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In Flight, John White Shares His Light

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Before she became a staff photographer at The New York Times, Michelle Agins was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where John H. White was already making his mark on the city's photographic scene. He looked out for her and gave her advice an d encouragement, even after he went to The Chicago Sun-Times and she to New York.

Soon after he and the rest of The Sun-Times's photo staff were fired late last month, Ms. Agins went to Chicago for her godson's graduation. While there, she visited Mr. White at his home. Their conversation has been edited into a first-person narrative.

While everybody else was stunned and upset that The Chicago Sun-Times had fired its entire photography staff, I couldn't stop thinking of one man. They did that to John White? The Chairman of the Board? That's like the Bulls getting rid of Michael Jordan.

For a hot minute, my South Side Chicago roots took over - I was ready to roll down.

M. Spencer Green/Associated Press John H. White at a June 6 protest in front of The Chicago Sun Times's headquarters.

John was the photographer I looked up to when I was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where he was working in the early 1970s. My godfather, John Tweedle, told me to look him up. John looked out for me, encouraged me and nudged my career. I watched him on the streets, in the darkroom and even stood by his side as he carefully put together the portfolio that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

When I visited him, he was not letting the firing change how he felt about himself, or his fellow photographers, one bit.

“A job's not a job because of labor law,” he said. “It's just something you love. It's something you do because it gives you a mission, a life, a purpose, and you do it for the service of others.”

All he had wanted to hear from the executives who let him go was two words that never came: thank you. But even then, he did not respond with anger.

“I light candles, I don't curse the darkness,” he said. “Even now, my colleagues are cursing the darkness. I'm lighting the candles. And I give wings to dreams, I ain't breaking no wings. I'm not clipping any wings. Make a difference in the world. One light. One day. One image.”

John taught me how to fly.

I had been taking pictures since high school, but when I got to The Daily News, I was a copy-girl intern. But I also tried to copy John the minute I saw him walk through the newsroom after an assignment. I would sneak away and go back toward the darkroom - his chapel away from church - and watch him unload his cameras and ask him about his day.

I even tried to walk like he walked. I had seen a lot of photographers on assignment, but to find John White, you had to look in the shadows. He was never where you could see him. He was always where he could be, like he was hovering over in a corner. Like he could see everything in a room. He had this look. He kept his camera low-key. And all of a sudden, he'd pick it up and find the real subject. The one you hadn't seen before.

He didn't do this for prizes, though he won a lot of them. He did it for “consistent excellence.” And for as long as he had been taking pictures, it never got boring or predictable.

“I've got the same set of eyes, nothing's changed,” he said. “Every day, a ba by is born. Every day, someone dies. Every single day. And we capture everything in between. You think of this thing called life and how it's preserved. It's preserved through vision, through photographs.”

John H. White “Ice House.”

You've probably figured out by now that John thought about bigger things. He was a religious man, born on a Sunday into a family of preachers in North Carolina. When he tells one and all to “keep in flight,” it's as much spiritual advice as it is professional. He takes that advice himself, even after the slight of seeing one of his pictures published in his old paper with only “Sun-Times Library” as the credit line.

“I can't get caught up in those things,” he said. “You got to look at the big picture, because I know the true photo editor.”

Like a good storyteller - or a preacher - he taught with examples from his life, often talking about moments with his father in North Carolina. He remembered one night walking through a wooded patch with his father, who reached out and grabbed a firefly.

“Look at my hand,” his father said as he gently squeezed the insect. “And look what he's doing. He's making a light. He can't contain his light. God gives us light and we can't contain this light. Be like the lightning bug. Don't let anyone contain your light.”

I was still an intern when, despite protests from some of the other staff photographers, I was sent out to cover how children were dealing with a teachers strike. I went out to Cabrini-Green, passed by a dentist's office and saw a boy sitting in the chair. I went in and asked if I could photograph the dentist, and he agreed.

Nothing much was happening.

I thought it was going to be a boring picture. All of a sudden, the dentist yanked a tooth from the kid's mouth. He didn't tell me he was going to do this. The kid's eyes crossed and his mouth was open. The paper ran it with “He'd Rather Be in School” as the caption. That shot helped the other photographers accept me.

“Everybody remembers that picture, a billion-dollar picture,” John said. “People realized then that she's doing what we did, she's spreading her wings and trying to fly, and you know, it's like you were that lightning bug. You didn't let them contain you and keep you down.”

I swear I didn't even know what the Pulitzer was when I watched him assemble the portfolio that would earn him journalism's highest prize. I stood beside him in the darkroom as he printed (with a towel slung over his left shoulder). I watched him put paper, make careful measurements and lay out a story. He showed me h ow to tell a story.

Years later, John and I both covered Pope John Paul II's Mass in Central Park. I showed off my computer and my new digital camera. I was proud of where he had helped me get. But not as proud as he was.

“It's like your child,” he told me. “And they got a touchdown. You know what I mean? And it wasn't a Hail Mary touchdown, you know what I mean? It was from one end of the line to the other. You know? It required a lot, but you got the touchdown. This is the journey. You go through storms, rain and hurricanes, and forces of evil. You know. But you keepin' the fight.”

John, I was just doing what you taught me: staying in flight and sharing the light.

Michelle Agins/The New York Times John White in his home th is month.

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Pictures of the Day: Senegal and Elsewhere

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Photos from Senegal, South Africa, Israel and Kosovo.

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Production Note

An article was posted on this page inadvertently, before it was ready for publication.

A Fairy Tale in Transylvania

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When Rena Effendi went to Transylvania to photograph hay for National Geographic, she envisioned a fairy tale, someplace almost medieval. But when she arrived in the Gyimes valley, she was disappointed. The scenery had been spoiled, she thought, by modern architecture.

“I was greedy,” Ms. Effendi said. “I wanted to find the real, bucolic, medieval type of scenery, and I couldn't find it there.”

So she consulted an expert.

“I Googled two words: ‘Transylvania' and ‘hay,' ” she said this week in a phone interview from her Cairo home.

Among the first results was Maramures, a Romanian-speaking region where one can find distilleries and mills more than 500 years old. Ms. Effendi, 36, sought advice from Kathleen McLaughlin, a photographer who had previously been there.

When Ms. Effendi arrived, she fell in love with the “Romanian Transylvanian fairy tale” she discovered.

“I found villages where almost all women know how to do embroidery and almost every man knows how to build a house from scratch,” she said.

She stayed with a family of musicians in Hoteni, a village of about 800 people. She slept in a wooden house set in a meadow and ate simple meals prepared with fresh produce from an orchard and a small vegetable garden. During two trips, Ms. Effendi spent about two months in the fields, photographing the hay-making process, which begins around 5 a.m. on dry summer days.

“People spend the day in the field,” she said. “They take their food, they take naps. You see these women climbing on top of the haystack in special trousers so the wind doesn't blow up their skirts.”

Life moves slowly in the villages of Maramures, all of which are nestled alongside streams. It revolves around hay, which is used to feed the cows that produce the milk that ends up on the table. During hay season, the farmers work by hand, moving at a frantic pace. One couple, Gheorghe and Anuta Borca, told Ms. Effendi their honeymoon had been cut short by hay. “They had to start working straight after the wedding,” she said. (They hadn't gone far, honeymooning in their village.)

