Editorial Is Under Fire for Saying President â€˜Clearly Misspoke\' on Health Care

Over the weekend, I heard from a New York Times picture editor, Soo-Jeong Kang, who was involved in the publication of a photograph that generated a great deal of discussion when it appeared on The Times's front page (PDF) last Wednesday. Ms. Kang assigned the photo shoot that resulted in that much-discussed image of an Israeli woman's upper torso, including incision scars, a portion of her areola and her Star of David tattoo. It did not show her face.

I wrote about it on this blog that day, after hearing from readers who were upset by it, and who found it offensive or insensitive. It also generated a great deal of discussion within The Times's newsroom, with varied points of view.

The post brought plenty of response, with most of the reader comments defending the photo choice.

Ms. Kang offered me this statement from the unnamed 28-year-old woman in the photograph, written after she became aware of media and reader reaction. I thought it was interesting enough to share:

When I first saw the photo I did not find it either provocative or inappropriate. I thought it was powerful and told my story â€" I am a proud, young Jewish woman who had breast cancer, and I have a scar that proves it.
I am not ashamed or embarrassed by the scar. Most of my breast was not exposed and the small part that was does not make the picture â€œcheap.â€ I think it's very artistic.

I didn't expect such controversy around the photo â€" but I'm glad the photo caused an impact since I believe that there should be more awareness about breast cancer, genetic testing, the conflict of â€œwhat to doâ€ with a positive result, etc.

I agreed to publish the photo since I wanted to raise awareness, but I decided to leave my identity unknown because I didn't want to become famous because I had cancer. The cancer I fought this past year is a part of me, but it's not who I am. It's not me. In addition, this photo was taken spontaneously and I didn't consult my close family beforehand, so I preferred to stay unknown.

In response to some readers' comment on the tattoo I have on my body, I come from a family of Holocaust survivors. When I was 17, I went with my high school on a trip to the concentration camps in Poland. It was a very emotional and difficult trip, and when I returned to Israel I was so proud that I am Jewish and Israeli that I wanted the whole world to know. I will never have to hide my religion or where I come from. That's when I made the tattoo of the Star of David. It was 10 years before my diagnosis of breast cancer.

When White House Photos Are â€˜Visual Press Releases\'

For Doug Mills â€" the longtime White House photographer for The Times â€" what happened on Veterans Day was more than annoying. It was wrong.

He and other Washington journalists had been hearing that the oldest World War II veteran alive was coming to Washington to commemorate the occasion. But they weren't sure just what the 107-year-old Richard Overton's precise coordinates would be.

As it turned out, he had a private breakfast with President Obama â€" undoubtedly a newsworthy event as well as one that cried out to be photographed.

But press photographers were not allowed to take that photo. Only Pete Souza, the government-employed photographer who works on the White House staff, was there. His photo of the president and the old soldier went out on Twitter and then was posted on Flickr, and from there the world could see it and distribute it.

â€œAs a journalist, you feel you should be there, but we're shut out,â€ Mr. Mills told me this week. â€œIt's very frustrating.â€

Increasingly, the Obama administration â€" yes, the most transparent administration ever, according to its early promises â€" has kept press photographers out of the kinds of events they used to be able to cover. Instead, the administration has relied on its own staff and social media to spread images worldwide.

That those images are exactly what the president's staff would like them to be is no surprise. That's what staff photographers are paid to do.

â€œIt's all about controlling the image and putting the president in the best light,â€ Mr. Mills said. There's no chance for a gaffe, or a bad hair day, or a sour expression, or much spontaneity when photographs are subject to approval by the presidential gatekeepers.

â€œThere's been a kind of creep, where even on innocuous events, the White House is calling it private and then pushing out a picture that's taken by their own photographer,â€ said Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, who has 40 years' experience as a photojournalist. (It is understood, he said, that acceptable photographic access would mean using â€œa tight poolâ€ of three to five press photographers who would then share their images with other photojournalists.)

Press photographers, and the news organizations they work for, are fighting back. As Mark Landler of The Times reported on Nov. 30:

In a letter two weeks ago to the press secretary, Jay Carney, the White House Correspondents' Association and other organizations, including The New York Times, protested that the White House routinely excluded news photographers from sessions with the president and then released photographs of the events, usually taken by Mr. Souza.

