Bronx.

Ms. Ryan provided this response to the criticism in an e-mail (I later talked in person with her and Mr. Goldstein):

To us the story captures the essence of the argument between civil libertarians and the N.Y.P.D.: Are the police using the stop-question-frisk tactic as a blunt instrument to target certain groups of people, or are they acting, as the Supreme Court requires, on reasonable and individualized suspicion The N.Y.P.D. has repeatedly said publicly that it uses the tactic only when an officer reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime.

But the reality of how that policy is communicated to officers in the station house appears quite different, as the story demonstrates. And in this case, it seems, the commanding officer of a precinct is suggesting an entire demographic be placed under suspicion.

The full transcript of the roughly 20-minute conversation shows Officer Serrano, who has been faulted for making too few stops, demanding guidance about whom to stop. He is told by his commanding officer, Inspector McCormack, to stop “the right people at the right time, the right location.” This is an oft-used N.Y.P.D. description of how the strategy is employed: they frequently talk about “the right people” or “the right stops.” It is obviously very vague.

At the end of the conversation, Inspector McCormack suggested that, in Mott Haven, given crime patterns there, the officer should stop “male blacks 14 to 20, 21.” This is not a specific description of suspects, such as “black male, 14 to 20, wearing red hoodie and blue sneakers,” or “black male, known to hang out in xyz location or associate with xyz people.” It is an entire demographic.

And Inspector McCormack does not appear, on the tape, to be talking about one specific crime for which particular young black males are wanted. He is describing the precinct’s two biggest categories of felony crime, grand larcenies and robberies, of which there are close to 1,000 a year. And, most significantly, in his course of this lengthy conversation with Officer Serrano, he defines “the right people” in terms of the broad demographic, rather than by their suspicious conduct - like peering into apartment windows or evading police â€" which is the only lawful basis for a stop, according to the Supreme Court. To critics of the N.Y.P.D., this is akin to racial profiling. And to us it suggests that the way the department’s strategy is communicated to officers is quite different from what N.Y.P.D. brass have described publicly.

She’s right on many counts and says it well. I disagree, however, that the inspector said the officer “should stop” male blacks, but rather that male blacks were given as an example of those associated with past crimes.

What’s more, the article is not presented as one about “how strategy is communicated.” It’s presented as something close to proof of racial profiling..

Mr. Levitt, for one, does not think it comes close. He wrote on his blog: “If federal judge Shira Scheindlin concludes that the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk is a racist policy she’ll need more proof than last week’s testimony of the 40th precinct’s commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Levitt - who rarely pulls his punches against the Police Department â€" noted that a front-page article in The Times carries enormous weight, and, he said, “to me, there is a much more nuanced picture” than the one portrayed there.

“The way The Times handled it just seemed unfair to McCormack,” he said, given that “so much of the violent crime in the city is committed by young, black males. You can yell and scream about the impropriety of what he said, but it’s true. And the victims are very often black, too.”

Mr. Levitt also noted that Inspector McCormack emphasizes - on the recording â€" that “99 percent of the people in this community are great, hardworking people, who deserve to walk to the train, walk to their car, walk to the store,” without becoming crime victims.” But that context is dismissed, far down in the article, as something that the inspector is “lecturing” his subordinate about.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, is correct when he says that the description of “young black males” was tied to specific crimes that had already occurred - the robberies and larcenies in the Mott Haven neighborhood. Note the use of the past tense in Inspector McCormack’s exact words: “The problem was what, male blacks … And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks 14 to 20, 21.”

On the other side, Ms. Ryan is totally correct when she says that “what’s left unsaid” is crucially important; the inspector never speaks about reasonable suspicion as a basis for possible stops.

I’ll offer some final thoughts, but first want to state the obvious:

Racial profiling is not only reprehensible and illegal; it’s also immoral. No individual should be prejudged as suspicious based on his or her age or the color of his skin. I can’t be the judge of whether that’s occurring in the context of “stop and frisk” â€" a federal trial will try to come to terms with that overarching question over the next month or more.

The Times’s article strikes me as essentially accurate. But with its emphasis on one sentence - without enough context - and its presentation on the front page, it comes off as clear proof of racial profiling in the New York Police Department. (And there’s no doubt that it was interpreted just that way by a wide variety of readers. The Rev. Al Sharpton quickly demanded Inspector McCormack’s suspension, and a Times editorial the next day was headlined “Walking While Black in New York.”)

The facts, though certainly newsworthy, don’t rise to that “smoking gun” level.



From Today’s Paper: Water Line Break and Flood Homes in Hoboken

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Workers at Willow Avenue and 8th Street in Hoboken, N.J., the site of one of two water line breaks just a few blocks apart. The other was at Willow and 14th. Many in the city lost water pressure, and an advisory was issued warning residents to boil water.



From Today’s Paper: Water Line Break and Flood Homes in Hoboken

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Workers at Willow Avenue and 8th Street in Hoboken, N.J., the site of one of two water line breaks just a few blocks apart. The other was at Willow and 14th. Many in the city lost water pressure, and an advisory was issued warning residents to boil water.



Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Yemen, Cyprus and South Korea.

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Photo That Was Hard to Get Published, but Even Harder to Get

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One of the most significant war photographs in American history is routinely taken for granted.

That’s not to say that the photo â€" of three dead American soldiers sprawled on a New Guinea beach early in World War II â€" isn’t appreciated. The death this month of A. B. C. Whipple was a reminder of its enduring importance. After a 34-year career as an editor and writer at Time Inc., Mr. Whipple considered one of his proudest achievements to have been his role in challenging the Pentagon’s censorship of that photo in 1943.

But that’s usually where the story of George A. Strock’s photo begins and ends: with the effort by Life magazine to publish it. At the time, military censors routinely refused such requests, partly for fear that Americans would be demoralized if they had any graphic understanding of the human price being paid in the war. As the story goes, the issue of printing Mr. Strock’s photo went all the way to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lifted the ban with the canny understanding that such graphic images might actually steel American resolve

What is lost in this telling is that Mr. Strock was nearly killed at least twice during his assignment on New Guinea in late 1942 and early 1943, as he recorded a critically important and very hard-won Allied victory. “When I took pictures, I wanted to bring the viewer into the scene,” Mr. Strock told an interviewer, Charles Wood of Los Angeles, shortly before his death in 1977 at age 66.

