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In Flight, John White Shares His Light

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Before she became a staff photographer at The New York Times, Michelle Agins was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where John H. White was already making his mark on the city's photographic scene. He looked out for her and gave her advice an d encouragement, even after he went to The Chicago Sun-Times and she to New York.

Soon after he and the rest of The Sun-Times's photo staff were fired late last month, Ms. Agins went to Chicago for her godson's graduation. While there, she visited Mr. White at his home. Their conversation has been edited into a first-person narrative.

While everybody else was stunned and upset that The Chicago Sun-Times had fired its entire photography staff, I couldn't stop thinking of one man. They did that to John White? The Chairman of the Board? That's like the Bulls getting rid of Michael Jordan.

For a hot minute, my South Side Chicago roots took over - I was ready to roll down.

DESCRIPTIONM. Spencer Green/Associated Press John H. White at a June 6 protest in front of The Chicago Sun Times's headquarters.

John was the photographer I looked up to when I was an intern at The Chicago Daily News, where he was working in the early 1970s. My godfather, John Tweedle, told me to look him up. John looked out for me, encouraged me and nudged my career. I watched him on the streets, in the darkroom and even stood by his side as he carefully put together the portfolio that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

When I visited him, he was not letting the firing change how he felt about himself, or his fellow photographers, one bit.

“A job's not a job because of labor law,” he said. “It's just something you love. It's something you do because it gives you a mission, a life, a purpose, and you do it for the service of others.”

All he had wanted to hear from the executives who let him go was two words that never came: thank you. But even then, he did not respond with anger.

“I light candles, I don't curse the darkness,” he said. “Even now, my colleagues are cursing the darkness. I'm lighting the candles. And I give wings to dreams, I ain't breaking no wings. I'm not clipping any wings. Make a difference in the world. One light. One day. One image.”

John taught me how to fly.

I had been taking pictures since high school, but when I got to The Daily News, I was a copy-girl intern. But I also tried to copy John the minute I saw him walk through the newsroom after an assignment. I would sneak away and go back toward the darkroom - his chapel away from church - and watch him unload his cameras and ask him about his day.

I even tried to walk like he walked. I had seen a lot of photographers on assignment, but to find John White, you had to look in the shadows. He was never where you could see him. He was always where he could be, like he was hovering over in a corner. Like he could see everything in a room. He had this look. He kept his camera low-key. And all of a sudden, he'd pick it up and find the real subject. The one you hadn't seen before.

He didn't do this for prizes, though he won a lot of them. He did it for “consistent excellence.” And for as long as he had been taking pictures, it never got boring or predictable.

“I've got the same set of eyes, nothing's changed,” he said. “Every day, a ba by is born. Every day, someone dies. Every single day. And we capture everything in between. You think of this thing called life and how it's preserved. It's preserved through vision, through photographs.”

DESCRIPTIONJohn H. White “Ice House.”

You've probably figured out by now that John thought about bigger things. He was a religious man, born on a Sunday into a family of preachers in North Carolina. When he tells one and all to “keep in flight,” it's as much spiritual advice as it is professional. He takes that advice himself, even after the slight of seeing one of his pictures published in his old paper with only “Sun-Times Library” as the credit line.

“I can't get caught up in those things,” he said. “You got to look at the big picture, because I know the true photo editor.”

Like a good storyteller - or a preacher - he taught with examples from his life, often talking about moments with his father in North Carolina. He remembered one night walking through a wooded patch with his father, who reached out and grabbed a firefly.

“Look at my hand,” his father said as he gently squeezed the insect. “And look what he's doing. He's making a light. He can't contain his light. God gives us light and we can't contain this light. Be like the lightning bug. Don't let anyone contain your light.”

I was still an intern when, despite protests from some of the other staff photographers, I was sent out to cover how children were dealing with a teachers strike. I went out to Cabrini-Green, passed by a dentist's office and saw a boy sitting in the chair. I went in and asked if I could photograph the dentist, and he agreed.

Nothing much was happening.

I thought it was going to be a boring picture. All of a sudden, the dentist yanked a tooth from the kid's mouth. He didn't tell me he was going to do this. The kid's eyes crossed and his mouth was open. The paper ran it with “He'd Rather Be in School” as the caption. That shot helped the other photographers accept me.

“Everybody remembers that picture, a billion-dollar picture,” John said. “People realized then that she's doing what we did, she's spreading her wings and trying to fly, and you know, it's like you were that lightning bug. You didn't let them contain you and keep you down.”

I swear I didn't even know what the Pulitzer was when I watched him assemble the portfolio that would earn him journalism's highest prize. I stood beside him in the darkroom as he printed (with a towel slung over his left shoulder). I watched him put paper, make careful measurements and lay out a story. He showed me h ow to tell a story.

Years later, John and I both covered Pope John Paul II's Mass in Central Park. I showed off my computer and my new digital camera. I was proud of where he had helped me get. But not as proud as he was.

“It's like your child,” he told me. “And they got a touchdown. You know what I mean? And it wasn't a Hail Mary touchdown, you know what I mean? It was from one end of the line to the other. You know? It required a lot, but you got the touchdown. This is the journey. You go through storms, rain and hurricanes, and forces of evil. You know. But you keepin' the fight.”

