The ‘Genius’ of Carrie Mae Weems

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Among the recipients of the 2013 MacArthur fellowships is Carrie Mae Weems, whose varied interests and skills encompass photography, film and activism. Though known for work that tackles questions of race and gender, she says it addresses “unrequited love” and the human condition. Her conversation with James Estrin has been edited.

Q.

Congratulations, on the MacArthur. It’s pretty wonderful.

A.

It is beyond wonderful. I feel like I am dancing in the stratosphere. I am sitting here with my tiara on and all of my fake jewels, and a bottle of Champagne that’s half empty. Or should I say half full?

Q.

This is a lovely validation of the work that you’ve been doing for so long. Do you have plans for what the money will enable you to do?

A.

Actually there’s a project I’ve been thinking about for the past year. It’s about women who are turning 60, but it’s also about those people who came of age in the 60s. I’ve spent years shooting lots of video and stills, and I want to do a feature-length film about a woman turning 60 who came of age in the 60s and use that as a metaphor to examine what it means to come of age in one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods of the 20th century.

Q.

Will that be a documentary?

A.

It’s not a documentary, it’s more of a fictional autobiography. I have a lot of footage, now I have this emotional freedom to work on it. Maybe to figure out some quiet time to really sink my teeth into this work that I have wanted to do for a long time, but now I can actually do it without having to think about paying the rent.

Q.

That’s pretty amazing.

A.

It is. It’s extraordinary. I am honored, I am floored, I am beyond gaga and I am even a little cocky and giddy.

Q.

You have this large body of work from over two decades dealing with race and gender and identity. Is that a fair way to characterize it?

A.

That’s the way most people do so, I think that’s fair.

Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman, New York From “The Kitchen Table Series.” 1990.

Q.

How would you characterize it?

A.

I always think about the work ultimately as dealing with questions of love and greater issues of humanity. The way it comes across is in echoes of identity and echoes of race and echoes of gender and echoes of class.

At the end of the day, it has a great deal to do with the breadth of the humanity of African-Americans who are usually stereotyped and narrowly defined and often viewed as a social problem. I’m thinking that it’s not about social problems, that it’s about social constructions. The work has to do with an attempt to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and to that extent it has to do with what I always call unrequited love.

Q.

Which is sort of the human condition.

A.

Exactly, exactly exactly, exactly. It becomes race as a shortcut and gender as a shortcut to the larger questions of humanity on any given subject.

Q.

You started out working in modes that are often documentary but also conceptual. Your projects are very much about ideas and thoughts

A.

Yes, well I started as a documentary photographer. Then, at a certain point, I realized that that really wasn’t what I wanted to do. That it wasn’t quite my way of working. But referencing documentary was important. So for instance, the kitchen table â€" which has all the markings of documentary photography â€" isn’t at all. It’s highly constructed. So I learned fairly early on that photographs are constructed. These can be constructed, and these realities can be as poignant and meaningful as something that was “documentary in nature,” so that you were able to arrive at and deal with multilevels of complexity, tiers of complexity, around the construction of photographs.

Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman, New York Eartha Kitt. From the series “Slow Fade to Black.” 2010.

That idea really challenges me, and excites me and engages me, that it doesn’t have to be the “real moment as seen spontaneously in life,” but that it can be constructed in my living room, my dining room, in my kitchen, in my backyard, and it can be equally honorable, if not more so, than the actual “document” of that reality.

Q.

What are you dealing with in “The Kitchen Table Series”?

A.

The kitchen table stories is really a play around notions of family. It’s really about how one comes into their own.

What are the issues that surround monogamy and polygamy? What are the issues that surround motherhood and friendship â€" compassion? Those are the qualities that are dealt with, and of course it’s really a mock documentary; it’s a mock biography of one woman’s journey as she contemplates and negotiates what it means to be a contemporary woman who wants something different for herself. And it’s been very interesting, because even though it’s anchored around a black woman, my hope was always that it would be understood as a condition of women. And it exceeded my expectations, because women around the world relate to that piece, as do men. They see themselves in it.

Q.

. Can you tell me about your move to film and how that happened?

A.

At a certain point, I realized that I didn’t know how to make photographs sing in a certain way, and I was becoming increasingly interested in composers and music and how one uses the voice. Film and video really allowed me to work across all of those interests in a single project. I could use voice and rhythm and work with the composers and use music to effect a certain visual image.

I love working with film, and even though â€" you know, every time I finish a project, I swear that I’m not going to make another film. It’s so difficult. There are so many aspects, so many parts and so many people that need to be involved. Invariably, as soon as I’ve finished one project, I start thinking about the next, because I love the form.

Q.

Have you given up photography?

A.

Not at all. I still make photographs all the time, and I will continue to do so.

Q.

You’re involved in Syracuse, in a program with young people in the community?

A.

Yes. Several years ago, there was a child killed in Syracuse â€" caught in the cross-fire of gangland violence. And I remember the day so clearly, because it was a snowy day in Syracuse, and I was exhausted. I thought I would just spend the morning in bed reading the newspaper and drinking coffee and looking at books and just relaxing. And I go into the kitchen, I saw this headline about this child that had been killed, and I was so upset about it that I immediately went to the studio and started working. And I started this series â€" a billboard project, actually, a public-art project, using billboards and broadsides and leaflets and a whole host of materials that I could use to do what I call “activating” the community around the issue of violence. And I did that for months and months and months, and it was the only thing I worked on, desperately, and getting things out there in the public.