One of Ms. Effendi's pictures shows three generations of the Borca family at work (Slide 8). “For them, it's a way a life,” she said.

Ms. Effendi asked one family why they kept doing what they do, when they could simply go to a market. “They said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with all this land, then?' ” she recalled. ” ‘It's just going to sit there?' ”

A farmer in Breb told Adam Nicolson, writing for the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, that houses there had cost six haystacks in Communist times.

“Hay is gold,” Ms. Effendi said.

It is also an art: “You can even guess who the owner is by the shape of a haystack,” she said. “They have their individual styles and forms.”

But, while Maramures still has the look of a fairy tale, it is on the verge of vanishing.

“You see it in the clothes people wear,” Ms. Effendi said. “You see small signs of this beautiful agrarian culture fading away.” It shows in the architecture - old people live in old homes, while many young families live in cement houses with bathrooms and television. More and more young people are enchanted by European cities.

“Transylvania is not yet a fossil,” Mr. Nicolson wrote in the magazine. “It is still alive - just - if in need of life support. But it represents one of the great questions for the future: Can the modern world sustain beauty it hasn't created itself?”

Ms. Effendi didn't want to use the juxtaposition of old and new to tell the story of Maramures, though. “I wanted to pay homage to the fairy tale,” she said. “I wanted to show the purity of the landscape and the people living there.”

She recalled a day she spent with a shepherd, who took her to the tent in the mountains where he spent most of his time, grazing sheep. In the past, women had left him because he was alwa ys away. But without a wife, he couldn't have a family to help him support a flock of his own.

“You know what?” he told Ms. Effendi. “If you ask me, ‘What would you choose today, women or sheep?' I'd still choose sheep.' ”

One woman she photographed, Maria, 23, was pregnant and working in the field when they met (Slide 7). She spoke more English than most villagers and told Ms. Effendi that she and her husband had spent a year in France, where he worked in construction. But she missed their home in the fields, which was made of cement and had a bathroom, and they returned.

In Maramures, Maria told Ms. Effendi, she has room for activity of the mind. People in France were preoccupied with the daily distractions of urban life, and they didn't have any room left for “beautiful thoughts.”

Ms. Effendi cannot see herself adopting the Transylvanian lifestyle. “But escaping into that world for some periods of time is wonderful,” she said. “ It's replenishing.”

Follow @rena_effendi, @kerrimac and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Syria, the Philippines and Senegal.

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Why No Byline or Named Source for an Article About a Leak Investigation?

A careful reader of The Times, David Smollar of San Diego, makes some astute observations about an unusual article in Friday's paper. The article caught many people's eyes because it lacked a byline. It also quoted Jill Abramson, the executive editor, and it used an unnamed source to confirm an NBC News report that a retired Marine officer, Gen. James E. Cartwright, is a target of a leak investigation about American cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear program.

As Mr. Smollar noted, the article required some “mental gymnastics” on the part of the reader.

He wrote:

It quotes a “person familiar with the investigation” confirming an investigation of Cartwright a s (the/a) leaker for NY Times stories that used unidentified sources about cyberattacks against Iran by the U.S.

It quotes Jill Abramson as declining comment on matters that involve “confidential sources.”

So here we have an NY Times story, with no byline, that uses a confidential source to confirm an investigation about someone suspected of being a confidential source for a series of NY Times stories. And the NY Times itself refusing to comment on a story written by the NY Times about the NY Times.

He added: “Confusing? You bet! My head was spinning after reading the article.”

I asked the managing editor Dean Baquet to explain the background. He told me that there was a rush Thursday night to confirm the NBC news report. The lack of a byline was “not a political decision” in any way but simply refle cted the number of reporters working on what turned out to be a brief article, he said.

In an e-mail, Mr. Baquet wrote: “It was a short story that numerous people scrambled to confirm when the networks broke it. It seemed odd to have more than one byline, and no one felt any real ownership of it.”

As for the confidentiality of the source, Mr. Baquet couldn't comment on that any more than Ms. Abramson was able to in the article itself.

The use of unnamed sources is never ideal. Sometimes it's necessary to get important information on the record. While I can't disagree entirely with Mr. Smollar's criticism, there probably was no alternative, given the deadline situation.

3:35 p.m. | Updated Friday afternoon, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece online that analyzes and helps mak e sense of the development.

Who\'s a Journalist? A Question With Many Facets and One Sure Answer

Behind almost every correction in The Times, there is a story. In the case of the correction about Alexa O'Brien, the story is a particularly interesting one.

The correction, which was in Wednesday's paper, read:

An article on Tuesday about the role of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in the case of Edward J. Snowden, the former computer contractor who leaked details of National Security Agency surveillance, referred incompletely to Alexa O'Brien, who has closely followed the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of providing military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. While Ms. O'Brien has participated in activist causes like Occupy Wall Street and US Day of Rage, she also works as an independent journalist; she is not solely an activist.

After the article was published, Ms. O'Brien e-mailed me and others at The Times, making the strong case that she is a journalist and should be referred to as one. I passed it along to the corrections desk. The Times, to its credit, considered the case and decided to run a correction.

But this raises a question that is very much of the current moment. Who â€" and what â€" is a journalist? It's not just about semantics.

There is a strong legal component to this discussion: Who will be covered by a federal shield law that would give legal protection to journalists who have promised confidentiality to their sources, if it ever comes to pass? Will it cover only established news organizations or those who get paid for news gathering? Or does it cover everyone with a Facebook page?

The question t akes on added heat in the context of the Obama administration's prosecution of leakers using the Espionage Act, its pursuit of Mr. Assange, and the recent naming of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, as a co-conspirator in a leak case.

Then, quite separately, there's a question of the amount of professional respect shown to those like Ms. O'Brien and the columnist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken major news stories about government surveillance for The Guardian in recent weeks.

Is Mr. Greenwald a “blogger,” as a Times headline referred to him recently? That headline was atop a profile that did not use the word journalist to describe the columnist for The Guardian United States, the New York-based Web site associated with the British newspaper. At the time, I wrote (on Twitter) that I found the headline dismissive. There's nothing wrong with being a blogger, of course â€" I am one myself. But when the media establishment uses the term, it somehow seems to say, “You're not quite one of us.” (And that might be just fine with Mr. Greenwald, who has written disparagingly of some media people, whom he calls “courtiers of power.”)

Bruce Headlam, who edits media coverage in The Times and who was an important voice in deciding that a correction was in order on the reference to Ms. O'Brien, has considered the subject.

“I don't consider ‘blogger' an insult and I don't consider ‘activist' to be an insult, either,” he said. But he acknowledges that “I might be in the minority” on those points.

He also noted, rightly, that these matters have taken on more significance in the current climate, and could be crucial for Mr. Greenwald. (Under fire, the Obama administration has recently said that it won't pursue journalists for doing their jobs.)

On the flip side, but in the same context, the journalistic credentials of at least one established broadcaster came under attack in the last week.

Frank Rich, writing about the NBC-“Meet the Press” anchor David Gregory, smacked him around (as did many others) for asking Mr. Greenwald why he “shouldn't be charged with a crime” for “the extent he aided and abetted” Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker.