John, I was just doing what you taught me: staying in flight and sharing the light.

DESCRIPTIONMichelle Agins/The New York Times John White in his home th is month.

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Pictures of the Day: Senegal and Elsewhere

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Photos from Senegal, South Africa, Israel and Kosovo.

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Production Note

An article was posted on this page inadvertently, before it was ready for publication.

A Fairy Tale in Transylvania

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When Rena Effendi went to Transylvania to photograph hay for National Geographic, she envisioned a fairy tale, someplace almost medieval. But when she arrived in the Gyimes valley, she was disappointed. The scenery had been spoiled, she thought, by modern architecture.

“I was greedy,” Ms. Effendi said. “I wanted to find the real, bucolic, medieval type of scenery, and I couldn't find it there.”

So she consulted an expert.

“I Googled two words: ‘Transylvania' and ‘hay,' ” she said this week in a phone interview from her Cairo home.

Among the first results was Maramures, a Romanian-speaking region where one can find distilleries and mills more than 500 years old. Ms. Effendi, 36, sought advice from Kathleen McLaughlin, a photographer who had previously been there.

When Ms. Effendi arrived, she fell in love with the “Romanian Transylvanian fairy tale” she discovered.

“I found villages where almost all women know how to do embroidery and almost every man knows how to build a house from scratch,” she said.

She stayed with a family of musicians in Hoteni, a village of about 800 people. She slept in a wooden house set in a meadow and ate simple meals prepared with fresh produce from an orchard and a small vegetable garden. During two trips, Ms. Effendi spent about two months in the fields, photographing the hay-making process, which begins around 5 a.m. on dry summer days.

“People spend the day in the field,” she said. “They take their food, they take naps. You see these women climbing on top of the haystack in special trousers so the wind doesn't blow up their skirts.”

Life moves slowly in the villages of Maramures, all of which are nestled alongside streams. It revolves around hay, which is used to feed the cows that produce the milk that ends up on the table. During hay season, the farmers work by hand, moving at a frantic pace. One couple, Gheorghe and Anuta Borca, told Ms. Effendi their honeymoon had been cut short by hay. “They had to start working straight after the wedding,” she said. (They hadn't gone far, honeymooning in their village.)

One of Ms. Effendi's pictures shows three generations of the Borca family at work (Slide 8). “For them, it's a way a life,” she said.

Ms. Effendi asked one family why they kept doing what they do, when they could simply go to a market. “They said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with all this land, then?' ” she recalled. ” ‘It's just going to sit there?' ”

A farmer in Breb told Adam Nicolson, writing for the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, that houses there had cost six haystacks in Communist times.

“Hay is gold,” Ms. Effendi said.

It is also an art: “You can even guess who the owner is by the shape of a haystack,” she said. “They have their individual styles and forms.”

But, while Maramures still has the look of a fairy tale, it is on the verge of vanishing.

“You see it in the clothes people wear,” Ms. Effendi said. “You see small signs of this beautiful agrarian culture fading away.” It shows in the architecture - old people live in old homes, while many young families live in cement houses with bathrooms and television. More and more young people are enchanted by European cities.

“Transylvania is not yet a fossil,” Mr. Nicolson wrote in the magazine. “It is still alive - just - if in need of life support. But it represents one of the great questions for the future: Can the modern world sustain beauty it hasn't created itself?”

Ms. Effendi didn't want to use the juxtaposition of old and new to tell the story of Maramures, though. “I wanted to pay homage to the fairy tale,” she said. “I wanted to show the purity of the landscape and the people living there.”

She recalled a day she spent with a shepherd, who took her to the tent in the mountains where he spent most of his time, grazing sheep. In the past, women had left him because he was alwa ys away. But without a wife, he couldn't have a family to help him support a flock of his own.

“You know what?” he told Ms. Effendi. “If you ask me, ‘What would you choose today, women or sheep?' I'd still choose sheep.' ”

One woman she photographed, Maria, 23, was pregnant and working in the field when they met (Slide 7). She spoke more English than most villagers and told Ms. Effendi that she and her husband had spent a year in France, where he worked in construction. But she missed their home in the fields, which was made of cement and had a bathroom, and they returned.

In Maramures, Maria told Ms. Effendi, she has room for activity of the mind. People in France were preoccupied with the daily distractions of urban life, and they didn't have any room left for “beautiful thoughts.”

Ms. Effendi cannot see herself adopting the Transylvanian lifestyle. “But escaping into that world for some periods of time is wonderful,” she said. “ It's replenishing.”

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Syria, the Philippines and Senegal.

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Why No Byline or Named Source for an Article About a Leak Investigation?

A careful reader of The Times, David Smollar of San Diego, makes some astute observations about an unusual article in Friday's paper. The article caught many people's eyes because it lacked a byline. It also quoted Jill Abramson, the executive editor, and it used an unnamed source to confirm an NBC News report that a retired Marine officer, Gen. James E. Cartwright, is a target of a leak investigation about American cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear program.

