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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan and Bahrain.

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Pictures of the Day: China and Elsewhere

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Photos from China, Pakistan, India and Spain.

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Faded Colors, Empty Rooms on the Shore

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The first time Douglas Ljungkvist saw Ocean Beach, N.J., it reminded him of a labor camp. It was 1993 and Mr. Ljungkvist’s then-girlfriend had suggested they rent a cottage in the Jersey Shore hamlet, as her amily had done for years.

“I did not want to spend my vacation there,” said Mr. Ljungkvist, a Swedish-born photographer. “It’s just rows and rows and rows of these tiny cottages in a line. The streets are made of sand, and it’s very sparse. There are telephone poles and wires and a Dairy Queen, so what

“But I gave in and fell in love with the place.”

Mr. Ljungkvist grew so fond of Ocean Beach that he returned the following summer, and the summer after that. In fact, he vacationed there for the next six summers. He went in June, rented a different cottage each year and spent a week relaxing on part of the beloved spit of land that runs for more than 200 miles along the Atlantic. Like many tourists who make annual pilgrimages to the Jersey Shore, Mr. Ljungkvist now has a long and detailed list of things he treasures about Ocean Beach.

“I love being there on foggy days when I can hear the ocean but can’t actually see it,” he said. “I love the dampness. It’! s almost like you can lick the salt out of the air. When you go to bed at night, there’s a dampness in the sheets. It’s something you would never put up with in the city, but when you’re there it just feels right. When you walk around at night, you smell barbecue everywhere. You can always hear a murmur of traffic. It’s never dead quiet. It feels safe. It feels comfortable. It feels like home in a strange way.”

DESCRIPTIONDouglas Ljungkvist

For the next decade or so, work and travel kept Mr. Ljungkvist away from Ocean Beach, even if his mind stayed close. When he returned during the winter of 2009, he took his camera.

Mr. Ljungkvist, who now lives in Brooklyn, began wandering the resort town’s sandy streets, photographing cottage exteriors. Because it was the off-season, stores wre shuttered, beaches were empty and the thin barrier island was his to roam. After a year of shooting, he visited Ocean Beach Sales and Rentals, the agency in charge of renting hundreds of cottages in town. There he was granted access to a wall full of keys and entry to any cottage he wished to shoot.

“The first thing I looked for was color,” said Mr. Ljungkvist, 47. “A very big part of all my work is color.” Growing up in Sweden, he explained, schoolchildren wore almost identical clothing; all that distinguished them was the colors they chose. “That’s what I love about the cottages,” he said. “They pretty much all look the same â€" same size, same materials â€" but the color is what gives them an individual identity.”

Mr. Ljungkvist prefers his colors pale, like the faded, almost imperceptible blue he found on an American flag hanging from one cottage (below). “Color for me is like wine or cheese,” he said. “It needs time, it needs air, it needs salt and wind; it! needs th! e elements to make it look beautiful.”

He also looked for cottages that had retained their original 70s-style décor. While he had been away, many owners had renovated their homes and installed all manner of modern conveniences to keep pace with the demands of a competitive rental market.

“The wood paneling was gone, replaced with white Sheetrock walls, flat-screen TVs, nice leather couches, tile floors, Wi-Fi networks,” Mr. Ljungkvist said. To him the refurbished homes felt less like vacation destinations and more like apartments in the city. “They had lost a little bit of a sense of place,” he said.

During the winter, most of the cottages were empty of personal effects or artwork, which suited Mr. Ljungkvist just fine. He liked having so few clues about the people who owned them. “I prefer photographs with more questions than answers,” he said.

DESCRIPTIONDouglas Ljungkvist

Over time, however, he began populating the pictures with some of his own belongings: a rotary telephone here, a metal suitcase there. The cottages reminded him of places where he had vacationed in Sweden, Mr. Ljungkvist said, and adding an object or two of his own allowed him to create a kind of abstract self-portrait that reflected both who he was as a child and the man he is now.

“It was a lot of experimentation,” he said. “Ninety percent of it didn’t work. It was the wrong thing, or it was displayed incorrectly. Sometimes it paid off.”

After two and a half years, Mr. Ljungkvist had photographed more than 60 cottages. He felt the project was done and was ready to send it to his book publisher.

Then Hurricane Sandy hit. The storm ravaged resort towns up and down the Jersey Shore and destroyed cottages in Ocean Beach that Mr. Ljungkvist had recently photographed. “I was very upset,” he said. “It felt personal, like there was a friend hurting.”

As soon as public access to the barrier island was restored, Mr. Ljungkvist drove to Ocean Beach. “It was horrifying,” he said, likening the cottages to ruined card houses. “It looked like someone had dropped a bomb on it.”

Slowly, Mr. Ljungkvist began taking pictures again, this time of homes without roofs or walls, with floors full of sand and doors open to the ocean breeze. He started getting phone calls from homeowners and renters looking for a record of their cottages before they were demolished.

“I was concerned that my work would make them more upset,” he said. “But it turned out it was helpful for them to be reminded of a better time.”

And now, he can’t stop.

Before Hurricane Sandy, Mr. Ljungkvist consdered himself a fine art photographer. But what he’s doing in Ocean Beach now feels more documentary.