Then I realized that I also needed to have another kind of response, and not just a response of being reactionary, or reactive, to a condition, but deciding to lead another kind of campaign.

I wanted to do a project that really focuses on young people that gets them engaged and involved in the arts. And so what do young people care about? They care about fashion. They care about music. They care about popular culture, and they care about sex. So I came up with this idea of doing an institute, the Institute of Sound and Style, that introduces kids to different aspects of popular culture â€" as technicians, as videographers, as photographers, as recording engineers.

You don’t have to be a rap singer, that you could be an engineer, that you didn’t have to be in the photograph, that you could make the photograph.

It’s a summer program, we run for four weeks over the course of the summer. We pay kids, because all the kids are desperately poor and need to be paid. We give them at least the minimum wage, and we train them in various aspects of the arts, giving them the skills that they need â€" and introducing them to the skills and ideas that they need to fashion another life for themselves. And it’s truly one of the most exciting things that I’m involved in.

It’s really a fabulous project, and I tell you, I get as much out of it as the kids. So that’s what I’m working on, that’s my heart’s desire. And we take donations.

Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman, New York From “The Kitchen Table Series.” 1990.

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Japanese-Brazilians: Straddling Two Cultures

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Paulo Siqueira grew up in São Paolo, Brazil, going to school in the 1980s with friends whose grandparents had immigrated from Japan earlier in the 20th century to work on coffee plantations. Inside their homes, Japanese language, culture and cuisine prevailed. His friends, he thought, were an interesting mix.

A generation later, some of those young people sought their fortunes in the land of their ancestors, lured back with visas to work in Japan’s auto industry, in factories that made every imaginable auto component. As Mr. Siqueira and his wife, Nadia Shira Cohen, have learned in their recently completed photo essay, “Japanese Brazilians,” navigating the crosscurrents of hopes and cultures is never simple for the Nikkeijin. It is a story familiar to anyone who left home and family for a few years of work that turned into decades.

“In Brazil, they were considered Japanese, but in Japan, they are seen as more Brazilian,” Mr. Siqueira said. “They’ve gone from spending three years in Japan to as much as 15 before they go back to Brazil. They have kids, they have a comfortable life and the migration becomes more stable, but lived in an improvised way.”

The roots of this migration date to the turn of the 20th century, when Brazil sought field hands to do work that had been done by slaves until abolition in 1888. Ms. Cohen said the Brazilian government had pushed this migration before World War I, which set the stage for another wave after World War II.

The Japanese community in Brazil, the couple noted, had the infrastructure to absorb new arrivals: neighborhoods where Japanese newspapers, schools and stores were common. “It was a very closed community, and a lot of the older Japanese maintained their culture,” Mr. Siqueira said. “It was easy for the next migrants to choose Brazil as a destination because everything was set.”

In the late 1980s, two factors combined to spur reverse migration. Brazil abolished its military dictatorship, and Japan was looking for foreign workers for its booming automotive industry. Ms. Cohen said the Japanese government wanted foreign laborers, because they expected their native-born children to become businessmen.

Paulo Siqueira/ParalelloZero and Nadia Shira Cohen Hayumi Honda blew out a candle at her 15th birthday party. Hayumi, who is Brazilian-Japanese, was born and raised in Japan. She speaks Portuguese at home, but speaks and writes Japanese fluently.

“A small group of government officials went to Brazil and saw the Japanese there who retained the culture and spoke Japanese,” Ms. Cohen said. “The problem is they focused mainly on the older generation, not that any of them were going to use the opportunity of a visa to get a job. The ones who went to Japan were the Brazilianized kids.”

The community now numbers some 200,000 migrants, she said. Those first migrants were able to work for a few years and return to Brazil to open small businesses and buy a house. But as years went on â€" and the global economy soured â€" people have stayed longer and faced more difficult challenges. Now they compete with other workers from Asia for a smaller number of jobs. Work contracts â€" which sometimes provide other practical services to help with life and chores outside of work â€" are shorter and bring fewer benefits.

Those changes accentuated some of the cultural clashes that were inevitable. While some of those whose children were born in Japan learned the language â€" which is critical to integrating into the culture â€" others have fared less well. Ms. Cohen recalls one woman who left her newborn child with a relative in Brazil as she went to look for work in Japan. Fourteen years later, no closer to returning, she sent for the boy.

“She doesn’t have the money to send him to a Brazilian school, which is expensive,” Ms. Cohen said. “So he goes to a Japanese school. I asked him how it was and he said he didn’t do anything, just sit around. He is not integrating and learning because the language barrier is huge. And he’s already at an age where it’s so easy to get lost.”

The Japanese government, she said, since 2009 has been offering migrants $3,000 per head of household and $2,000 for family members â€" and a one-way ticket to Brazil. Yet some persist in staying. The reasons became clear as the couple worked on their project this year, which coincided with street protests in Brazil over corruption, unemployment and poverty.

“The Japan story gave us a different angle to look at those troubles,” Ms. Cohen said. “They are staying in Japan to raise their families, not because they love Japan, but because it is a place that has public services, health care, schools and a working pension system. It’s a safe environment for them to play and walk around.”

