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A Quest for Justice in Guatemala

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Daniel Hernández-Salazar is used to waiting. Two decades ago he abandoned his photojournalistic career to devote himself to documenting the search for justice in the wake of Guatemala's 36-year civil war. He stood at exhumations alongside indigenous Maya, as they waited to spy a bracelet or scrap of muddy fabric that would allow them to finally locate the bones of a loved one. More recently, he stood among them in a Guatemala City courtroom as the former dictator, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, was sentenced to 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity.

When the verdict was read, he could barely comprehend it.

“I have been waiting all my life for something like this,” he said. “Now we truly have a chance to change and have the country become more inclusive, where all of us have more rights and where those who have been dominating the country up to now have to step back a bit.”

Mr. Hernández-Salazar grew up in a country that never knew peace: from 1954's C.I.A.-backed coup against Jacobo Árbenz, though the civil war where General Ríos Montt presided over an early 1980s scorched-earth policy and up to today's lawless urban landscape. Last week's verdict, he said, offered a chance that the country may finally straighten itself.

The verdict marked the first time a former head of state was convicted in his own country for such crimes.  As such, Mr. Hernández-Salazar likens it to the Nuremberg trials, with significance for other countries in the region, which lived through violent conflicts where civilians were killed and disappeared.

His own documentary work - from exhumation sites and forensic labs to protests and religious rituals - reminded people of the toll of Guatemala's war, which officially ended in 1996. Many of the supposed perpetrators enjoyed impunity - either though silence or stature. General Ríos Montt, an outspoken evangelical Christian, was untouchable by law during his postwar tenure as president of the country's Congress.

Those circumstances led Mr. Hernández-Salazar to create four striking images featuring an angel whose wings were made from shoulder blades exhumed from a mass grave. The angel was shown covering his eyes, mouth and ears - to see, speak and hear no evil. But the last image, hands cupped around his mouth like a megaphone, urged people to speak out.

He called it, “So That All Shall Know,” and he took it to Auschwitz and Bosnia to connect his country's tragedy to others.

“One of the things he has done is using that image of speaking the truth in Guatemala and connecting it with struggle all over the world to find justice for human rights crimes,” said Kate Doyle, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, a United States research group that provided Guatemalan prosecutors with documents that helped build the case. “His photos from the trial show the hope and anguish of survivors and the power of Guatemalan society to fight the impunity they have lived with for so long.”

Working inside a packed courtroom Mr. Hernández-Salazar singled out faces filled with anxiety, hope and pain. In one, Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum holds both hands of an older indigenous woman. In another, a crying woman clutches the old black and white portrait of her brother, who disappeared decades ago. Several show General Ríos Montt testifying alone at a small desk. And when the verdict was announced, his picture shows a jubilant crowd.

The one image that sticks with him is a wide shot of the crowded courtroom. In a tiny spot, surrounded by spectators and photographers, General Ríos Montt is barely visible (Slide 1).

“That photo shows the dimensions this event has, even as it shows how small Ríos Montt is,” Mr. Hernández-Salazar said. “All the people there represent the numbers which he killed and allows you to judge that defenseless person in the middle. He did not invent this tragedy. He was part of a great mechanism. To an extent, he was used by the military and the oligarchy.”

Not that it is over. In the wake of the verdict, supporters of the military and General Ríos Montt have voiced outrage. And Mr. Hernández-Salazar worries that the nation's behind-the-scenes powers are not ready to accept judgment for the crimes of the past.

“We are seeing those hidden powers a bit,” Mr. Hernández-Salazar said. “It's the tip of the iceberg.”

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Pictures of the Day: Bangladesh and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bangladesh, Turkey, Kenya and Iraq.

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Honoring a Fallen Photographer\'s Spirit

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Tomás Munita has won the second annual Getty Images and Chris Hondros Fund Award, and Bryan Denton was named a finalist. The award is a memorial to Chris Hondros, who was killed two years ago while photographing in Misurata, Libya.

Mr. Munita, 38, who is based in Santiago, Chile, will receive $20,000 and Mr. Denton, who is based in Beirut, Lebanon, will receive $5,000. Both are freelance photographers who shoot frequently for The New York Times.

