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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, West Bank, Kenya and Italy.

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For Times Environmental Reporting, Intentions May Be Good but the Signs Are Not

Judging by appearances, things are not looking good for environmental reporting at The Times.

In January, The Times dismantled its environmental reporting “pod” - a group of reporters and editors solely devoted to that subject who worked with one another to develop stories and projects.

Then, on Friday, The Times’s “Green” blog ended after more than four years (initially as Green Inc.).

Many readers are unhappy and disillusioned about the changes, believing that they speak to declining interest on the part of top editors in this important subject. And in the case of the blog, they miss having a single online destination for environmental developments that may not be big enough to make it into the paper and for other voices from freelance contributors.

John Tuxill of Bellingham, Wash., exressed the disappointment of many in an e-mail to me, writing that the blog had been a major source of news for him in recent years:

Environmental issues are not becoming any less important or prevalent in our lives. On the contrary, I believe that climate change, water resources depletion, food production trends and other environmental challenges are the defining issues of our times. So why on earth is The Times closing the blog

I teach environmental studies classes to college students in Washington State. I make a point of telling my students that The Times is one of their best sources for environmental news and staying up-to-date on the events affecting our nation and our planet. I cannot in good conscience tell my students that anymore. I’m not even sure where to tell them to look now for environmental news in The Times.

You’ll forgive me for being highly skeptical that The Times will find other ways to cover environmental news a! s efficiently. I believe this decision is as shortsighted and nonsensical as they come.

The moves have been criticized in the journalism press, as well. Curtis Brainard, writing in Columbia Journalism Review online, called it “terrible news,” and was harshly critical of Times management:

“They’ve made a horrible decision that ensures the deterioration of The Times’s environmental coverage at a time when debates about climate change, energy, natural resources and sustainability have never been more important to public welfare …”

Andrew Revkin, who writes the Dot.Earth opinion blog on NYTimes.com, mourned the Green blog’s demise in a post, calling it “an excellent aggregator of environmental news and analysis that didn’t fit in the flow of conventional articles.” And he said that he would list on his blog, the Green blog’s former freelance contributors, so that his readers could continue to follow their work.

I talked with a number of writers and editors at The Times, including the blog’s editor, Nancy Kenney, who has been reassigned to the Culture department, and to the managing editor, Dean Baquet, who made the decision in consultation with other top editors.

Mr. Baquet said the move was done, in part, for cost-cutting reasons, as The Times eliminated 30 management positions, but more for coverage reasons.

“I think our environmental coverage has suffered from the segregation â€" it needs to be more integrated into all of the different areas,” like science, politics and foreign news, he said.

He agreed that environmental coverage is of great importance, and said that having The Times’s environmental reporters working on other desks is the best way to “drive more of these important stories onto the home page and the front page.”

“The thinking ! used to b! e that ‘you’ve got to have a blog’ for every subject you care about,” Mr. Baquet said. That thinking has changed, he said, and now readers can find environmental news on the Caucus blog, the Bits blog and in other places.

(Some readers also noted unhappily that the news of the Green blog’s demise was announced at 5 p.m. on Friday, a convenient time for an inconvenient truth. Mr. Baquet agreed that, in retrospect, “we could have handled that better.”)

As for the complaint that readers with a particular interest in the environment can no longer go to a single online destination, “I acknowledge that criticism,” he said. He said, though, that he hopes that a continuing Web site redesign may make it easier for readers to locate the topics that they are particularly interested in.

Ms. Kenney described the blog’s strengths. “When there was an overriding issue or event, the blog was a locus and a magnet, attracting tens of thousands of readers” to a particular post, she aid, “with the Deepwater spill as a great example.”

She added, “I’d be the first to admit that the blog was uneven because of a shortage of resources.” It needed a dedicated editor, she said; as deputy environment editor, she was able to give it only a few hours a day, given her other duties.

Here’s my take: I’m not convinced that The Times’s environmental coverage will be as strong without the team and the blog. Something real has been lost on a topic of huge and growing importance.

Especially given The Times’s declared interest in attracting international readers and younger readers, I hope that Times editors â€" very soon â€" will look for new ways to show readers that environmental news hasn’t been abandoned, but in fact is of utmost importance. So far, in 2013, they are not sending that message.