â€œYou are, in effect, replacing independent journalism with visual press releases,â€ said the letter, which criticized the White House's policy as â€œan arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference in legitimate news-gathering activities.â€

And, in the past few weeks, some news organizations have taken another step â€" they have banned the use of these official photographs in their publications. Gannett and its flagship paper, USA Today; McClatchy; and The Associated Press are among them. (In each case, the organizations allow for a very narrow exception â€" a rare case like the famous photograph from the night of the Osama bin Laden raid.)

Santiago Lyon, A.P.'s director of photography, described to The Washington Post's Paul Farhi â€œthe trendâ€ of more limitations on photographers since President Obama took office.

The White House, for example, did not allow photographers to shoot a meeting between the president and Malala Yousafzai. She is the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban for her statements in support of education for girls.

The Times has not changed its unwritten policy, which is to use such photographs only rarely, in certain unusual situations â€" where access is impossible because of security concerns, where the photo is a referenced part of the story or in photos of historical importance â€" according to Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor for photography.

I found seven instances in which White House â€œhandoutâ€ photographs were used in The Times in 2013 â€" including a photograph of the president shooting skeet the previous year at Camp David and one of him sharing a laugh with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over lunch outside the Oval Office. Another shows the president discussing options for Syria in the Oval Office.

The Times signed the letter to Mr. Carney and was represented on an earlier conference call to plan strategy. But it could go further and be a more dominant voice on this issue. A written restatement of its policy and a more strictly enforced ban on such pictures would send a strong message and help the cause.

Why should this concern readers? Does it really matter what the source of the photograph is?

Here's why it matters: First, in the age of digital manipulation, political photographs can be tampered with all too easily. Remember the congresswomen on the steps of the Capitol, with some members' pictures inserted later because they couldn't be there? (There is no suggestion that Mr. Souza or his White House colleagues have done anything like that.)

Second, controlling the image is just another way of controlling the news. To put it bluntly, White House â€œhandoutâ€ photographs are closer to propaganda than to journalism.

That may seem overstated to some, but not to Doug Mills.

â€œI think every newspaper should have a ban on it,â€ he said. Â He's right, and I agree.

Updated, 11:24 a.m. | A.P.'s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, wrote to me today to note that this is not a new policy for her organization. In fact, the A.P. has been waging this fight for a long time. She wrote, in part:

It is the A.P.'s longstanding policy not to accept or distribute handout photos when we believe the event should have been open to news coverage. In this administration, that fight goes back to Day One, when the do-over swearing in was photographed only by the official White House photographer. That was not acceptable to us. There were thousands of independent images made of the muffed oath, only one lone government-sanctioned image of the Take Two version.

Correction| An earlier version of this post referred to a photo taken in the Situation Room the night of the bin Laden raid. It actually was taken in an adjacent conference room at the White House.

The Public Editor\'s Sunday Column: The Thorny Challenge of Covering China

The Thorny Challenge of Covering China

HOW do major American news organizations write about a Communist country with the world's second-largest economy - a country that doesn't believe in press rights and that punishes tough-minded coverage?

Aggressively? Cautiously? Fearlessly? Competitively?

The country is China. The news organizations include The New York Times, as well as its closest competitors. And those questions are on the minds of top editors and executives of news organizations. The Chinese market is a lucrative one, important to their profitability; and, separately, news value is high. There are crucial stories to be reported in this fast-changing nation of Â more than 1.3 billion people, the most populous country in the world.

The answers are playing out on newspaper front pages and websites, in newsroom personnel decisions and on corporate balance sheets.

Consider some of what's happened:

- Last year, The Times published a story by David Barboza about the enormous wealth of China's ruling family. The article won a Pulitzer Prize - and caused the Chinese government to shut down The Times's website in China, an important part of its growth as a global business, at a cost of about $3 million in lost revenue to The Times so far.

- On Nov. 9, The Times published an article on its front page about one of its chief business-news competitors, Bloomberg News, describing how the organization had decided against the planned publication of an article for fear of reprisal by the Chinese government. The Times story, which came from unidentified Bloomberg employees, included denials by Bloomberg news executives, including the editor in chief, Matthew Winkler, that the story was killed.

