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Pictures of the Day: Iraq and Elsewhere

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Photos from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Virginia.

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Dancing in the Dark: The Architectural Photography of Hélène Binet

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If the second and third dimensions were battling each other, the Swiss photographer Hélène Binet would be something of the cunning go-between. Well known for photographing architecture, she has a knack for giving depth to the flat plane of a 2-D photograph.

Pitting two dimensions against each other, her pictures seize empty spaces and fold, braid and twist them into knots. For her, light has material properties â€" cutting like a scythe or covering like a blanket. Her work, collected in a new monograph from Phaidon called “Composing Space,” is about bending preconceptions.

“It comes from the feeling that you cannot represent real space in photography,” said Ms. Binet, 53. “You’re looking for this third dimension all the time, but it’s almost impossible.”

The book presents work dating back to the late 1980s, conjuring mystery while bridging the flat and the physical in counterintuitive ways. She has worked with architectural luminaries like Peter Zumthor, Le Corbusier and Daniel Libeskind, whose latest high-profile work, One World Trade Center, was recently crowned with a spire in Manhattan. One doesn’t get more 3-D than a tower that thrusts 1,776 feet into the air.

But Ms. Binet isn’t interested in showing buildings as grand structures on a landscape. Instead, she zooms in, hiding some parts of a space to reveal new qualities in others.

“I try to see how I can bring one experience out that somehow is referring to the third dimension,” Ms. Binet said. “But not saying, ‘This is the building. I’m going to try to tell you everything about the building.’ ”

She is now based in London but was born in Switzerland, where her early pictures came out of a job at an opera house in Geneva. But photographing dancers didn’t give her much room to experiment, and she soon grew dissatisfied. When she took a picture of a dancer, she said, she was not really taking a picture of a dancer â€" it was the performance.

“And immediately, you know that you don’t know the performance,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s quite clear.”

DESCRIPTIONHélène Binet Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France, designed by Le Corbusier, 1953. View of a light well, photographed in 2007.

Eventually, through a friend, Ms. Binet became acquainted with a circle of architects and began to shoot, and interpret, their creations. Her first series, in 1989, of John Hejduk’s “Subject/Object” structures in Riga, Latvia, was the fruit of a lonely and exhausting process of discovery. She had no assistants, no experience photographing architecture and no formal instruction in the field, Mark Pimlott writes in an essay in the new book.

“She was alone with her subject, confronted with making architectural photographs in isolation, so was obliged to proceed instinctively, looking for both her subject and a picture,” Mr. Pimlott wrote. “The act of making photographs was bound to the process of understanding.”

Over time, Ms. Binet found an approach that suited her, one that seems less scientific or precise than one might expect. She read the architects’ books, went to their lectures and had tea with them. She was looking to synchronize sensibilities â€" so much so that she even penetrated their dreams.

After seeing one of her early images, Mr. Hejduk declared, “You’re bringing me back to the first dream I had when I did the project.”

It was early in Ms. Binet’s career, but the compliment meant a lot. It told her not only that she was getting somewhere, but that their mind-meld benefited her, too. “Even if I was not one of his students, he taught me how to look at the world,” she said.

In other chapters of the new book â€" with enigmatic titles like “Memory,” “Materiality” and “Ground” â€" Ms. Binet trains her eye on surfaces and things not made by man. Even a crack in stone can be represented in a way that explores the questions that dog her.

“The crack is really about the fascination of shifting from architecture made by man to architecture made by nature,” she said. “So the way I look at the earth, the surface, is how it’s been made.”

And she has learned to think of light as something she can wield.

“We cannot appreciate the space and the texture without the light touching it, and we cannot appreciate the light without the material,” she said. “This combination is part of a challenge and quite beautiful. They absolutely need each other.”

This echoes her early days with dancers who darted in and out of darkness. In her photo of Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne, Germany, for example (Slide 1), natural light danced with electric light, dappling the brick and speckling the ceiling. It was a fleeting, precise moment, when the indoor and outdoor light was blending and bouncing in a single frame. She likened the elements to players in an orchestra.

Performing.

“The sense of the light, the sense of coming out of the dark, it’s something that stays very much in the way I photograph,” she said. As when she photographed dancers, she had to be quick. “There’s the dark, and then there’s the things coming out of it,” she said. “I say, ‘Oh, that’s a performance.’ Then they disappear. It’s light again.”

