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Bill W. - Famous, Yet Seldom Seen

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Kevin Hanlon and Dan Carracino figured they would face a steep learning curve when they started making their first documentary in 2004. They expected to make the usual newbie mistakes when it came, for example, to finding the right visuals. But considering their subject, they should have known better.

Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“We had looked around before to see if anybody had made a documentary on him, and we were surprised to be the first ones,” Mr. Hanlon said. “We must’ve looked like a couple of knuckleheads. We were making a film about an anonymous man and we got no photos.”

What they had, fittingly, was faith. It paid off a year later, when Mr. Hanlon sat in the kitchen of a Long Island man who had sold him six images of Bill W. on eBay. The man hauled out a shoebox and dumped its contents onto a table. All told, there would be some 1,600 images of William Griffith Wilson at meetings, at home, at rest and at play. They provided a rare peek into the life of a man who was as influential as he was anonymous (though Mr. Wilson allowed his name to be made public after his death in 1971).

“We had been going on faith that we would find this stuff,” Mr. Carracino said. “I flew in from California to see what Kevin had picked up. That’s when I said, ‘O.K., now we can make a film.’ ”

“Bill W.” was completed last year and premiered to favorable reviews. It will be screened at some two dozen theaters in June. A catalog and prints from the Bill W. collection will be on sale today at the Salmagundi Club in New York, followed by similar one-day events in other cities, with part of the proceeds going to recovery-related groups.

“To me, some of the really wonderful photos are when he is just a regular person,” Mr. Hanlon said. “There was a series from a picnic held every year, and there’s a photo of Bill picking up a crate of Coca-Colas from a store in Bedford Hills, relaxing in his studio, playing the cello. There was just a wide range of photos.”

The first-time filmmakers had been friends since attending high school in New York. Mr. Carracino was in the electronics business and Mr. Hanlon in real estate when they decided to act on their teenage promise to make a movie one day. Neither had been in A.A., but as they were casting about for ideas, Mr. Hanlon was reading a book on the group’s history. He thought it was “a page-turner,” and suggested to Mr. Carracino that they consider doing their documentary on Mr. Wilson.

The duo began doing interviews and research in late 2004. Though the lack of visuals was daunting, their search took a momentous turn the next year when they learned of 13 images being sold on eBay. They bid, like newbies, about $300 for each of the six images they would eventually win. Considering that similar photos in a previous sale had gone for about $60 an image, the seller agreed to meet Mr. Hanlon to discuss selling more.

A lot more.

The seller, whom the filmmakers declined to identify, had obtained the Wilson pictures as part of a larger lot purchased from the photographer’s estate. He had sorted them out and almost tossed them. “He thought they were from a Fuller Brush convention in the 1950s,” Mr. Hanlon said. But when he noticed that some of the negative sleeves were marked “Wilson,” he started digging around and realized they were of the A.A. co-founder.

DESCRIPTIONThe Bill W. Collection/Page 124 Productions, LLC, all rights reserved Bill relaxing at his desk. The Prayer of St. Francis, which he referred to often, sits on his desk. There are many versions of this prayer, including Bill’s own interpretation, which he included in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.

Purchasing, organizing and restoring the photographs cost Mr. Hanlon and Mr. Carracino “north of six figures,” but added a dimension to the film that was priceless, they said. To use them without violating A.A.’s tradition of anonymity, they blurred the faces of people who appeared with Bill or his wife, Lois. Through the pictures, and through the final film, they got a sense of the great sacrifices Mr. Wilson made through the years.

“He was always looking and expecting to be done, but he was never done,” Mr. Carracino said. “He’s like Jimmy Stewart in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ where he thinks he’s about to go on his honeymoon, he’s about to leave, but then he has to stay. That’s Bill Wilson’s life. He was constantly being called upon to do more and more and more for A.A., and he always answered the bell.”

Among the things he gave up was the chance to be a regular member of the fellowship he helped start, because other members not only held him in high esteem, but placed him on a pedestal. The filmmakers, however, set out to create a more well-rounded and grounded portrait of the man, who sought privacy in a studio he built behind his suburban New York home.

Mr. Carracino said the pictures gave him a clear sense that Mr. Wilson had known he was an historic figure. So, too, did the photographer.