In an e-mail to Mr. Munita notifying him of his prize, the jurors wrote: “We believe in your fierce commitment to photojournalism and endless drive to tell a story. Your images speak volumes about the exceptional quality of your work and the rigor with which you approach these stories, but what also comes through - in an exceptional way - is your nature as a photographer who cares for his subjects and colleagues in a spirit of humility and grace.”

There are many contests and awards that recognize photographers who make superior news photographs, but what sets the Hondros Fund Award apart is that the jury looks not only at the quality of the work, but also at the qualities of the person. To make truly important images on a consistent basis, one cannot be separated from the other.

“We're looking for someone who's a great photographer, but we're looking beyond aesthetics and we're looking at the personality and their connection to their subjects,” said Todd Heisler, a Hondros Fund board member and a staff photographer for The New York Times, who was close to Mr. Hondros. The jury, he added, also sought someone who showed a seriousness about the world and was well-read, unflaggingly dedicated to telling the truth and generous with colleagues and subjects.

In addition to Mr. Heisler, the jury included Pancho Bernasconi, director of photography at Getty Images; Christina Piaia, executive director of the Chris Hondros Fund and Mr. Hondros's fiancée at the time of his death; and the photographer Jeff Swensen.

Mr. Munita, who was featured on Lens last year, started out as a newspaper photographer. He began working for The Associated Press in 2000 and became the agency's chief photographer in Afghanistan in 2005. He eventually left The A.P. to devote more time to personal projects.

In a phone interview, Mr. Munita said that he never met Mr. Hondros, but that he was honored to receive the award.

“This is different from other awards because of the work that Chris did,” Mr. Munita said. “It's a lonely kind of job. I sometimes feel like I'm lost. I'm on my own when working on a story and not sure how good it is. This makes me feel that maybe I was not so lost.”

DESCRIPTIONBryan Denton for The New York Times A doctor tried desperately to revive a fatally wounded man in Misurata, Libya. April 15, 2011.

Last year, Mr. Munita won the Visa d'Or daily press award at the Visa Pour l'Image photo festival in Perpignan, France. With the winnings, he bought an old van and took his wife and three young children to the Patagonia region of Argentina to accompany him while he started a project photographing Tierra del Fuego. With the prize money from the Hondros Fund award, he intends to complete that project and another on dams, mining and deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon.

Mr. Bernasconi, who was Mr. Hondros's editor at Getty Images, said that Mr. Munita was a good choice because he “is so present in the moment that he's making the photo, whether in the Amazon or a war zone. He knows exactly why he's there and can convey that to his reader or editor.”

Ms. Piaia said she saw similarities in how Mr. Munita and Mr. Denton, the finalist, approach their work. “Both of them have an extraordinary way to tell a story that sometimes is missing in photographers today - their sense of narrative, sense of historical context and their intellectual curiosity,” she said.

The 6-foot-6 Mr. Denton, 30, first worked alongside Mr. Hondros while covering the conflict in Georgia in 2008, and often turned to the more experienced photographer for advice. They also worked together on the ever-shifting front lines of the Libyan conflict.

Mr. Denton was already in Misurata, working with the New York Times correspondent C. J. Chivers, when Mr. Hondros took a ship to the port city. On board, Mr. Hondros e-mailed Mr. Denton to find out about the working conditions there. The Times journalists left Misurata on the same ship that had carried Mr. Hondros in. Not long after, Mr. Hondros and the photographer Tim Hetherington were killed, and Mr. Chivers and Mr. Denton helped to arrange safe transport for the bodies and a memorial service in Benghazi.

Mr. Denton continues to cover the effects of the Arab Spring and has recently worked in Syria. Next month, he will marry Maria Abi-Habib, a Middle East staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

The ceremony will be held in Roumieh, Lebanon, Ms. Abi-Habib's ancestral village, on the edge of a knoll in an old-growth olive grove that belongs to her family, next to a small, old chapel.

When Mr. Denton received the news of his finalist award in a phone call from jury members, including Ms. Piaia, he was in that olive grove. The news, he said, “was bittersweet.”

“I was honored,” he said, “but I couldn't help but think of all of the things that Chris missed - including his own wedding to Christina.”