“I always felt that my work down there was a race against time,” he said. “Against modernization. Now there’s an even greater time pressure, more like what I imagine a photojournalist has. In a few weeks they’re going to start knocking houses down.”

Although he intends to document the town’s reconstruction, Mr. Ljungkvist said the most important time for him was now â€" between the storm and the beginning of recovery. “I’ve always been fascinated by suspended time, something that’s temporary, that’s not going to last very long,” he said. “I plan on visiting a lot in the next couple months.”

DESCRIPTIONDouglas Ljungkvist


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Pictures of the Day: Pakistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Pakistan, Mali, France and South Africa.

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A South Bronx Family Album

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When Ricky Flores started taking pictures as a high school senior in 1980, he did what a lot of young photographers did: he photographed his friends, family and neighbors. He captured giddy, even goofy moments, of dancers in the park, teenagers on stoops and costumed children o Halloween.

In the South Bronx.

His neighborhood was no stranger to cameras. But as he got older, Mr. Flores was bothered by how other photographers swooped into his Longwood neighborhood to make clichéd images that plumbed the depths of their preconceptions.

“If there was a picture in the newspaper from the block, it was always negative,” said Mr. Flores, who is now a staff photographer for The Journal News in Rockland County. “It was the image of the Puerto Rican wearing a bandanna with a knife in his pocket. But that wasn’t my experience. You know, my mom was a garment worker. She was very hard working, as were most people in my community.”

That sentiment guided his photography, which went from hobby to obsession. His images showed the full range of experience and emotion in Longwood â€" the same neighborhood that had been home decades earlier to Colin Powell. He shot the fires and ! those who fell to drugs, of course. But he also captured everyday images that often escaped others’ attention.

His images from that era will be on exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center in “Seis del Sur: Dispatches From Home by Six Nuyorican Photographers,” which opens Saturday. The show is a nuanced, insider’s view of an area that was as misunderstood as it was notorious. The show also includes Joe Conzo Jr., Francisco Molina Reyes II, Edwin Pagan, Angel Franco (a staff photographer for The New York Times) and David Gonzalez (co-editor of the Lens Blog).

Mr. Flores’s chronicle of Longwood is part of a deep archive of South Bronx life. He moved to a six-story walk up apartment on ox Street, in 1965, when the area was a vibrant, mostly black and Latino blue-collar neighborhood. He was a curious 5-year-old who played street games like Skelly, Kick the Can, Johnny on the Pony or Stoop Ball.

DESCRIPTIONRicky Flores Josie and Vinnie, 1984.

Although his father had recently died, others looked out for him. If he misbehaved, Mrs. Robinson â€" a one-woman neighborhood watch â€" would tell his mother by the time he got home.

Longwood may not have looked like the pristine communities he saw on television, but its sidewalks were alive with music, domino games and hard-working people leaving early and returning late from their jobs. Yes, there were drugs, yet any disputes were usually settled with fists.

Then the fires came.

As the old, brick! building! s in his neighborhood began to burn, Mr. Flores became a very, very light sleeper. Often he would wake up in the middle of the night to the screaming sirens and clanging bells of fire engines racing down the street.

“First thing you would do is pop up, make sure they’re not running into your apartment building and make sure that nothing bad was going on so you were secure,” he recalled.

He became hypervigilant, always worrying whether his building would be the next on the block to burn. As more blocks were reduced to clusters of charred, broken shells, landlords cut services to remaining buildings, eventually abandoning them or having them taken over by the city. A once-bustling neighborhood became a rubble-strewn urban prairie.

It got bad enough that even the city â€" the reluctant landlord of last resort â€" slowly turned its back on the community, too. The city stopped picking up abandoned cars that were left on the block, and it was common to see three or four cars sitting there ith the wheels off. This became the new normal for Mr. Flores.

A modest inheritance from his father let him buy his first camera â€" a Pentax with a 50-millimeter lens â€" when he was a senior at James Monroe High School. After attending college in Puerto Rico for a year he met Mel Rosenthal, a photographer teaching at the SUNY Empire State College. As he studied with Mr. Rosenthal â€" himself a sensitive chronicler of the South Bronx â€" Mr. Flores realized he had an opportunity, and a responsibility, to document what was really happening in his community.

By the late 80s, Mr. Flores moved farther north in the Bronx, but he continued to photograph the streets of his youth. He also photographed the politically charged protests over racial violence and freelanced for The Village Voice and The New York Times before landing a job at the Gannett-Westchest! er Rockla! nd newspapers.

Pablo Delano, a photographer and a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, often instructs his students to look at Mr. Flores’s “raw and real” photos to understand what an insider view can bring to documentary photography. Mr. Delano says that there is a role for both outsider and insider views, but that growing up in the Bronx and seeing the close-knit neighborhood unravel, then survive, gives Mr. Flores’s work an authority that no outsider can bring.

“He takes full advantage of what you get growing up with the smell of the place in your nostrils,” Mr. Delano said.

The memory of that era is still fresh for Mr. Flores. When Mr. Flores was a teenager, and the neighborhood was in steep decline, he had long discussions with his friends about what they would do with their lives.