In a New York magazine piece, Mr. Rich wrote: “Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he's covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he's conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer.” And he derisively suggested that Mr. Gregory begin to host his network's “Today” show, so that he can “speak truth to power by grilling Paula Deen.”

So, who's a journalist? I could explore the legislative and legal questions, and that may be something worth returning to in this space. (Decisions that have been made in interpreting New Jersey's strong shield law are of particular interest, as is the language before the Senate now on the proposed federal law.)

But for now, I'll offer this admittedly partial definition: A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn't shy away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press â€" the very tension that America's founders had in mind with the First Amendment.

Those who fully meet that description deserve to be respected and protected - not marginalized.

Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Syria, the Philippines and Senegal.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Why No Byline or Named Source for an Article About a Leak Investigation?

A careful reader of The Times, David Smollar of San Diego, makes some astute observations about an unusual article in Friday’s paper. The article caught many people’s eyes because it lacked a byline. It also quoted Jill Abramson, the executive editor, and it used an unnamed source to confirm an NBC News report that a retired Marine officer, Gen. James E. Cartwright, is a target of a leak investigation about American cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program.

As Mr. Smollar noted, the article required some “mental gymnastics” on the part of the reader.

He wrote:

It quotes a “person familiar with the investigation” confirming an investigation of Cartwright as (the/a) leaker for NY Tims stories that used unidentified sources about cyberattacks against Iran by the U.S.

It quotes Jill Abramson as declining comment on matters that involve “confidential sources.”

So here we have an NY Times story, with no byline, that uses a confidential source to confirm an investigation about someone suspected of being a confidential source for a series of NY Times stories. And the NY Times itself refusing to comment on a story written by the NY Times about the NY Times.

He added: “Confusing? You bet! My head was spinning after reading the article.”

I asked the managing editor Dean Baquet to explain the background. He told me that there was a rush Thursday night to confirm the NBC news report. The lack of a byline was “not a political decision” in any way but simply reflected the number of reporters working on what turned ou! t to be a brief article, he said.

In an e-mail, Mr. Baquet wrote: “It was a short story that numerous people scrambled to confirm when the networks broke it. It seemed odd to have more than one byline, and no one felt any real ownership of it.”

As for the confidentiality of the source, Mr. Baquet couldn’t comment on that any more than Ms. Abramson was able to in the article itself.

The use of unnamed sources is never ideal. Sometimes it’s necessary to get important information on the record. While I can’t disagree entirely with Mr. Smollar’s criticism, there probably was no alternative, given the deadline situation.

3:35 p.m. | Updated Friday afternoon, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece online that analyzes and helps make sense of the development.

A Fairy Tale in Transylvania

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When Rena Effendi went to Transylvania to photograph hay for National Geographic, she envisioned a fairy tale, someplace almost medieval. But when she arrived in the Gyimes valley, she was disappointed. The scenery had been spoiled, she thought, by modern architecture./p>

“I was greedy,” Ms. Effendi said. “I wanted to find the real, bucolic, medieval type of scenery, and I couldn’t find it there.”

So she consulted an expert.

“I Googled two words: ‘Transylvania’ and ‘hay,’ ” she said this week in a phone interview from her Cairo home.

Among the first results was Maramures, a Romanian-speaking region where one can find distilleries and mills more than 500 years old. Ms. Effendi, 36, sought advice from Kathleen McLaughlin, a photographer who had previously been there.

When Ms. Effendi arrived, she fell in love with the “Romanian Transylvanian fairy tale” she discovered.

“I found villages where almost all women know how to do embroidery and almost every man knows how to build a house from scratch,” she said.

She stayed with a family of musicians in Hoteni, a village of about 800 people. She slept in a wooden house set in a meadow and ate simple meals prep! ared with fresh produce from an orchard and a small vegetable garden. During two trips, Ms. Effendi spent about two months in the fields, photographing the hay-making process, which begins around 5 a.m. on dry summer days.

“People spend the day in the field,” she said. “They take their food, they take naps. You see these women climbing on top of the haystack in special trousers so the wind doesn’t blow up their skirts.”

Life moves slowly in the villages of Maramures, all of which are nestled alongside streams. It revolves around hay, which is used to feed the cows that produce the milk that ends up on the table. During hay season, the farmers work by hand, moving at a frantic pace. One couple, Gheorghe and Anuta Borca, told Ms. Effendi their honeymoon had been cut short by hay. “They had to start working straight after the wedding,” she said. (They hadn’t gone far, honeymooning in their village.)

One of Ms. Effendi’s pictures shows three generations of the Borca family atwork (Slide 8). “For them, it’s a way a life,” she said.

Ms. Effendi asked one family why they kept doing what they do, when they could simply go to a market. “They said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with all this land, then?’ ” she recalled. ” ‘It’s just going to sit there?’ ”

A farmer in Breb told Adam Nicolson, writing for the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, that houses there had cost six haystacks in Communist times.

“Hay is gold,” Ms. Effendi said.

It is also an art: “You can even guess who the owner is by the shape of a haystack,” she said. “They have their individual styles and forms.”

But, while Maramures still has the look of a fairy tale, it is on the verge of vanishing.

“You see it in the clothes people wear,” Ms. Effendi said. “You see small signs of this beautiful agrarian culture fading away.” It shows in the arc! hitecture! â€" old people live in old homes, while many young families live in cement houses with bathrooms and television. More and more young people are enchanted by European cities.

“Transylvania is not yet a fossil,” Mr. Nicolson wrote in the magazine. “It is still alive â€" just â€" if in need of life support. But it represents one of the great questions for the future: Can the modern world sustain beauty it hasn’t created itself?”

Ms. Effendi didn’t want to use the juxtaposition of old and new to tell the story of Maramures, though. “I wanted to pay homage to the fairy tale,” she said. “I wanted to show the purity of the landscape and the people living there.”

She recalled a day she spent with a shepherd, who took her to the tent in the mountains where he spent most of his time, grazing sheep. In the past, women had left him because he was always away. But without a wife, he couldn’t have a family to help him support a flock of his own.

“You know what?” he told s. Effendi. “If you ask me, ‘What would you choose today, women or sheep?’ I’d still choose sheep.’ ”

One woman she photographed, Maria, 23, was pregnant and working in the field when they met (Slide 7). She spoke more English than most villagers and told Ms. Effendi that she and her husband had spent a year in France, where he worked in construction. But she missed their home in the fields, which was made of cement and had a bathroom, and they returned.

In Maramures, Maria told Ms. Effendi, she has room for activity of the mind. People in France were preoccupied with the daily distractions of urban life, and they didn’t have any room left for “beautiful thoughts.”

Ms. Effendi cannot see herself adopting the Transylvanian lifestyle. “But escaping into that world for some periods of time is wonderful,” she said. “It’s replenishing.”

Follow @rena_effendi, @kerrima! c and! @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

A Fairy Tale in Transylvania

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

When Rena Effendi went to Transylvania to photograph hay for National Geographic, she envisioned a fairy tale, someplace almost medieval. But when she arrived in the Gyimes valley, she was disappointed. The scenery had been spoiled, she thought, by modern architecture./p>

“I was greedy,” Ms. Effendi said. “I wanted to find the real, bucolic, medieval type of scenery, and I couldn’t find it there.”

So she consulted an expert.