A few days later, Bloomberg made a written complaint to me, through its ethics consultant Tom Goldstein, a former Columbia journalism dean. Mr. Goldstein called the article unfair and inaccurate. He criticized The Times for â€œsabotaging a competitorâ€ by describing the news in the unpublished article.

After I began investigating the complaint by interviewing journalists at Bloomberg and at The Times, Bloomberg postponed and then canceled my scheduled interview with Mr. Winkler. A public relations representative told me that a follow-up Times article on Nov. 25 - a broader look at Bloomberg's corporate mission - was â€œmuch more accurateâ€ and made the interview unnecessary.

Bloomberg's insistence that its China exposÃ© simply wasn't ready for publication, and that therefore the original Times story was invalid, is off the point. The core of the Times story had to do with media self-censorship in China: A top American news executive's telling his reporters that a story was being pulled back at least partly because it might get their news organization kicked out of the country. The details of Mr. Winkler's conference call, in which he spoke to the reporters, are â€œverifiable,â€ The Times's foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, told me. Other journalists, inside and outside The Times, mentioned the existence of audio recordings of that call.

I believe the initial Times article was essentially solid - and certainly eye-opening. Still, one can reasonably question whether it was sound judgment to put an article focused on a competitor's news decision at the top of The Times's front page.

- Fortune magazine reported last week that Chinese authorities barged into Bloomberg News offices in Shanghai and Beijing to conduct inspections shortly after The Times wrote about the disputed and still unpublished article. Chinese officials also demanded an apology from Mr. Winkler, Fortune reported. Mr. Winkler has built Bloomberg News into a top-flight news organization, one that has clearly done some of the best reporting from China. Publicly, Bloomberg has continued to say that its article was held back for more reporting, not permanently killed. One of the reporters of that article, Michael Forsythe, was sus pended from Bloomberg; he later left the company. It would not be surprising if Mr. Forsythe soon joined the reporting staff of The Times.

- American reporters in China are having problems getting their residency visas renewed and soon may be forced to leave the country. What once was â€œan annual noneventâ€ has become â€œa very big worry,â€ said Jill Abramson, the executive editor at The Times. â€œI'm concerned that we won't be able to do the unfettered coverage we need to do for our readers.â€

The Times has a dozen people reporting on China who have New York Times accreditations from the Chinese government, including a photographer and a videographer. All are in Beijing except Mr. Barboza, who is based in Shanghai. The Times also has several correspondents and an editing operation in Hong Kong.

- The websites of The Wall Street Journal and Reuters were both recently blocked, and Bloomberg's has been blocked for many months. And after officials ordered some companies to stop paying for Bloomberg's data terminals - central to the company's distinctive business model - the growth in sales slowed in China, a major potential market.

In short, the stakes are high and the circumstances difficult, both for newsgathering and for news-based businesses.

From a news perspective, The Times has an advantage: It is still that rarity, a family-owned news organization. As Ms. Abramson noted, its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., â€œdoesn't flinchâ€ from running critical China stories.

James L. McGregor, former Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, offered this blunt assessment in The Times's Nov. 25 article:

â€œIt's looking increasingly like as a media company, you have a choice in China. You either do news or you do business, but it's hard to do both.â€

So far, The Times - and, to varying degrees, its competitors - has continued to â€œdo news.â€ That's worthwhile, and challenging, and not very likely to get easier.

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

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 8, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: The Thorny Challenge of Covering China.

Snowden for Person of the Year, and Coverage of a Story That Just Won\'t Quit

Some stories have legs: They just keep coming; they don't fade away.

Perhaps the ultimate story with legs this year, in The Times and elsewhere, has been about government surveillance. And that's just one tiny reason Edward J. Snowden would make an unfathomably better choice for Time magazine's Person of the Year than Miley Cyrus. (The finalists were announced Monday; we'll see how Mr. Snowden, the former government contractor, and Ms. Cyrus, the twerking twentysomething, fare against Pope Francis, among others, on Wednesday morning.)

Occasionally on this blog, I've rounded up some of the current surveillance-related coverage. And here I am doing it again. To wit:

1. Five Nobel laureates and hundreds of other prominent writers protested surveillance practices and their chilling effect on free expression and creativity, and called for an international digital bill of rights. Jeanette Winterson, the British author, was quoted in The Guardian:

Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do.