DESCRIPTIONTomás Munita From Mr. Munita's ongoing series shot in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. 2013.

The Chris Hondros Fund will present the awards on June 7 with a reception and silent auction at the New York Public Library. An online auction will launch May 22.

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A Photographer\'s Unfiltered Account of the Iraq War

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“Photojournalists on War,” an oral history of the Iraq war by those who documented it from the front lines, was published this month by the University of Texas Press. The book consists of interviews conducted by Michael Kamber, who covered the war for eight years for The New York Times and is a co-founder of the Bronx Documentary Center.

Among the 39 photojournalists interviewed in the book are Andrea Bruce, Carolyn Cole, Stanley Greene, Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Khalid Mohammed, Eugene Richards, Joao Silva and Peter van Agtamael. Lens presents an excerpt from Mr. Kamber's conversation with Mr. Van Agtamael. A member of Magnum, Mr. Van Agtmael received the 2012 W. Eugene Smith Award. The interview, lightly edited for space and content, took place in July 2010, in Brooklyn.

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, an affluent suburb. It seems like a disproportionate number of photographers that end up covering war are white boys that grew up in the suburbs.

From childhood on, I was really interested in war, especially World War II. My grandpa had served and he was always telling stories about it; I worshiped him. That's where photography became so empowering because, at a formative age, I saw some really brutal pictures of war and I realized that I didn't have it in me. I didn't want to drop a bomb on someone or shoot someone. There were two books that provoked my interest and I realized, “Oh, this is the path for me.” One was “Requiem,” the book of Vietnam photographs taken by the photographers who died in Vietnam. The other was that Anthony Loyd book, “My War Gone By, I Miss It So.”

Q.

You were obsessed with war [as a child]?

A.

I was building tons of model airplanes. I had tons of toy soldiers. I was seduced by the aesthetics of it. The aesthetics of war are really so seductive to a child. Uniforms provoke a certain feeling. Not to everybody, far from it, but the strength that war represents is a powerful primal force.

Q.

They say an unhappy childhood is necessary to be a good artist, but it doesn't seem to really apply in your case.

A.

Obviously these things are selfish on a lot of levels. [War photography] is a powerful way of finding meaning in one's own life - to try to serve oneself by serving others. I am not going to paint a picture of it that “I am a noble photographer coming to document history. My body and mind be damned.” I'm not an artist. I don't have this beautiful sense of depth and geometry and scale, but I can find emotion and capture it. What starker place than war for that?

I am a big believer that photojournalists have done an amazing job. I blame the media largely for not allowing the depth of the perspective to get out. That's partly why photographers feel compelled to make books, to bring it completely on our terms. I felt so detached from my experience versus how it was being represented in newsprint. Everything that mattered to me, all the experiences that profoundly affected me, weren't being shown. They simply weren't. Or some of them were, but they were being published in Europe.

Q.

We routinely publish photos of dead Iraqis or dead Africans - we don't really worry about their families. When it comes to American soldiers, the U.S. military has pushed this thing on us that it's a question of privacy. Because they are Americans, maybe we feel we have to accord them a certain amount of respect that we don't accord an Iraqi civilian or an Afghan civilian.

A.

I agree. That comes down to these questions of the titillating and smutty quality of photography and that people are attracted to images of death, not necessarily just to be moved by them but to be intrigued by them. Almost to remind themselves that it's good to be alive and that death is a brutal and awful thing. It's easier to look at, of course, when it's not one of us because it doesn't remind us of ourselves. If I am honest with myself I would say I probably I am more affected by pictures of dead Americans or badly wounded Americans than badly wounded Afghans or badly injured or dead Africans, because I feel that in many ways I am looking at myself and it all comes back to that instinct of self-preservation.

Q.

Do you feel P.T.S.D. now or do you know other photographers that have been dealing with that?

A.

I don't know if I really have post-traumatic stress. I was twenty-four when I first went to Iraq. I went in deep in '06 and spent five months on embeds constantly. I was really hard-core about it, not taking any days off, going out on every patrol. I felt like I had something to prove to myself or to others and for a lot of selfish reasons. Frankly, I was into it. I was. I remember stepping out of the wire for the first time on a foot patrol and I was happy.

