Pictures of the Day: South Korea and Elsewhere

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from South Korea, Mexico, Bangladesh and Iraq.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Gender Questions Arise in Obituary of Rocket Scientist and Her Beef Stroganoff

Yvonne Brill’s accomplishments as a scientist made her a natural subject for a Times obituary last weekend. Those staff-written obituaries, which recognize only the tiniest fraction of people who die on a given day, are intended not as tributes but as news stories of those who lived highly distinctive lives.

When this particular obituary appeared online Saturday, though, it caused many readers to do a double-take because of its emphasis on Mrs. Brill’s domestic life.

When it initially appeared online and in the first print edition, the first two paragraphs read as follows:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

Many people responded negatively to what they saw as sexism.

Typical was this Twitter message from Aaron Brady:

Hey, ‪@Sulliview‬‬‬ what’s up with that disgraceful obituary for Yvonne Brill “was also a brilliant rocket scientist” For real

Others, like Amy Alexander and Ron Charles â€" humorously but with an edge â€" wanted The Times to know how they would like to be remembered when the time comes.

For the record, please note that my ‪#Obit Dish is my “mean penne farfalle with zucchini.” Just ‪#FYI ‪@nyt ‪@JAWS ‪@sulliview

Dear NYT, just in case you’re prewriting obits of obscure book critics, everybody says I make delicious chocolate chip cookies.

Amy Davidson, a senior editor at The New Yorker who writes its Close Read blog, said on Twitter that it was striking how Mrs. Brill’s “work was both mentioned and somehow invisible,” given the emphasis in the obituary. Ms. Davidson also noted that the eight years off from work apparently wasn’t entirely the case; Mrs. Brill continued to work part time as a consultant during those years, the obituary said further down.

Later on Saturday, after the flurry of negative attention, the culinary reference dropped out and some other language changed in the online version of the obituary. And when it appeared in print on Sunday, its first paragraph still mentioned her family life but also included her profession, and the beef stroganoff was nowhere to be found. (It’s not unusual for The Times to make changes to articles online. When a factual error is corrected, that is drawn to the reader’s attention, but otherwise, incremental changes are not generally noted.)

This didn’t satisfy everyone:

Julie Rehmeyer, a freelance science writer from New Mexico, e-mailed:

The change in the lede for Yvonne Brill’s obituary only makes it worse, in my opinion. Yes, the original reference to beef stroganoff was inappropriate in the extreme â€" but having any reference to her parenting or spouse in the first paragraph of her obituary is also inappropriate. Fixing the beef stroganoff reference without fixing the misguided nature of the article as a whole doesn’t solve the problem; it minimizes it through its insufficiency.

An additional problem with the article is mentioning the “Diamond Superwoman award” immediately after her National Medal of Technology and Innovation, as if the two awards were comparable.

You can see the changes on NewsDiffs.

Others disagreed with those who complained.

Jennifer King, a journalism student who is studying obituaries for her master’s thesis at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, wrote to me:

I feel Mr Martin was subtly pointing out the irony of a woman in that era not only being a remarkable scientist but also a great wife and mother. The reference to her cooking was, I believe, to add context to Mrs Brill’s extraordinary achievements in an era where women were not encouraged to be anything other than Domestic Goddesses.

Anyway, I think it has been an all ’round learning experience for everyone and has drawn attention to the art of obituary writing, which can’t be a bad thing! Best of all, while some may be critical of the obituary, at least we now all know about Yvonne Brill, which must be a positive outcome, don’t you agree

This all may seem to be a tempest in a Crock-Pot, but it actually raises some significant questions related to gender - which is under much discussion at a time when Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” has hit the top of the nonfiction best-seller list.

When it’s highly unusual for a woman to do what she did professionally, to what extent does that merit notice Should gender be ignored in a profile or obituary Should it be treated as the main event

A recent article in Columbia Journalism Review gives guidelines for writing about women in this context. Curtis Brainard quotes the science writer Christie Aschwanden, who objects to journalism about women in science that “treats its subject’s sex as her most defining detail.”