As Mr. Smollar noted, the article required some “mental gymnastics” on the part of the reader.

He wrote:

It quotes a “person familiar with the investigation” confirming an investigation of Cartwright a s (the/a) leaker for NY Times stories that used unidentified sources about cyberattacks against Iran by the U.S.

It quotes Jill Abramson as declining comment on matters that involve “confidential sources.”

So here we have an NY Times story, with no byline, that uses a confidential source to confirm an investigation about someone suspected of being a confidential source for a series of NY Times stories. And the NY Times itself refusing to comment on a story written by the NY Times about the NY Times.

He added: “Confusing? You bet! My head was spinning after reading the article.”

I asked the managing editor Dean Baquet to explain the background. He told me that there was a rush Thursday night to confirm the NBC news report. The lack of a byline was “not a political decision” in any way but simply refle cted the number of reporters working on what turned out to be a brief article, he said.

In an e-mail, Mr. Baquet wrote: “It was a short story that numerous people scrambled to confirm when the networks broke it. It seemed odd to have more than one byline, and no one felt any real ownership of it.”

As for the confidentiality of the source, Mr. Baquet couldn't comment on that any more than Ms. Abramson was able to in the article itself.

The use of unnamed sources is never ideal. Sometimes it's necessary to get important information on the record. While I can't disagree entirely with Mr. Smollar's criticism, there probably was no alternative, given the deadline situation.

3:35 p.m. | Updated Friday afternoon, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece online that analyzes and helps mak e sense of the development.



Who\'s a Journalist? A Question With Many Facets and One Sure Answer

Behind almost every correction in The Times, there is a story. In the case of the correction about Alexa O'Brien, the story is a particularly interesting one.

The correction, which was in Wednesday's paper, read:

An article on Tuesday about the role of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in the case of Edward J. Snowden, the former computer contractor who leaked details of National Security Agency surveillance, referred incompletely to Alexa O'Brien, who has closely followed the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of providing military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. While Ms. O'Brien has participated in activist causes like Occupy Wall Street and US Day of Rage, she also works as an independent journalist; she is not solely an activist.

After the article was published, Ms. O'Brien e-mailed me and others at The Times, making the strong case that she is a journalist and should be referred to as one. I passed it along to the corrections desk. The Times, to its credit, considered the case and decided to run a correction.

But this raises a question that is very much of the current moment. Who â€" and what â€" is a journalist? It's not just about semantics.

There is a strong legal component to this discussion: Who will be covered by a federal shield law that would give legal protection to journalists who have promised confidentiality to their sources, if it ever comes to pass? Will it cover only established news organizations or those who get paid for news gathering? Or does it cover everyone with a Facebook page?

The question t akes on added heat in the context of the Obama administration's prosecution of leakers using the Espionage Act, its pursuit of Mr. Assange, and the recent naming of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, as a co-conspirator in a leak case.

Then, quite separately, there's a question of the amount of professional respect shown to those like Ms. O'Brien and the columnist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken major news stories about government surveillance for The Guardian in recent weeks.

Is Mr. Greenwald a “blogger,” as a Times headline referred to him recently? That headline was atop a profile that did not use the word journalist to describe the columnist for The Guardian United States, the New York-based Web site associated with the British newspaper. At the time, I wrote (on Twitter) that I found the headline dismissive. There's nothing wrong with being a blogger, of course â€" I am one myself. But when the media establishment uses the term, it somehow seems to say, “You're not quite one of us.” (And that might be just fine with Mr. Greenwald, who has written disparagingly of some media people, whom he calls “courtiers of power.”)

Bruce Headlam, who edits media coverage in The Times and who was an important voice in deciding that a correction was in order on the reference to Ms. O'Brien, has considered the subject.

“I don't consider ‘blogger' an insult and I don't consider ‘activist' to be an insult, either,” he said. But he acknowledges that “I might be in the minority” on those points.

He also noted, rightly, that these matters have taken on more significance in the current climate, and could be crucial for Mr. Greenwald. (Under fire, the Obama administration has recently said that it won't pursue journalists for doing their jobs.)

On the flip side, but in the same context, the journalistic credentials of at least one established broadcaster came under attack in the last week.

Frank Rich, writing about the NBC-“Meet the Press” anchor David Gregory, smacked him around (as did many others) for asking Mr. Greenwald why he “shouldn't be charged with a crime” for “the extent he aided and abetted” Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker.

In a New York magazine piece, Mr. Rich wrote: “Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he's covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he's conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer.” And he derisively suggested that Mr. Gregory begin to host his network's “Today” show, so that he can “speak truth to power by grilling Paula Deen.”

So, who's a journalist? I could explore the legislative and legal questions, and that may be something worth returning to in this space. (Decisions that have been made in interpreting New Jersey's strong shield law are of particular interest, as is the language before the Senate now on the proposed federal law.)

But for now, I'll offer this admittedly partial definition: A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn't shy away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press â€" the very tension that America's founders had in mind with the First Amendment.

Those who fully meet that description deserve to be respected and protected - not marginalized.



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