There's no past and there's no future. It's a good feeling. Except for the fact that, of course, you're courting death in the process. I have a loving and close family and the burden my presence [in Iraq] places on them is huge. I'm not saying abandon war entirely, but [we can cover] war in a safer way: do stories in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul instead of Kandahar and Helmand; or go to Syria or Jordan to do some more stories about refugees; or go to a burn center in Texas.

I don't have any blood on my hands, and as much as I have been troubled by these experiences, I can also get through them. I am going to carry them with me but I am not gonna be destroyed by them, I hope.

For me, the thing I struggle with is that [covering war] has messed up certain aspects of my life, but not insurmountably. Mostly it's made me a better person; it's made me more empathetic; it's made my ideas and my ideals more clear-cut. It's made me extremely confident in my own skin. All those things when projected have made me successful in a lot of ways. It was always my dream to join Magnum and it was on the strength of my war photography that I joined Magnum.

Q.

Do you feel like you used the Iraq War for some personal gain? Or do you feel that there is nothing to feel guilty about? You're making the world a better place?

A.

I think it's kind of that combination between selfish and selfless intentions - different factors are stronger at different points. I still believe in the power of photography and journalism despite the fact that it's corrupted in certain elements and doesn't go far enough in others. That doesn't mean that it isn't also this essential and beautiful thing. Did I set down in Iraq with a lot of ambition? To the point of hubris? Absolutely. I am not ashamed to admit it. It goes without saying almost. To represent myself or for anyone to represent themselves any differently would be a pack of lies.

I do resent the mythmaking created by the genre because it's unnecessary and distracts from our stated ideals as a collective group of people who share similar ideals in truth telling. The more honest you can be to yourself, the more honest you can be with your work.

Q.

What is the difference between the Hollywood images and stories that we grow up with and the war that you experience? Where is the divergence between what we grow up on and what you saw?

A.

Sadly the divergence is in experience. That's what also makes more important our role, because a lot of these soldiers come back and they don't have any kind of voice to express what happened. We can do that, and pretty damned often they will let us in to tell that story. You get distanced so much from the actual implications of these events that you're shocked when you actually see them for what they are.

I see these articles periodically - “Where are the iconic images of these wars?” All I conclude every time is that the iconic images aren't being published. I think of Balazs [Gardi's] work from the Korengal Valley [Afghanistan] that was such a big part of Tim [Hetherington's] movie, for example, as being so powerful. And Christoph [Bangert's] picture of that decapitated man in the pile of garbage with his arms bound behind his back. Some of Ben Lowy's work from Arab Jabor, that terrible day, and Ashley [Gilbertson's] work from Fallujah - the list is long. Yuri [Kozyrev] has been in the deep, in the thick of it forever. And Franco [Pagetti].

It's not for us to judge what icons there are at this point, because icons are determined by history and the passage of time. Nina Berman - that Marine wedding picture, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the most important. When I think of questions of self-preservation - of my body and my mind and the life I'd like to lead - pictures like that can be reminders [that] you don't have to necessarily go on patrol 873 to find something that validates one's intentions for being there in the first place.

Q.

Do you see yourself to some degree as an activist? Or anti-war? Do you see yourself not as the totally neutral objective photographer?

A.

No, I don't see myself as a neutral objective photographer. I try to be a truthful photographer, but that probably shouldn't be confused with objective. At the end of the day, if you're choosing what to frame, you're choosing what to exclude. What objectivity is in that? You try to be truthful to what you're seeing and see it in a nuanced and complex way. At least that's how I try to see things, but I am going to use those things to interpret what my own perspective is going to be.

When I did the book ["2nd Tour, Hope I Don't Die"], I wanted everyone to be the victim in the book: the soldiers, the civilians. There are no John Wayne heroics. It's just stripped down to its depraved and destructive core.

The camera is a relatively new phenomenon. Humanity has gone through vast changes in the 150 years since photography was first used on the battlefield. I would like to think that photography has had some positive influence. I found it very inspiring, [this idea] about photographs somehow ending war in some short-term fashion. [I'm] obviously being hopelessly naïve and ridiculous, but in the long view, I think it's a goal to aspire to - not just photography, but all these different mediums. We co-exist with video, and we co-exist with the written word, and just plain old testimonies from soldiers at the VFW maybe, or at a Memorial Day parade. It's the collective weight of all of these things that at some point provokes change.