To do that, he had to put himself in harm’s way. Not every photojournalist would take such risks. “Two photographers left after their first taste of fire,” Mr. Strock told Wilson Hicks, Life’s picture editor, in a letter from New Guinea, “and as far as I know they are still going.”

Mr. Strock grew up in Los Angeles. At John C. Fremont High School, he studied photojournalism in a groundbreaking course taught by Clarence A. Bach. Mr. Strock was a crime and sports photographer at The Los Angeles Times before joining Life magazine in 1940, where he worked until 1944.

His brief turn was eventful enough, however.

In the winter of 1942-43, Mr. Strock was assigned to a crucible in the war for control of the Pacific. Japanese forces had established beachheads on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, including the villages of Buna and Gona, and were poised to advance on Port Moresby to the south, placing them dangerously close to Australia. Control of this port was vital to both sides.

After weeks of fighting, American and Australian forces began to close in on Buna village in late November. A correspondent for The New York Times, F. Tillman Durdin, reported that the Japanese “seemed determined to make a desperate attempt to retain their southernmost foothold in New Guinea or sell their lives dearly in losing it.” As it turned out, they did both.

Mr. Strock attested personally to the defenders’ ferocity in a story told to Mr. Wood. He used a derogatory term that is all but inescapable in such contemporary accounts from the American side:

I knew he was dead, laying in a pill-box, all black-faced â€" no question that he was dead. I took a picture to illustrate how in the pill-box they had palm logs covered with dirt, and the Japs were buried down there. No way to get them out except with a flame thrower.

I took a picture of this guy. I put the camera carefully down on a mound of dirt. Gave it a time exposure. Took my time; there was no hurry. Got the camera and cranked the film past. Got up again. Got 10 feet away. There was firing right behind me. I turned around. “What are you shooting at” I asked one of the officers. “The bastard sat up and was blinking his eyes,” he said.

And it was this very guy that I had photographed. He had a hand-grenade in his hand. I didn’t notice, but the picture showed that he had it. He sat up and was going to clobber me, and the officer shot him.

Nothing was easy at Buna, as Mr. Strock made clear in his Dec. 17 letter to Mr. Hicks. “Must admit that it’s tough work as well as being somewhat dangerous,” he said, “but I have the feeling that nothing will happen to me and so far I’m right. Our clothes were wet for a week, it rains almost every nite. Shoes have been soaked and there is very little chance to take them off because of a possibility of a nite raid. We sleep in a helmet; this way we keep the head dry.”

He once tried to take a bath, Mr. Strock told his boss, but the groundwater smelled too much like dead bodies.

Moisture was a formidable enemy, as was the heat. On a caption sheet stamped “Passed Military Censor G.H.Q.” and “Passed by Publicity Censorship (Operational),” Mr. Strock had to explain that two rolls of film were blistered. “I couldn’t help this,” he wrote. “As a matter of fact, it was fortunate that I got anything at all.”

Sometimes, luck was with him, as he told Mr. Hicks. Mr. Strock wrote that he went along with some soldier who raided a Japanese hospital supply dump one day and found some film there that fit his camera. “Got swell pix of the whole thing.” He ran out of film again, but said Japanese soldiers were all around, “so I couldn’t very well go out after more film.”

Luck was never more with him than when he was leaving New Guinea, clutching the pictures he had taken under his arm. “He almost lost them, and his life, too, when the plane in which he made the first leg of the homeward trip climbed into a tree on the takeoff from Port Moresby,” Time’s in-house “F.Y.I.” newsletter reported on March 3, 1943.

Once the wood and debris were cleared from engine No. 4, the heavily loaded plane was able to take off successfully. Mr. Strock may have thought at that moment that all the fighting was behind him.

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Pictures of the Day: Washington and Elsewhere

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Photos from Washington, Syria, Spain and the Vatican.

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Is There Really Room to Debate Whether Women Can Lead

The headline was powerful - or at least it had the power to startle.

Within the setting of the often excellent Opinion section blog, Room for Debate, and in the context of Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” it read: “Do Women Have What It Takes to Lead”

On Twitter, Sarah Green, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, deemed it “not fit to print.” Those responding to her were quick to note that The Times’s own newsroom is led by Jill Abramson, the executive editor.

In a blog called Policymic, Elizabeth Plank took up the topic with a certain amount of impatience.

“Can you hear that Ah yes. That’s the distinct sound of thousands of face palms echoing all over the nation.” And she noted that the subject “was last formally addressed in 1954 in the October issue of The Homemaker.”

By phone, Ms. Green later called the question “undermining.”

“If you substituted any other demographic group, I think there would have been an a-ha moment by an editor that this wasn’t such a good idea,” she told me.

She added: “Why, with women, are we still asking questions like that” Is it, she wondered, “because sexism is harder to see” And, she said, “Because we don’t see women in leadership positions as much, people think there’s something wrong with the women.”

Harvard Business Review has published a number of studies that suggest that women actually outpace men in leadership abilities, according to both genders.

“So why don’t we have more female leaders I think that’s a much more interesting (and debatable) question than ‘Do women have what it takes’” Ms. Green said.

The editor of Room for Debate, Susan Ellingwood, responded to my question about the headline.

Raising a provocative question is our way of starting an interesting discussion. That title starts a productive conversation about gender stereotypes and leadership - even if, in the end, the consensus among the debaters is “yes, women do have what it takes.” Each post explored the question from a different angle. And as readers’ reactions show, the pieces sparked a conversation about an important topic. That’s our goal.

What struck all of us here at Room for Debate is that the publicity around Sheryl Sandberg’s book promotes an aggressive self-centered “male” approach to leadership, and yet there are many studies that show that team-building and consensus, seen as a “female,” approach to leadership can be more effective.

Gender equity, equal pay, the differences in leadership styles, the relatively small number of women in top corporate jobs or top elected positions, how women can succeed at both career and home life - all of these topics are worth discussing. (And now that we all live in what sometimes feels like Ms. Sandberg’s “Lean In” nation, we’re certainly getting plenty of opportunities to do just that.) No complaints there.

