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Pictures of the Day: Bahrain and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bahrain, Syria, North Korea and Honduras.

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Conflicting Assertions Over an Electric Car Test Drive

Let me get this out of the way up front: This blog post will not be the definitive word on the contentious subject of a Times article in Sunday’s Automobiles section. It’s just an early effort to put some claims and counterclaims out there, while I continue to look into it.

I will keep reporting on this, and, for now, am simply telling readers what I know so far.

John M. Broder set out to test drive the Tesla S Model electric car with a trip up the East Coast, starting in suburban Washington. His trip ended unsuccessfully, he wrote - so unsuccessfully that the car made the last part of its journey on a flatbed truck.

He wrote: “The Model S has won multiple car-of-the-year awards and is, many reviews would have you believe, the coolest car on the planet. What fun, no Well, no.”

Elon Musk, the chief executive of the Tesla car company, strongly disagrees about what happened. In a blog post Wednesday night, he used the driving logs to state that Mr. Broder misrepresented what happened on the test drive.

“Our Model S never had a chance with John Broder,” he wrote

Mr. Musk said that, along the way, Mr. Broder unplugged the car before it was fully charged, drove faster than he claimed and drove around in circles to deliberately run down the battery.

And, he added, “He simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.” Mr. Musk released screen shots of the car driving logs to reinforce his points.

Mr. Broder’s article was certainly negative for Tesla. And Mr. Musk’s contentions are devastating ones for any jour! nalist.

I will be interviewing Mr. Broder later on Thursday. When I reached him earlier, he said that he and his editors were working on a point-by-point response to Mr. Musk’s blog that would appear on The Times’s Wheels blog. An earlier post on that blog made an initial response on the matter, but that predated Mr. Musk’s release of the logs. I’ll link to the new post when it’s available.

Mr. Musk has not returned my call, made at about noon on Thursday. I eventually intend to ask him to fully release and “open source” the driving logs, along with whatever other data might be necessary for better understanding and interpretation.

Here is a discussion on Reddit.

And here is an article from Wired, and another from Forbes.

There will be more to come.



Knowing That Fly on the Wall

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Brad Vest is a freelance photojournalist based in Concord, N.H. He has spent the last several years working on “Adrift,” a project for his master’s thsis at Ohio University. The series documents the life of Travis, a father who is trying to put his life back together after being incarcerated. Mr. Vest, 27, was a photo intern at The New York Times last summer and at National Geographic last fall.

His Turning Point conversation with Peter Moskowitz has been edited.

Q.

What’s happening in this photo

A.

This was the day Travis had just gotten out of jail. The whole series is about his past and how it has come back to make his future pretty difficult. The day was winding down and he was going in to eat dinner so he invited me in. We sat down to eat dinner and I figured since he’d been in jail for a while I wanted to do a nice family portrait of him and his two daughters together, because I like giving back prints to people I photogra! ph.

Q.

How did this image change the way you shoot

A.

From that first photo, I had no clue that our relationship would come to be caring so much about each other. He knows just as much about me as I know about him. I never really thought about how you go about having relationships with the subjects you photograph. There’s that saying in photojournalism, “being a fly on the wall.” That’s not really at all how I approached Travis and his family. I got to know him really well. Eventually it became that fly on the wall thing, just through knowing them so well it was almost expected that I would be there. He trusted me, I trusted him, and then it became a very natural thing to be there, photographing.

Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photo runaway from Florida who stole her father’s credit card. Hollywood. 1991.

Inspiration: “Raised By Wolves”
Photographer: Jim Goldberg
Represented by: Magnum Photos

Q.

Why did you choose this photo

A.

It’s one of my favorite photographs from the book, but the inspiration that I got from him is really from the book as a whole experience. He spent about 10 years with the people in the photographs. There’s also Polaroids, and writings to him and from the subjects as well as writing about people’s daily lives. He’s got interviews, and ephemera that’s been scanned or photographed. It gets at so many different aspects that are hard to get at with just photography. I was doing tha! t initial! ly when I met Travis, but I didn’t realize it â€" I was collecting a few writings and drawings. I’d always ask: “Hey are you going to throw this out Can I take it”

You don’t have to actually take something away and scan it to collect it. It made me appreciate being in someone’s home and seeing how they live. The things they collect, the things on their coffee table, the things they hang on their walls, what they keep in small boxes and drawers that they never really look at but they can’t get rid of â€" people do that and it sort of reflects who they are. I think that makes me appreciate the people and their environments much more.

Follow @brad_vest, @PeterMoskowitz and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Knowing That Fly on the Wall

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Brad Vest is a freelance photojournalist based in Concord, N.H. He has spent the last several years working on “Adrift,” a project for his master’s thsis at Ohio University. The series documents the life of Travis, a father who is trying to put his life back together after being incarcerated. Mr. Vest, 27, was a photo intern at The New York Times last summer and at National Geographic last fall.

His Turning Point conversation with Peter Moskowitz has been edited.

Q.

What’s happening in this photo

A.

This was the day Travis had just gotten out of jail. The whole series is about his past and how it has come back to make his future pretty difficult. The day was winding down and he was going in to eat dinner so he invited me in. We sat down to eat dinner and I figured since he’d been in jail for a while I wanted to do a nice family portrait of him and his two daughters together, because I like giving back prints to people I photogra! ph.

Q.

How did this image change the way you shoot

A.

From that first photo, I had no clue that our relationship would come to be caring so much about each other. He knows just as much about me as I know about him. I never really thought about how you go about having relationships with the subjects you photograph. There’s that saying in photojournalism, “being a fly on the wall.” That’s not really at all how I approached Travis and his family. I got to know him really well. Eventually it became that fly on the wall thing, just through knowing them so well it was almost expected that I would be there. He trusted me, I trusted him, and then it became a very natural thing to be there, photographing.

Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photo runaway from Florida who stole her father’s credit card. Hollywood. 1991.

Inspiration: “Raised By Wolves”
Photographer: Jim Goldberg
Represented by: Magnum Photos

Q.

Why did you choose this photo

A.

It’s one of my favorite photographs from the book, but the inspiration that I got from him is really from the book as a whole experience. He spent about 10 years with the people in the photographs. There’s also Polaroids, and writings to him and from the subjects as well as writing about people’s daily lives. He’s got interviews, and ephemera that’s been scanned or photographed. It gets at so many different aspects that are hard to get at with just photography. I was doing tha! t initial! ly when I met Travis, but I didn’t realize it â€" I was collecting a few writings and drawings. I’d always ask: “Hey are you going to throw this out Can I take it”

You don’t have to actually take something away and scan it to collect it. It made me appreciate being in someone’s home and seeing how they live. The things they collect, the things on their coffee table, the things they hang on their walls, what they keep in small boxes and drawers that they never really look at but they can’t get rid of â€" people do that and it sort of reflects who they are. I think that makes me appreciate the people and their environments much more.

Follow @brad_vest, @PeterMoskowitz and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



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