“And the question for many of us was choice,” he said. â€What kind of life do you want to live Do we want to spend our entire lives living in that type of environment What would make us better people Changing our personalities or leaving the block Or was it both”

They would struggle over these issues, but Mr. Flores said that each one had a personal choice: many of his friends went to college, some became b-boys and rappers. And some were consumed by the streets.

Photography provided the path for Mr. Flores.

“I breathed it, I ate it, I slept with it,” he said. “It allowed me to look at what was taking place around me and figure out what was going on and what I wanted to do.”

Follow @followbdc, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook, as is Seis del Sur.

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, West Bank, Gaza and Pakistan.

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In the Shadows of Wolves and Man

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“They say you don’t start living until you step out of your comfort zone,” the photographer Christian Houge said. “Art arises when you let go. It can be in the process, in the darkroom. But it can also be in the concept. Te end product is about not having control.”

As if he needs a reminder: he photographs wolves.

His images - deep-toned close-ups sometimes printed on cowhide - have a visceral impact, showing piercing eyes, bristly fur, hunched shoulders and bared teeth. But the series “Shadow Within” is as much about humans as it is about wolves. Mr. Houge, who is based in Oslo, wants us to reconsider the impulses, fears and instincts we keep in check as man allows his own nature to be boxed in by nurture. It is a theme that runs through his other projects, from a nude portrait series to another on a distant, frozen island that houses the Global Seed Vault.

“I like exploring what culture does to us,” he said. “I see nature and culture being juxtaposed both within and without us. We are born as something much larger than ourselves. Then you have culture coming! in with boxes, with identities, teachers, religion. Before all that, we are nature and we still have all this nature inside us. Well, some more than others.”

That’s where the wolf comes in. Growing up in Norway, Mr. Houge was well aware of the Norse legends and Viking lore in which wolves played a central role, as they did in other cultures. Then there are the fables and fairy tales - ostensibly for children â€" in which the Big Bad Wolf was always the dark, malevolent force. And as much as the wolf may be wise, it was also feared.

Perhaps too much.

In modern Scandinavia, he said, there has been a debate on how to deal with recent incidents in which wolves had been spotted on the outskirts of Oslo or how packs have killed sheep that ranged free on farmland.

All that played into his decision to turn his lens on the lupine. During the course of his research, Mr. Houge met a woman who studied wolves, and she invited him to a nature preserve. But before he could embark on his projec, he had to take a safety course.

“Things can happen if you don’t understand their language,” he said. “Things can go very wrong.”

DESCRIPTIONChristian Houge

He had to learn to let go.

“You have to face your fear,” he said. “They are in your face, and they have their tongue in your mouth, if they choose to come and greet you. This is how they get food from their parents when they are young. It is a sense of security, but it is their way of showing they’re in charge.”

In his various shoots, Mr. Houge has found the animals to have distinct personalities: from bullying and aggressive to loving and curious. They have tested him, too, pushed him down to the ground or huddled up close.

“The preconception of being a human in nature really shifts after an expe! rience li! ke that,” he said.

And that’s his goal: to get viewers to recognize in themselves what the wolves show openly, whether how they set boundaries or use nature.

“Humans can learn a lot from wolves,” Mr. Houge said. “The debate in Norway about if we should get rid of this animal is astounding. It says something larger about how brutal we are with nature. It’s mostly about how to make money.”

The idea of the lone wolf â€" the iconoclast who follows his own rules â€" may be admired in some cultures, but it’s a hard job in nature. Mr. Houge has seen how wolves that did not learn their place in the pack’s hierarchy trail behind the pack for months seeking to be let back in.

DESCRIPTIONChristian Houge

“I feel one of man’s deepest wishes is to be part of something larger,” he said. “Hierarchies are strong in humans, even if we don’t talk about it. In humans we have social, cultural, fashion hierarchies. I hope some of this series inspires people to feel some of this, how they are part of whatever pack.”

Even one of the more often-cited traits admired in some circles loses its luster after a conversation with Mr. Houge. Corporate titans â€" or photographers â€" want to see themselves as the alpha male, a concept Mr. Houge dismisses.

“The wolf pack that has longevity is a family,” he said. “It is a pair, not one male, but a male and a female. If they are secure enough in themselves, they let the weak individual lead the pack. If one has a fantastic nose, even if it is weaker, they’ll let it run first to lead the pack to the kill. These weaker individuals feel part of something larger â€" it’s ‘We need you for the pack to be strong! er.’ Th! at’s a perfect example of how business should be led. Including people, not excluding. Without me, this would not be as strong.”

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt.

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Chim: A Vivid Retrospective of Europe

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History’s fickle nature has given Chim and George Rodger a back seat to their more celebrated colleagues and co-founders of Magnum Photos, Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Capa, charismatic and brave, defined modern war photography. He was the lover of Ingrid Bergman and the confidant of Hemingway and Picasso. He nursed a lifelong ache for Gerda Taro, his fianceé killed during the Spanish Civil War. Cartier-Bresson first defined the limits of 35-millimeter film, then created a body of work in it that could perhaps be equaled, but never surpassed.