2. In The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza's sweeping, scary and depressing piece about President Obama and why he doesn't rein in what so many see as surveillance abuses. He writes:

In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.'s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the â€œbusiness recordsâ€ provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information.

3. In Esquire, Tom Junod's interview with the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken many of the Snowden-sourced surveillance articles. A highlight:

The promise of the Internet has always been that it was gonna be this unprecedentedly potent instrument of liberation and democratization. That it would empower people to band together to work against oppression. That it would let you explore things and meet people who you wouldn't otherwise get to know in completely free and unconstrained ways. And what has happened instead is that we face the threat that it's the exact opposite - that instead the Internet could become the most potent and odious tool of human control and oppression in human history.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 10, 2013

An earlier version of this blog post referred incorrectly to Miley Cyrus's age. She is 21; she is no longer a teenager.Â

Just the Facts, but Which Ones Are Included in Times Articles?

Now that we know the person of the year (at least according to Time magazine), I have a nomination for the understatement of the year. It's this: New York Times readers examine the paper closely.

Here's an example or two, from my recent mail, and some responses from Times editors:

On Locations in New York City Articles

A Manhattan reader, Richard Barr, wrote to say that he has often noticed that The Times is much more likely to provide a specific location in a story when that location is in Manhattan rather than elsewhere in New York City. He wonders what lies beneath this â€" do the outer boroughs simply not rate as high with reporters and editors?

This practice, intentional or not, was exceptionally head-scratching (to me) in the piece (Dec. 9) â€œBringing Back the Artistic Beauty of a 19th-Century Churchâ€ in which the â€œstunningâ€ and â€œexquisiteâ€ architecture of St. Anselm's Church is discussed in detail. Not discussed in detail, however, was the location, described once as â€œin the South Bronxâ€ and once as â€œtucked between the Melrose and Longwood areas.â€

People reading about it might well become interested in seeing it. I was born, and spent my first 25 years living, in the Bronx. I have been all over the borough then, and since moving to Manhattan decades ago. I cannot figure out precisely where this building is, based on the amount of information provided in the article. I can only imagine what someone unfamiliar with the Bronx could figure out.

Mr. Barr would like to see that kind of information in articles in The Times regularly, and, reasonably enough, believes that readers shouldn't have to research it elsewhere.

I asked the Metro editor, Wendell Jamieson, about the articles and about the practice in general. He said that the editors on his desk â€œstrive to be specific where ever we write about - Manhattan, the boroughs, or anywhere in the region.â€

He noted that the desk's editors â€œare not Manhattan-centric at allâ€ and include those who were born and raised in the Bronx, Brooklyn (including him), Queens and Manhattan, as well as Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey and Connecticut â€" and still live in those places.

He added: â€œWe don't have an editor who was raised on Staten Island, but we just got a new columnist who was - Rachel Swarns.â€ (Ms. Swarns has started a new Metro column, â€œThe Working Life.â€)

As for this particular case, Mr. Jamieson said, â€œit was an accidental omission.â€

On Including a Person's Age in Articles

Moira Dolan, another Manhattan reader, wrote to note that on the Dec. 6 Business section front page, two women are featured. In both cases, their ages are given: Marjorie M. Scardino, 66, the first woman on the Twitter board of directors, and Shirley Hickey, 65, in an article about treating allergies.

She noted that other articles do not include the ages of men on the same section front. Â They include one about Ford cars, which makes reference to the c.o.o. Mark Fields; another about economic growth and Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank; and a third about Edward S. Lampert, in an article on losses at Sears.

Ms. Dolan, who describes herself as â€œlongtime subscriber, age not relevant,â€ wants to know what the style rule is on using people's ages in articles.

I posed her question to Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards. He wrote:

The guideline, which is in the stylebook, is to include the age if it's relevant or useful. Obviously that gives writers some leeway, but I think it is pretty much what we've done in each of these cases. The Twitter story was all about Scardino, the new board member, and her career; naturally you want to know how old she is. In the allergy story, Hickey is an example of someone who's suffered for years and is now benefiting from a new medical treatment; age certainly seems relevant.

He noted that the story on Mr. Lampert did include his age, 51, lower in the article. The other two articles are about car exports and European growth, not about the specific men, he said.