Gordon Parks’s Harlem Family Revisited

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In March 1968, Gordon Parks published a portrait of an African-American child with disheveled clothes in Life magazine. His lips were swollen and cracked from eating plaster, in a futile attempt to wardoff hunger. His eyes were plaintive and haunting.

Richard Fontenelle was too young to understand, but he and his family became the faces of urban poverty for millions of Americans. The photo essay Mr. Parks produced â€" “A Harlem Family,” which is now on exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem â€" changed Mr. Fontenelle’s life, and the lives of every member of his family, forever. It sparked in him a desire to succeed, and a lifelong friendship with Mr. Parks.

Three days after the show opened, Mr. Fontenelle died of heart attack. He was 48 years old.

Yet his was a life of triumph savored: Of the eight Fontenelle children who appeared in “A Harlem Family,” he was the only one who lived past his 30th birthday and built a stable family life. He gave much of the credit for his success to his mother and to Mr. Parks, who became a father figure to him.

“His whole life kind of centered aro! und that event,” his widow, Michelle, said of his feelings about being in the groundbreaking photo essay. “I guess he took from that ‘What can I do with my life not to be like my brothers and sisters What can I do with my life not to cause my mother this grief What can I do with my life to make her life better’”

Telling the Fontenelles’ story was a personal crusade for Mr. Parks. As he recalled in his memoir “To Smile in Autumn,” the assignment came at the end of the long, hot summer of 1967, a period of urban uprisings in black America. His editors asked him â€" the only African-American photographer on the magazine’s staff â€" to explain to them and to Life’s readers why the nation’s inner cities were going up in flames.

To Mr. Parks, the answers were clear: racism and poverty. To bring these political and economic abstractions to life, he knew that he had to focus on the daily lies of a single, impoverished black family.

Gordon Parks, courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation Bessie couldn’t stop Little Richard from eating plaster. His lips stayed cracked and swollen.

The “cold hawk of winter was over the ghetto,” Mr. Parks remembered, by the time he introduced himself to Norman and Bessie Fontenelle, Richard’s parents, and convinced them to allow him to tell their story. They were a family in deep distress. Norman had been laid off from his job and could not find steady work. He and his wife struggled to feed their eight children and to keep their fourth-floor Harlem apartment warm.

Mr. Parks left his camera at home during the first week that he spent with them. Instead, he got to know the family and allowed t! hem to be! come comfortable with his presence in their cramped apartment. By the time he pulled out his camera, he said in the 2004 documentary film “Family Portrait,” “I was practically in the family … I was like Uncle Gordon.”

During the month that he spent with the Fontenelles, Mr. Parks took hundreds of photographs. The 25 that appeared in “A Harlem Family” were spread over 16 pages, printed in gritty black and white. They seemed to claim the authority of documentary truth, yet their dark tones and shadows hinted at the subjectivity of Mr. Parks’s vision by refusing to reveal everything that he and his camera saw.

Gordon Parks, courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation “Is that to keep out the rats” Mr. Parks asked Norman Jr. “Naw, they eat right throuh this stuff. This is to keep out that cold wind.”

Bessie emerged as the story’s heroine, the gravitational force struggling to hold the family together. Mr. Parks described her sympathetically, writing in the magazine that she “appears to be a strong woman, especially in the early part of the day, when she looks younger than 39. As the day wears on, she seems to age with it. By nightfall she has crumbled into herself. ‘All this needing and wanting is about to drive me crazy,’ she said to me one evening.”

Another photograph early in the essay depicted her as the faltering sun around which the family orbited. She and four of her children were shown at the offices of the Poverty Board (Slide 1), with Bessie centered in the frame, facing the camera. Two of her children leaned on her shoulders, seeming to draw strength from her and, at the same time, to offer her support.

A young Richard dozed off in her lap.

Bessie and Richard also appeared in the essay’s f! inal imag! e (Slide 13). Few readers would have been prepared for it, despite the essay’s relentlessly grim tone. Published without a caption, it covered an entire two-page spread. In it, Bessie was seen lying on her bed, seemingly exhausted. One arm shielded her eyes, while Richard nestled under the other, staring directly into Mr. Parks’s lens. Norman had beaten her while in a drunken rage, leaving her neck scratched and swollen. She had thrown a pot of boiling water on him in retaliation, sending him to the hospital.