Chim â€" born Dawid Syzmin and later known as David Seymour â€" was a quiet ph! otographer, the type who never seems to get his artistic due, but who remains an indispensable part of history. He documented moments that slipped somewhere between the iconic and the commonplace, made vivid by their unexpected familiarity.

A testament to his range â€" both geographic and artistic â€" will be on display in “We Went Back,” a retrospective exhibit that opens Friday at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. Featuring more than 120 vintage prints, contact sheets and ephemera, the show aims to place him in his rightful context.

“Chim was an astute observer of 20th century European political affairs, workers’ rights, and culture,” reads a description of the show, “from the beginnings of the antifascist struggle to the rebuilding of countries ravaged by World War II.”

DESCRIPTIONDavid Seymour/Magnum Photos Prostitute standing near the partly destroyed Krupp factory. Essen, Germany, 1947.

In one image, a prostitute poses defiantly in the ruins of a German factory after World War II (above). In another, a haunted-looking man displays an image of himself as a young, confident Nazi officer (below). As old alliances crumbled, Chim photographed a beach on the border between East and West Germany guarded by a stern soldier and a German shepherd.

These pictures are not conventionally dramatic, but they reveal one of our defining but rarely spoken qualities: we easily adapt to war. Indeed, we are almost comfortable with it. Until a certain point â€" but of course by then it’s too late.

Chim is perhaps best known for his photographs of children. Many photojournalists tend to see children as victims or props in photographs. Ch! im treate! d them with reverence and respect â€" even a rare love and empathy â€" but the children are often in ominous surroundings. In his pictures, the world created for them by adults is often a violent one.

Some may see sentimentality, but I see a longing for an innocence that won’t be restored, or perhaps an acknowledgment that those exposed to violence will often sustain it.

Although his pictures often mix hope with despair, an image of a deranged young girl at a blackboard drawing her idea of “home” will endure as one of the most damning pictures of war (Slide 10).

DESCRIPTIONDavid Seymour/Magnum Photos A former Nazi general, Otto-Ernst Remer, who played a vital role in stopping the July 20, 1944, plot against Adolf Hitler, holding a portrait of himself as a young officer. German, 1949.

In his pictures of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the founding of Israel, Chim sometimes seemed to put activism ahead of journalism. Still, he was no propagandist. One of his last pictures was taken in Egypt during the 1956 war with Israel, showing a mother carrying her baby rushing through a destroyed neighborhood. There are fear, anger and strength in her face. The image could have been made in any era, in any country at war.

Chim’s pictures are often appreciative of humanity’s resilience. No doubt that is also part of the sadness of these images as well.

And 56 years since Chim died, his photographs show the kind of man he was. For that, we all gain something.

Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum associate, has been photographing the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2006. Last year he won the W. Eugene S! mith Gran! t for Humanistic Photography, which he will use to document the effects of the conflicts on Afghans and Iraqis. On March 8 he will lead a walk-through of the exhibit, which is on view through May 5.

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Pictures of the Day: Pakistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Pakistan, Syria, Indonesia and Mali.

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Russia, in Three Cities and \'7 Rooms\'

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Contradictions lie at the heart of Rafal Milach’s “7 Rooms,” a project that took Mr. Milach, a Warsaw-based photographer, to Russia in search of insights through the ordinary. Though he wanted to avoid clichés â€" vodka drinking, prions, cadet schools, ballets â€" some pictures reflect their Soviet legacy. And although he traveled widely through three cities - Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk - his project didn’t make sense to him until he narrowed his focus to seven individuals.

Those people became his friends. Although many of the portraits are warm and close, some evoke a feeling of distance. A few simultaneously suggest intimacy and a chasm of understanding. In the end, Mr. Milach said he felt he had to lose his way - and his expectations - to find direction.

“When I think of it right now,” said Mr. Milach, who this week was named a grantee of the Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund, “I was a totally different person â€" a totally different photographer â€" from when I started.”

Though Mr. Milach is Polish, he has Russian roots. He emphasized a fascination and familiarity with Russia, yet he noted how as time went on he truly understood little of it. It took several months’ worth of trips ! over the course of several years, beginning in 2004, to comprehend fully how little it made sense to him - and to his subjects, too.

DESCRIPTIONRafal Milach/Institute Krasnoyarsk.

He grew close to his subjects as the project progressed. Like him, they are in their 30s, part of a generation that can recall the collapse of the Soviet Union but did not come of age until afterward, as Russia sought a new way in the chaotic, bare-knuckled transformation into a market-based economy.

The sum of these contradictions presents a complete picture, an exploration of belonging and identity. And part of that exploration involves making sense of the Communist past and the incongruities of the repressive, quasi-capitalist Putin regime.

“You would be surprised,” writes Liza Faktor in her introduction to Mr. Milach’s book, “that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government.”

One of his subjects, Sasha, recalls, “The teacher who used to brainwash us with Soviet propaganda came to the lesson one day and said sadly, ‘Children, it turns out Lenin was a bad person â€" he killed hares while out hunting.’ ”

For the most part, though, the images do not immediately summon perceptions of crisis, either present or past. Perestroika and Communism are little more than abstractions to his subjects, but their portraits tell other stories, and Mr. Milach invites us to fill in that gap.