In other stories in the same day's paper, The Times included the age of many men, Mr. Corbett said. They were: William J. Bratton, 66 (and, of course, Nelson Mandela, 95); Ronnie Smith, teacher killed in Benghazi, 33; Shezanne Cassim, American arrested in Dubai, 29; Lester Charles, calypso singer and protester, 43; Joshua M. Davidson, new rabbi, 45; Rufino Garcia, graffiti fan, 69; and the Rev. Danilo Lachepel, who runs a food pantry, 58.

Mr. Corbett makes a persuasive case. He noted, however, that there is â€œno question that unconscious (or conscious) sexism can be a problem, and something we need to be very alert to.â€

Pictures of the Day: Ukraine and Elsewhere

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Photos from Greece, Ukraine, India and the Philippines.

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Photographing Outside Apartheidâ€™s White Bubble

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JoÃ£o Silva was among a handful of photographers who made their reputation chronicling the fall of apartheid in South Africa. While he has gone on to cover conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he still lives and works in South Africa, even photographing mourners gathering in front of Nelson Mandelaâ€™s home on Friday (below). Mr. Silva recalls covering those momentous years leading up to and after Mr. Mandelaâ€™s election as South Africaâ€™s first black president in a conversation with Shreeya Sinha, an editor at the international desk, which has been edited. More photos by Mr. Silva of Mr. Mandela, and recollections by other photographers, were publised Friday in a multimedia feature.

What brought you to South Africa?

My parents immigrated to South Africa when I was a kid. Growing up in South Africa I was like any other immigrant kid learning the culture. South Africa, back then, was a polarized country. As a child growing up in South Africa, you are pretty much protected from the world around you, so as a young kid, you had no real understanding of what was happening politically around the country.

What awareness did you have of apartheid?

South Africa was a segregated society, completely; you lived in bubbles. I very much lived in a white-bubble world. So growing up in school, I never got to see it in the public media. When I rebelled and broke away and kind of found my political boundaries, I become aware that such a man [Nelson Mandela] existed. That this hypocritical, oppressive government existed.

These are political awakenings, but growing up in that political white bubble, it was not existent. My parents never spoke about it. I had no understanding who Mandela was. I lived in my little bubble and thatâ€™s exactly the way the government wanted the country to be. So I was very much a victim of that, if you want to call it a victim. I had no idea â€" my friends growing up, we were into playing sports and discos and the things that teenagers do. And it sounds bizarre, but thatâ€™s the way it was for kids growing up during apartheid under the white supremacist rule, which favored me. I wasnâ€™t oppressed in any way â€" it favored me.

South Africans mourned in Houghton, Johannesburg, outside the home of Nelson Mandela, who died Thursday after a long illness.

Joao Silva/The New York Times South Africans mourned in Houghton, Johannesburg, outside the home of Nelson Mandela, who died Thursday after a long illness.

Your training ground was South Africa. What made you pick up a camera and shoot there? What were the early years like?

In my early 20s, I picked up photography and started using it as a tool to show the world around me and what I was experiencing. As a photojournalist, I documented the end of apartheid and the violence that became associated with it.

There was no real choice. I wanted to be a photographer to document the world around me. And the world around me was apartheid coming to an end, and all this violence that was going on as a result of the unbanning of the political parties â€" a lot of it instigated by the government.

I was photographing for a local newspaper, one of these free newspapers, where there wasnâ€™t really much interest in what was happening in the black communities, it was mostly about what was happening in the white communities. I had to break away from that and go document what I felt was the reality of South Africa.

And I found myself witnessing all this mass mayhem all over the country. For those four years up until the point that apartheid came to an end and then beyond, because violence actually continued for at least another year in certain areas.

What was it like when Mandela was freed?

I was a freelancer in the urban skyscraper environment in Johannesburg. Hillbrow, which is a highly dense area. I lived in an apartment and people just came out of nowhere in the streets and started celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela. And even back then in the apartheid Hillbrow, this neighborhood was very much a mixed area; it was very cosmopolitan.

It would be months after that when I actually got to photograph him. The first time I got to photograph him would have been the summer of 1991.