“I Googled two words: ‘Transylvania’ and ‘hay,’ ” she said this week in a phone interview from her Cairo home.

Among the first results was Maramures, a Romanian-speaking region where one can find distilleries and mills more than 500 years old. Ms. Effendi, 36, sought advice from Kathleen McLaughlin, a photographer who had previously been there.

When Ms. Effendi arrived, she fell in love with the “Romanian Transylvanian fairy tale” she discovered.

“I found villages where almost all women know how to do embroidery and almost every man knows how to build a house from scratch,” she said.

She stayed with a family of musicians in Hoteni, a village of about 800 people. She slept in a wooden house set in a meadow and ate simple meals prep! ared with fresh produce from an orchard and a small vegetable garden. During two trips, Ms. Effendi spent about two months in the fields, photographing the hay-making process, which begins around 5 a.m. on dry summer days.

“People spend the day in the field,” she said. “They take their food, they take naps. You see these women climbing on top of the haystack in special trousers so the wind doesn’t blow up their skirts.”

Life moves slowly in the villages of Maramures, all of which are nestled alongside streams. It revolves around hay, which is used to feed the cows that produce the milk that ends up on the table. During hay season, the farmers work by hand, moving at a frantic pace. One couple, Gheorghe and Anuta Borca, told Ms. Effendi their honeymoon had been cut short by hay. “They had to start working straight after the wedding,” she said. (They hadn’t gone far, honeymooning in their village.)

One of Ms. Effendi’s pictures shows three generations of the Borca family atwork (Slide 8). “For them, it’s a way a life,” she said.

Ms. Effendi asked one family why they kept doing what they do, when they could simply go to a market. “They said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with all this land, then?’ ” she recalled. ” ‘It’s just going to sit there?’ ”

A farmer in Breb told Adam Nicolson, writing for the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, that houses there had cost six haystacks in Communist times.

“Hay is gold,” Ms. Effendi said.

It is also an art: “You can even guess who the owner is by the shape of a haystack,” she said. “They have their individual styles and forms.”

But, while Maramures still has the look of a fairy tale, it is on the verge of vanishing.

“You see it in the clothes people wear,” Ms. Effendi said. “You see small signs of this beautiful agrarian culture fading away.” It shows in the arc! hitecture! â€" old people live in old homes, while many young families live in cement houses with bathrooms and television. More and more young people are enchanted by European cities.

“Transylvania is not yet a fossil,” Mr. Nicolson wrote in the magazine. “It is still alive â€" just â€" if in need of life support. But it represents one of the great questions for the future: Can the modern world sustain beauty it hasn’t created itself?”

Ms. Effendi didn’t want to use the juxtaposition of old and new to tell the story of Maramures, though. “I wanted to pay homage to the fairy tale,” she said. “I wanted to show the purity of the landscape and the people living there.”

She recalled a day she spent with a shepherd, who took her to the tent in the mountains where he spent most of his time, grazing sheep. In the past, women had left him because he was always away. But without a wife, he couldn’t have a family to help him support a flock of his own.

“You know what?” he told s. Effendi. “If you ask me, ‘What would you choose today, women or sheep?’ I’d still choose sheep.’ ”

One woman she photographed, Maria, 23, was pregnant and working in the field when they met (Slide 7). She spoke more English than most villagers and told Ms. Effendi that she and her husband had spent a year in France, where he worked in construction. But she missed their home in the fields, which was made of cement and had a bathroom, and they returned.

In Maramures, Maria told Ms. Effendi, she has room for activity of the mind. People in France were preoccupied with the daily distractions of urban life, and they didn’t have any room left for “beautiful thoughts.”

Ms. Effendi cannot see herself adopting the Transylvanian lifestyle. “But escaping into that world for some periods of time is wonderful,” she said. “It’s replenishing.”

Follow @rena_effendi, @kerrima! c and! @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Remembering ‘Madiba’

David Turnley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who has worked in more than 90 countries covering many of the most important international news events of the past 30 years. In 2008 his book, “Mandela: Struggle and Triumph,” was published by Abrams. He spoke recently with Shreeya Sinha, an editor at The New York Times foreign desk. The conversation has been edited.

Q.

When did you start covering South Africa?

A.

I arrived in South Africa in 1985 and was based there for several years in the middle of some of the most explosive years of protest in the unraveling of apartheid. I was kicked out of the country in 1988, by the apartheid regime, which was a big compliment in those years. I was then invited to come back to the country a week before Nelson Mandela was released, and I have been working in South Africa each year since.

Q.

What was South Africa like when you go there and how did it evolve through the years?

A.

When I arrived in South Africa I knew very little except who Nelson Mandela was and his aspirations, his commitment, his dedication and his incarceration for life for what he believed.

I was very familiar with the photographic work of Peter Magubane, a black South African photographer. I remember going to a National Press Photographers Association seminar in Akron, Ohio, in about 1979 and seeing this black South African gentleman, very soft-spoken, humble, showing his photographs and speaking about the realities of life under apartheid in South Africa. And his photographs were so incredibly powerful. But not only were his photographs powerful â€" he was incredibly poignant. I was really changed by the experience of listening to Peter.

David C. Turnley It was common during apartheid for even middle-class white South Africans to have at least one black domestic worker. 1986.

Q.

So when was the first time that you actually saw Mandela?

A.

I was asked by Life magazine in 1985 to do a photographic essay looking at the lives of Winnie Mandela and her daughters, Zindzi and Zenani. I was accompanied by an amazing Life reporter named Chris Whipple. We were introduced to Winnie by Peter Magubane, who is like family to the Mandelas, and we were immediately accepted. And over the course of the first six months from the time we met, not only did we accomplish a quite amazing project looking at the lives of Winnie and her daughters in photographs with Chris’s writing, but I became a family friend. And on a regular basis Iwould visit the family in Soweto. And often, when I wasn’t working, I would stop by to talk.

In the course of that time, I would speak to Winnie about her visits to see Nelson in prison. And I remember asking one day if she would allow me to accompany her when she went to Pollsmoor Prison, on the edge of Cape Town.

I went along under the guise of being a lawyer and went into the waiting room. And we sat together, and then Winnie was taken from the room and led somewhere where she would actually go and sit with Nelson Mandela. And I remember she came back to the waiting room, and as she got to the door, she motioned â€" she stopped and she very quietly, with her hand, motioned for me to come to the door. And as I got to the door, she said, “look to your right,” and I stuck my head out the door, just enough that I could look down the corridor. And probably 15 yards down the corridor, under a bare light bulb, was a very tall silhouette. I couldn’t see the man’s face; I could see th! at he was! wearing prison garb. And it was Nelson Mandela. On either side of him were two prison guards. And that was the first time I saw Nelson Mandela. I remember when we got outside, as we got into the car, as we were driving through the parking lot, Winnie said, “Look up at a certain window on the top floor of the prison,” and as we did, you could see a face, and you could see a hand that was motioning goodbye. And she said, “He always comes to that window when I leave.”

That was the first time that I saw Nelson Mandela. It was a powerful experience.

The next time I saw Nelson Mandela was on Feb. 11, 1990, at about 4:20 in the afternoon, after standing in the same one-foot by one-foot spot for about 11 hours, as we waited for Nelson to emerge from Verster Prison, where he spent his last year, as he walked through the prison gates holding his fists in the air next to his wife, Winnie, as the world â€" for the first time in 27 years â€" really saw Nelson Mandela.

