Pictures of the Day: Washington and Elsewhere

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Photos from Washington, D.C., Chile, Iran and Afghanistan.

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Pictures of the Day: India and Elsewhere

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Photos from India, Lebanon, North Korea and Indonesia.

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Hoop Dreams in Oaxaca\'s Hills

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Any proper town in Latin America has a church facing a plaza - except the towns of the Sierra Norte region of Mexico, where Jorge Santiago is from.

“In my part of the Sierra, the basketball courts are like the zócalo in the colonial city,” Mr. Santiago said, using a Mexican word for “plaza.” “It's really the most important part of the town. A respectable town has a church, and a basketball court in front of the church.”

Call it the postcolonial era - for the last 80 years, the people who live in this mountainous part of Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca, have been crazy about basketball. Introduced to the region by a president who wanted to unite, or perhaps distract, the various indigenous groups, the sport has taken root and become more popular than soccer. It occupies a physical place of honor, with the courts built on the few flat stretches of any town.

Jorge Santiago San Cristobal Lachirioag, 2009.

“Basketball was really important to me,” Mr. Santiago said of his childhood in Guelatao de Juárez. “There was nothing to do. The only place to get some satisfaction was on the basketball court. I really believe it was one of the only things that offered an opportunity for the people of the Sierra to be different from the rest of Mexico.”

Just how different is evident in “Identity at Play.” The series explores basketball and the attendant rituals that have come to surround hoop culture in the Sierra, where basketball tournaments are intertwined with local customs and celebrations. As unlikely as it might sound, the sport has helped foster a sense of community.

Not that Mr. Santiago knew that growing up. In his town, there were 300 people and two television stations, one of which carried N.B.A. games. He left to study business in Mexico City, but returned to Oaxaca after graduation. He had already begun taking photographs, thanks to a workshop he had participated in as a teenager.

At first, Mr. Santiago was interested in documenting migration. While researching that topic, he came across “True Tales From Another Mexico” by Sam Quinones, which had a story about an Oaxaca native who started a “basketball movement” in Los Angeles.

“That's when I realized how important basketball is when you don't have it,” he said.

Jorge Santiago San Pedro Cajonos, 2012.

When he first started taking pictures, he concentrated too much on the sport itself. It was not until he moved to Pittsburgh, where his wife was studying, that he realized he needed to place the sport in the region's cu ltural context.

“People will sacrifice the flattest space in a town to build a basketball court,” he said. “Then they end up using it just like a plaza, like a social place. It's not only the space where sport happens. There are weddings there. All the dances take place on the court. There are political meetings there.”

Tournaments are held in dozens of villages, timed to the feast days of the town's patron saint. That adds yet another dimension to the sport's significance, with political and religious beliefs coming together.

“There is one photo where they are sacrificing a bull at the same time they are cutting the ribbon for the court,” Mr. Santiago said. “It's interesting how all these get combined in basketball.”

Players from different teams go from feast to feast, vying for prize money, which ranges from 15,000 to 40,000 pesos (about $1,100 to $3,000). The big event of the season is in Guelatao's Copa Benito Juárez, named after the Mexican president who was born there, which attracts as many as 200 teams over a five-day period.

The prize money is often supplied by migrants from the area who now live in the United States. Many of them come back for the festivities, sometimes playing on courts whose color schemes mimic N.B.A. courts.

Mr. Santiago, who stopped playing basketball once he took up photography, is now following another aspect of migrant life.

“I'm doing a project on the houses built by migrants in their hometowns,” he said. “Most of them are abandoned. They start building the house after having been in the States a while. But most of them never come back.”

Jorge Santiago Fireworks over a basketball court.

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Brazil and India.

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Bringing Invisible Stories to Instagram Followers

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A year after Radcliffe Roye went to New Orleans to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina, his archives were crammed with hundreds of 4-by-5 images that sat unseen and unpublished. He wonders now whether, if Instagram had existed at the time, he would have had a better opportunity to share the voices of the people working to rebuild their city.