The couple â€" as well as their 13-month-old son, Rafael, who accompanies them on their projects â€" now plan to explore the Brazilian side of the story when they return to Brazil in the winter from their base in Italy. It will be interesting to see how those who spent a chunk of their lives on the other side of the world manage their way in a place they may not have seen in decades.

“I can’t think of two cultures that are more different than Brazil and Japan,” Mr. Siqueira said. “When you say hi to someone in Brazil, you kiss or have physical contact. Japanese are really reserved, and everything works in society because nobody gets out of line. In Brazil, there is no line.”

Paulo Siqueira/ParalelloZero and Nadia Shira Cohen A boy caught butterflies in a public housing complex’s park, in Chiryu.

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Pictures of the Day: Kenya and Elsewhere

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Photos from Kenya, India, the Philippines and Pakistan.

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Photos, Like Life, Blurred and Re-Envisioned

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Brian Nice traveled the world as a fashion photographer for 25 years creating technically precise images reflecting his clients’ concepts of beauty.

Recently, his photographs have changed, as has Mr. Nice himself. Now, they mirror his own vision.

“Before everything was sharp and technically correct â€" now everything is looser and more go-with-the-flow,” Mr. Nice said. “Before, I was controlling. Now, I just let it happen.”

Brian Nice Until 2009, Brian Nice was a fashion and beauty photographer.

A congenital cavernous malformation caused bleeding in his brain in 2009, and two subsequent complex operations left him in a wheelchair without fine-motor skills. His vision is erratic, fluctuating from hour to hour. He has double vision and says one eye goes up and down sometimes while the other goes side to side.

Speaking slowly, he described himself as “mentally fit, but trapped inside a broken body,” where just holding a conversation can be “like an Olympic event.”

Mr. Nice, 52, still loves photography, but now he uses a plastic Holga to take pictures on film. His hands shake when he holds a camera, but he makes that work for him in his images. Besides, the camera is plastic, so replacing it is easy if he drops it.

“I know it’s trendy, but the reason I use it is because you can easily do double exposure,” Mr. Nice said. “And basically, it duplicates how I see. You don’t always know how it’s going to come out.”

Mr. Nice lives with his parents in a house overlooking the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y. He has a home health aide five days a week, and his mother, Sandra, assists him the rest of the time.

James Estrin/The New York Times Mr. Nice in Garrison, N.Y., last week.

While he was in a hospital and a long-term rehabilitation center for 10 months he spent a lot of time looking out of windows. Although he worked in more than 50 countries as a professional photographer, he now shoots all of his photos out of his home’s windows or from a car while being driven back and forth to physical therapy sessions.

But that is about to change. On Friday, he will be setting out on a cross-country road trip. He will be accompanied by his mother, two childhood friends and a documentary filmmaker. (You can follow his journey on his blog.)

People Mr. Nice worked with in the industry have offered assistance and raised money, for the trip.

He says he wants to push his limits and test his endurance, but the main purpose of the trip is to draw attention to people who have been affected by traumatic brain injury, including many people he met during his own recovery.

“At the hospital I saw a lot of people who were injured in accidents by people texting and driving, and also a lot of soldiers who were badly injured,” he said. “I saw a lot of horrible stuff.

“I’m pretty lucky.”

Brian Nice Untitled.

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Photos, Like Life, Blurred and Re-Envisioned

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Brian Nice traveled the world as a fashion photographer for 25 years creating technically precise images reflecting his clients’ concepts of beauty.

Recently, his photographs have changed, as has Mr. Nice himself. Now, they mirror his own vision.

“Before everything was sharp and technically correct â€" now everything is looser and more go-with-the-flow,” Mr. Nice said. “Before, I was controlling. Now, I just let it happen.”

Brian Nice Until 2009, Brian Nice was a fashion and beauty photographer.

A congenital cavernous malformation caused bleeding in his brain in 2009, and two subsequent complex operations left him in a wheelchair without fine-motor skills. His vision is erratic, fluctuating from hour to hour. He has double vision and says one eye goes up and down sometimes while the other goes side to side.

Speaking slowly, he described himself as “mentally fit, but trapped inside a broken body,” where just holding a conversation can be “like an Olympic event.”

Mr. Nice, 52, still loves photography, but now he uses a plastic Holga to take pictures on film. His hands shake when he holds a camera, but he makes that work for him in his images. Besides, the camera is plastic, so replacing it is easy if he drops it.

“I know it’s trendy, but the reason I use it is because you can easily do double exposure,” Mr. Nice said. “And basically, it duplicates how I see. You don’t always know how it’s going to come out.”

Mr. Nice lives with his parents in a house overlooking the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y. He has a home health aide five days a week, and his mother, Sandra, assists him the rest of the time.

James Estrin/The New York Times Mr. Nice in Garrison, N.Y., last week.

While he was in a hospital and a long-term rehabilitation center for 10 months he spent a lot of time looking out of windows. Although he worked in more than 50 countries as a professional photographer, he now shoots all of his photos out of his home’s windows or from a car while being driven back and forth to physical therapy sessions.

But that is about to change. On Friday, he will be setting out on a cross-country road trip. He will be accompanied by his mother, two childhood friends and a documentary filmmaker. (You can follow his journey on his blog.)