But prompting the discussion with a question whose answer is self-evident may not be the best approach.

As Ms. Plank responded to the question: “Uh, yes.”



A War’s Cold Comfort in China

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Ahn Sehong had to go to China to recover a vanishing â€" and painful â€" part of Korea’s wartime history. Visiting small villages and overcoming barriers of language and distrust, he documented the tales of women â€" some barely teenagers â€" who had been forced into sexual slavery during World War II by the Japanese Army.

Starting in 2001, he began tracking down 13 of these women who had been stranded in China after the war. Now in their 80s and 90s, some were childless, others penniless. Most lived in hovels, often in the same dusty rural towns where they had endured the war. They had been away from their native land so long, some could no longer speak Korean.

Mr. Ahn had no doubts about their identity.

“Each one of these women is history,” he said. “They have suffered the biggest pain created by the war. Everyone forgot about the suffering these women went through. But I want to embrace them. As Koreans, we have to take care of them.”

“Comfort Women” â€" the euphemistic term bestowed on them by their Japanese masters â€" is the name of an exhibition of Mr. Ahn’s black-and-white photographs that opened last week at the Korea Press Center in Palisades Park, N.J. The city, which has a substantial Korean population, has also been a site of controversy in recent years after Japanese officials lobbied local authorities to remove from a public park a plaque commemorating these women.

Japan’s 35-year colonial rule of Korea still provokes anger and controversy despite formal apologies. Mr. Ahn, a native of South Korea who now lives in Japan, had been set to show his work at Nikon galleries in Tokyo and Osaka last year when the company withdrew the offer with little explanation. News reports said Nikon officials thought Mr. Ahn was pursuing a political agenda. The Tokyo show went on after Mr. Ahn pursued the matter in court, although the exhibition was marred by right-wing protesters who rushed into the gallery denouncing the women as prostitutes. Litigation on the Osaka show is pending, Mr. Ahn said.

Nikon did not respond to an e-mail and three phone calls seeking comment since last week.

Mr. Ahn, 42, started working as a magazine photographer in Seoul in 1996 when he learned about the plight of women who had been forced into prostitution in Korea and other countries under Japanese rule. The topic he said, had been taboo for decades, although he was drawn in once he started looking into the women who were still living in China. He worked with researchers who had been tracking down the women.

In 2001, he made the first of seven trips to China, where he found the women reluctant to discuss how they had been forced into prostitution during the war.

“They were very ashamed of the fact they had been comfort women,” Mr. Ahn said. “But in time I gained their friendship.”

DESCRIPTIONAhn Sehong Park Seo-un was born in 1915 and drafted in 1934. Her comfort station was in Chunhua, China, where she still lives. Because of her ordeal, she was unable to have children.

The women told him they had been lured to China with false job offers or were pressed into “voluntary” service by the Japanese Army. They described how they were raped even before they arrived in China, where they would have relations with as many as 10 men a day. Some weren’t even women yet; Bae Sam-yeop (Slide 6) said she was 13 when she lost her virginity to a high-ranking Japanese officer.

Left behind in rural areas after World War II, the women were further isolated after the Korean War, when China had no diplomatic relations with South Korea. The North Korean government, Mr. Ahn said, provided some assistance and citizenship, but the aid ended in the 1980s and few of the women wanted to relocate to North Korea, where conditions were worse.

Yet life in China was agonizingly difficult.

DESCRIPTIONAhn Sehong “Each one of these women is history,” Mr. Ahn said. “As Koreans, we have to take care of them.”

“They had no family and no one to support them,” he said. “Because they had been comfort women, it was hard to get a decent husband. Some of them got raped and beaten when they did get married. Most of them were not able to have babies. They lived poor in rural areas. Most of them lived only with the support of their neighbors.”

In New Jeresy, the exhibition has attracted crowds â€" mostly Korean â€" who have begun to explore part of their history. Mac Han, who organized the show, said he did so as an act of free expression, something he prizes as someone who became an American citizen last year.

“I’m an American,” he said. “In a country of justice, where civil rights exist, I wanted to open this up to everyone, to look at this history that no one can deny.”

Mr. Ahn said that of the nine women featured in the show, only three are still alive. He hopes to pursue his project to raise awareness and aid, even though he knows it will also raise hackles. South Korea, once weakened by war and poverty, he said, is now in a better position to help them.

“We couldn’t take care of them after the war,” he said. “But now we have money and power to help them. People forget very easily the memory of the war. Korea has evolved. But since they have evolved very fast, they let go of the past.”

DESCRIPTIONAhn Sehong Park Dae-im.

“Comfort Women” will be on view at the Korea Press Center, 7 Broad Avenue, Palisades Park, N.J., through April 18.

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Praying for Dry Land in Panama

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For thousands of years on the Kuna Yala islands, water and prayer were intertwined with daily rituals.

The Kuna â€" a group of roughly 40,000 indigenous people living on dozens of islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast â€" were isolated, relying on the land and one another to sustain their communities. Most of the local fishermen spend their days coasting the sun-drenched waters in hand-carved dugout canoes, looking for lobsters and fish to sell at the local market.

In the evenings, they gather for several hours in “congreso,” a nightly meeting led by the community spiritual leader, where they worship and recite traditional songs. The lyrics are steeped in myths and metaphors acknowledging their ancestors and giving praise to their land.

But for the past several years, the congresos have taken a dark tone. After abnormally high tides hit the coast in 2008, hundreds of the Kuna were forced to move inland when their homes were destroyed by knee-deep floodwaters. According to studies by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, since 1910 the average sea level in Kuna Yala has risen by almost six inches, and is continuing to increase by roughly three-quarters of an inch annually. Many of the Kuna are beginning to fear that in the near future, their land will be completely submerged.

Now when the Kuna pray to their gods, they mostly ask for protection to preserve their way of life.

“From the outside looking in, it looks like a very peaceful living paradise,” said Matthieu Rytz, who has been photographing the islands, with the support of Neus Photos since 2011. “The women are dressed in molas, their traditional dress. Everything looks so calm. But the Kuna have a lot of problems they are trying to address. There are many things that the tourists don’t see.”