Last year, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Breezy Point, Queens, he was ready. With only his smartphone, he uploaded a stream of haunting and raw images of the devastation to Instagram, the photo-sharing site, where he now has nearly 27,000 followers. A few days later, The New Yorker came calling.

Telling stories this way has always fascinated Mr. Roye, a 43-year-old Jamaican photographer who cares deeply about “the forgotten man” - the diverse, blue-collar residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He chats up people on the street and, with his smartphone and some processing with a filter app, takes their portrait.

†œMy Instagram account has become a way for me to question everything around me,” said Mr. Roye, who has uploaded roughly 2,000 images in the past year. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people's faces - forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.”

Ruddy Roye“William Frazer.”

His subject's faces often dominate the square frame, their eyes glinting. The closeness is intentional, he said: a way to provoke his viewers to question their thoughts on race, gender and income inequality. Each image is accompanied by a description of the subject or location, followed by a sequence of hashtags to make it easier fo r his viewers to follow each of his series. His most popular searches to date are #iamaman, #relevance, #poverty, #blackportraiture, #elements and #queenspride.

Mr. Roye says his work depends on developing relationships based on trust, which means spending time with subjects to discover their personal stories. By the time he asks them if he can take their photograph, the bond has been solidified. He is almost never turned away.

Last week he uploaded a vivid image (below) of a young girl in tears, gripping her father with her small hands. A caption on a previous image explained it: “A distraught father strolls into the shadows of Washington Park (Fort Greene Park) hours after learning from the courts that he was not allowed to go back home to be with his daughter. ‘I am a childless father,' he whispered, fighting back tears.”

Immediately after Mr. Roye posted that photo, a stream of his followers began commenting.

Ruddy Roye “Jesse - Brooklyn.”

“I want people to think about Jesse tonight and what he is going through,” he said of the father. “We all have been Jesse in some form in our lives, experiencing loss and despair.”

Mr. Roye did not set out to be a photographer while growing up in Jamaica; his mother did not consider it a proper profession. He started his journalism career writing stories for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer, but he was dissatisfied with the pictures that accompanied his stories. He decided to take them himself.

Within months, he landed his first photo assignment - to document the many squatters who had built makeshift homes on top of a discontinued train line running 120 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston. He wound up walking the lin e, literally.

It still has not been an easy journey.

“A photojournalist is not a job that a child is told to be,” said Mr. Roye, who originally planned to be an English teacher. “When I go back home, I ask photographers if they have a body of work. Many of them, studio and event photographers, have no idea what I am talking about.”

Mr. Roye moved to Brooklyn in 2000, bringing with him his slides from the railroad project. Within a few months, a friend helped him secure an interview with the photography department at The Associated Press. When he showed the editors his slides, many of them were stunned.

“I remember one of the editors saying to me, ‘If the photojournalists in Jamaica could photograph the way they photograph cricket, your country would have some of the best photojournalists in the world,' ” he said.

That interview led to a freelancing contract with The A.P., along with work for publications like Ebony and Jet magazine . In 2002, he traveled back to Jamaica to photograph fashion trends of the underground dancehall movement for Vogue.

Mr. Roye said he considered his images on Instagram an extension of the work that has always moved him. It's just that, now, he has a platform to reach a broader audience.

He will quickly challenge those who say smartphone photography is not real photojournalism, though he has no intention of abandoning his digital or film cameras. For Mr. Roye, it has always been about the story behind the image and how the image is shared.

A few months ago, he got a chest tattoo of a caricature of himself peering into a 4-by-5 film camera. Someone graciously used Mr. Roye's smartphone to take a photograph of the moment.

Which, of course, he immediately shared with his followers on Instagram.

Ruddy Roye“Image Vendor.”

Follow @RAjah1, @Whitney_Rich and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Bringing Invisible Stories to Instagram Followers

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

A year after Radcliffe Roye went to New Orleans to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina, his archives were crammed with hundreds of 4-by-5 images that sat unseen and unpublished. He wonders now whether, if Instagram had existed at the time, he would have had a better opportunty to share the voices of the people working to rebuild their city.