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Dancing in the Dark: The Architectural Photography of Hélène Binet

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If the second and third dimensions were battling each other, the Swiss photographer Hélène Binet would be something of the cunning go-between. Well known for photographing architecture, she has a knack for giving depth to the flat plane of a 2-D photograph.

Pitting two dimensions against each other, her pictures seize empty spaces and fold, braid and twist them into knots. For her, light has material properties â€" cutting like a scythe or covering like a blanket. Her work, collected in a new monograph from Phaidon called “Composing Space,” is about bending preconceptions.

“It comes from the feeling that you cannot represent real space in photography,” said Ms. Binet, 53. “You’re looking for this third dimension all the time, but it’s almost impossible.”

The book presents work dating back to the late 1980s, conjuring mystery while bridging the flat and the physical in counterintuitive ways. She has worked with architectural luminaries like Peter Zumthor, Le Corbusier and Daniel Libeskind, whose latest high-profile work, One World Trade Center, was recently crowned with a spire in Manhattan. One doesn’t get more 3-D than a tower that thrusts 1,776 feet into the air.

But Ms. Binet isn’t interested in showing buildings as grand structures on a landscape. Instead, she zooms in, hiding some parts of a space to reveal new qualities in others.

“I try to see how I can bring one experience out that somehow is referring to the third dimension,” Ms. Binet said. “But not saying, ‘This is the building. I’m going to try to tell you everything about the building.’ ”

She is now based in London but was born in Switzerland, where her early pictures came out of a job at an opera house in Geneva. But photographing dancers didn’t give her much room to experiment, and she soon grew dissatisfied. When she took a picture of a dancer, she said, she was not really taking a picture of a dancer â€" it was the performance.

“And immediately, you know that you don’t know the performance,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s quite clear.”

DESCRIPTIONHélène Binet Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France, designed by Le Corbusier, 1953. View of a light well, photographed in 2007.

Eventually, through a friend, Ms. Binet became acquainted with a circle of architects and began to shoot, and interpret, their creations. Her first series, in 1989, of John Hejduk’s “Subject/Object” structures in Riga, Latvia, was the fruit of a lonely and exhausting process of discovery. She had no assistants, no experience photographing architecture and no formal instruction in the field, Mark Pimlott writes in an essay in the new book.

“She was alone with her subject, confronted with making architectural photographs in isolation, so was obliged to proceed instinctively, looking for both her subject and a picture,” Mr. Pimlott wrote. “The act of making photographs was bound to the process of understanding.”

Over time, Ms. Binet found an approach that suited her, one that seems less scientific or precise than one might expect. She read the architects’ books, went to their lectures and had tea with them. She was looking to synchronize sensibilities â€" so much so that she even penetrated their dreams.

After seeing one of her early images, Mr. Hejduk declared, “You’re bringing me back to the first dream I had when I did the project.”

It was early in Ms. Binet’s career, but the compliment meant a lot. It told her not only that she was getting somewhere, but that their mind-meld benefited her, too. “Even if I was not one of his students, he taught me how to look at the world,” she said.

In other chapters of the new book â€" with enigmatic titles like “Memory,” “Materiality” and “Ground” â€" Ms. Binet trains her eye on surfaces and things not made by man. Even a crack in stone can be represented in a way that explores the questions that dog her.

“The crack is really about the fascination of shifting from architecture made by man to architecture made by nature,” she said. “So the way I look at the earth, the surface, is how it’s been made.”

And she has learned to think of light as something she can wield.

“We cannot appreciate the space and the texture without the light touching it, and we cannot appreciate the light without the material,” she said. “This combination is part of a challenge and quite beautiful. They absolutely need each other.”

This echoes her early days with dancers who darted in and out of darkness. In her photo of Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne, Germany, for example (Slide 1), natural light danced with electric light, dappling the brick and speckling the ceiling. It was a fleeting, precise moment, when the indoor and outdoor light was blending and bouncing in a single frame. She likened the elements to players in an orchestra.

Performing.