It was during a boat trip from Panama to Colombia that Mr. Rytz first came across the Kuna Yala islands. He had been studying anthropology at the University of Montreal and was immediately drawn to how the Kuna showed reverence for their ancient traditions to maintain the land.

“It was literally like traveling through time,” Mr. Rytz, 32, said.

Originally from Switzerland, Mr. Rytz said he has always been interested in understanding how different cultures are formed and how people are influenced by their surroundings. In 2009, he founded Anthropographia, a nonprofit organization that promotes art and photography focused on human rights issues. When he reached the Kuna islands and noticed the flooding, he wanted to explore how these challenges could change their future.

But for Mr. Rytz, photographing them was no simple task.

DESCRIPTIONMatthieu Rytz A Kuna Indian prepares his boat for a trip.

After a bloody rebellion against Panama in 1925, the Kuna claimed their independence and became an autonomous Indian community â€" with complete control over the use of their land. Originally from what is now Colombia, the Kuna occupy nearly 40 of the 350 islands between Central and South America and have fought for many years against development and mining activities that could disrupt their resources.

Most islands have no electricity and are powered by oil-fueled generators brought in by Colombian merchants. Kuna leaders have also strictly regulated tourism, limiting hotel construction to only a few of the main islands as well as charging tourists a small fee for interacting with residents.

Immediately after Mr. Rytz began taking pictures of the Kuna islands, he was told by several spiritual leaders that he would need a permit for each individual island he wanted to document. Without their permission or a spiritual blessing, he could face a $500 fine.

“It wasn’t an easy process and it became frustrating at times,” Mr. Rytz said. “The Kuna are very big on protecting their image and maintaining a certain level of control over their people. Sometimes, they didn’t even care to hear what I was trying to do with my photographs. I was told to leave the island right away.”

After getting his permits, he returned in 2012 and traveled with several local guides.

On each island, he watched how the Kuna spent most of their days working together to collect garbage, corals and sand to create makeshift barriers along their homes, only for the waters to wash away their efforts in a matter of hours.

“The majority of the people think the island is disappearing, they speak about it a lot,” he said. “So they are putting these blockers up by the sea. They don’t have engineers. They don’t have concrete or cement. Instead they use garbage. Without proper understanding on how to build bags, they do whatever they think will work.”

He quietly joined in on a few congresos, where the Kuna sang spiritual songs and asked for better days to come. Then there were the debates on how to handle the Colombian drug trafficking trade surrounding their islands, which sometimes results in bags of cocaine drifting to their shores. (They eventually decided that any money made from a Kuna selling drugs found off the coast would go back to improving the community.)

At one point, one of his guides brought home a large flat-screen television that he received from a traveling merchant after trading several small bags of cocaine he found while fishing for lobsters. Mr. Rytz watched as the man proudly carried the television into his home, propping it up against a small branch to keep it away from the sandy floor.

When he realized he didn’t know how to turn it on, he turned to Mr. Rytz for help.

“I had to explain to him that he needed electricity to make this television work,” he chuckled. “There are no outlets in the middle of the sea.”

DESCRIPTIONMatthieu Rytz An unusually heavy rain on the Kuna Yala archipelago.

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and Yemen.

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and Yemen.

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Anna Quindlen and Andrew Solomon Join Discussion about Media and Transgender Children

My blog post last week - about Coy Mathis, the 6-year-old transgender Colorado child - drew some strong responses from readers. On Twitter, I immediately heard from those who sharply questioned my suggestion that “the willingness of the child” be considered, along with parental approval, in deciding to name her and use photographs of her. As many of these critics (some of whom were parents) noted, young children are willing to do many things they might regret later; they don’t have the maturity to know how their actions will play out.

More thoughtful reasoning than mine came from Anna Quindlen, the author and former Times columnist whose work I have long admired. She wrote in an e-mail:

I was intrigued by your journal entry today because it raises a question that is so beautifully and intelligently explored in the new book “Far From the Tree,” by Andrew Solomon. If you haven’t read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is about children who are essentially different than their parents â€" there is a chapter on transsexual children and their families-but an overarching question he raises is when and whether parents have a moral right to make certain choices for their minor children. Can hearing parents really make a dispassionate decision for a toddler about a cochlear implant What about the average-sized parents of a dwarf, who, if she is to receive painful and extensive limb-lengthening surgery, must begin at 7 or 8 And do parents make such decisions based on what is best for their child or what is best for their self-image

It’s a fascinating question, and I thought of it when you noted that Coy’s parents had agreed to let her be photographed and interviewed. They have the legal right to do that, I’m sure-but do they have the moral right to do so I don’t know the answer. I only know that, as Solomon suggests over and over again in his exceptional book, parents frequently make decisions based on a complex calculus that has as much to do with them as their kids. I know I did that even as I tried not to do so.

Ms. Quindlen’s e-mail prompted me to get in touch with Mr. Solomon, who had appeared on Katie Couric’s ABC program with Coy Mathis and her parents last month. In a phone interview, he agreed that young children can’t be allowed to make important decisions for themselves, joking that he won’t let his own four-year-old son decide what to have for dinner, much less make choices that could change his life forever. Parents’ accepting and loving guidance is a necessity, he said.

But, on balance, he sees “an enormous greater good” coming from children such as Coy Mathis and her parents taking their stories public and in articles like the one in The Times. He spoke of another transgender girl, 11-year-old Jazz, who became well-known through a January interview with Barbara Walters.

“The presence of these children has a huge impact” in making other transgender children feel that they are not alone and that their lives are not a cause for shame, Mr. Solomon said, noting the high rate of suicide and despair among transgender children.

Stories like these can “spare families enormous suffering.”

In addition to that greater good, there is potential for personal benefit to the child as well: being able to live openly and honestly, and in some cases, even to feel a sense of mission in helping other children accept themselves.

“There is a tendency to see this as shameful and best kept secret,” he said. “That is tremendously burdensome.”

I talked at length, after the post appeared, with the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, who described making decisions involving a child’s privacy as “a very difficult issue, made more difficult because of the Google factor.” By that, he means that references to the child in news stories “live on forever and are instantly accessible.”