People Mr. Nice worked with in the industry have offered assistance and raised money, for the trip.

He says he wants to push his limits and test his endurance, but the main purpose of the trip is to draw attention to people who have been affected by traumatic brain injury, including many people he met during his own recovery.

“At the hospital I saw a lot of people who were injured in accidents by people texting and driving, and also a lot of soldiers who were badly injured,” he said. “I saw a lot of horrible stuff.

“I’m pretty lucky.”

Brian Nice Untitled.

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

Pictures of the Day: Kenya and Elsewhere

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Photos from Kenya, Pakistan, Israel and the West Bank.

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A Haitian State of Mind

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Growing up in Italy as the child of a Dutch mother and a Canadian father, Paolo Woods was fascinated by the notion of the state. How does where you live, and how you live, shape individual and national identity? To find out, he moved to a country most often described as anything but a state: Haiti.

“When you see Haiti in the press, it is almost always described as a failed state,” he said. “How does a failed state live? Who takes the place of the state? How is society organized and how does it reorganize on the corpse of a failed state?”

Mr. Woods, 43, has been exploring those questions since late 2010, based out of Les Cayes in southern Haiti and traveling with the journalist Arnaud Robert for a series of stories dealing with everything from religion to the country’s oligarchs. The result of this collaboration is “State,” an imposing exhibition that just opened at Photoville in New York and at the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. An accompanying book was published by the museum and Éditions Photosynthèses.

Paolo Woods/Institute President Michel Martelly of Haiti in front of the presidential palace, destroyed by the 2010 earthquake, in Port-au-Prince. The Creole word “Prezidan” is written on his cap. 2012.

Mr. Woods’s images do not rely on the jarring visual tropes of misery, grime and violence employed by the hordes of photojournalists who have descended on Haiti since the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime in 1986. Instead, he has found a series of quiet, even ordinary, scenes that add up to a layered portrait of a complicated place. Would-be saviors and so-called experts seem lost and spouting nonsense, while seen-it-all Haitians note the absurdities playing out before them.

“Photojournalists tend to divide the world into good and bad,” Mr. Woods said by phone from Lausanne last week. “You constantly find those two elements that we so clearly think define our vision of the world. But things are a lot more mixed. There are not just bad guys and good guys. That is what is interesting to me, to get into the nuances and make images that are not answers, but raise more questions.”

The idea to examine the concept of the state came to him after a series of projects in places like Iran where he was limited to two-week stays. Rather than be at the mercy of a short-term visa, he wanted to dig in somewhere. He considered Sudan, but dismissed it as too dangerous. Haiti, which had been left reeling after the 2010 earthquake, was his next choice. Besides, he had been there in the early 1990s after graduating high school.

“All my other friends went to Amsterdam to smoke joints,” he said. “I went to Haiti on vacation.”

Paolo Woods/Institute Mario Andrésol, a former military man and chief of the Haitian National Police under President Jean-Claude Duvalier, recently introduced his own line of clothing. He parks his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in his living room. Belleville, Pétion-Ville.

His choice, he acknowledges, was hardly a good one from the perspective of news. Photo editors said they had had their fill of images depicting the ravages of the earthquake and the cholera epidemic that followed. But this forced him to stay away from the typical photo stories that had come out of the island as he and Mr. Robert worked on pieces for a variety of European and American publications. And rather than live in the capital, he moved to Les Cayes to avoid the usual tug of the news cycle. He said that approach allowed him to delve into several topics of great importance that had been overlooked.

For example, while the country’s economic elites have been denounced as corrupt or as profiteers, Mr. Woods and Mr. Robert spent time with them to gain an understanding of how they made their money and whether they were forces for change. The resulting story provoked a strong reaction on the island.

“I have enormous respect for someone who wants to be a businessman in Haiti,” Mr. Woods said. “They can do what so many others did and move to Miami and live a comfortable life. But being an entrepreneur in Haiti is not easy. You have to love your country enormously.”

If anything, he said, one of the biggest challenges to the nation’s economy has come from the very sector that is supposedly there to help: the nongovernmental organizations that have flooded the island over the decades. Apart from inflating prices for cars, food and lodging, he said, these groups have hired away educated locals to work on projects that collapse once the financing ends.

“I am convinced the NGOs do not do development,” Mr. Woods said. “If you go through Haiti, it is littered with the projects of NGOs â€" mills, canals, thousands of different projects that were built and inaugurated with beautiful pictures that ended up in glossy brochures and that no longer exist. They come to Haiti without a knowledge of the place, and when they leave, everything they constructed falls because they did not create a structure to keep it up.”

Paolo Woods/Institute Radio Macaya 102.5 FM, in Les Cayes. Marie Lourdes Jean Pierre is a mambo, or female Voodoo priest. Every Sunday she hosts a program about her religion, countering the negative stereotypes promoted by Protestant missionaries.

A similar lack of understanding, he said, can be seen in the evangelical missionaries that have targeted Voodoo believers as souls in need of salvation from the grip of Satan. He calls them “misery tourists” who are brought to villages by various missionary groups and told to pray over the people they encounter.