David C. Turnley Apartheid became a formal, state-sponsored system of racial segregation in 1948 at the instigation of the National Party, which ruled until 1994.

What happened next was really fascinating and kind of amazing. The crowd broke. I had time literally to make three frames. Fortunately, they were in focus. And probably three of the happiest frames of my life.

He was rushed into a motorcade, and as this immense crowd broke, I dove for my car. The motorcade was racing into Cape Town, which was about an hour away… the sun was setting â€" it was just unbelievably cinematic.

People lined the highway, screaming, waving. As the motorcade got to the city hall, there were probably a couple hundred thousand South Africans waiting. I somehow managed to park my car and jumped! out in t! his immense crowd of people, and it was the first time I thought I’d be crushed to death in a crowd. The crowd was so frenetic from the unbelievable excitement and happiness, joyfulness of the idea that Nelson Mandela was in this motorcade that they started to jostle the cars, and it really was frightening.

And in that moment, with the sensation that I could be crushed, I climbed above the shoulders of the crowd and literally walked across this sea of people to the balcony of the city hall of Cape Town. Jumping on to the balcony and running down the corridor thinking, “I’m completely out of position; I have to find a door that I can enter so that I can at least see from a window if he appears.” When I opened the door, I had just fallen into the reception committee for Nelson Mandela. Inside was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Alain Boussac, who was a very powerful activist during the anti-apartheid movement, Jesse Jackson was in the room, Walter Sisulu â€" essentially the prisoner who spent 27 years n Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison with Madiba, who was his best friend â€" and Walter Sisulu’s wife, Albertina Sisulu. As they saw me, they all sort of motioned for me to come and be quiet.

David C. Turnley During apartheid, every South African of color was deprived of citizenship and obligated to carry a passbook at all time. Black South Africans, after 1970, were further divided into ten self-governing tribal sections known as bantustans.

Within minutes the door opens and in walks Nelson Mandela, and greets everyone in the room as if he’d known them his entire life. Nelson Mandela’s like six feet tall, with wide shoulders and incredible stature and presence. More than that, he has this unbelievable charm and a way of making everyone in the roo! m feel li! ke a million dollars.

He went to every single person in the room, and everyone is crying and hugging, and Archbishop Tutu took a glass and a spoon and he clanked the glass. And standing about three feet from Nelson Mandela, eye to eye, completely locked, he said, “I have to tell you about what you meant to my life.” He started to cry. And he started to tell Nelson Mandela what his life meant to him, and then several people in the room did the same thing. And while this was going on there were thousands people outside not knowing what’s happening, but you could hear the roar of the crowd.

And Nelson Mandela listened. The pride that emanated from this man, the strength, the dignity was just overwhelming. Suddenly, he says, “You’ll have to excuse me, but I have to take care of something.” He opens the window and walks out on a balcony and addresses the world for the first time in 27 years. And as he got to the balcony, the crowd, seeing him, erupted in a spontaneous rendition of the Afrcan National Anthem, and everyone inside the room â€" as the sun was setting through the windows, and the lights glistening on the tears on their cheeks â€" held their fists in the air as this immense crowd was singing this song, and it was just unbelievably powerful.

Then he repeated the words that he spoke on the dock 27 years earlier when at the end of his sentencing he was given the chance to speak for himself. He spoke about his dedication to a world without white domination, without black domination, and he said essentially that it was a vision for which he was prepared to live, but it was also a vision for which he was prepared to die.

Q.

How close was your relationship with Mandela’s family after he came out of prison? Did you see him transform during the campaign or when he was president, looking at ways to reconcile?

A.

I was kicked out of South Africa in ’88, so there was a period between ’88 and ’90 when he was re! leased wh! en I really wasn’t in touch with the Mandela family. And then when I came back, I was invited by the South African government just before he was released, unbeknownst to me â€" I didn’t know he was going to be released; but I got a visa and went back and then the events were just so momentous and things happened as Nelson Mandela emerged and as a free South Africa was emerging.

On the second evening after he was released from prison in Cape Town, he had flown to Johannesburg and I was invited into the family dining room when they had dinner together for the first time in 27 years, and I traveled with Nelson Mandela really pretty much anywhere he went.

Over the course of those next four years, I was invited to travel with Nelson Mandela to the United States, for his first trip ever to America. Peter Magubane and myself were invited as the two photographers to personally follow the Mandela family as they traveled America. I was with him the day he voted in the first free elections in South Afrca, when he voted outside of Durban, and I so I photographed him dropping his ballot in the voting box.

Q.

You saw him come out of prison â€" how did he change into the man that was to become president?

A.

Honestly, I don’t think Nelson Mandela did change. I think what’s stunning when you’re around Madiba â€"is that he’s not someone that changes. He is who he is. And what he is.

When he walks in a room he will always check the room to see who is the person who needs some attention. The person who’s shy, humble, or perhaps feels like the outcast in that group, he always finds those people. He always does the right thing, in terms of just very simple kindness and consideration. I’ve never seen him be rude to anybody. And it doesn’t matter what your station is in life, he doesn’t make a differentiation in terms of how he treats someone.

Q.

What do you remember most from his campaign days? W! hat was t! he moment when he won election like for you?

A.

When he came out of prison, South Africans of color understood that their day had arrived; their leader had arrived. And against the backdrop of the decades of oppression, this was such a monumental hopeful time. And Mandela doesn’t disappoint. When he arrives in front of an audience his presence, his wisdom, his humility, his graciousness, his steadfastness, the sort of iron spirit that you can feel is unwavering, emboldens everyone, in any audience.

There was also a time that required an unbelievable strength of vision, of steadfastness, of real negotiation. There were plenty of occasions when Mandela was in a position where most human beings would have lashed out, would have lost the elevated plane that he stays on, but he never lost that as far as I could see.

You know, it’s really hard at a time like this to really say anything about Nelson Mandela’s life, because anything one might say feels so pale in fac of what he really represents. Something I would like to say, and I feel strongly that Nelson Mandela believes, is there’s a little Nelson Mandela in all of us. And I think that’s the legacy that he would like to leave.

David C. Turnley Nelson Mandela and his wife, Graça Machel, the widow of Samora Michel, the former Mozambican president, in 2005.

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Pictures of the Day: Senegal and Elsewhere

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Photos from Senegal, South Africa, Israel and Kosovo.

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In Flight, John White Shares His Light

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Before she became a staff photographer at The New York Times, Michelle Agins was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where John H. White was already making his mark on the city’s photographic scene. He looked out for her and gave her advice and encouragement, even after he ent to The Chicago Sun-Times and she to New York.

Soon after he and the rest of The Sun-Times’s photo staff were fired late last month, Ms. Agins went to Chicago for her godson’s graduation. While there, she visited Mr. White at his home. Their conversation has been edited into a first-person narrative.

While everybody else was stunned and upset that The Chicago Sun-Times had fired its entire photography staff, I couldn’t stop thinking of one man. They did that to John White? The Chairman of the Board? That’s like the Bulls getting rid of Michael Jordan.

For a hot minute, my South Side Chicago roots took over â€" I was ready to roll down.