“That doesn’t change our fundamental approach of weighing what we need to tell our readers against privacy concerns,” he said, “but it is a complicating factor.”

But, Mr. Corbett added, “Our default setting is to inform readers, not to withhold information.”

The Times article, sensitively told by Dan Frosch, “certainly had more impact because of the pictures, the details, the name,” Mr. Corbett said. Without those elements, he said, “We would have lost something.”

It is, of course, a tricky balance. “We need to be reluctant to say we know better than a child’s parents what’s good for the child,” Mr. Corbett said.

Reporters do need to be sensitive to parents whose motivations are questionable. “That doesn’t seem to be the case here,” he said.

Many readers also questioned the thinking that, because Coy Mathis had already appeared on a network talk show and elsewhere, The Times had a less difficult choice to make.

Mr. Corbett responded to this point: “When something is so widely known that there’s no privacy left to protect, that does weigh into our consideration,” he said. “We need to think it through every time and be prepared to pull back.”

In this case, he said: “We did a thoughtful, difficult story on an important subject. It’s a decision we’re comfortable with but not an easy one.”

Without a doubt, Mr. Solomon said, “It’s murky territory.” News organizations should evaluate the motives of parents who are willing to make their child’s story public and to actively advocate, as the Mathises have done.

“There’s a lot of self-aggrandizement that can creep in, but I don’t think that’s so in this case.”

The media “has to assess the balance of harm and good,” Mr. Solomon said. There are risks but “the positives count, too.”



Sunday Column: The Times’s Work in Progress

The Times’s Work in Progress

SINCE I started as The Times’s fifth public editor last September, I’ve taken up topics from “false balance” in news articles to negative arts criticism to government secrecy. After six months, 16 Sunday columns and close to 100 blog posts to the Public Editor’s Journal, I thought it would be worthwhile to see where some of the issues I have written about stand now.

QUOTE APPROVAL Early in my tenure, I called for The Times to prohibit the practice of allowing news sources to approve quotations for use in news articles. Times management was already considering such a move, and soon issued such a policy.

Last week, I asked the Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt, how that policy was going, since Washington stories were some of those most affected by the change. “Some in government are less willing to talk to us, and we have lost a few interviews,” he said. “But the cost has been entirely bearable, and the policy is an improvement.”

Reporters still do a great deal of reporting on background and later negotiate with sources to put quotations on the record â€" a practice that the policy allows â€" but “we won’t allow people to edit what they’ve said, after they’ve spoken to us, which often was taking place through a spokesperson,” Mr. Leonhardt said.

I’m glad The Times has made this move; quote approval was an insidious practice that had to end.

THE HAZARDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Twitter and Facebook can be dangerous places for journalists. I wrote about two cases in which problems arose: a sexist Twitter message from the Times magazine freelancer Andrew Goldman to the author Jennifer Weiner, and eyebrow-raising Facebook and Twitter messages by Jodi Rudoren as she began her new post as the Jerusalem bureau chief.

The Times dealt with the situations in quite different ways: by suspending Mr. Goldman from his column for a few weeks and by assigning an editor to work with Ms. Rudoren on her social media efforts. A deputy foreign editor, Michael Slackman, told me that Ms. Rudoren’s social media presence eventually fell off as she dug into her new beat and that she uses it now “primarily to cover the news and far less as a public journal.” When she does post on Facebook and Twitter now, the messages are no longer vetted by an editor, according to the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, but are “monitored,” as are those of other reporters.

Mr. Goldman told me in an e-mail that he had only gradually returned to Twitter: “I learned the hard way that I have a foot that fits remarkably well in my mouth. Now, I’m doing what I should have done all along: let the interviews speak for themselves.”

Last fall, The Times also reissued its social media guidelines and emphasized that they applied to freelancers as well as the newsroom staff. The guidelines are general ones that basically say, “Think first and remember that you represent The Times.”

THE TIMES’S BUSINESS MODEL Like all newspaper companies, The Times is dealing with tough challenges as print advertising â€" long its major source of revenue â€" continues its sharp decline. At the same time, it is reinventing itself as a global digital media company.

In recent months, a new chief executive came on board, 30 newsroom management positions were eliminated in a cost-cutting effort, and The Times announced plans for new ways of finding revenue. One development: The Times will run more events like the DealBook conference, which I questioned last fall because such events sometimes blur the line between journalism and marketing.

Another development is the transformation of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, which will become The International New York Times. And the company has reorganized both its business-side management ranks and its newsroom leadership.

In a recent speech at the University of Michigan, Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said that excellent work would save the day: “Quality, serious journalism that is thoroughly reported, elegantly told and that truly honors the intelligence of its readers is the business model of The New York Times.”

But the challenges are as daunting as they are diverse â€" as The Times found out when its Chinese language Web site, an important part of its global strategy, was blocked by the Chinese government last fall; months later, it remains blocked. Safe arrival on the shore of stable profitability in the digital age won’t be achieved in 2013; it is a long journey, with headwinds all the way.

ACCURACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE One of the low points of the period was The Times’s error-ridden coverage of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. The Times briefly named the wrong person as the gunman online, and, even the next day in print, it made serious errors about how Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School, about his weapons, and about his mother’s role at the school. While other news organizations had the same problems â€" and many far worse â€" readers hold The Times to a higher standard. Since then, editors have met several times to discuss solutions.

“Newtown forced us to ask ourselves some questions and tighten up our practices,” Ian Fisher, the assistant managing editor in charge of the newsroom’s digital report, told me. Mr. Fisher said there would be more reluctance to attribute an important fact to other media organizations, as The Times did when it identified Ryan Lanza as the gunman instead of his brother.

In addition, he said, breaking stories may include “cautionary language” that clearly tells the reader that some facts aren’t yet known. In addition, a more streamlined editing process should reduce the internal confusion that resulted in what Mr. Fisher called “some self-inflicted wounds.” In short, he said, “We took it very seriously.”

-

My last print column suggested that the American public’s first knowledge of the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison came from a press leak. As an astute reader pointed out, the United States military, responding to an internal complaint, had announced its investigation before news organizations obtained leaked information that provided much of the detail that so outraged the world.

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 March 24, 2013, on page SR14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Times’s Work in Progress.