In one case, a Haitian man who took an American woman to pray over his father admitted to Mr. Woods that he did this every time missionaries brought in a group. The father, Mr. Woods said, only wanted to be left alone, but the son described the near-daily encounters as “our work.” Another time, he was left aghast by an American preacher who proclaimed that anyone who accepted Jesus did not have to worry about falling victim to the cholera epidemic (which, according to a recent report, was introduced to the country by United Nations peacekeepers).

“There is such an amount of psychological violence in this,” Mr. Woods said. “They have this neocolonialist mentality of freeing people from evil. It creates an enormous amount of problems because these missionaries have schools and money, and make people dependent.”

And yet, for every outrage, there were signs of hope and faith for the future. In an illegal development called Canaan, shacks sprang up, unpaved paths were given street names and lots were left empty for a town hall and a police precinct.

“It’s such an unbelievable place,” Mr. Woods said. “This is a completely illegal settlement, yet they desire the presence of elements that represent the state. The whole idea of anarchy and that they are people who do not want a functioning government is completely contradicted by that.”

One reason he was able to get closer to the country’s real situation, he said, was that he knew his work was being seen not just by Western audiences but by his neighbors, too. Every story he published in the United States or Europe was provided free to the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste. The local reaction was always stronger, he said, but the knowledge that every word and picture would be scrutinized and debated kept him honest.

Haiti can be what people look for. In his case, Mr. Woods found a home â€" he will return in October to Les Cayes, where he lives with his partner and son. As he has learned, it is hardly a shallow place. Nor is it a failure.

“Haiti’s basic identity is that it became a state, the first black republic,” he said. “Through every standard we look, it is a failed state. But a failed state means the idea of the state has failed, and that is not the case. The realization has had an enormous amount of trouble, but people keep an enormous amount of faith. Everything that deals with how the state runs concerns Haitians.”

Paolo Woods/Institute In the Les Cayes office of Jean Michelet Seide, justice of the peace, a plaintiff registered a complaint against her husband, who had hit her the night before with a metal bowl. She brought the bowl with her as evidence. The computer, supplied by Canadian aid, is not used. The complaint is written out by hand.

“State” will be on view at Photoville, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Thursday through Sunday, and at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, through May 1, 2014.

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

A Haitian State of Mind

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

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Growing up in Italy as the child of a Dutch mother and a Canadian father, Paolo Woods was fascinated by the notion of the state. How does where you live, and how you live, shape individual and national identity? To find out, he moved to a country most often described as anything but a state: Haiti.

“When you see Haiti in the press, it is almost always described as a failed state,” he said. “How does a failed state live? Who takes the place of the state? How is society organized and how does it reorganize on the corpse of a failed state?”

Mr. Woods, 43, has been exploring those questions since late 2010, based out of Les Cayes in southern Haiti and traveling with the journalist Arnaud Robert for a series of stories dealing with everything from religion to the country’s oligarchs. The result of this collaboration is “State,” an imposing exhibition that just opened at Photoville in New York and at the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. An accompanying book was published by the museum and Éditions Photosynthèses.

Paolo Woods/Institute President Michel Martelly of Haiti in front of the presidential palace, destroyed by the 2010 earthquake, in Port-au-Prince. The Creole word “Prezidan” is written on his cap. 2012.

Mr. Woods’s images do not rely on the jarring visual tropes of misery, grime and violence employed by the hordes of photojournalists who have descended on Haiti since the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime in 1986. Instead, he has found a series of quiet, even ordinary, scenes that add up to a layered portrait of a complicated place. Would-be saviors and so-called experts seem lost and spouting nonsense, while seen-it-all Haitians note the absurdities playing out before them.

“Photojournalists tend to divide the world into good and bad,” Mr. Woods said by phone from Lausanne last week. “You constantly find those two elements that we so clearly think define our vision of the world. But things are a lot more mixed. There are not just bad guys and good guys. That is what is interesting to me, to get into the nuances and make images that are not answers, but raise more questions.”

The idea to examine the concept of the state came to him after a series of projects in places like Iran where he was limited to two-week stays. Rather than be at the mercy of a short-term visa, he wanted to dig in somewhere. He considered Sudan, but dismissed it as too dangerous. Haiti, which had been left reeling after the 2010 earthquake, was his next choice. Besides, he had been there in the early 1990s after graduating high school.

“All my other friends went to Amsterdam to smoke joints,” he said. “I went to Haiti on vacation.”

Paolo Woods/Institute Mario Andrésol, a former military man and chief of the Haitian National Police under President Jean-Claude Duvalier, recently introduced his own line of clothing. He parks his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in his living room. Belleville, Pétion-Ville.

His choice, he acknowledges, was hardly a good one from the perspective of news. Photo editors said they had had their fill of images depicting the ravages of the earthquake and the cholera epidemic that followed. But this forced him to stay away from the typical photo stories that had come out of the island as he and Mr. Robert worked on pieces for a variety of European and American publications. And rather than live in the capital, he moved to Les Cayes to avoid the usual tug of the news cycle. He said that approach allowed him to delve into several topics of great importance that had been overlooked.

For example, while the country’s economic elites have been denounced as corrupt or as profiteers, Mr. Woods and Mr. Robert spent time with them to gain an understanding of how they made their money and whether they were forces for change. The resulting story provoked a strong reaction on the island.

“I have enormous respect for someone who wants to be a businessman in Haiti,” Mr. Woods said. “They can do what so many others did and move to Miami and live a comfortable life. But being an entrepreneur in Haiti is not easy. You have to love your country enormously.”