Previously, Lens excerpted Dexter Filkins's foreword to “Photojournalists on War.”

There will be a panel discussion at a book event, featuring Mr. Kamber, Mr. Filkins and several photographers interviewed in “Photojournalists on War,” Wednesday night at 25CPW Gallery.

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Pictures of the Day: Jerusalem and Elsewhere

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Photos from Jerusalem, Spain, Afghanistan and Turkey.

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Still Shooting After the End of War

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Stacy Pearsall never wanted to stop being a combat photographer.

When her job ended, she wondered whether life was worth living.

Ms. Pearsall joined the Air Force at age 17 and soon grew eager to photograph American military efforts around the world. But the odds of covering combat were slim, and she knew it. “Somebody had to either die or retire,” she recalled. When a position opened up, it changed her whole world.

The Air Force staff sergeant began training in a program for war photography at Syracuse University. She traveled to more than 40 countries, including places like South Korea and the Horn of Africa. But it was her two rotations in Iraq where she made her deepest mark. Among her many honors include twice being named the National Press Photographers Association's military photographer of the year. The Pentagon handed out her work documenting the military efforts in Iraq to the media and public on a daily basis. They were republished online, and in newspapers and magazines.

During her first stint, which began in September 2003, assignments varied widely. “One day we were on a raid hunting down one of the face cards,” she recalled, referring to the deck of cards identifying the most wanted officials of Saddam Hussein's government. “The next day we were shooting a school opening.”

Her second stint centered on 2007's battle of Baquba. “The fighting I experienced was very extreme,” she said. “In my last deployment, it was an everyday occurrence.”

U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway After hunting down known bombmakers, Ms. Pearsall prepared to document a raid with members of the United States Army in Khalis. Feb. 21, 2007.

She had started her military photo career inspired by noted war photographers like James Nachtwey, Carolyn Cole and Eddie Adams. Ms. Pearsall worked to get into the right spot, take a moment and plan the shot.

“I'm definitely as deliberate as I can be in the circumstances,” she said. “Instead of chasing the action, I'm kind of anticipating where that action is going to happen, taking risks and getting in front of the action so you can be there when it happens.” She tells more about her craft in her newly published second book, “A Photojournalist's Field Guide.”

Her work took her to the front lines, not common for female soldiers, and where the United States only recently lifted its ban on women in combat despite 20 percent of its ranks being female. “Being a woman, it was a really unique opportunity,” she said.

Not everyone understood. Sometimes soldiers would yell at her. But she felt, “If you don't take those pictures, then how will anybody know what sacrifices were made?”

Sometimes Ms. Pearsall was capturing images of soldiers she barely knew. Other times it was of her closest friends. She recalled the death of Capt. Donnie R. Belser, killed by sniper fire mere hours after she had heard him singing “Happy Birthday” to his son.

And at times she set down her cameras to help her fellow soldiers in battle. While riding along with a unit caught in an ambush, she picked up an M240 machine gun and provided cover fire as others brought back wounded soldiers. Amid flying bullets, she hauled the wounded into the armored vehicle, including a soldier almost twice her size, placing her hand on his neck to stop the blood pumping out of his carotid artery.

Stacy L. Pearsall Members of the Iraqi Army shared lunch with a local family during a four-day operation in New Baquba. March 4, 2007.

But her two rotations in Iraq exacted an enormous physical toll. During her first tour, she suffered injuries from a roadside bomb that tore through her Humvee, and a similar I.E.D. blast occurred during her second tour. She suffered concussions, traumatic brain injuries, and a ruptured disc in her neck.

By February 2007, Ms. Pearsall began to feel tremors in her hands and it was difficult to hold her head up straight. One morning she could not get out bed. Her bunkmate, Kathryn Robinson, a videographer, got her to go to the doctor, where she learned the injuries were worse than she suspected. About three months later she was flown out of Iraq for medical care in Charleston, S.C.