DESCRIPTIONRafal Milach/Institute Pervouralsk.

He considers himself a storyteller, and it’s no wonder that he includes selections of prose to precede his pictures, including stories by Svetlana Alexievich, a Ukranian-born Belarusian writer and journalist. Adding quotations from his subjects, the effect was “more like literature than visual stuff at the end of the project,” Mr. Milach said.

Nevertheless, “7 Rooms,” published by Kehrer Verlag, won Best Photography Book in last year’s Pictures of the Year International contest. A new edition of the book, which has its share of pictures of unfathomable cold, is expected this spring. It is a bit contradictory, like a Polish guy making trips to some other country to retrieve a sense of belonging, with strangers he now knows well and recalls fondly.

“It was so beautiful and boring,” Mr. Milach said. “I spent an amazing borin time with them.”

DESCRIPTIONRafal Milach/Institute Yekaterinburg.

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Was a Reporter\'s Role in a Government Prosecution a Reason to Recuse Him

It’s a generally accepted rule in journalism that if you’re involved in a newsworthy situation, you shouldn’t cover it. Most of the time that makes excellent sense.

The Times made an exception to that rule on Sunday with Scott Shane’s riveting piece on John C. Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. operative who is facing prison for giving information to a freelance reporter.

Mr. Shane, a national security reporter in the Washington bureau, became a tangential part of the situation when Mr. Kiriakou was also charged with revealing to “Journalist B” the name of a person who had participated in the operation to catch the Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah, which the government said was classified.

Some readers found fault with Mr. Shane’s writing of the story, given his involvement. One was James Savage, a former longtime investigations editor with The Miami Herald.

“There’s an easy way to avoid this glaring conflict of interest,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Assign another reporter to write the story. That reporter could interview Mr. Shane and include his comments, properly attributed, in a balanced story.”

That point certainly occurred to me on Saturday when I first read the story online, and again later when I saw it prominently displayed on the Sunday front page. I was also interested, as I read deeper into the article, to see Mr. Shane writing in the first person - that’s rare for a news story in The Times.

But my overall reaction was sheer fascination with the tale he told â€" an invaluable glimpse inside a secret world, one that provided rare insights into the reporter-source relationship. It also illuminates a troubling subject that does not get enough attention: the Obama administration’s prosecution of government employees who leak information to the press - an effort with major implications for press freedom and the ability to inform the public.

I talked with Mr. Shane and with two editors who were involved in the decision-making. They told me that, after quite a bit of discussion, they decided that the pros far outweighed the cons.

“Having Scott tell the story wasn’t a downside; it enriched the story, by allowing us to give readers insight on how Kiriakou operated,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief.

Mr. Leonhardt added, “So long as the story made the disclosures that it did, I don’t see the argument that the reader would have been better served by someone else writing the piece and Scott being quoted in it.”

The piece originally was intended to appear in The Times Magazine on Sunday, but was moved to the news pages to get it published sooner. “We felt competitive pressure,” said Dean Baquet, a managing editor. Editors thought another news organization might be writing a similar story.

The article’s point of view, and Mr. Shane’s writing in the first person, might have seemed more at home in the magazine. But the value remained, despite its change of places. More than 500 readers commented on the story, and it generated plenty of attention on Twitter and elsewhere.

Mr. Shane, who proposed the piece to his editors months ago, saw an opportunity to tell a story from a different angle.

“It was a chance to be more direct about the dilemma involved when we report publicly on the secret activities of government,” he told me. “That involves rather risky relations between reporter and source - more risky now than it’s been in the past.”

I’ve been writing recently about the debate over reportorial impartiality and its role in the truth-telling that makes journalism worthwhile. One crucial element when impartiality comes into question is transparency.

This story is an example of just that. The reporter’s involvement is disclosed, and readers can draw their own conclusions.

“It’s always awkward when you’re a part of it,” Mr. Shane said, “but I thought it was justified.”

I agree. In this case, no one could have told this important tale as well. Those who have read it know more about how government and reporting work than they did before.

It’s the kind of story that makes you think; it may make you question the status quo. That’s a pretty good definition of what effective journalism does.



In the Spirit of Ada Louise Huxtable, a Times Critic Reinvents His Role

Michael Kimmelman’s piece on Ada Louise Huxtable, who died this week at age 91, in Tuesday’s Arts section is tagged “An Appraisal,” but it could easily have been called something more enthusiastic: an appreciation. For by his own eager admission, Mr. Kimmelman - who took over as architecture critic in September 2011 â€" owes much to Ms. Huxtable, whom he calls a role model.

If Ms. Huxtable invented the role of newspaper architecture critic in the 1960s and 1970s, then Mr. Kimmelman has spent the last year or so inventing it anew - with more than a nod to the woman whose work he grew up reading and admiring.

“She’s been a role model and an inspiration,” Mr. Kimmelman told me Tuesday. “I exist in her shadow as somebody who aspires to see both the art and the social and political role of the built environment, and to treat this job as a bully pulpit for making better places to live.”

Unlike many of the other culture critics at The Times, the architecture critic has considerable freedom to choose his own assignments and areas of interest - not bound, as others are, by the equivalent of the blockbuster movie, the big Broadway premiere, or the major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The role is “an outlier among the critics,” he said.