If anything, he said, one of the biggest challenges to the nation’s economy has come from the very sector that is supposedly there to help: the nongovernmental organizations that have flooded the island over the decades. Apart from inflating prices for cars, food and lodging, he said, these groups have hired away educated locals to work on projects that collapse once the financing ends.

“I am convinced the NGOs do not do development,” Mr. Woods said. “If you go through Haiti, it is littered with the projects of NGOs â€" mills, canals, thousands of different projects that were built and inaugurated with beautiful pictures that ended up in glossy brochures and that no longer exist. They come to Haiti without a knowledge of the place, and when they leave, everything they constructed falls because they did not create a structure to keep it up.”

Paolo Woods/Institute Radio Macaya 102.5 FM, in Les Cayes. Marie Lourdes Jean Pierre is a mambo, or female Voodoo priest. Every Sunday she hosts a program about her religion, countering the negative stereotypes promoted by Protestant missionaries.

A similar lack of understanding, he said, can be seen in the evangelical missionaries that have targeted Voodoo believers as souls in need of salvation from the grip of Satan. He calls them “misery tourists” who are brought to villages by various missionary groups and told to pray over the people they encounter.

In one case, a Haitian man who took an American woman to pray over his father admitted to Mr. Woods that he did this every time missionaries brought in a group. The father, Mr. Woods said, only wanted to be left alone, but the son described the near-daily encounters as “our work.” Another time, he was left aghast by an American preacher who proclaimed that anyone who accepted Jesus did not have to worry about falling victim to the cholera epidemic (which, according to a recent report, was introduced to the country by United Nations peacekeepers).

“There is such an amount of psychological violence in this,” Mr. Woods said. “They have this neocolonialist mentality of freeing people from evil. It creates an enormous amount of problems because these missionaries have schools and money, and make people dependent.”

And yet, for every outrage, there were signs of hope and faith for the future. In an illegal development called Canaan, shacks sprang up, unpaved paths were given street names and lots were left empty for a town hall and a police precinct.

“It’s such an unbelievable place,” Mr. Woods said. “This is a completely illegal settlement, yet they desire the presence of elements that represent the state. The whole idea of anarchy and that they are people who do not want a functioning government is completely contradicted by that.”

One reason he was able to get closer to the country’s real situation, he said, was that he knew his work was being seen not just by Western audiences but by his neighbors, too. Every story he published in the United States or Europe was provided free to the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste. The local reaction was always stronger, he said, but the knowledge that every word and picture would be scrutinized and debated kept him honest.

Haiti can be what people look for. In his case, Mr. Woods found a home â€" he will return in October to Les Cayes, where he lives with his partner and son. As he has learned, it is hardly a shallow place. Nor is it a failure.

“Haiti’s basic identity is that it became a state, the first black republic,” he said. “Through every standard we look, it is a failed state. But a failed state means the idea of the state has failed, and that is not the case. The realization has had an enormous amount of trouble, but people keep an enormous amount of faith. Everything that deals with how the state runs concerns Haitians.”

Paolo Woods/Institute In the Les Cayes office of Jean Michelet Seide, justice of the peace, a plaintiff registered a complaint against her husband, who had hit her the night before with a metal bowl. She brought the bowl with her as evidence. The computer, supplied by Canadian aid, is not used. The complaint is written out by hand.

“State” will be on view at Photoville, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Thursday through Sunday, and at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, through May 1, 2014.

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On the Edge With a GoPro and a Pole

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This summer, David Frank got an assignment to do a video on a New York City window washer. He thought it would be an interesting story and envisioned himself shooting from a scaffold as it glided along the side of some skyscraper.

“But when I called the guy, I found out he doesn’t do scaffold work,” Mr. Frank said with a chuckle. “He does it the old-fashioned way, by crawling outside the window.”

After rethinking his approach â€" for example, taking his Canon camera and his GoPro, attached to a pole, to the edge with him â€" Mr. Frank was able to convey the skill and calm needed by someone standing on three inches of window ledge. The resulting video, “Man on an Edge,” has racked up more than 450,000 views.

“I’d like to think that has something to do with the photography,” he said.

In the accompanying piece, Mr. Frank, who was deputy director of photography at The Times before becoming a video journalist six years ago, talks about how he got that vertiginous video.

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Witness to a Massacre in a Nairobi Mall

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The New York Times staff photographer Tyler Hicks was nearby when gunmen opened fire at an upscale Nairobi mall, killing at least 39 people in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Kenya’s history. He was able to go inside the mall as the attack unfolded.

His conversation with James Estrin has been edited.

Q.

What happened? How were you so close?

A.

I was at a framing shop in an adjacent mall picking up some photographs that had been given to me as gifts by photojournalists who attended my wedding. I was very close. I didn’t have all of my equipment, just had a small camera that I always have with me in case something happens.

I ran over to the mall and I was able to photograph until my wife [Nichole Sobecki], who is also a photojournalist and was at our house, was able to collect my Kevlar helmet and professional cameras before she came to cover the news herself.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Police and soldiers swept through the mall to pursue the assailants and to help civilians escape to safety.