Growing up at school or even as a young adult, the images of Mandela were banned by the apartheid government. Nobody really knew what he looked like. At that point, when I finally photographed him, there had already been many, many pictures of him in newspapers because he had been released a few months before, but it was the first time I was seeing him. It was a press conference at Winnie Mandelaâ€™s house. It was outdoors, this long table sitting out in the yard. And all these faces sitting beyond this table, and I remember trying to identify where is Mandela, because I hadnâ€™t seen him yet. And of course, he was easy to identify, he was sitting right in the middle of the table.

That was the first time, and sadly I didnâ€™t get to spend much time with Mandela. I photographed him on numerous occasions, but my focus back then was photographing the violence that was going on. Many times, I would photograph Mandela in places that were volatile. There would be the potential for violence as a result of his presence.

A man with a superficial head wound outside the African National Congress headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. Nine people were killed when gunmen opened fire from the building on Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party supporters protesting the coming general elections. 1994.

JoÃ£o Silva/Associated Press A man with a superficial head wound outside the African National Congress headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. Nine people were killed when gunmen opened fire from the building on Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party supporters protesting the coming general elections. 1994.

That was partly because the Freedom Party at the time, which was incredibly militant, there would be violence as a result. I recently found on a sheet of color negatives from the time, I have four frames that are linked together. In two of the frames, there are pictures of Nelson Mandela and then the following frames are images of somebody who is being severely injured as a result of violence. And that, to me, is so representative of the time and how volatile it was. At one minute, youâ€™d be covering Nelson Mandela and then thereâ€™d be some kind of commotion in the area and suddenly youâ€™d be witnessing somebodyâ€™s death or the aftermath of somebody being killed.

How often were you able to photograph him, and did he change during your time?

My period with Mandela was brief, relatively speaking. I focused on him when I had to during those periods between 1990 through to 1994. And then my career continued and I started traveling more and more abroad. To the point that my focus became mostly Afghanistan and Iraq.

I photographed him a few times after 1999. In 2008, I noticed how much he had aged and how much more frail he had looked, because so many years had passed in between the times I had seen him. He visibly really had aged, and that was quite shocking. I have a picture of him being helped by Jacob Zuma (below), and that stuck with me for a long time after because I knew Mandela was getting older and then to see him that visibly frail was quite incredible because in your mind, heâ€™s frozen. Heâ€™s this image of this man walking to freedom. But like everybody else, we get old and we die. And l saw firsthand his frailty in 2008, and I hadnâ€™t photographed him since.

What was it like being around him?

The man was incredibly charismatic. He was a people person, very comfortable around people. Loved being around children â€" he was just so easily approachable. And back then, as a photographer, he wasnâ€™t president, there wasnâ€™t all these restrictions around him. You could really get up close and photograph him very, very close and intimate distance. You can see it in the images. He fills the frame from very close up. With a wide-angle lens, and yeah, he was quite comfortable in front of the camera as he was comfortable around people. I guess a photographerâ€™s dream.

What does he mean to you?

He brought freedom. Heâ€™s it, that messiah almost. I was a child in that white bubble. How black Africans suffered was not a concern of mine because I was a kid that lived in this bubble. He became this icon of rebellion, this icon of liberation. Heâ€™s been with me ever since. My career kicked off about the time he was freed â€" 1990, I started shooting a year before that, and now Iâ€™m seeing him go. Itâ€™s like itâ€™s gone full circle, if you know what I mean.

And now?

South Africa faces challenges whether heâ€™s present or not. South Africa faces challenges. We have this huge inequality between rich and poor. Poverty is going to destroy this country if it is not addressed by the political powers. If thereâ€™s no political willpower to deal with the poor, itâ€™s a ticking time bomb.

In many ways, South Africa has become an issue of class. Itâ€™s those who have and those who donâ€™t have. I think South Africa faces many challenges, but those challenges are there whether Mandela lives or dies. Can we live up to expectations? Whose expectations?

Nelson Mandela walked offstage, assisted by the presidential candidate Jacob Zuma at an African National Congress pre-election rally in a Johannesburg stadium on April 20, 2009.

JoÃ£o Silva/The New York Times Nelson Mandela walked offstage, assisted by the presidential candidate Jacob Zuma at an African National Congress pre-election rally in a Johannesburg stadium on April 20, 2009.

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

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