I talked to William McDonald, the obituaries editor, on Monday morning about the reaction.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “It never occurred to us that this would be read as sexist.” He said it was important for obituaries to put people in the context of their time and that this well-written obituary did that effectively. He also observed that the references in the first paragraph to cooking and being a mother served as an effective set-up for the “aha” of the second paragraph, which revealed that Mrs. Brill was an important scientist.

Mr. McDonald said that he was consulted about the changes on Saturday night by editors who were working then and who believed that the negative reaction should be listened to. But, he said, he would have preferred to leave the obituary as it was.

The Times clearly would never have written about Mrs. Brill if her major accomplishments had been merely or mostly domestic, he noted. It was her role as a scientist that made the obituary worth doing, and that caused it to be displayed as the lead obituary in Sunday’s paper.

The writer, Douglas Martin, described himself as “just so full of admiration for this woman, in all respects.”

“I was totally captivated by her story,” he said, and he looked for a way to tell it in as interesting a way as possible. The negative reaction is unwarranted, he said â€" a result of people who didn’t read the obituary fully but reacted only to what they saw on Twitter about the opening paragraph.

It hasn’t changed his mind about how he wrote it: “I wouldn’t do anything differently.”

Here’s my take: It was fine for the obituary to point out how unusual it was for a woman to be a successful rocket scientist at midcentury and what the obstacles were.

And the way she handled her role as a wife and mother certainly had a place, given the era in which she did her work. Cultural context is important.

But if Yvonne Brill’s life was worth writing about because of her achievements, and all agree that it was, then the glories of her beef stroganoff should have been little more than a footnote.

The emphasis on her domesticity â€" and, more important, the obituary’s overall framing as a story about gender â€" had the effect of undervaluing what really landed Mrs. Brill on the Times obituaries page: her groundbreaking scientific work.

From Combat, Compassion

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

It is there, in each of the photographs. The beauty. And the sorrow. The beautiful far-away stare of a young Israeli woman sitting on her bed. The sorrow of the tan skin suit that protects her badly burned torso. The beautiful joy of a soldier fencing with his sons using plastic light sabers, “Star Wars”-style. The sorrow of the prosthetic leg that extends from his rolled-up blue jeans.

The photographer Ashley Gilbertson was thinking about just those things â€" the beauty and the sorrow â€" when he came upon a picture by Henri Huet at an installation titled “War/Photography” that opened March 23 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.

The photo (Slide 17), shot straight up from the ground, shows a dead American G.I. pulled skyward by a helicopter during the Vietnam War. The lifeless body dangles weightlessly, as if floating in water, below the darkened underbelly of the aircraft, itself hovering beyond time and gravity. For Mr. Gilbertson, whose photographs from both the Iraqi war front and the American home front appear in the show, the picture was unexpectedly riveting.

“It’s horrifying but it’s also beautiful,” Mr. Gilbertson said. “The fact that they had to tie a rope to him is awful. But you can see there is so much sacrifice and dignity â€" which seems a strange word to use. But that really struck me.”

That tension is precisely what the curators were looking for in every photograph in this exhibit: images that could depict the violence, cruelty, fear, destruction and, yes, humanity of war â€" yet still be gorgeous.

“It gets to be a push-pull situation for the viewer,” said Anne Tucker, curator of photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the show originated. “You are horrified and attracted at the same time.”

Or, as Will Michels, the show’s co-curator, put it: “We wanted to make sure that if you pulled the picture out of the exhibit, it was still a good photograph.”

The exhibit, which will move to Washington’s Corcoran Gallery in June and then the Brooklyn Museum in November, includes some of the best-known photographs of war, including Joe Rosenthal’s shot of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima and Eddie Adams’s image of a South Vietnamese police commander executing a Viet Cong operative with a silver revolver.

A long list of all-star conflict photographers is represented, including W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey and Joao Silva, as are photographers whose work is best identified with the aftershocks of war, like Nina Berman and Todd Heisler.

But the curators also included the work of military photographers, the uniformed troops who carry cameras with their rifles and whose photos, no matter how compelling, usually get little recognition. There are even pictures taken by combatants themselves, antigovernment guerrillas and government troops alike, including one by T. E. Lawrence, a k a Lawrence of Arabia.