M. Spencer Green/Associated Press John H. White at a June 6 protest in front of The Chicago Sun Times’s headquarters.

John was the photographer I looked up to when I was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where he was working in the early 1970s. My godfather, John Tweedle, told me to look him up. John looked out for me, encouraged me and nudged my career. I watched him on the streets, in the darkroom and even stood by his side as he carefully put together the portfolio that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

When I visited him, he was not letting the firing change how he felt about himself, or his fellow photographers, onebit.

“A job’s not a job because of labor law,” he said. “It’s just something you love. It’s something you do because it gives you a mission, a life, a purpose, and you do it for the service of others.”

All he had wanted to hear from the executives who let him go was two words that never came: thank you. But even then, he did not respond with anger.

“I light candles, I don’t curse the darkness,” he said. “Even now, my colleagues are cursing the darkness. I’m lighting the candles. And I give wings to dreams, I ain’t breaking no wings. I’m not clipping any wings. Make a difference in the world. One light. One day. One image.”

John taught me how to fly.

I had been taking pictures since high school, but when I got to The Daily News, I was a copy-girl intern. But I also tried to copy John the minute I saw him walk through t! he newsro! om after an assignment. I would sneak away and go back toward the darkroom â€" his chapel away from church â€" and watch him unload his cameras and ask him about his day.

I even tried to walk like he walked. I had seen a lot of photographers on assignment, but to find John White, you had to look in the shadows. He was never where you could see him. He was always where he could be, like he was hovering over in a corner. Like he could see everything in a room. He had this look. He kept his camera low-key. And all of a sudden, he’d pick it up and find the real subject. The one you hadn’t seen before.

He didn’t do this for prizes, though he won a lot of them. He did it for “consistent excellence.” And for as long as he had been taking pictures, it never got boring or predictable.

“I’ve got the same set of eyes, nothing’s changed,” he said. “Every day, a baby is born. Every day, someone dies. Every single day. And we capture everything in between. You think of this thing caled life and how it’s preserved. It’s preserved through vision, through photographs.”

John H. White “Ice House.”

You’ve probably figured out by now that John thought about bigger things. He was a religious man, born on a Sunday into a family of preachers in North Carolina. When he tells one and all to “keep in flight,” it’s as much spiritual advice as it is professional. He takes that advice himself, even after the slight of seeing one of his pictures published in his old paper with only “Sun-Times Library” as the credit line.

“I can’t get caught up in those things,” he said. “You got to look at the big picture, because I know the true photo editor.”

Like a good storyteller â€" or a preacher â€" he taught with examples! from his! life, often talking about moments with his father in North Carolina. He remembered one night walking through a wooded patch with his father, who reached out and grabbed a firefly.

“Look at my hand,” his father said as he gently squeezed the insect. “And look what he’s doing. He’s making a light. He can’t contain his light. God gives us light and we can’t contain this light. Be like the lightning bug. Don’t let anyone contain your light.”

I was still an intern when, despite protests from some of the other staff photographers, I was sent out to cover how children were dealing with a teachers strike. I went out to Cabrini-Green, passed by a dentist’s office and saw a boy sitting in the chair. I went in and asked if I could photograph the dentist, and he agreed.

Nothing much was happening.

I thought it was going to be a boring picture. All of a sudden, the dentist yanked a tooth from the kid’s mouth. He didn’t tell me he was going to do this. The kid’s eyes crosed and his mouth was open. The paper ran it with “He’d Rather Be in School” as the caption. That shot helped the other photographers accept me.

“Everybody remembers that picture, a billion-dollar picture,” John said. “People realized then that she’s doing what we did, she’s spreading her wings and trying to fly, and you know, it’s like you were that lightning bug. You didn’t let them contain you and keep you down.”

I swear I didn’t even know what the Pulitzer was when I watched him assemble the portfolio that would earn him journalism’s highest prize. I stood beside him in the darkroom as he printed (with a towel slung over his left shoulder). I watched him put paper, make careful measurements and lay out a story. He showed me how to tell a story.

Years later, John and I both covered Pope John Paul II’s Mass in Central Park. I showed off my computer and my new digital camera. I was proud! of where! he had helped me get. But not as proud as he was.

“It’s like your child,” he told me. “And they got a touchdown. You know what I mean? And it wasn’t a Hail Mary touchdown, you know what I mean? It was from one end of the line to the other. You know? It required a lot, but you got the touchdown. This is the journey. You go through storms, rain and hurricanes, and forces of evil. You know. But you keepin’ the fight.”

John, I was just doing what you taught me: staying in flight and sharing the light.

Michelle Agins/The New York Times John White in his home this month.

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In Flight, John White Shares His Light

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Before she became a staff photographer at The New York Times, Michelle Agins was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where John H. White was already making his mark on the city’s photographic scene. He looked out for her and gave her advice and encouragement, even after he ent to The Chicago Sun-Times and she to New York.

Soon after he and the rest of The Sun-Times’s photo staff were fired late last month, Ms. Agins went to Chicago for her godson’s graduation. While there, she visited Mr. White at his home. Their conversation has been edited into a first-person narrative.

While everybody else was stunned and upset that The Chicago Sun-Times had fired its entire photography staff, I couldn’t stop thinking of one man. They did that to John White? The Chairman of the Board? That’s like the Bulls getting rid of Michael Jordan.

For a hot minute, my South Side Chicago roots took over â€" I was ready to roll down.

M. Spencer Green/Associated Press John H. White at a June 6 protest in front of The Chicago Sun Times’s headquarters.

John was the photographer I looked up to when I was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where he was working in the early 1970s. My godfather, John Tweedle, told me to look him up. John looked out for me, encouraged me and nudged my career. I watched him on the streets, in the darkroom and even stood by his side as he carefully put together the portfolio that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

When I visited him, he was not letting the firing change how he felt about himself, or his fellow photographers, onebit.

“A job’s not a job because of labor law,” he said. “It’s just something you love. It’s something you do because it gives you a mission, a life, a purpose, and you do it for the service of others.”

All he had wanted to hear from the executives who let him go was two words that never came: thank you. But even then, he did not respond with anger.

“I light candles, I don’t curse the darkness,” he said. “Even now, my colleagues are cursing the darkness. I’m lighting the candles. And I give wings to dreams, I ain’t breaking no wings. I’m not clipping any wings. Make a difference in the world. One light. One day. One image.”

John taught me how to fly.

I had been taking pictures since high school, but when I got to The Daily News, I was a copy-girl intern. But I also tried to copy John the minute I saw him walk through t! he newsro! om after an assignment. I would sneak away and go back toward the darkroom â€" his chapel away from church â€" and watch him unload his cameras and ask him about his day.

I even tried to walk like he walked. I had seen a lot of photographers on assignment, but to find John White, you had to look in the shadows. He was never where you could see him. He was always where he could be, like he was hovering over in a corner. Like he could see everything in a room. He had this look. He kept his camera low-key. And all of a sudden, he’d pick it up and find the real subject. The one you hadn’t seen before.

He didn’t do this for prizes, though he won a lot of them. He did it for “consistent excellence.” And for as long as he had been taking pictures, it never got boring or predictable.