“The sense of the light, the sense of coming out of the dark, it’s something that stays very much in the way I photograph,” she said. As when she photographed dancers, she had to be quick. “There’s the dark, and then there’s the things coming out of it,” she said. “I say, ‘Oh, that’s a performance.’ Then they disappear. It’s light again.”

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Pictures of the Day: Oklahoma and Elsewhere

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Photos from Oklahoma, Gaza, Somalia and Kashmir.

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Societal Ills Spike in Crisis-Stricken Greece

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ATHENS â€" “Five euros only, just 5 euros,” whispered Maria, a young prostitute with sunken cheeks and bedraggled hair, as she pitched herself forward from the shadows of a graffiti-riddled alley in central Athens on a recent weeknight.

As a chill wind swept paper and trash across a grimy sidewalk, Angelos Tzortzinis, a Greek photographer, caught sight of Maria lowering her price to the equivalent of about $6.50. Maria, who would only give a pseudonym, had hoped to get some money for food â€" and for a cheap but dangerous new street drug that has emerged during Greece’s crisis, guaranteed to obliterate her sorrows, if only for a moment.

With the country heading into the fifth year of economic depression, and unemployment near 60 percent for young people, greater numbers of women and men are offering their bodies for next to nothing to get any scrap of money. According to the National Center for Social Research, the number of people selling sex has surged 150 percent in the last two years.

Many prostitutes have been selling their services for as little as 10 to 15 euros, a price that has shrunk along with the income of clients afflicted by the crisis. Many more prostitutes are taking greater health risks by having unprotected sex, which sells for a premium. Still more are subject to violence and rape.

Now a new menace has arisen: a type of crystal methamphetamine called shisha, after the Turkish water pipe, but otherwise known as poor man’s cocaine, brewed from barbiturates and other ingredients including alcohol, chlorine and even battery acid.

DESCRIPTIONAngelos Tzortzinis An addict on an Athens street.

A hit of shisha, concocted in makeshift laboratories around Athens, costs 3 to 4 euros. Doses come in the form of a 0.01-gram ball, leaving many users reaching for hits throughout the day. They include prostitutes, whom Mr. Tzortzinis photographed in a seedy central neighborhood of Athens called Omonia, next to a large police station.

Shisha is most often smoked. But it is increasingly being taken intravenously; because of the caustic chemicals it contains, a rising number of users are winding up in the emergency room. Health experts say the injections are also adding to an alarming rise in H.I.V. cases around Greece, which surged more than 50 percent last year from 2011 as more people turn to narcotics.

With scant money left in the government’s coffers, and an austerity program in place until Greece repays hundreds of billions of euros in bailout money, programs for health care, treatment and social assistance have been curbed sharply.

That leaves the problems in the hands of Greece’s police to clean up. In daily sweeps, officers at the nearby police station arrest prostitutes and jail them overnight. There, they are out of reach of the drug, but also cut off from assistance of any type.

For Mr. Tzortzinis, who grew up in the area, seeing women give themselves for as little as 5 euros underscores one of the many horrors of Greece’s drawn-out crisis.

“These women need help,” he said. “But they cannot help themselves. Nobody is helping them.”

DESCRIPTIONAngelos Tzortzinis A drug addict’s mattress was hung on the front of a closed store in central Athens.

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Pictures of the Day: Oklahoma and Elsewhere

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Photos from Oklahoma, Egypt, France and Golan Heights.

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From Pictorialism to Modernism, With Little Notice

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Imagine you’re a young photographer. It’s 1930, and you’re armed with a letter of introduction from a family friend â€" a fellow patron of the arts. The letter is addressed to Edward Weston.

Alma Lavenson, a young photographer from the Bay Area, had traveled south to Carmel, Calif., to visit Mr. Weston. She had been photographing around Oakland, where she was raised, and was hoping Mr. Weston might critique her work. Her images were heavily influenced by Pictorialism, in which soft-focus lenses created a dreamy effect, rendering reality as if seen by a painter (or a Photoshop filter, if computers had existed back then).

Mr. Weston complimented her compositions, but firmly suggested she jettison her style. It must have been difficult for Ms. Lavenson to be told she had gotten it so wrong. But it was probably not surprising, given Mr. Weston’s predilection for sharply focused, crystal clear photographs. He was a champion of Modernism, soon to sweep Pictorialism off the pages of publications like Camera Craft and Photo-Era Magazine, through which Ms. Lavenson stayed current.