In his first 16 months on the job, Mr. Kimmelman, by design, has taken on architecture (broadly defined) in all of New York City’s five boroughs, as well as farther afield - going to Medellín, Colombia, to write about urban planning, to Louisville, Ky., to write about highways, and to Oakland, Calif., to write about housing projects.

Rather than lavishing attention on the world of “starchitects” and what he calls “buildings as baubles,” he has defined his role more broadly: writing, for example, about the importance of place to the Occupy Wall Street movement, and about the implications of Hurricane Sandy.

“Why is it intrinsically more interesting to write about a museum wing instead of a library or a hospital” he asked.

He has also shown himself more than willing to take a big swing at a fat pitch, as he did in his Christmas Eve takedown of the new Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. (The piece qualifies as one of those “all guns blazing” reviews I wrote about in a recent Sunday column.) It begins:

Offhand I can’t recall seeing a more ridiculous looking building than the new Stedelijk Museum, which recently opened here. Shaped like a bathtub, of all things, it arrives years behind schedule at the tail end of the money-fueled, headline-hungry, erratically ingenious era of indulgent museum design that began to peter out with the global economy.

Later: “Entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.”

Like Ms. Huxtable, Mr. Kimmelman is attuned to “the democracy of this art form.” In that context, he told me that he admired her “ability to speak truth to power” and to express - and stand by - an unpopular point of view as she did when she wrote approvingly of Boston’s new and widely deplored city hall in 1969.

“Maybe that came partly from being a woman, having a distance from the traditional seats of power,” he said, calling her “incorruptible.”

In his appraisal, Mr. Kimmelman wrote that Ms. Huxtable “had that rare journalistic opportunity to pioneer something of her own, to fill a yawning gap in the public discourse, to carve a path with moral dimensions…”

It’s heartening to see him honor his role model by bringing that same mission into The Times again, reinvented for the 21st century.



Creative Use of White Space in Sports ... Discuss

Readers who picked up Thursday’s print edition and turned to the Sports section could be forgiven if they did a double-take or choked on their morning coffee. For what they saw on the front page of the section was … well, nothing. Or actually, almost nothing: The page was more than three-quarters blank, topped with a headline, in most editions, that read “And the Inductees Are …”

The design decision memorably recognized what many knew was coming, that the Baseball Hall of Fame voters, in the wake of the steroids scandal, would induct no living players into Cooperstown this year.

Reaction came quickly from the media world, and it was largely positive. The sports blogger Ed Sherman wrote that it shows how design can be a “profoundly powerful tool.” Dana O’Neil of ESPN called it “exceptional.”

Some Times readers begged to differ. Steve Singer of Austin, Tex., wrote to me to register his objections:

I’m a longtime subscriber to the national edition … the subscription isn’t cheap but it’s fair. I enjoy it and want to support the paper. I usually ease into the day by reading the Sports page first. Sports Thursday on Page B11 was 90 percent white space. I get it, there were no Hall of Fame nominees this year. But the news hole is small enough. I’m paying for news, not white space. a cutesy design idea gone wrong. and it’s happened before. Please be more judicious when doling out precious news space. Isn’t there an editor who thinks about stuff like this

In fact, there is such an editor. I chatted on Thursday morning with Joe Sexton, the sports editor, who approved the design idea this week. It came from Wayne Kamidoi, the lead sports page designer, and Jay Schreiber, an assistant sports editor in charge of baseball coverage.

“Tyler Kepner had written as early as the weekend that this was likely, so that’s when people’s brains started firing - or misfiring,” Mr. Sexton said.

Mr. Sexton said he liked the idea - the creation of “a striking, profound emptiness” â€" from the start, noting that “white space is the most undervalued thing” in news presentation. The concept was not entirely dissimilar to his section’s treatment in December 2011 of the hockey player Derek Boogaard’s brain in the presentation of the series, “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer,” in which, for example, a small, striking image of Mr. Boogaard’s brain was the only content above the fold in a sea of white space.

“The job of a newspaper is to capture a moment - small, large, historic, otherwise - and you can do that creatively and surprisingly,” Mr. Sexton said. “I don’t view it as wasted space but as an effective use of the printed newspaper for conveying the significance of the day’s events.” (Mr. Sexton fielded some good-natured tough hops from friends, he told me, like this one from Martin Gottlieb, a former Timesman who is the editor of The Record in New Jersey: “Your most finely edited piece.”)

The best commentary I saw came from Josh Crutchmer, who blogs about sports design at the Society of News Design. He offered a critique, in the form of pros and cons, including the observation it “looks like a mistake.”

The page was certainly a conversation starter. And that conversation - not only about baseball, but also about design and the power of the printed page â€" is worth having.



Keeping Environmental Reporting Strong Won\'t Be Easy

Those who care deeply about environmental issues were understandably concerned Friday after learning that The Times was dismantling its special team - or “pod” - of seven reporters and two editors.

Beth Parke, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists, told InsideClimate News that The Times’s decision was “worrying.”