Wading Into Weirdness on the Street

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It’s another typical day: there’s a commute, work, people in the street; it’s been done before, and it can be expected to happen again tomorrow. But for Stephen McLaren, these seemingly humdrum routines are packed with weirdness.

He’s the guy with a camera, a wry sensibility and a measure of both luck and patience; a San Francisco-based street photographer of Scottish extraction whose work feels like a field guide to how normal things can be really odd, contradictory â€" and visually rich.

“I’m a naturally inquisitive, kind of curious person,” he said. “So I’m really quite happy to hit the ground running, to just kind of see what transpires.”

The idea of a field guide is apt, since Mr. McLaren’s method can resemble that of a naturalist. He described staking out a scene, waiting for the subject to step into the tableau he has framed. Or he’ll stalk a subject â€" a man wrestling an oversize Christmas tree home, for instance (below).

“I know this scenario very well, and look for people who are trying to manhandle trees that are quite a bit bigger than them,” he said. “They always underestimate what a job it is. I’d been following this guy for several hundred yards.”

DESCRIPTIONStephen McLaren From the series “East End.”

He tends to invite himself into spaces, private properties â€" “pretty much anything with a door,” he said â€" pretending to be a tourist and “bumble in” uninvited to a function or restaurant. He takes his pictures and basically waits “until someone asks you what you’re doing there.”

Then he’s told he had better leave.

It helps that Mr. McClaren mentally catalogs moments, even if they pass by without his getting the shot. “Typically, I find if something happened and I’ve missed, I kind of log it, and think that there’s a good chance it’s going to happen again,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than beating yourself up about missed photographs. It’s a waste of energy.”

Mr. McLaren’s background is in television documentaries, which he made for a time in his native Scotland and then in London, before moving to the United States. Making a living as a still photographer is relatively new to him â€" he began shooting exclusively six years ago â€" but it has since taken him all over Los Angeles, New Orleans, inside the Ikea in Beijing and elsewhere.

He belongs to a collective of four Scottish photographers called Document Scotland, which does just that, at an important time for Scots as they prepare for next year’s referendum on Scottish independence. Unfortunately, Mr. McLaren, who lived in London before relocating to the United States West Coast, has disenfranchised himself, as only residents of Scotland in Scotland can vote. The collective expects to compile a book in time for the vote.

DESCRIPTIONStephen McLaren An Ayrshire shepherd in Scotland.

But Mr. McLaren seeks to do more than merely pluck strange moments out of time or create a loving record of his homeland. Some works, like his series “Moral Hazard” â€" which offers a street-level view of the global fiscal crisis as it unfolded in London and will be available in a forthcoming book â€" is an attempt to get closer and deeper to what he sees in front of him.

“Obviously, that’s impossible with photography, to get to that level,” he said. “But it’s worth striving for, using â€" hopefully â€" great visual intelligence to bring the metaphorical side of it to life. I hope that people understand that it’s not saying two plus two equals four â€" there are some open-ended issues that people can wrestle with if they wish.”

In London, amassing material for his series, Mr. McLaren’s pursuit of that metaphorical side took him to London Bridge. It is a common location for photographers â€" professionals and amateurs alike â€" and every day, people cross the bridge as they rush to their trains home. Mr. McLaren, facing the tide of thousands of commuters going in one direction, noticed a little podium in front of him. “They’re always looking for tiny little shortcuts that will get them to the platform of the train a nanosecond quicker,” he recalled.

Every now and then someone would climb the podium and leap off, hoping to get a tiny advantage over the others heading home (Slide 1).

“I stood there for an hour, waiting for someone who looked most resolute in getting this little sliver of time,” he said. “It brought a bit of levity to the idea of all these commuters rushing home. It’s not a dreary picture â€" a lot of pictures of London Bridge are of all these commuters looking dreary and sad and miserable, and I like to think this one has a little bit of joy behind it as well.”

DESCRIPTIONStephen McLaren “Goldilocks Economy,” from the series “Moral Hazard.”

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From Today’s Paper: Catholics Celebrate Palm Sunday in Israel

Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

In Jerusalem’s Old City, priests and others carried palm fronds early Sunday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, believed by many to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus Christ.



Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Israel, Myanmar and Cyprus.

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Guided by Blindness

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A blind man helped Gaia Squarci find the heart of her photography project documenting the lives of the sightless and visually impaired. Dale Layne was describing to her the onset of blindness, which he said was like seeing the world on a broken screen that fragments, then eventually obliterates, reality.

“Broken Screen” became not just the project’s name, but also its guiding sentiment. It made her dwell less on the lack of sight itself, but more on how it changes both how you think about and perceive the world around you.

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’


Michael Faillace, employment lawyer (Slide 3).

“I didn’t try to structure it in a literal way,” Ms. Squarci said. “Dale has a camera that has a broken screen and he takes pictures that no one can see, though the pictures are there. The idea is more like a computer that functions without the screen: your mind is there, your feelings and personality stay the same. But everything about the way you perceive the world and interact with it is influenced by the fact that you don’t have a screen.”

The project began two years ago when Ms. Squarci, 24, was studying photography in New York. She had thought about a project about how blind couples were attracted despite being unable to see one another. But she quickly put aside that idea when she started frequenting Visions, an organization that helps the blind and visually impaired. She realized there was a lot she didn’t know about their daily lives and routines.

DESCRIPTIONGaia Squarci Collin Watt tied a knot on a climbing rope in his backyard in Jamaica, Queens.

“There is an invisible wall between the sighted and the visually impaired,” Ms. Squarci said. “One of the women I interviewed, she has been blind since she was 4 years old, she told me sighted people are almost scared to deal with the blind. Being blind is like speaking a language. If sighted people don’t find eye contact â€" which is the first hint of communication â€" they feel lost and they don’t engage.”

Her earliest encounter at Visions led her to Mark Andres, a photographer who led a workshop for the center’s clients. He would describe scenes that the photographers â€" who had once been sighted and had memory of vision â€" would collaborate with him in setting up and then photographing using long exposures, illuminating part of the subject with flashlights they guided by touch.

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’


Donald Baker, a radio D.J. at the Visions center for the blind.