“These photos are journalism,” Mr. Carracino said. “The photographer is aware he is photographing an important person and giving you a sense of who that guy is. He had access.”

What he does not have, at least publicly, is a name.

“We think we know who he is,” Mr. Hanlon said. “But we chose not to disclose his name because we’re certain he’s an A.A. member.”

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Colombia, Spain and Vatican City.

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Who Will Crowdfund the Crowdfunder?

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The crowdfunding platform Emphas.is has helped 60 photographers finance their personal projects and books over the past two years. Now, it is trying to help finance itself.

And how could Emphas.is raise money to expand its reach and help even more photographers? Through its own Emphas.is campaign.

The company’s founders, the husband-and-wife team of Karim Ben Khelifa and Tina Ahrens, are turning to the community of photographers it has nurtured. “We’ve run Emphas.is on a shoestring up until now,” Ms. Ahrens said. “Our company was built to be sustainable, but not necessarily to make a profit, so we are not attractive to most investors.”

DESCRIPTIONTamara Abdul Hadi Hisham, Lebanese. From the project “Picture an Arab Man,” in which Tamara Abdul Hadi photographed semi-nude Arab men of diverse backgrounds, hoping to combat stereotypes and highlight unexplored aspects of their identities.

Mr. Khelifa, a photographer whose work has been featured on Lens, added, “So that’s why the next logical step was to say to the community that obviously cares about what we are doing, ‘Lend us a helping hand to grow to the next stage.’ ”

They hope to raise at least $50,000 so they can support more projects, hire more staff and bring an enhanced experience to mobile platforms. The fund-raising, Ms. Ahrens said, is also a way to show donors “that people care, that they use Emphas.is and they are ready to back it up.”

Emphas.is started as a necessity for Mr. Khelifa, a veteran photojournalist, who saw assignments drying up for him and his friends in 2009. Few magazines were willing to pay for overseas coverage, and even fewer were interested in the in-depth stories he wanted to pursue. He decided that to survive in the profession, he had to solve the problem himself.

Introduced in 2011, the Emphas.is platform connects the people who want to tell hard-to-finance stories with the people who want to see them. Contributors subscribe to a project and receive rewards and updates from photographers in the field.

Emphas.is is not the first crowdfunding enterprise, and many photographers have raised money successfully on platforms like Kickstarter. But it is dedicated to documentary photography and visual storytelling, and it provides a closer and more active relationship between viewers and photographers, whose projects are screened by a board of reviewers.

“What we have going for us is that we are journalists and we are curated,” Ms. Ahrens said. “We keep within our ethics, and the quality of the work and the subject are very important.”

DESCRIPTIONLaura El-Tantawy/VII Mentor Program In Egypt, Safeya Sayed Shedeed, the mother of a protester who was killed by police officers, wept as she waited to hear former President Hosni Mubarak’s sentencing. From the project “In the Shadow of the Pyramids.”

The success rate is also much higher than Kickstarter’s. Emphas.is finances 72 percent of its projects, while Kickstarter finances around 44 percent.

Lens has featured many stories that received funding through Emphas.is, including Matt Eich’s “The Seven Cities,” Andri Tambunan’s “Against All Odds,” Per-Anders Pettersson’s “Soweto,” Rian Dundon’s “Changsha” and Patrick Brown’s “Trading to Extinction.”

Originally, Emphas.is only financed projects that had not yet started or were partly finished. Last year, it expanded into crowdfunded books, finding that, by offering preordered copies or special editions, people could finance a book completely before it was published.

Emphas.is Publishing has begun to fill a void for photographers who can’t afford to pay publishers thousands of dollars to print their documentary and photojournalism projects. But the group’s main mission is still making sure that difficult, issue-oriented stories can be told. Emphas.is was created out of a combination of idealism and desperation. Even as the economic landscape has continued to change, it has proved that photographers can raise money for their personal projects.

Now it is time to see if photographers will help Emphas.is help photographers.

DESCRIPTIONNeil Ever Osborne A green sea turtle breached the surface for a breath near Maui, Hawaii. From the project “Return of the Black Turtle.”

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Pictures of the Day: Myanmar and Elsewhere

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Photos from Myanmar, India, France and Czech Republic.