Last year, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Breezy Point, Queens, he was ready. With only his smartphone, he uploaded a stream of haunting and raw images of the devastation to Instagram, the photo-sharing site, where he now has nearly 27,000 followers. A few days later, The New Yorker came calling.

Telling stories this way has always fascinated Mr. Roye, a 43-year-old Jamaican photographer who cares deeply about “the forgotten man” â€" the diverse, blue-collar residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He chats up people on the street and, with his smartphone and some processing with a filter app, takes their portrait.

“My Instagram account has become a way for me to question ! everything around me,” said Mr. Roye, who has uploaded roughly 2,000 images in the past year. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people’s faces â€" forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.”

Ruddy Roye“William Frazer.”

His subject’s faces often dominate the square frame, their eyes glinting. The closeness is intentional, he said: a way to provoke his viewers to question their thoughts on race, gender and income inequality. Each image is accompanied by a description of the subject or location, followed by a sequence of hashtags to make it easier for his viewers to follow each of his series. His most popular searches to date are #iaaman, #relevance, #poverty, #blackportraiture, #elements and #queenspride.

Mr. Roye says his work depends on developing relationships based on trust, which means spending time with subjects to discover their personal stories. By the time he asks them if he can take their photograph, the bond has been solidified. He is almost never turned away.

Last week he uploaded a vivid image (below) of a young girl in tears, gripping her father with her small hands. A caption on a previous image explained it: “A distraught father strolls into the shadows of Washington Park (Fort Greene Park) hours after learning from the courts that he was not allowed to go back home to be with his daughter. ‘I am a childless father,’ he whispered, fighting back tears.”

Immediately after Mr. Roye posted that photo, a stream of his followers began commenting.

Ruddy Roye “Jesse â€" Brooklyn.”

“I want people to think about Jesse tonight and what he is going through,” he said of the father. “We all have been Jesse in some form in our lives, experiencing loss and despair.”

Mr. Roye did not set out to be a photographer while growing up in Jamaica; his mother did not consider it a proper profession. He started his journalism career writing stories for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer, but he was dissatisfied with the pictures that accompanied his stories. He decided to take them himself.

Within months, he landed his first photo assignment â€" to document the many squatters who had built makeshift homes on top of a discontinued train line running 120 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston. He wound up walking the line, literally.

It still has not been an easy journey.

“A photojournalist is not a job that a child is told to be,” said Mr. Roye, whooriginally planned to be an English teacher. “When I go back home, I ask photographers if they have a body of work. Many of them, studio and event photographers, have no idea what I am talking about.”

Mr. Roye moved to Brooklyn in 2000, bringing with him his slides from the railroad project. Within a few months, a friend helped him secure an interview with the photography department at The Associated Press. When he showed the editors his slides, many of them were stunned.

“I remember one of the editors saying to me, ‘If the photojournalists in Jamaica could photograph the way they photograph cricket, your country would have some of the best photojournalists in the world,’ ” he said.

That interview led to a freelancing contract with The A.P., along with work for publications like Ebony and Jet magazine. In 2002, he traveled back to Jamaica to photograph fashion trends of the underground dancehall movement for Vogue.

Mr. Roye said he considered his images on Instagra! m an exte! nsion of the work that has always moved him. It’s just that, now, he has a platform to reach a broader audience.

He will quickly challenge those who say smartphone photography is not real photojournalism, though he has no intention of abandoning his digital or film cameras. For Mr. Roye, it has always been about the story behind the image and how the image is shared.

A few months ago, he got a chest tattoo of a caricature of himself peering into a 4-by-5 film camera. Someone graciously used Mr. Roye’s smartphone to take a photograph of the moment.

Which, of course, he immediately shared with his followers on Instagram.

Ruddy Roye“Image Vendor.”