“I’ve got the same set of eyes, nothing’s changed,” he said. “Every day, a baby is born. Every day, someone dies. Every single day. And we capture everything in between. You think of this thing caled life and how it’s preserved. It’s preserved through vision, through photographs.”

John H. White “Ice House.”

You’ve probably figured out by now that John thought about bigger things. He was a religious man, born on a Sunday into a family of preachers in North Carolina. When he tells one and all to “keep in flight,” it’s as much spiritual advice as it is professional. He takes that advice himself, even after the slight of seeing one of his pictures published in his old paper with only “Sun-Times Library” as the credit line.

“I can’t get caught up in those things,” he said. “You got to look at the big picture, because I know the true photo editor.”

Like a good storyteller â€" or a preacher â€" he taught with examples! from his! life, often talking about moments with his father in North Carolina. He remembered one night walking through a wooded patch with his father, who reached out and grabbed a firefly.

“Look at my hand,” his father said as he gently squeezed the insect. “And look what he’s doing. He’s making a light. He can’t contain his light. God gives us light and we can’t contain this light. Be like the lightning bug. Don’t let anyone contain your light.”

I was still an intern when, despite protests from some of the other staff photographers, I was sent out to cover how children were dealing with a teachers strike. I went out to Cabrini-Green, passed by a dentist’s office and saw a boy sitting in the chair. I went in and asked if I could photograph the dentist, and he agreed.

Nothing much was happening.

I thought it was going to be a boring picture. All of a sudden, the dentist yanked a tooth from the kid’s mouth. He didn’t tell me he was going to do this. The kid’s eyes crosed and his mouth was open. The paper ran it with “He’d Rather Be in School” as the caption. That shot helped the other photographers accept me.

“Everybody remembers that picture, a billion-dollar picture,” John said. “People realized then that she’s doing what we did, she’s spreading her wings and trying to fly, and you know, it’s like you were that lightning bug. You didn’t let them contain you and keep you down.”

I swear I didn’t even know what the Pulitzer was when I watched him assemble the portfolio that would earn him journalism’s highest prize. I stood beside him in the darkroom as he printed (with a towel slung over his left shoulder). I watched him put paper, make careful measurements and lay out a story. He showed me how to tell a story.

Years later, John and I both covered Pope John Paul II’s Mass in Central Park. I showed off my computer and my new digital camera. I was proud! of where! he had helped me get. But not as proud as he was.

“It’s like your child,” he told me. “And they got a touchdown. You know what I mean? And it wasn’t a Hail Mary touchdown, you know what I mean? It was from one end of the line to the other. You know? It required a lot, but you got the touchdown. This is the journey. You go through storms, rain and hurricanes, and forces of evil. You know. But you keepin’ the fight.”

John, I was just doing what you taught me: staying in flight and sharing the light.

Michelle Agins/The New York Times John White in his home this month.

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Pictures of the Day: Washington and Elsewhere

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Photos from Washington, D.C., Chile, Iran and Afghanistan.

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Pictures of the Day: India and Elsewhere

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Photos from India, Lebanon, North Korea and Indonesia.

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Hoop Dreams in Oaxaca\'s Hills

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Any proper town in Latin America has a church facing a plaza - except the towns of the Sierra Norte region of Mexico, where Jorge Santiago is from.

“In my part of the Sierra, the basketball courts are like the zócalo in the colonial city,” Mr. Santiago said, using a Mexican word for “plaza.” “It's really the most important part of the town. A respectable town has a church, and a basketball court in front of the church.”

Call it the postcolonial era - for the last 80 years, the people who live in this mountainous part of Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca, have been crazy about basketball. Introduced to the region by a president who wanted to unite, or perhaps distract, the various indigenous groups, the sport has taken root and become more popular than soccer. It occupies a physical place of honor, with the courts built on the few flat stretches of any town.

Jorge Santiago San Cristobal Lachirioag, 2009.

“Basketball was really important to me,” Mr. Santiago said of his childhood in Guelatao de Juárez. “There was nothing to do. The only place to get some satisfaction was on the basketball court. I really believe it was one of the only things that offered an opportunity for the people of the Sierra to be different from the rest of Mexico.”

Just how different is evident in “Identity at Play.” The series explores basketball and the attendant rituals that have come to surround hoop culture in the Sierra, where basketball tournaments are intertwined with local customs and celebrations. As unlikely as it might sound, the sport has helped foster a sense of community.

Not that Mr. Santiago knew that growing up. In his town, there were 300 people and two television stations, one of which carried N.B.A. games. He left to study business in Mexico City, but returned to Oaxaca after graduation. He had already begun taking photographs, thanks to a workshop he had participated in as a teenager.

At first, Mr. Santiago was interested in documenting migration. While researching that topic, he came across “True Tales From Another Mexico” by Sam Quinones, which had a story about an Oaxaca native who started a “basketball movement” in Los Angeles.

“That's when I realized how important basketball is when you don't have it,” he said.

Jorge Santiago San Pedro Cajonos, 2012.

When he first started taking pictures, he concentrated too much on the sport itself. It was not until he moved to Pittsburgh, where his wife was studying, that he realized he needed to place the sport in the region's cu ltural context.

“People will sacrifice the flattest space in a town to build a basketball court,” he said. “Then they end up using it just like a plaza, like a social place. It's not only the space where sport happens. There are weddings there. All the dances take place on the court. There are political meetings there.”

Tournaments are held in dozens of villages, timed to the feast days of the town's patron saint. That adds yet another dimension to the sport's significance, with political and religious beliefs coming together.

“There is one photo where they are sacrificing a bull at the same time they are cutting the ribbon for the court,” Mr. Santiago said. “It's interesting how all these get combined in basketball.”

Players from different teams go from feast to feast, vying for prize money, which ranges from 15,000 to 40,000 pesos (about $1,100 to $3,000). The big event of the season is in Guelatao's Copa Benito Juárez, named after the Mexican president who was born there, which attracts as many as 200 teams over a five-day period.

The prize money is often supplied by migrants from the area who now live in the United States. Many of them come back for the festivities, sometimes playing on courts whose color schemes mimic N.B.A. courts.

Mr. Santiago, who stopped playing basketball once he took up photography, is now following another aspect of migrant life.

“I'm doing a project on the houses built by migrants in their hometowns,” he said. “Most of them are abandoned. They start building the house after having been in the States a while. But most of them never come back.”

Jorge Santiago Fireworks over a basketball court.

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Brazil and India.

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Bringing Invisible Stories to Instagram Followers

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A year after Radcliffe Roye went to New Orleans to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina, his archives were crammed with hundreds of 4-by-5 images that sat unseen and unpublished. He wonders now whether, if Instagram had existed at the time, he would have had a better opportunity to share the voices of the people working to rebuild their city.

Last year, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Breezy Point, Queens, he was ready. With only his smartphone, he uploaded a stream of haunting and raw images of the devastation to Instagram, the photo-sharing site, where he now has nearly 27,000 followers. A few days later, The New Yorker came calling.

Telling stories this way has always fascinated Mr. Roye, a 43-year-old Jamaican photographer who cares deeply about “the forgotten man” - the diverse, blue-collar residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He chats up people on the street and, with his smartphone and some processing with a filter app, takes their portrait.

†œMy Instagram account has become a way for me to question everything around me,” said Mr. Roye, who has uploaded roughly 2,000 images in the past year. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people's faces - forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.”