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Fending Off the Heat of the Dog Days of Spring

Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

On Thursday, New Yorkers in Brooklyn rallied to the challenge of the area’s first hot day of the season. Eli Belizaire, in Park Slope, tackled an ice cream cone. John Loftin sold cold water at the intersection of Kings Highway and Remson Avenue in East Flatbush. And the driver of a red convertible, with a towel on his head to cool off, decided he might as well go shirtless.

Bryan Thomas for The New York Times


Tickled by America’s Quirky Coincidences

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Inauguration day in President Abraham Lincoln’s time was on March 4. That’s also the photographer Joshua Yospyn’s birthday â€" and if you’re given to seeing meaning in coincidences, as he is, it’s a pretty big deal.

“I’m a little superstitious about things, and Lincoln supposedly had a terrific sense of humor,” said Mr. Yospyn, 36. “I like to think he would’ve enjoyed this same project, were it done 150 years ago.”

That project, “American Sequitur,” is a series of gleefully odd juxtapositions. It’s a photo set whose sequencing is essential to the humor, and understanding, of the series.

It’s natural that Mr. Yospyn, who is based in Washington, would have a mind for noticing patterns or strange relationships, however subtle they might be. His eye is drawn to the quirks of our nation’s cultural and political landscape, and as anybody who follows the goings-on in Washington knows, it is a peculiar landscape indeed.

Investigating coincidences is how he makes some sense of it all.

“There is a gushing reservoir of irony, whimsy and pride in this country,” Mr. Yospyn said.

DESCRIPTIONJoshua Yospyn God’s ark of safety, Maryland, 2012.

After a girlfriend introduced him to photography more than a decade ago, he worked sporadic freelance jobs and eventually started making freelance photo essays for TBD.com, a now-defunct local news Web site. That work made him think of his photographs as storytelling sets rather than collections of discrete moments.

His “American Sequitur” series, culled from more than 300 photos he has taken since 2009, started to take shape at the suggestion of Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb at a workshop in 2011. With their encouragement, Mr. Yospyn pursued the project to last year’s presidential conventions and beyond.

He received praise from other high places: Stephen Crowley, a New York Times staff photographer who can make quirky or snappy compositions even at a staid hearing, saw Mr. Yospyn’s work at a portfolio review.

“I was looking at it and I was thinking, ‘God, I wish I had shot this picture,’ ” Mr. Crowley said.

DESCRIPTIONJoshua Yospyn Ronald at the Cherry Blossom Parade in Washington, 2010.

While Mr. Yospyn’s whimsical photo romp is somewhat political in nature â€" almost a given since he lives and works in the capital â€" he says he has no partisan allegiance and has voted both Republican and Democratic tickets.

“I have opinions,” he said. “But I’m literally right in the middle, like smack middle independent.”

What interests him, “kind of to the extreme,” is the vehemence with which the opposing sides express themselves. “I’m highly interested in topics like American jingoism â€" the extreme battles that go on in this country and the positions that people take on one side or the other,” he said.

But his aim isn’t to incense either side. Rather, he seeks to emphasize the sillier aspects of the American political experiment â€" to poke fun and to have fun. Photography these days just isn’t funny enough, he said.

At the Look3 photography festival in Charlottesville, Va., in 2009, he said, he was overwhelmed by all the serious topics that photojournalists make it their mission to document. He went to a talk given by one of his favorite contemporaries, Martin Parr, who is no slouch at making weird pictures. Amid all the grimness, Mr. Yospyn was struck by Mr. Parr’s wit and dry sense of humor, even if he did hail from our old colonial overseer, Britain. Mr. Parr inspired him to ask himself, “He’s doing that in England â€" what if I did it here?”

“Plus,” Mr. Yospyn said, “we both seem to enjoy working in terrible weather.”

Sometimes it seems oddness follows Mr. Yospyn, both in front of and behind the lens. In Grand Central Terminal in New York, he happened on a scene swiped right off a Monopoly board. An elderly man with a copy of The New York Post at his feet was nodding off, almost completely horizontal. He was slouched next to a much more aristocratic-looking and upright gentleman, who was reading The Times.

“The man next to him at the next table is completely alert with whatever he’s reading,” said Mr. Yospyn, who hovered, taking pictures.

A woman, out of the frame, gave him a strange look as he worked, wondering what the relationship here was.

“I just sort of turned to her and put my finger on my mouth and said, ‘Shh,’ ” he said. “And then I just walked away.”