When I left the framing shop, I could see right away that there was something serious going on, because there were lots of people running away from the mall. I ran over there and within minutes I could see people who had been shot in the leg or stomach from what appeared to be small arms fire being helped by other civilians. This went on for about 30 minutes.

The mall is Nairobi’s most high-end shopping center, completely up to Western standards, with movie theaters, nice cafes, supermarkets and a casino. Pretty much anything you need. I’ve been there, so I knew the layout inside.

From the beginning I wanted to get with some security forces inside the mall.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Glass was shattered inside the mall.

We managed to find an entrance where people who were hiding inside the mall were coming out. We ran into that service entrance and we hooked up with some police who let us stay with them as they did security sweeps clearing different stores â€" very much like what you see when the military enters a village. Shop to shop and aisle to aisle, looking for the shooters who were still inside.

I had a clear view in there. I could see that there were multiple bodies lying dead in the mall, some lying together just next to where they were having lunch at a cafe. It seemed everywhere you turned there was another body.

Military forces didn’t know where the militants were, so they continued to sweep through looking for them. Of course, there was the concern of I.E.D.’s or that they would throw a grenade or shoot. In the shopping mall, there was an endless amount of places that they could hide or potentially attack from.

Q.

How long were you there?

A.

I was around the mall for the better part of the day. I was inside the mall for about two hours.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Several Kenyan soldiers were wounded.

Q.

What exactly was unfolding in front of you during those two hours?

A.

We were with one group of police for most of the time. There were moments when I branched out. If you had to stop, and they continued, you would be in the mall, completely alone, without anyone knowing where these gunmen were. So it was important to make the commitment to stay with them. They moved from place to place, sometimes running, sometimes having to clear areas around corners, where they couldn’t see around the corner, and it looked very much like a military operation inside.
They had two objectives as far as I could see: one was to try to find the militants. And two, to get civilians out of the mall. There were many civilians who had barricaded themselves inside shops, inside the movie theater, inside restaurants, inside a beauty salon â€" it seemed like everywhere you went, there were more people who just appeared out of the woodwork.

Q.

You didn’t see any of the shooters, either dead or alive?

A.

No, I didn’t see any of the militants. I only saw the casualties and the fatalities. I estimate I saw between 10 and 12 people who had been killed.

Q.

What are you thinking at this point? Is covering a terrorist attack where you live different than covering war in Afghanistan or Syria?

A.

When something of this magnitude happens, it’s just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than being in Afghanistan or any other number of countries where there are wars going on. You have to think about where you’re standing, you have to think about where you have cover, the type of obstacles you can place between you and potential gunmen. A lot of the same rules apply when they’re sweeping through a building like that.

This is just plain and simple murder of unarmed civilians. It’s not a war. These militants went into the mall and executed people: women and children, anyone who got in their path. That’s not typical of war.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Gunshots continued to ring out after nightfall, though the Kenyan authorities did not provide much information about what was happening inside the mall.

Tyler Hicks is a staff photographer for The New York Times. In 2009, Mr. Hicks was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for its coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He received the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award from Pictures of the Year International for his work in 2006 and was third place in this year’s National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism photographer of the year contest,  for work from 2012. In 2001, Mr. Hicks was the recipient of the 2001 ICP Infinity Award for Photojournalism for his coverage in Afghanistan, as well as other awards, including World Press and Pictures of the Year and Visa Pour L’Image in Perpignan, France.

Mr. Hicks was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on July 9, 1969. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya, and married the photojournalist Nichole Sobecki on Sept. 7 in Ancramdale, N.Y.

Follow @TylerHicksPhoto, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.

Pictures of the Day: Gaza and Elsewhere

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Photos from the Gaza Strip, the Philippines, Germany and South Africa.

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Pictures of the Day: Gaza and Elsewhere

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Photos from the Gaza Strip, the Philippines, Germany and South Africa.

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Responding to Reader Comments on War Photographs and Drone Victims

I’m appreciative of the reader response to my column last Sunday on photographic images from Syria. A few of those responses have made me realize that some further explanation is in order, on two points.

Several readers responded to a statement in the column about how rarely The Times publishes photographs from the aftermath of American drone strikes. My point was that these strikes have also killed children, just as chemical weapons in Syria have, but that we don’t see large front-page images of the victims.

The filmmaker Robert Greenwald drew my attention to the photographs of drone strike victims, which have been used by The Huffington Post. And a commenter, Dotconnector from New York, incisively noted that The Huffington Post gave prominent display to a photograph of children who died in a drone attack in Afghanistan in April, positioning it “all the way across the top of its home page.”

Mr. Greenwald, who has produced a film about drones, said it is extremely important for Americans to see images of those who have died in those attacks. “Images’ impact on narrative is deeply underestimated, especially by professionals who are most often driven by words and data,” he wrote. He discussed the film in an interview with D. B. Grady in The Week.

I asked Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor in charge of photography at The Times, about these readers’ observations. She pointed out that on April 8, The Times published a photograph of children who died in a drone strike, and on April 19 did so again, as well as publishing a photograph of a children’s grave in Afghanistan.

Could the photographs of the children have been displayed more prominently, rather than small and on  inside pages? No doubt. By contrast, the photograph of the dead Syrian children was displayed at the top of the front page â€" undoubtedly dictated by the news value of the chemical weapons attack. But the children are equally human and there is news value in both situations. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being moved by the sight of these innocent faces.