“Dedicated teams bring strength and consistency to the task of covering environment-related issues,” she said. “It’s always a huge loss to see them dismantled … it’s not necessarily a weakening to change organizational structure, but it does seem to be a bad sign. I will be watching closely what happens next.”

On Twitter, Dan Froomkin, a journalist, wrote: “NYT dismantles its nine-person environmnt desk â€" but says that won’t affect climate coverage. How is that possible”

And Ben Grossman-Cohen, writing for OxfamAmerica.org, joined the chorus, calling the decision “an unmitigated disaster.”

Top editors at The Times say that this is a structural change only, and that the paper’s commitment to the topic will remain intact.

In a memo to newsroom staff, the executive editor Jill Abramson mentioned the change in the context of overall newsroom restructuring, amid efforts to reduce newsroom numbers and cut expenses:

We are changing some of traditional architecture of the newsroom, including in the leadership and editing ranks. For instance, we have decided not to continue having separate editing and reporting groups on the environment and how we live. We will continue to cover these areas of national and international life just! as aggressively and Dean and I are having talks with all the journalists in those groups about how to do this without the existing “pod” structure.

Even if there was no fiscal pressure to do so, we would be making some structural changes in the newsroom to balance our precious journalistic resources. In order to expand digitally and internationally in the exciting ways we have planned, it is natural to reshape our contours.

And the managing editor Dean Baquet offered more reassuring words:

“We can tell the story just as well without the infrastructure,” he told me.

As for sheer numbers, he added: “If we have fewer reporters, we won’t have far fewer. We’re still going to have tons of people on this.”

He said no decision has been made on the Green blog: “If it has impact and audience it will survive,” he said.

Andrew C. Revkin, a former Times reporter who now writes the Dot.Earth blog for The Ties’s Opinion pages, told me that the decision does not worry him: “What works best is a group of like-minded people getting excited about something,” and then working with a strong editor to bring the ideas to fruition. He sees this change as one “about efficiency,” not quality of content. His blog post on Friday provided details.

Sandy Keenan, the environment editor, told me she wishes the decision had not been made.

“Of course, I’m disappointed,” she said. “I’ll try to hold everyone to their promise that the coverage won’t suffer.” She is uncertain of her next move, she said.

Elisabeth Rosenthal, a medical doctor and a 19-year Times veteran reporter, who has done outstanding work as part of the environment pod, told me that she sees pros and cons to the pod structure.

“The pro is that you give specific attention to a subject that needs it,” she said. “T! he con is! that it takes the subject out of the mainstream of news flow.” The subject areas “don’t have their own real estate in the newspaper, and that can mean that it’s harder to get attention” for their stories.

“There’s not a lot of news in this area - we’re watching glaciers melting - so there isn’t an urgency to get things into the paper right away,” Ms. Rosenthal said. Integration into the main desks can be a help with that.

Here’s my take:

Symbolically, this is bad news. And symbolism matters - it shows a commitment and an intensity of interest in a crucially important topic.

In real life, it doesn’t have to be bad news. A pod’s structure, outside the major desks - Foreign, Business, National and Metro - by its nature means that the coverage is not integrated into the regular coverage of those desks, which have their own space in the paper and their own internal clout.

If coverage of the environment is not to suffer, a lot of people - including The Time’s highest ranking editors â€" are going to have to make sure that it doesn’t.

They say they will. But maintaining that focus will be a particular challenge in a newsroom that’s undergoing intensive change as it becomes ever more digital while simultaneously cutting costs.



Make No Mistake, but if You Do, Here\'s How to Correct It

Newspaper people try to get everything right, but given that they are human beings writing and editing huge amounts of copy on unforgiving deadlines, often they don’t.

Thus, they write and publish corrections. And that’s a good thing. Printed corrections to material that has been published in the print edition of The Times appear most commonly on Page A2. Online corrections appear on the articles themselves.

The Times takes this seriously enough that it has a senior editor and a news assistant who deal exclusively with corrections. And, as with many things at The Times, there are rather formalized rules about them.

So, when The Washington Post (which has a new editor, Martin Baron) this week unveiled some revisions to its online corrections policy, I thought it might interest readers to see how they compare with those at The Times.

Here are The Post’s new rules, with some reponses from Greg Brock, senior editor for standards at The Times. The memo appeared Wednesday on Jim Romenesko’s blog, JimRomenesko.com, and The Post’s new rules were summarized as follows:

“We should never ‘unpublish’ stories from the Web.”

“Placement for corrections reflects gravity of error. A serious error must be noted at the top of the story, blog or graphic.”

“Clarifications should be rare and must be approved by the editor-in-chief, or managing editors.”

And here are Mr. Brock’s responses to each:

1. On “unpublishing,” meaning removing a story entirely from the Web:

Yes. We have a strict policy on unpublishing: We don’t. If a special case arises, then Phil Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards (and my boss), would make the final decision to remove the information. It’s not something we do lightly. An example: Say we po! sted a picture with an article and discovered that not only was the person in the picture not in the article, but the picture itself had nothing to do with the point of the article. We would remove such a picture - and have done so. When we do, we add a note explaining why we removed the picture. An example: If we posted a picture of Margaret Sullivan, noting that she is on the Top 10 Most Wanted List, and she isn’t, we would remove that and explain that the picture has vanished and why. (That she is really No. 15.)