Her job prospects dimmed. She was awarded a Bronze Star, but photojournalism was no longer an option in the military. She felt the Air Force did not take her injuries seriously, including her post-traumatic stress, and they questioned why she did not report her problems sooner. But she knew that if she had reported them, should would lose the job she loved so much. “The military had trained me this way - to suck it up,” she said.

Ms. Pearsall reluctantly took a medical discharge in one of the most difficult times in her life.

Even worse, she said, was the psychological toll. She was reluctant to say anything about PTSD, fearful that few of her colleagues would take her seriously.

“The one thing about PTSD is it's the war that never ends” she said. “Suicide might seem like a viable option. It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

Driving in South Carolina one day, she wondered whether she should just steer her car into an overpass. Nearly a thousand active duty military personnel have attempted suicide in 2011, the most recent year for which there are official statistics. While Ms. Pearsall did not, she is among an untold number who engage in what is termed suicidal ideation, contemplating how they might kill themselves.

Ms. Pearsall sought help from a local Department of Veterans Affairs clinic. Now she is active in a variety of efforts to help veterans, including photography workshops and her work as a spokeswoman for the Real Warriors Campaign. She's spoken about her path on Oprah's television show, and the role of women in combat.

But photography still remains her passion. She runs a photo studio in Charleston with her husband, who was also a military photographer, and highlights work by her students on her studio's walls. Her military experience has led to commercial assignments for products like body armor.

Ms. Pearsall continues to ensure that the sacrifices made by veterans are not forgotten. She started the Veterans Portrait Project Foundation, capturing images of those who served in conflicts stretching back to World War II, which hang on the walls of the local Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. She is currently at work on several photo essays about the lives of veterans.

She worries about the plight of veterans and sees her work as a continuation of her job in the military. “That story isn't over for them,” she said. “I just don't want people to forget that.”

Stacy L. Pearsall United States Army Staff Sgt. Branden Embry shared a moment with another troop member at the Iraqi police station in Buhriz. Feb. 15, 2007.

The New York Times has been chronicling the experiences of military veterans who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan but continue to confront the medical and psychological scars of battle in The Hard Road Back series. A new installment about the baffling rise in suicides in the U.S. military by James Dao and Andrew Lehren was published today.

Follow @StacyPearsall, @lehrennyt and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Healing in the Aftermath of a Massacre

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On a Friday afternoon in July 2011, Andrea Gjestvang was preparing to leave the offices of the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, where she was working as a temporary photo editor, when an enormous explosion shook the building, blowing out windows.

It wasn't immediately clear what had happened. As her colleagues screamed, Ms. Gjestvang fled down the fire escape and made her way to the site of the explosion. She wasn't prepared for the sight of eight dead bodies.

She also wasn't prepared to start taking photographs.

“It was absurd, because I was working as a picture editor and I didn't have my cameras,” she said. “I found myself in the middle of what happened, and I was very scared and almost paralyzed.”

After taking in the carnage for a few minutes, she sprinted nearly two miles home to get her gear and raced back to photograph the scene. For someone who had never covered war, it seemed impossible that anything worse could happen. But then news came that the Norwegian right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had bombed the government center in Oslo had then gone on a shooting rampage at an island summer camp for young members of the governing Labor Party. He killed 69 people, mostly youth. Another 500 survived the massacre, though many were badly wounded.

Ms. Gjestvang, 32, helped put out the newspaper from temporary offices. The next day, she photographed the scene at the hotel where uninjured camp survivors were being reunited with family members and examined by doctors.

“It was terrible to be there,” she said.

The following weeks were taken up with putting out the paper and photographing a seemingly endless wave of sadness. Norway was overwhelmed with grief. By September, it seemed that everything that could be said about the tragedy and what it meant for Norway had been said in the exhaustive news coverage. But Ms. Gjestvang decided to explore the nature of surviving such a catastrophic event.

“I was very moved by the incident, and I didn't feel that it was possible not to do the project,” she said.

Gingerly, she began reaching out to survivors and their families, but she didn't start photographing until after Christmas 2011 because, she said, she “wanted to wait to give the youth some time to recover.” She found that most of them “wanted to be able to tell the story differently than in media headlines.”

DESCRIPTIONAndrea Gjestvang/Moment Adrian, 22, swam from the shore as the gunman charged at him. Instead of shooting, however, he walked away. Later, lying on the ground under a jacket, Adrian was struck by a bullet in the left shoulder.