Follow @RAjah1, @hitney_Rich and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Bringing Invisible Stories to Instagram Followers

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

A year after Radcliffe Roye went to New Orleans to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina, his archives were crammed with hundreds of 4-by-5 images that sat unseen and unpublished. He wonders now whether, if Instagram had existed at the time, he would have had a better opportunty to share the voices of the people working to rebuild their city.

Last year, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Breezy Point, Queens, he was ready. With only his smartphone, he uploaded a stream of haunting and raw images of the devastation to Instagram, the photo-sharing site, where he now has nearly 27,000 followers. A few days later, The New Yorker came calling.

Telling stories this way has always fascinated Mr. Roye, a 43-year-old Jamaican photographer who cares deeply about “the forgotten man” â€" the diverse, blue-collar residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He chats up people on the street and, with his smartphone and some processing with a filter app, takes their portrait.

“My Instagram account has become a way for me to question ! everything around me,” said Mr. Roye, who has uploaded roughly 2,000 images in the past year. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people’s faces â€" forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.”

Ruddy Roye“William Frazer.”

His subject’s faces often dominate the square frame, their eyes glinting. The closeness is intentional, he said: a way to provoke his viewers to question their thoughts on race, gender and income inequality. Each image is accompanied by a description of the subject or location, followed by a sequence of hashtags to make it easier for his viewers to follow each of his series. His most popular searches to date are #iaaman, #relevance, #poverty, #blackportraiture, #elements and #queenspride.

Mr. Roye says his work depends on developing relationships based on trust, which means spending time with subjects to discover their personal stories. By the time he asks them if he can take their photograph, the bond has been solidified. He is almost never turned away.

Last week he uploaded a vivid image (below) of a young girl in tears, gripping her father with her small hands. A caption on a previous image explained it: “A distraught father strolls into the shadows of Washington Park (Fort Greene Park) hours after learning from the courts that he was not allowed to go back home to be with his daughter. ‘I am a childless father,’ he whispered, fighting back tears.”

Immediately after Mr. Roye posted that photo, a stream of his followers began commenting.

Ruddy Roye “Jesse â€" Brooklyn.”

“I want people to think about Jesse tonight and what he is going through,” he said of the father. “We all have been Jesse in some form in our lives, experiencing loss and despair.”

Mr. Roye did not set out to be a photographer while growing up in Jamaica; his mother did not consider it a proper profession. He started his journalism career writing stories for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer, but he was dissatisfied with the pictures that accompanied his stories. He decided to take them himself.

Within months, he landed his first photo assignment â€" to document the many squatters who had built makeshift homes on top of a discontinued train line running 120 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston. He wound up walking the line, literally.

It still has not been an easy journey.

“A photojournalist is not a job that a child is told to be,” said Mr. Roye, whooriginally planned to be an English teacher. “When I go back home, I ask photographers if they have a body of work. Many of them, studio and event photographers, have no idea what I am talking about.”

Mr. Roye moved to Brooklyn in 2000, bringing with him his slides from the railroad project. Within a few months, a friend helped him secure an interview with the photography department at The Associated Press. When he showed the editors his slides, many of them were stunned.

“I remember one of the editors saying to me, ‘If the photojournalists in Jamaica could photograph the way they photograph cricket, your country would have some of the best photojournalists in the world,’ ” he said.

That interview led to a freelancing contract with The A.P., along with work for publications like Ebony and Jet magazine. In 2002, he traveled back to Jamaica to photograph fashion trends of the underground dancehall movement for Vogue.

Mr. Roye said he considered his images on Instagra! m an exte! nsion of the work that has always moved him. It’s just that, now, he has a platform to reach a broader audience.

He will quickly challenge those who say smartphone photography is not real photojournalism, though he has no intention of abandoning his digital or film cameras. For Mr. Roye, it has always been about the story behind the image and how the image is shared.

A few months ago, he got a chest tattoo of a caricature of himself peering into a 4-by-5 film camera. Someone graciously used Mr. Roye’s smartphone to take a photograph of the moment.

Which, of course, he immediately shared with his followers on Instagram.

Ruddy Roye“Image Vendor.”

Follow @RAjah1, @hitney_Rich and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.