Gordon Parks, courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation The living conditions of the Fontenelle family shocked readers of the March 8, 1968 issue of Life. Money was raised for a new home, but tragedy struck not long after they moved in.

Those images joltd Life’s readers, whose response to “A Harlem Family” was immediate and overwhelming. Hundreds of letters poured into the magazine’s offices expressing sympathy and pledging money. Encouraged by the response, Mr. Parks urged Life to contribute enough additional money to buy and furnish a new home in Springfield Gardens, Queens, for the Fontenelles.

“Most important,” Mr. Parks wrote in “A Hungry Heart,” another memoir, “the magazine helped Norman get a job.”

But the Fontenelles’ new beginning came to a sudden end. A little over a year after the story was published, Life ran an editor’s note under the headline, “Tragedy in a House that Friends Built.” Late one night, the house had gone up in flames. Norman and his son Kenneth died in th! e fire; B! essie and the other children survived. The house and everything in it was destroyed. The family had only lived in the home for three months.

Bessie refused to allow Life to rebuild her new home; she wanted to move back to Harlem. The magazine, Mr. Parks wrote in “A Hungry Heart,” “found her a comfortable apartment and gave her money to get started again.”

Devastated by the episode, the family began what seemed to be an inevitable decline as AIDS and the streets claimed the lives of one child after another. Yet Richard escaped his siblings’ fate. His widow, Michelle, said that his success was because of his belief in himself, his mother’s support, and his enduring relationship with Mr. Parks.

“Richard lived beyond Fontenelle years,” Michelle said in her apartment, where she keeps a large self-portrait by Mr. Parks. “He was almost 50. He did so much beyond what he ever expected to do. No one would have expected to see him living now.”

At the time of his death, he ha achieved middle-class success. The father of four children, he was married to his wife for 21 years. He had been employed by Columbia University for 23 years, having worked his way up from porter to maintenance supervisor. He composed music and ran a recording studio in his spare time.

Though he vowed never to be a statistic like his siblings â€" or the young victim seen in the Life photo essay â€" he remained proud to be a Fontenelle. “‘You know, my family was in Time-Life magazine,’” Michelle recalled him telling new friends. “Even through all the adversities and the negative sides to the story, it didn’t matter to him. It was just, ‘This is my family and this is how we lived and this is where we come from. But this is where we’re going and this is what I’m doing with my life now.’”

Bessie was overprotective of Richard, Michelle said. Small wonder, given how his siblings’ lives were destroyed by drugs, poverty and mental illness. He stuck close to her and grew u! p never a! busing drugs or seeing the inside of a jail cell.

In “Family Portrait,” Mr. Parks mentioned that Bessie’s belief in Richard was a faith that mingled with worries about his safety. She once told him that if “anything happens to me, I hope you look in on him now and then,” he said.

He did. Over the years the two grew close. When Richard built a recording studio in the basement of the building where he lived and worked, Mr. Parks offered him advice on the music business. Later, he and Michelle would attend Mr. Parks’s exhibits. In Richard’s office, there is still a newspaper clipping from a 1997 New York Times article announcing a retrospective of Mr. Parks’s work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Accompanying the story is Mr. Parks’s famous photo of the Fontenelles at the welfare office.

“He loved Gordon to death,” Michelle said. â€I kid you not. He couldn’t talk enough about Gordon. He couldn’t. He would always say, ‘I remember when Gordon and I would sit down and talk about…’ He would just call him. If he had a question about something or if he was just feeling a little bit down, he would give Gordon a call.”

This was especially true, Michelle said, after Bessie died in 1990. In some ways, Mr. Parks became the final â€" and most enduring â€" link to his family.

“I think it was comforting for him to know that there was still someone there,” Michelle said. “Through all of his family being gone and not having no one really to reach out to, on that side of the family, it was as if Gordon was that outlet for him.”

Yet a flesh and blood reminder of his past and future lives on. Among the four children that Richard is survived by is a son. His first name is Kenneth, for the brother who died in that house fire so many years ago in Queens.

His middle name is Gordon, for the man who changed e! verything! .

And his last name is Fontenelle.

Gordon Parks, courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation Norman Jr. didn’t get along with his father, but to see him in the hospital, burned, shook him deeply.

Reporting assistance provided by Kia Gregory.

“Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967,” will be on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem through June 30.

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. Follow @johnedwinmason and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is alsoon Facebook.



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