Dale Layne, one of the participants, became Ms. Squarci’s friend and guide, telling her about interesting events and outings. As Ms. Squarci got to know more subjects, she accompanied them to their homes â€" where television provided a constant soundtrack â€" or to museum outings where sighted guides would describe masterpieces.

“I remember for one sculptor, they had to wear gloves so they could touch the sculpture,” she said. “You’re going to imagine the art in a different way and experience it differently.”

How they experienced their own loss of sight varied. Ms. Squarci was struck when one man told her how, after being totally blind for two months, he regained vision for a fleeting moment. He was able to glimpse his girlfriend.

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’



Donald Baker, radio D.J. at Visions.

“It stayed like that for a few seconds, and then everything got gray,” Ms. Squarci said. “These little moments, for me, are important. He was saying he likes to go to the theater because you have this perception of the actor being in the same room with you. What he misses the most are the facial expressions.”

She also realized that everything could go dark without notice, as it did for one woman who was blinded in a car accident when she was 26.

“She became blind from one moment to another,” Ms. Squarci said. “I asked her how she moved into accepting this new thing. She said: ‘I didn’t have the time to notice. One moment I’m sighted and the following moment I’m blind. If I spent the night crying because I’m blind, the next day I would still be blind.’ ’’

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’



Alexandra Hobbes, a student of forensic criminology.

The idea of visual memory came through in some of her pictures. Dale, for example, repairs computers relying on his recollections of their circuits and wires. But another subject made Ms. Squarci question the idea of memory itself.

“She was 4 when she lost her sight, and she can recall colors from television and ‘The Simpsons,’ ” Ms. Squarci said. “But she couldn’t remember her face. Of course her face changed so much. It’s not just the perception of the world, but of yourself.”

Ms. Squarci intends to continue the project, adding audio interviews she has done with many of her subjects. To her, they are the most important audience.

“Being guided by them, there are infinite things that I can still explore,” she said. “Pictures are limited, especially for the perception of what they can get out of them. I would like to do something with sound that they can experience more and possibly collaborate with other artists or designers who can do something really creative for them.”

DESCRIPTIONGaia Squarci Blind people wear sunglasses not only for medical reasons, but also, often, for social acceptance. They are aware that sighted people tend to be more at ease not seeing their eyes at all, instead of looking for eye contact and not getting it.

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Guided by Blindness

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

A blind man helped Gaia Squarci find the heart of her photography project documenting the lives of the sightless and visually impaired. Dale Layne was describing to her the onset of blindness, which he said was like seeing the world on a broken screen that fragments, then eventually obliterates, reality.

“Broken Screen” became not just the project’s name, but also its guiding sentiment. It made her dwell less on the lack of sight itself, but more on how it changes both how you think about and perceive the world around you.

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’


Michael Faillace, employment lawyer (Slide 3).

“I didn’t try to structure it in a literal way,” Ms. Squarci said. “Dale has a camera that has a broken screen and he takes pictures that no one can see, though the pictures are there. The idea is more like a computer that functions without the screen: your mind is there, your feelings and personality stay the same. But everything about the way you perceive the world and interact with it is influenced by the fact that you don’t have a screen.”

The project began two years ago when Ms. Squarci, 24, was studying photography in New York. She had thought about a project about how blind couples were attracted despite being unable to see one another. But she quickly put aside that idea when she started frequenting Visions, an organization that helps the blind and visually impaired. She realized there was a lot she didn’t know about their daily lives and routines.

DESCRIPTIONGaia Squarci Collin Watt tied a knot on a climbing rope in his backyard in Jamaica, Queens.

“There is an invisible wall between the sighted and the visually impaired,” Ms. Squarci said. “One of the women I interviewed, she has been blind since she was 4 years old, she told me sighted people are almost scared to deal with the blind. Being blind is like speaking a language. If sighted people don’t find eye contact â€" which is the first hint of communication â€" they feel lost and they don’t engage.”

Her earliest encounter at Visions led her to Mark Andres, a photographer who led a workshop for the center’s clients. He would describe scenes that the photographers â€" who had once been sighted and had memory of vision â€" would collaborate with him in setting up and then photographing using long exposures, illuminating part of the subject with flashlights they guided by touch.

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’


Donald Baker, a radio D.J. at the Visions center for the blind.

Dale Layne, one of the participants, became Ms. Squarci’s friend and guide, telling her about interesting events and outings. As Ms. Squarci got to know more subjects, she accompanied them to their homes â€" where television provided a constant soundtrack â€" or to museum outings where sighted guides would describe masterpieces.

“I remember for one sculptor, they had to wear gloves so they could touch the sculpture,” she said. “You’re going to imagine the art in a different way and experience it differently.”

How they experienced their own loss of sight varied. Ms. Squarci was struck when one man told her how, after being totally blind for two months, he regained vision for a fleeting moment. He was able to glimpse his girlfriend.

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’



Donald Baker, radio D.J. at Visions.

“It stayed like that for a few seconds, and then everything got gray,” Ms. Squarci said. “These little moments, for me, are important. He was saying he likes to go to the theater because you have this perception of the actor being in the same room with you. What he misses the most are the facial expressions.”

She also realized that everything could go dark without notice, as it did for one woman who was blinded in a car accident when she was 26.

“She became blind from one moment to another,” Ms. Squarci said. “I asked her how she moved into accepting this new thing. She said: ‘I didn’t have the time to notice. One moment I’m sighted and the following moment I’m blind. If I spent the night crying because I’m blind, the next day I would still be blind.’ ’’

Voices of ‘Broken Screen’



Alexandra Hobbes, a student of forensic criminology.

The idea of visual memory came through in some of her pictures. Dale, for example, repairs computers relying on his recollections of their circuits and wires. But another subject made Ms. Squarci question the idea of memory itself.

“She was 4 when she lost her sight, and she can recall colors from television and ‘The Simpsons,’ ” Ms. Squarci said. “But she couldn’t remember her face. Of course her face changed so much. It’s not just the perception of the world, but of yourself.”

Ms. Squarci intends to continue the project, adding audio interviews she has done with many of her subjects. To her, they are the most important audience.