If an issue of libel were to arise, the odds are that we would remove the information - but publish a note explaining why it was removed. We have had postings before that were just flat-out wrong. A “source” told us something and it turned out not to be right. We do not take that down. We put a paragraph labeled UPDATE at the top of the post, saying that the report below is erroneous. Even though the post is wrong, we still do not believe that we should unpublish it and pretend it neer existed. If we removed the article, then the UPDATE would make no sense because the reader wouldn’t have the benefit of reading the original (however wrong).

2. On the placement of corrections:

If we run an Editors’ Note â€" which may indicate a violation of ethical standards or other serious lapse â€" we put that note at the top: Editors’ Note Appended.

If it is a correction of fact, we do not put Correction Appended at the top anymore. We used to do that, but that was because in those days we did not correct the error in the article. So the Corrections Appended label at the top warned readers that they were about to read an article that had an error in it. And then they learned at the bottom of the article what that error was. Yes, yes: a very bad system for the Web. So we changed it. Now we correct the error in the article, so we feel that there is no reason to warn readers. But we must, without exception, acknowledge and explain at the bottom that “an! earlier ! version of this article” … screwed up whatever. (Let us count the ways.)

Even that rule is not set in stone. If we had an egregious error of fact in an article, we might choose to put the label Correction Appended at the top just to make sure readers went to the end and read the correction: “Greg Brock retired from The Times; he was not fired.” Any person so maligned would want The Times to point every reader to that correction - in huge type.

3. On “clarifications”:

We don’t run “clarifications” or use such a label. We label them Corrections and then offer specific info: The article was wrong; it referred incompletely to something (but it was not wrong); it referred imprecisely to something (but it was not wrong). And on rare occasions, we use: “may have left the incorrect impression…”

On a related note: The Times is also working on an online corrections form and expects to have a rudimentary version of it available soon. A more sophisticatedand complete effort is in the works, too. I hope that these forms will be available to readers as soon as possible. The Times does a good job of correcting errors, but streamlining the process would be helpful internally and a service to Times readers.

And from Craig Silverman at Poynter.org, here’s some commentary on the Post’s corrections policies.



Reporting in The Times on Football Star\'s Nonexistent Girlfriend Was Glancing, but Still Troubling

The truly strange - and still unfolding - tale of the Notre Dame football star and his nonexistent dead girlfriend has lessons for journalists, including those at The Times.

Joe Sexton, the sports editor and a former Metro editor, put it bluntly: “Trust but verify.”

It’s one of the cardinal rules of reporting, and something that can’t be emphasized enough.

The Times was not among the most prominent offenders in taking at face value what turned out to be a hoax, as revealed by the Web site Deadspin.com on Wednesday.

But Times reporters still wrote about the Fighting Irish linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend at least five times in recent months.

A Nov. 25 article said that Te’o was “dealt a full deck of adversity when his grandmother and his girlfriend died within hours of each other.”

Another, on Oct. 14, noted, “His girlfriend, who lost a long fight with leukemia, was a Stanford alumnus.” That last word, by the way, is just wrong: She would have been an alumna, according to my high school Latin. Far more important, her status as a Stanford alumna would have been easy enough to check - and the fact that she wasn’t one might have created enough suspicion to start asking bigger questions. But that never happened.

Mr. Sexton responded to my questions about The Times’s role as follows:

The death of his grandmother and ostensible girlfriend were never the focus of! any article we did. They were mentioned, glancingly, as part of the accepted, to date unchallenged public narrative of a prominent athlete. I could never imagine in editing such a story, with the references existing as they did, asking the reporters: Do you know for a fact his grandmother is dead Do you know for a fact his girlfriend is dead Do you know for a fact his grandmother existed Do you know for a fact his girlfriend ever existed And any editor who tells you they would have or should have asked those questions is kidding you.

I’d like to think that, had we been doing a more substantial and focused story on the player and his dead grandmother and girlfriend, we â€" reporters and editors â€" would have pushed to fill out the picture of those relationships: to reach the player’s parents, say, to hear more about the dead grandmother; to reach the family of the dead girlfriend, to understand who she was and what the player had meant to her. Can I guarantee we would have done that No. That’d e both smug and suspect. But I like to think we would have. The first month I was Metro editor we got taken in by an alleged Katrina victim. She had been the focus of our piece, and we had not verified her particulars. We took our medicine and pledged to recommit to our operating ethos: trust, but verify. Indeed, everyone on the Metro desk was required to attend a round of presentations by our researchers and data reporters called just that: Trust but verify.

Might be a good idea to have another round of those presentations, for Sports and every other department.

Meanwhile, the Te’o story - with its bizarre twists and large cast of characters, and hard-to-determine motivations - continues to unspool. Times reporters are among many chasing it down.

I asked Mr. Sexton what lessons, at this early date, can be learned

“I’m not sure the full assortment or exact nature of them have yet become clear,” he said. “First, we have to figure out the truth. It’s ce! rtainly a! story that makes that effort a formidable one.”

He’s right. In the meantime, and very soon, a refresher course in verification for every newsroom department would be a very good idea.



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