Technically, Ms. Lavenson was self-taught, having learned to print while hanging around a drugstore in Oakland. Susan Ehrens, the curator who would collaborate with her many years later, says this was not uncommon. “Let’s face it,” Ms. Ehrens said. “None of them went to school. They were all learning photography and had darkrooms in the woodshed.”

DESCRIPTIONAlma Lavenson/Alma Lavenson Associates, all rights reserved Girl, Majorca, 1961.

Fortunately, a good critique, once digested, often makes the difference in a photographer’s career. Ms. Lavenson heeded Mr. Weston’s advice, swapped out her soft-focus lens for the sharp one that came with her camera and embarked on a remarkable, if not exactly well known, career.

Shortly after meeting Mr. Weston, Ms. Lavenson began photographing architecture, machinery and still lifes, stressing their formal qualities. She depicted dams, bridges and ships in a manner that highlighted the angular shapes and sweeping curves. In an interview, Ms. Ehrens said Ms. Lavenson had been drawn to the forms, enchanted by “the idea of light on metal, and the way it would gleam in the sunshine.”

In 1932, she was invited to participate in an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, featuring work by a recently formed photo group called f/64. The official members, including Mr. Weston, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, decided to allow auxiliary members to join the exhibition, and Ms. Lavenson was among those chosen.

The f/64 artists’ photographs reflected the same shift away from a painterly style that Mr. Weston had urged in Ms. Lavenson’s work. The resulting images were primarily stark depictions of nature in the American West, presenting photographic reality as art, unadorned.

“Group f/64 was not about differentiation in style: it was about conformity,” said Rebecca Senf, the curator of photography at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Norton family curator at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, at the University of Arizona, where Ms. Lavenson’s archive resides. “As an attempt to distinguish ‘pure’ photography from the soft-focus, highly manipulated and very popular California Pictorialist style, the point of Group f/64 was to present a unified front about what the new modernist approach for art should be.”

That exhibition marked the beginning of the best-known phase of Ms. Lavenson’s career, in which she had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum and even bested the legendary Ansel Adams in a landscape photo contest. (Mr. Weston placed first, Ms. Lavenson second and Mr. Adams fourth. Her prize was $75.)

DESCRIPTIONAlma Lavenson/Alma Lavenson Associates, all rights reserved Snow Blossoms, 1932.

Soon after, Ms. Lavenson married a locally prominent lawyer, Matt Wahrhaftig, gave birth to two sons and began to raise a family. She continued to make and exhibit work throughout her life, but photography would never again be her sole focus. It’s hard not to view this as a function of the limited role for women in society at the time. Even today, though women have achieved a much greater degree of freedom and equality in the workplace, the balance between family and career proves difficult.

“I do think that Lavenson would have had a more acknowledged career if she had been a man and had actively pursued the opportunities that her male colleagues did,” Ms. Senf said.

After her husband died prematurely, Ms. Lavenson devoted herself to charitable causes and traveled the world, documenting disparate cultures in black and white. She had also taken extended journeys as a young woman, including a trip to Mexico to purchase work from Diego Rivera. The list of countries in which she photographed is too long to enumerate, but she managed to visit every continent except Antarctica and Australia. (She did make it to New Zealand, though, which almost counts. Right, Kiwis?)

The resulting pictures, made over several decades, reflect a humanistic style and an anthropologist’s curiosity. Her work has gone largely unseen, as few of the photographs were ever exhibited in museums. While Ms. Lavenson continued to travel and shoot, her Modernist photographs received intermittent recognition throughout the 20th century. She mounted three solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was included in Edward Steichen’s famed “The Family of Man” exhibition, as well as group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Late in life, Ms. Lavenson met Ms. Ehrens, and they began a comprehensive effort to catalog and preserve her archive. The endeavor, which lasted more than a decade, resulted in a major solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1988 and the publication of a book edited by Ms. Ehrens, “Alma Lavenson: Photographs,” which accompanied the show. The exhibition introduced a new generation of viewers to Ms. Lavenson’s work. By then, she had fallen off the radar, having never managed to break into the commercial gallery world â€" which was a fraction of the size it is today, as were the prices garnered for photographic prints in the art market.