In one such snapshot, an American soldier bends to trim a tiny patch of grass outside his tent in Iraq, using scissors. His lovingly tended lawn, barely larger than a bathtub, provides the only color in a landscape gray with rock, dirt and canvas. The picture had floated about the Internet for years, its creator and subject unidentified until the curators tracked down both for this show.

The photographs, ranging from the mid-19th century through Afghanistan and the Arab Spring, are grouped by themes reflecting the flow of war itself, starting with the saber-rattling and moving through recruitment, training, daily routines, patrols and troop movement, fighting, death, grief, burials, homecoming and remembrance. Sections on civilians, refugees and children are also included.

Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos Muchachos awaiting a counterattack by the National Guard. Matagalpa, Nicaragua. 1978.

Flipping through the exhibit catalog, it is hard not to make connections, some heartbreaking, some amusing, between images that cross generations and national borders. Al Chang’s famous shot (Slide 5) of an American infantryman in Korea cradling the head of a sobbing comrade, for instance, is eerily, soulfully redolent of Gleb Garanich’s picture of a Georgian man who weeps inconsolably while hugging the body of his dead brother.

“We saw patterns in the grief, in the images of civilians scrounging for food, in the scenes of combat,” Ms. Tucker said. “We saw the same images again and again and again.”

Some images have resonated with audiences in unexpected ways, Ms. Tucker said. She noticed that many younger veterans have congregated around a photograph taken by Damon Winter of The New York Times showing hundreds of combat-ready infantrymen sitting in the cavernous bay of a military transport plane headed to Afghanistan.

It was a scene those veterans knew well, but it was also one any soldier traveling to Europe in the hull of a troop transport ship during World War II might have recognized as well. The technology, in other words, did not notably alter the content or emotion of the photograph.

“The 19th century photos of a guy next to horse is no different than a soldier in World War II standing next to jeep or plane,” Mr. Michels said. “We learned that horse was not an accessory or luxury. It was a piece of equipment.”

A photo from Mr. Gilbertson’s series “Bedrooms of the Fallen,” which is part of a film accompanying the installation, offers a different way of looking at war and its consequences. The series captures the heartbreakingly meticulous ways parents keep the bedrooms of their children, killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, frozen in time, the sports trophies and stuffed animals and rock-star posters as untouched as museum pieces.

Mr. Gilbertson undertook the project because, he said, he felt his photographs from combat zones like Falluja or Sadr City were failing to make emotional connections with civilians who had grown weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I wanted to make something foreign and difficult to identify with understandable,” he said. “This could be your son’s room, or your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s.”

Mr. Michels, himself a photographer, said he became interested in war and veterans issues in the 1990s while working on a project to restore the U.S.S. Texas, a World War I and II-era battleship. When he started working at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, he and Ms. Tucker went through the museum’s collection of war-related photographs and began filling holes with new acquisitions. The seeds of the current exhibit were planted.

For Ms. Tucker, curating the show forced her to think more expansively about war. She realized battlefield medicine did not mean the same thing for insurgents as for conventional armies; or that the concept “home front” could be quite meaningless in places where battle rages just outside the door.

“Our perceptions of the widening circle of the impact of war made me realize: wars don’t end,” she said. “Our fathers’ wars are our wars. Our wars are our children’s wars. The consequences have generations of effects.”

For Mr. Gilbertson, the opening of the show provided an opportunity to reconnect with photographers he had not seen since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago, and many tears were shed.

As he strode through the exhibit for the first time, he said he found himself pondering the obvious: man’s stunning inhumanity toward man. But as he studied and restudied the images, a very different sentiment took root.

“What was surprising was seeing how much compassion and empathy was on the walls,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting that. Maybe it put a voice to something I’ve been trying to work out about war. It brings out the absolute worst in us, but also it brings out the best.”

“I was inspired. I remembered why I take photos.”

Dmitri Baltermants/Russian Photo Association, Razumberg Emil Anasovich Grief. Kerch, Crimea, Ukraine. 1942.

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

From Today’s Paper: Before the Season Opens, the Sky Does

Pool photo by Smiley N.

An Astros fan caught in the rain outside Minute Maid Park, where Houston opened the season against Texas.