“Being guided by them, there are infinite things that I can still explore,” she said. “Pictures are limited, especially for the perception of what they can get out of them. I would like to do something with sound that they can experience more and possibly collaborate with other artists or designers who can do something really creative for them.”

DESCRIPTIONGaia Squarci Blind people wear sunglasses not only for medical reasons, but also, often, for social acceptance. They are aware that sighted people tend to be more at ease not seeing their eyes at all, instead of looking for eye contact and not getting it.

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



Pictures of the Day: Myanmar and Elsewhere

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Photos from Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Israel.

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Toppling Saddam and a War’s Coverage

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We highly recommend viewing this slideshow in “full-screen” mode.

Broadcast live to millions around the globe, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square seemed to be the defining visual moment of the Iraq war. To viewers and commentators, it was gripping proof that Iraqis were celebrating the triumphal arrival of the Marines.

But it was not so apparent to some of the journalists who were actually there.

The photographer Gary Knight saw more journalists and Marines than actual civilians. And those Iraqis he saw, he said, seemed to be “doing it for the benefit of the cameras” at what amounted to little more than a media event. Just beyond the view of he cameras, the square was mostly empty. Lt. Tim McLaughlin, the Marine tank commander whose American flag ended up briefly atop the statue before it fell, drily observed that it was hardly a turning point, just “an event that for me occurred probably between 4:10 in the afternoon and 4:25 in the afternoon.”

Ten years after the invasion, it is clear that the moment hardly heralded a clean and decisive victory. If anything, the news coverage raises questions about the role the news media played in the run-up to the war and the toll it took on soldiers and civilians.

Mr. Knight hadn’t taken any photographs that day in 2003 when his Newsweek photo editor, watching a live television broadcast in New York, called his satellite phone and anxiously asked if he was shooting the crowd pulling down the statue with cables. Mr. Knight half-heartedly squeezed off a few frames while on the phone and tried to explain what was happening.

“I saw this for what it was â€" this wasn’t Iwo Jima,” he said. “It was probably the most trivial thing I had seen in five weeks. And I recognized what the press, the live TV cameras who had been starved of a story, were making of it. But I thought to myself, I’m not going to flatter this by making it into something that I know it isn’t.”

DESCRIPTIONPeter Maass Gary Knight in Iraq.

Needless to say, other photographers had more artful images than Mr. Knight.

Peter Maass, a reporter covering the invasion for The New York Times Magazine, had taken the dangerous journey north from Kuwait as an unembedded journalist alongside Mr. Knight. While standing in Firdos Square during the two hours it took to topple the statue, Mr. Maass did not see it as a defining moment. He took a few snapshots for himself. Later, in 2011, he wrote a detailed account of the events of that day for The New Yorker.

His clear-eyed take, along with pictures and recollections by Lieutenant McLaughlin and Mr. Knight, are at the heart of “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,” which opened last week at the Bronx Documentary Center. The exhibit features Lieutenant McLaughlin’s handwritten diaries, Mr. Knight’s black-and-white photos and Mr. Maass’s words, along with snapshots by all three and Wesley Bocxe, an American photographer based in Mexico. The show is a stinging rebuke of the news media’s early unquestioning coverage as well as a window into the nature of war.

“I worry that most people don’t understand the unforgiving violence of my Marine Corps experiences,” Lieutenant McLaughlin said at the show’s opening. “Shoot a few seconds too soon and you kill a civilian. Hesitate, and another Marine dies. There are no second chances. Killing people is ugly, brutal and abrupt. It is final, and it stays with you for a lifetime. It’s done because that’s what your country asked you to do, yet most Americans will only experience war through cable news, politicians and Hollywood. It’s a flag on a statue, a talking point and a movie.”

Lieutenant McLaughlin had joined the Marines during peacetime and was stationed at the Pentagon when it was attacked on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. For part of the push north across Iraq, his was the lead tank of the Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment.

There were no other American military units ahead of them.

Mr. Maass and Mr. Knight, on the other hand, were in separate SUVs rented from Hertz in Kuwait. Mr. Knight smashed through a barricade on the Iraq border at the start of the war on March 20 2003. He assumed â€" correctly â€" that the Kuwaiti border guards were unlikely to pursue him into Iraq.

DESCRIPTIONCourtesy of Peter Maass Peter Maass in front of a mural of Saddam Hussein on which Marines had spray-painted, “Bravo Tanks,” the designation of Lt. Tim McLaughlin’s tank company.

Along with several other photographers who rode with him, Mr. Knight joined Mr. Maass and other journalists trying to cover the invasion on their own â€" unilaterally â€" not embedded with the United States military.

Mr. Knight wanted to have access to the Iraqi civilian side of the war. It quickly became apparent to him that this was an extremely risky strategy and that he needed to find an American military unit if he was going to make it to Baghdad alive.

Fortunately, a blinding sandstorm led Mr. Knight to rear-end a marine Humvee. The battalion’s commander graciously allowed him and his companions to travel alongside the battalion. After some difficult combat, the Marines arrived in Firdos Square â€" mainly to rescue journalists who were trapped in the Palestine Hotel.

The exhibition’s three main participants say that the tight shots of the statue that were broadcast and published in newspapers showed only the people beating and toppling the statue and not that the square was mostly empty. If anything, they say, the event was more symbolic of the news media’s failings.

“It is a really serious problem,” Mr. Maass said. “It’s kind of a continuation of the problem the media had with the weapons of mass destruction and the whole coverage of Iraq.”

Even 10 years after the invasion, it is difficult to calculate the extent of the war’s toll.

Mr. McLaughlin is now a lawyer in Boston and the president of Shelter Legal Services, a nonprofit group that provides free legal advice to homeless and low-income veterans. He has had a difficult time since returning from Iraq in 2003. Although he overcame a drinking problem, he said, he still has trouble in social situations and has constant nightmares.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs says I have post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “I don’t have a disorder. It’s a natural reaction. It would be a disorder if I was unaffected.”

DESCRIPTIONCourtesy of Tim McLaughlin A destroyed Iraqi T-72 tank

Much of the material is available on a free iPad app and on a Web site dedicated to the project. Mr. Knight’s account of his Iraq war experiences are in the book “Photojournalists on War,” published this month by the University of Texas Press.

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