“Inspiring” is often a cliché. But in this case, it’s perfectly appropriate. Alma Lavenson died in 1989, at the age of 92. She photographed for almost 70 years, documenting Native Americans in New Mexico, abandoned Gold Rush towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Shinto priests in Japan and just about everything in between. She survived the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and lived long enough to photograph the futuristic Transamerica Pyramid.

We should all be so lucky.

DESCRIPTIONAlma Lavenson/Alma Lavenson Associates, all rights reserved Self-Portrait, 1932.

An exhibition of rare, vintage prints from Alma Lavenson’s Modernist era are on view through June 1 at Gitterman Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1103, in New York.

Jonathan Blaustein is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. He contributes regularly to the blog A Photo Editor, and two of his photo projects have been shown on Lens: “The Value of a Dollar” in 2010 and “MINE” in 2012. Follow him â€" @jblauphoto â€" and @nytimesphoto in Twitter.



Pictures of the Day: England and Elsewhere

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Photos from England, Oklahoma, Afghanistan and Norway.

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, England and Oklahoma.

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Leaving Tehran and Restraints Behind

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Kiana Hayeri has fond memories of her teenage years in Tehran â€" even if she had to dodge the morality police whenever she decided to wear a little more makeup or uncover her hair.

But at 17, her family sent her to live in Toronto so that she could have better opportunities for college and a career. At an age when fitting in at school is important, Ms. Hayeri’s mastery of English was limited to “I don’t speak English.”

Ms. Hayeri, now 24, has spent the last three years documenting people very much like herself. Her first major project, “Your Veil Is a Battleground,” published last year on Lens, showed teenage girls in Tehran living dual lives â€" a proscribed one in public and another pushing limits and striving for personal freedoms in private. Her subjects were not necessarily typical of the country, but in Tehran she found many young people yearning for more.

They were, she felt, exactly who she would have been if she had not emigrated.

Ms. Hayeri followed four of them as they, too, emigrated in search of those freedoms and better economic opportunities. She photographed her 17-year-old subjects in Tehran, as they moved and in the countries where they settled over the last year.

DESCRIPTIONKiana Hayeri Soheila got ready for a birthday party. With all the restrictions she faces at home, she keeps her family life and her social life â€" with which her family does not agree â€" separate.

“I think for all these girls, the families sent them away for exactly the same reason that my family did: for a better future, for more safety, more educational options,” Ms. Hayeri said. “Hoping for a better future.”

Their experiences have been quite different.

Parmida moved with her family to California to study ballet, which was illegal in Iran. “Not only couldn’t she perform, but ballet classes have to be run sort of underground,” Ms. Hayeri said. In the United States, Parmida has continued her ballet lessons and has started ballroom dancing.

Melika moved to Montreal to finish high school and attend college. She lives alone, though her parents visit often. She is generally quiet and shy. “She studies all the time, so grade-wise, she’s doing amazing,” Ms. Hayeri said. “But I don’t think that she’s happy with where she is right now.”

Soheila moved to Toronto with her family, “very religious and restrictive” Sunni Muslims from southern Iran. She has changed a lot since arriving, especially in “the way she dresses and the way she interacts with friends,” Ms. Hayeri said. “Now she lives her life and works at McDonald’s.”

DESCRIPTIONKiana Hayeri Parmida before ballet practice in Tehran. Since ballet is banned in Iran, she practiced underground and worked hard to keep up until she moved to California.

Parastou was a member of the Iranian national junior canoeing team, but her prospects for continued athletic competition were dim because she was a woman, and women are discouraged from participating in public sporting events in Iran. She moved to Australia, hoping to compete there. Now, she works as a lifeguard and teaches swimming while continuing her training.

As new immigrants, each of these four women face similar challenges to those Ms. Hayeri faced when she moved to Canada in 2005. But since then, Ms. Hayeri has found her own path as a successful young photographer. She is glad that she emigrated â€" a move that allowed her to become “a different person.”

Now, though, she is back in Tehran, photographing during the run-up to Iran’s June 14 presidential election.

DESCRIPTIONKiana Hayeri Parastou, a member of Iran’s junior national canoeing and kayaking team, reached for her paddle in Tehran. By Islamic law, the team is required to cover up during outdoor practices.

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



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