(On the subject of American drone strikes, I’ve written about how often the victims are described by government sources as “militants,” when that is not always the case.)

I also fielded a question from a reader, Maura T. Fan of New York City, challenging my statement that many readers find graphic photographs of foreigners far easier to take than those of Americans.  That reader wanted to know my evidence for the statement. I responded by e-mail that I based it on personal experience: many years as an editor, and many conversations with other editors around the country. I can’t prove it, but I do continue to believe it. I also should have made it clear that, even if the images are deeply disturbing, it’s still important that they are seen.

And I wanted to mention someone who was helpful on the column, but whom space did not permit me to quote: Mickey Osterreicher, a longtime photographer who now, as the lawyer who represents the National Press Photographers Association, works on press-freedom problems, of which there is an endless supply.

Finally, there is a thought-provoking post by Michael Shaw on the photojournalism site BagNews about a famed image from the Vietnam War that I mentioned in the column: Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl.” This post discusses how the photograph was edited, calling it “one of the most significant crops” in history.

The Italian-Americans of Mulberry Street, Long Before ‘The Godfather’

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Strolling along Mulberry Street in Little Italy during this year’s Feast of San Gennaro, visitors passed stands selling zeppole and sausage and peppers as vendors hawked “Fuggedaboudit” T-shirts and “Godfather”-themed trinkets. But when they reached St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral at the corner of Prince Street, the atmosphere changed, the booths thinned and visitors encountered large banners with historical photographs of the neighborhood hanging on the church cemetery walls.

For modern-day viewers, the simple images of Italian immigrants and their families are a window into the struggle and joys of the residents of Manhattan’s Little Italy in the early- and mid-20th century. But for Msgr. Donald Sakano, they have a somewhat deeper function.

“While we gaze at them, it is almost as if the people in the photos are gazing back at us and are reflecting on our situation from another place, almost like an icon in a religious setting,” he said. “I find that to be magical. You look at these figures and you’re drawn into them and you wonder about the moment that occurred before and after the shutter froze their features on a piece of film.”

The monsignor’s purpose for hanging the banners â€" seven and a half feet tall, five feet wide â€" is to try to bring the festival back to its roots, and away from what he sees as a crass, commercial use of stereotypes of Italian-Americans.

The project was assembled by Mark Bussell, a photography professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a former photography director at The New York Times, with the help of Joseph V. Scelsa, founder of the Italian-American Museum on Mulberry Street.

Mr. Bussell moved to Elizabeth Street in Little Italy in 1974 and enjoyed the sense of neighborhood in the small, family-owned shops and cafes, as well as on the stoops. He found that his neighbors looked out for one another in a way that had become rare in most of the rest of Manhattan.

Over the next 30 years, he watched many young Italian families move to the suburbs as they assimilated; rising rents forced out others. Recently, he became acutely aware of the dwindling number of Italians left in Little Italy. He realized that the “soul of that neighborhood, the Italian people, were quickly disappearing, and that it was incredibly important to document them before that happened.”

So he started a class at N.Y.U., “The Last Italians of Little Italy,” and enlisted his students to make photo essays and videos and to help preserve existing historical images. At first, they faltered. As a local butcher told Mr. Bussell, “A thousand N.Y.U. students have come into my shop to photograph me over the years, and not one ever returned.”

Courtesy of the Italian-American Museum A bakery on Mulberry Street. Circa 1935.

But over the course of three years, Mr. Bussell made sure his students did return, and with the help of Mr. Scelsa, Monsignor Sakano and a couple of neighborhood mainstays, they spent time in residents’ homes and shops.

At the festival last year, the cemetery walls featured life-size portraits of parishioners of St. Patrick’s done by Mr. Bussell’s student Alex Arbuckle. This was the beginning of Monsignor Sakano’s campaign to use photographs to try to refocus the festival on the neighborhood and the people who live there â€" and on a broader, more nuanced view of what it means to be Italian-American.

“The Sopranos,” the “Godfather” movies and the reality television show “Jersey Shore” have helped shape the image of Italian-Americans â€" even, sometimes, among themselves, said Joseph Sciorra, associate director of the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute at Queens College.

“Italian-Americans are often represented in the broadest caricatures â€" whether undereducated, bigoted people from the outer boroughs who are overly concerned with their own body image or, of course, the ubiquitous Mafioso image,” he said. “There’s very little room in the media for an interesting and nuanced depiction.”

And while popular culture seldom shows the rich musical, artistic and intellectual heritage of Italian-Americans, Mr. Sciorra would be satisfied simply with more complex and subtle portrayals. Too often, he said, the third, fourth and fifth generations of Italian immigrants have their sense of Italian-American identity “created by the ‘Godfather’ movie narrative, as opposed to any story told by their own godfathers.”

Besides the photographs on the cemetery walls of Old St. Patrick’s, there have been other quiet efforts to broaden the cultural portrayal at the San Gennaro festival in the last few years, with buskers playing authentic Italian folk music and the Italian-American Writers Association selling books and holding readings.

And the religious processions, not the dubious items being sold, are still the core feast events for most of the Italian residents of the neighborhood, Mr. Sciorra said.

“Italian-American festivals have always been a mixture of the sacred and the profane,” he said.

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