That moment, by the way, was on Oct. 9, 2012, a mere day after Steven Spielberg’s bio-pic “Lincoln” premiered at the New York Film Festival. Coincidence?

DESCRIPTIONJoshua Yospyn The 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

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Rare Glimpses of Birds of Paradise

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If patience is a virtue, Tim Laman will be in great shape if there’s an afterlife.

He has logged thousands of hours sitting perfectly still in the treetops of dense New Guinea rain forests to photograph all 39 unique species of birds of paradise. These birds, famed for brilliant colors and intricate courtship dances, are beautiful to look at â€" once you find them. Over eight years and 18 expeditions, Mr. Laman and his scientific partner Edwin Scholes, traveled by bush plane, four-wheel drive, boat and foot to very remote and extremely rugged areas. Mr. Laman became the first person to photograph all of the birds of paradise species in the wild. Some had never been photographed in their natural habitat.

Few people have ever seen these spectacular creatures in the wild. But now, because of Mr. Laman’s arduous quest, you can see them in very easy-to-find trees: in Charlottesville, Va. The images are being exhibited on large banners suspended in old oak trees along an outdoor pedestrian mall during this year’s Look3 photography festival, from June 13 through June 15. Curated by Melinda Harris and Yolanda Cuomo, the festival will also feature exhibits and talks by Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas, Gregory Crewdson, Carrie Mae Weems, Richard Misrach and Michael Nichols.

DESCRIPTIONJon Golden Mr. Laman’s birds of paradise pictures will be on display at the Look3 festival in Charlottesville, Va.

The festival’s roots go back 25 years to gatherings of photographers in Mr. Nichols’s backyard in Berkeley, Calif. By 2005, he had moved to Charlottesville, and was attracting 500 people to his home for the annual event. Look3 became a full-blown festival in 2007 and has since become one of the most important American photography events. It is a tribal gathering, of sorts, for both successful and aspiring American photographers.

Mr. Laman will give a talk this year and have a book signing for his and Mr. Scholes’s book “Birds of Paradise,” published by the National Geographic Society.

The book project started when Mr. Laman, who has a doctorate in rain forest ecology from Harvard, pitched the idea to the National Geographic magazine. He photographed 19 species over the next four years and the article was published in 2007. Having gone that far, Mr. Laman decided to try to photograph all 39 species, a goal made possible with support from Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology and the National Geographic Society.

DESCRIPTIONTim Laman A female Brown Sicklebill (Epimachus meyeri). Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea.

“Few Westerners ever get to see the bird of paradise’s courtship display in the wild,” Mr. Laman wrote in National Geographic about his early expeditions. “It took a lot of time, effort and help from specialist Edwin Scholes and from local people to locate display sites in the remote forests of New Guinea. Once we found one, we built a blind where I could wait out of sight. Then came the long hours of anticipation. At some sites â€" even after spending many days in blinds â€" I never got any pictures because the male never came and displayed.

“But then there were those moments when the birds did show up. I experienced heart-thumping seconds when I saw such scenes as the blue bird of paradise flip over to his upside-down position and perform his astonishing hanging display, spreading his breast plumes into a fan, bouncing and buzzing, and waving his tail wires. He did something that is totally ordinary in his world but truly bizarre in ours. Being a witness to such spectacles of nature made all the hard work and discomfort worthwhile.”

Because food was plentiful and there were few predators in the rain forests, sexual selection was the main driving force for evolution, and the birds of paradise developed brilliant colors and elaborate courtship displays. And since most of their habitats are so remote, the birds have developed without interference from humans. Only three of the species are endangered right now, but that’s changing fast because of pressure on forests from logging and palm oil plantations, Mr. Laman said.

“One of my goals in my work is to bring more attention to the earth’s biodiversity that we should protect,” said Mr Laman, 51. “And the birds of paradise are really spectacular little birds that can get people really motivated to help save the rainforest in New Guinea”

DESCRIPTIONTim Laman Wallace’s Standardwing Bird of Paradise (Semioptera wallacei). Halmahera, Indonesia.

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Pictures of the Day: Germany and Elsewhere

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Photos from Germany, Turkey, the West Bank and Iran.

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Pictures of the Day: Turkey and Elsewhere

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Photos from Turkey, China, Gaza City and Afghanistan.

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