Ruddy Roye“William Frazer.”

His subject's faces often dominate the square frame, their eyes glinting. The closeness is intentional, he said: a way to provoke his viewers to question their thoughts on race, gender and income inequality. Each image is accompanied by a description of the subject or location, followed by a sequence of hashtags to make it easier fo r his viewers to follow each of his series. His most popular searches to date are #iamaman, #relevance, #poverty, #blackportraiture, #elements and #queenspride.

Mr. Roye says his work depends on developing relationships based on trust, which means spending time with subjects to discover their personal stories. By the time he asks them if he can take their photograph, the bond has been solidified. He is almost never turned away.

Last week he uploaded a vivid image (below) of a young girl in tears, gripping her father with her small hands. A caption on a previous image explained it: “A distraught father strolls into the shadows of Washington Park (Fort Greene Park) hours after learning from the courts that he was not allowed to go back home to be with his daughter. ‘I am a childless father,' he whispered, fighting back tears.”

Immediately after Mr. Roye posted that photo, a stream of his followers began commenting.

Ruddy Roye “Jesse - Brooklyn.”

“I want people to think about Jesse tonight and what he is going through,” he said of the father. “We all have been Jesse in some form in our lives, experiencing loss and despair.”

Mr. Roye did not set out to be a photographer while growing up in Jamaica; his mother did not consider it a proper profession. He started his journalism career writing stories for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer, but he was dissatisfied with the pictures that accompanied his stories. He decided to take them himself.

Within months, he landed his first photo assignment - to document the many squatters who had built makeshift homes on top of a discontinued train line running 120 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston. He wound up walking the lin e, literally.

It still has not been an easy journey.

“A photojournalist is not a job that a child is told to be,” said Mr. Roye, who originally planned to be an English teacher. “When I go back home, I ask photographers if they have a body of work. Many of them, studio and event photographers, have no idea what I am talking about.”

Mr. Roye moved to Brooklyn in 2000, bringing with him his slides from the railroad project. Within a few months, a friend helped him secure an interview with the photography department at The Associated Press. When he showed the editors his slides, many of them were stunned.

“I remember one of the editors saying to me, ‘If the photojournalists in Jamaica could photograph the way they photograph cricket, your country would have some of the best photojournalists in the world,' ” he said.

That interview led to a freelancing contract with The A.P., along with work for publications like Ebony and Jet magazine . In 2002, he traveled back to Jamaica to photograph fashion trends of the underground dancehall movement for Vogue.

Mr. Roye said he considered his images on Instagram an extension of the work that has always moved him. It's just that, now, he has a platform to reach a broader audience.

He will quickly challenge those who say smartphone photography is not real photojournalism, though he has no intention of abandoning his digital or film cameras. For Mr. Roye, it has always been about the story behind the image and how the image is shared.

A few months ago, he got a chest tattoo of a caricature of himself peering into a 4-by-5 film camera. Someone graciously used Mr. Roye's smartphone to take a photograph of the moment.

Which, of course, he immediately shared with his followers on Instagram.

Ruddy Roye“Image Vendor.”

Follow @RAjah1, @Whitney_Rich and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Bringing Invisible Stories to Instagram Followers

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A year after Radcliffe Roye went to New Orleans to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina, his archives were crammed with hundreds of 4-by-5 images that sat unseen and unpublished. He wonders now whether, if Instagram had existed at the time, he would have had a better opportunty to share the voices of the people working to rebuild their city.

Last year, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Breezy Point, Queens, he was ready. With only his smartphone, he uploaded a stream of haunting and raw images of the devastation to Instagram, the photo-sharing site, where he now has nearly 27,000 followers. A few days later, The New Yorker came calling.

Telling stories this way has always fascinated Mr. Roye, a 43-year-old Jamaican photographer who cares deeply about “the forgotten man” â€" the diverse, blue-collar residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He chats up people on the street and, with his smartphone and some processing with a filter app, takes their portrait.

“My Instagram account has become a way for me to question ! everything around me,” said Mr. Roye, who has uploaded roughly 2,000 images in the past year. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people’s faces â€" forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.”

Ruddy Roye“William Frazer.”

His subject’s faces often dominate the square frame, their eyes glinting. The closeness is intentional, he said: a way to provoke his viewers to question their thoughts on race, gender and income inequality. Each image is accompanied by a description of the subject or location, followed by a sequence of hashtags to make it easier for his viewers to follow each of his series. His most popular searches to date are #iaaman, #relevance, #poverty, #blackportraiture, #elements and #queenspride.

Mr. Roye says his work depends on developing relationships based on trust, which means spending time with subjects to discover their personal stories. By the time he asks them if he can take their photograph, the bond has been solidified. He is almost never turned away.

Last week he uploaded a vivid image (below) of a young girl in tears, gripping her father with her small hands. A caption on a previous image explained it: “A distraught father strolls into the shadows of Washington Park (Fort Greene Park) hours after learning from the courts that he was not allowed to go back home to be with his daughter. ‘I am a childless father,’ he whispered, fighting back tears.”

Immediately after Mr. Roye posted that photo, a stream of his followers began commenting.

Ruddy Roye “Jesse â€" Brooklyn.”

“I want people to think about Jesse tonight and what he is going through,” he said of the father. “We all have been Jesse in some form in our lives, experiencing loss and despair.”

Mr. Roye did not set out to be a photographer while growing up in Jamaica; his mother did not consider it a proper profession. He started his journalism career writing stories for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer, but he was dissatisfied with the pictures that accompanied his stories. He decided to take them himself.

Within months, he landed his first photo assignment â€" to document the many squatters who had built makeshift homes on top of a discontinued train line running 120 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston. He wound up walking the line, literally.

It still has not been an easy journey.

“A photojournalist is not a job that a child is told to be,” said Mr. Roye, whooriginally planned to be an English teacher. “When I go back home, I ask photographers if they have a body of work. Many of them, studio and event photographers, have no idea what I am talking about.”

Mr. Roye moved to Brooklyn in 2000, bringing with him his slides from the railroad project. Within a few months, a friend helped him secure an interview with the photography department at The Associated Press. When he showed the editors his slides, many of them were stunned.

“I remember one of the editors saying to me, ‘If the photojournalists in Jamaica could photograph the way they photograph cricket, your country would have some of the best photojournalists in the world,’ ” he said.

That interview led to a freelancing contract with The A.P., along with work for publications like Ebony and Jet magazine. In 2002, he traveled back to Jamaica to photograph fashion trends of the underground dancehall movement for Vogue.

Mr. Roye said he considered his images on Instagra! m an exte! nsion of the work that has always moved him. It’s just that, now, he has a platform to reach a broader audience.

He will quickly challenge those who say smartphone photography is not real photojournalism, though he has no intention of abandoning his digital or film cameras. For Mr. Roye, it has always been about the story behind the image and how the image is shared.

A few months ago, he got a chest tattoo of a caricature of himself peering into a 4-by-5 film camera. Someone graciously used Mr. Roye’s smartphone to take a photograph of the moment.

Which, of course, he immediately shared with his followers on Instagram.

Ruddy Roye“Image Vendor.”

Follow @RAjah1, @hitney_Rich and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.