Ms. Gjestvang interviewed each of her subjects to present their words next to her photos. Some wanted to show their physical scars, while others preferred not to. Each approached the recovery process, physical or emotional, differently. She describes their ordeal in an introduction to the project:

They have returned to their daily lives now. They go to school, they hang out with friends and they fall in love. They go to bed every night and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning. But something has changed. The young survivors will live on with their scars - both visible and mental - many of which may never fully heal.

Some have difficulties handling the easiest tasks, and many struggle to find meaning in life. On the other hand, some of the survivors have gained a stronger belief in themselves, and they appreciate being alive.

Around the time Ms. Gjestvang started her project, she learned that she was pregnant with her first child. That knowledge made the project all the more resonant for her and enabled her to empathize more deeply.

“I met so much death and suffering, and now I had this person growing inside me,” she said. “Of course, I was thinking about all these parents that had lost their child or got their child back with these unbelievable physical or psychological scars.”

Her daughter, Agnes, is now 6 months old. When she is older, she will be able to read her mother's book, “En Dag i Historien” (“A Day in History”), which was published in Norwegian this year.

While many photojournalists work in places where their subjects are unlikely to see their images, this was different.

“I had to be very aware of every little step in the process,” Ms. Gjestvang said, “because the 22nd of July is such a sensitive topic in Norway and everyone has an opinion.”

But even though so much has been written about the attacks, Ms. Gjestvang says she discovered that “a photographer can really contribute to history.”

“I think this has taught me to take my work even more seriously,” she said.

DESCRIPTIONAndrea Gjestvang/Moment “I wear a mask. I wear a mask in school and among friends. I smile and I am happy. I'm laughing and joking. Many times it's straight from the heart. But often, too often, it is forced out. Sometimes I wonder if my classmates have heard my real laughter.” Cathrine, 17, swam away from the gunshots and was eventually rescued by volunteers in a boat.

Ms. Gjestvang's photographs of Greenland were featured on Lens in 2010. She recently won a FotoVisura Photography Grant, the l'Iris d'Or at the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards and first place in the portrait series category in the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism contest. She is represented by Moment photo agency.

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Pictures of the Day: Myanmar and Elsewhere

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Photos from Myanmar, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Iraq.

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After 25 Years, Confronting Alienation in Astoria

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Photographers have long turned to New York's ethnic enclaves for stories of cultural tenacity in the face of sweeping change. When Niko J. Kallianiotis came to Astoria, Queens, on a 1987 family visit from Greece, he got none of that.

“I didn't want to be there at all,” he said. For a teenager raised in Athens, he said, the ethnic identity in Astoria seemed forced, the stories it embodied ersatz. “They were trying to hold on to their Greek identity and also working hard to fit in,” he said. After one summer in what was then the center of Greek-American culture, he returned to Athens, vowing never to go back. “I refused to set foot in Astoria.”

DESCRIPTIONNiko J. Kallianiotis Mike Kallos, on the stoop of his apartment on 31st Street, as his mother Theano Kallos let the dog out.

Twenty-five years later, Mr. Kallianiotis said he was drawn back to Astoria to explore the community that had so alienated him as a teenager. What benefits did people there get from their ethnic identity, and what did they give up? What he found was a changed neighborhood, no longer the tight enclave he had encountered as a teenager. Many of the old Greek families had left, and returned only to work. The younger residents no longer spoke Greek on the street, or alternated between Greek and English.

The fruits of his return, which he calls “Pikroglykimalon,” or “Bittersweetapple,” are both affectionate and aloof, reflecting what he calls “my alienation and eagerness to discover some sort of tranquility in a place that once felt so foreign to me.” The images suggest the photographer's essential solitude, capturing rituals or institutions - the Greek Orthodox baptism, the neighborhood gyro stand - that are meant to forge solidarity and community, but seem to keep him (and us) on the outside, welcomed but not quite a part of what he sees.

“I don't think I'm going to be able to make this my home,” he said.

DESCRIPTIONNiko J. Kallianiotis The Olympiakos Football Club on 30th Avenue is a gathering place for the team's local fans, who watch the games each weekend via satellite or online stream. There are clubs for other teams nearby.

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

A version of this article appeared in print on 05/19/2013, on page WE8 of the Westchester edition with the headline: Back to Astoria .

Pictures of the Day: Bolivia and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bolivia, Georgia, Iraq and Bangladesh.

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Leak Investigations Are an Assault on the Press, and on Democracy, Too

This was supposed to be the administration of unprecedented transparency. President Obama promised that when he took office, and the White House's Web site says so on this very day. It reads:

My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing.

Instead, it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press. I wrote about the chilling effect of the Obama administration's leak investigations â€" including the ramped-up criminal prosecution of those who provide information to the press - in a Sunday column in March.

Now that situation, already bad, has taken a major turn for the worse with revelations that the Obama Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records of a large number of journalists for The Associated Press, as part of a leak investigation.

While it may not be immediately apparent, readers have a big stake in this development.

Why should what happens to another news organization matter to Times readers?

For several reasons. Partly because the situation speaks directly to being able to know how your government operates. It's hard to avoid sounding a little corny - all civics class and founding fathers - when talking about it: The ability of the press to report freely on its government is a cornerstone of American democracy. That ability is, by any reasonable assessment, under siege.

Reporters get their information from sources. They need to be able to protect those sources and sometimes offer them confidentiality. If they can't be sure about that â€" and it looks increasingly like they can't â€" the sources will dry up. And so will the information.

Sad to say, that seems to be exactly what the Justice Department has in mind with its leak investigations, two of which involve Times journalists. One has to do with the chief Washington correspondent David Sanger's book and articles about American cyberattacks against Iran, the other is Scott Shane and Jo Becker's article from last May about Mr. Obama's “kill list.”

The Times's executive editor, Jill Abramson, put it simply when I asked her about it Tuesday: “The press is supposed to hold government accountable. These investigations intrude on that process.”

The Times stories that are the subject of leak investigations “were in the great tradition of Washington reporting, helping people understand how decisions were made,” The Times's newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, told me Tuesday. “There was no compromising of national security involved.”

“The net effect is universal,” he said. “People are less willing to talk, and that's a loss for everyone.”

The Times is one of the many news and press rights organizations that signed a strongly worded letter sent to the Justice Department leadership on Tuesday.

This isn't just about press rights. It's about the right of citizens to know what their government is doing. In an atmosphere of secrecy and punishment â€" despite the hollow promises of transparency - that's getting harder every day.



For Extra Credit: A Little Light Reading on Press Rights

With press rights very much in the news this week, here are some of the most noteworthy pieces I've come across on the subject.

1. Molly Redden of The New Republic writes that there really is a chilling effect on journalism from the Justice Department's leak investigations, quoting the investigative journalist Jane Mayer: “It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so ‘chilling' isn't quite strong enough. It's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill.”

2. David A. Kaplan of Fortune magazine, who teaches First Amendment law at New York University, says the press should stop whining: “From the government's perspective, lawlessness is a bad thing, and disclosure of secrets can endanger security. When the Justice Department, legally (so far as we know), wants to obtain evidence to prove law-breaking, it seems to me the press is entitled to no special protection.”

3. The former New York Times counsel James Goodale, writing in The Daily Beast, compares President Obama's record on press rights to that of President Richard Nixon and recalls that Mr. Obama “deep-sixed” the press shield law he is now proposing.

4. Frank Rich of New York Magazine, formerly a Times columnist, calls the seizure of Associated Press phone records “the scandal with legs” for the president.

5. Thomas Stackpole of Mother Jones, with information from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, details the six indictments of government leakers during the Obama administration.

6. The New Yorker's general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, analyzes the A.P. phone records case from a legal perspective: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.”

7. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, writing for National Review Online, summarizes the recent troubles in the Obama administration: “ ‘Hope and change' is fast becoming the 1973 Nixon White House.”

8. Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian writes about the media's sudden interest in civil liberties, coming rather late in the troubled game, as he notes. In short, he writes, the issue is catching fire now because media organizations are now in the crosshairs: “It is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are.”

A note to readers: My Sunday print column in the Review section examines and explains The Times's policy on photographic integrity. After that, I'll be off the grid for a few days.



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