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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Indonesia, Austria and South Africa.

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Indonesia, Austria and South Africa.

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From Russia to Georgia, a Lesson in Relativity

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Jana Romanova has been compiling a handbook of rules for relatives. Unconditional support is one of the big ones. So, too, is your duty to fix another relative’s mistake as soon as you can. And her favorite?

“You can tell the truth to your relative anytim.. Even if he becomes angry, you will not lose him,” she said. “A relative is yours forever. Nothing changes.”

These insights came to her the hard way, 13 years after her paternal grandparents, Keto and Peter, were murdered. Though Ms. Romanova grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, her grandmother Keto hailed from Georgia; she moved to Russia after marrying Peter, an army officer. For years, Keto remained the linchpin for the Georgian side of the family, an extended clan that Ms. Romanova never met. A few years ago, she got to thinking: who were all these people back in Georgia?

DESCRIPTIONJana Romanova “A studio portrait of Keto, my grandmother,” Jana Romanova writes. “! Probably the image was made shortly after her wedding. These photographs were sent to Georgian relatives by Keto from St. Petersburg and other places where she traveled with her family during the period from 50th to 80th. All the information about the dates and places is missing.”

“In Russia and Europe, the idea of family is something small,” Ms. Romanova, 28, said. “It’s your parents, your grandparents, your children and uncles. It’s not really big. There’s a lot of them you won’t even meet. But in Georgia, it’s completely different. For them, family is something really big. If you are a relative, it means you are accepted into a big community. It’s very, very important. It’s more important than the government or friends.”

Her exploration of her Georgian roots resulted in a handmade book and multimedia project titled “Shvilishvili” â€" child of a child, or grandchild. It consists of a series of portraits, each linked to the next by a common relative. It alsofeatures many of her grandmother’s photographs of her life in St. Petersburg, and it is capped by a back story that turns the titular concept on its head.

After deciding to embark on the project, Ms. Romanova traveled to Georgia in January 2012 to connect with her grandmother’s cousin and daughter. They were the two relatives she remembered as being closest to her grandmother, and also the first contacts she found.

They received her warmly.

“It was like, ‘Oh, you finally came! We’ve been waiting for you!’ ” she recalled. “They were really fantastic. I was astonished. How should I act? What should I say?”

DESCRIPTIONJana Romanova “All the images that Keto sent to her relatives to Tbilisi and other Georgian towns and villages were kept by these ! families ! in old plastic bags for many years. By looking though piles of these photographs, I was trying to find any chronology to build her lifeline, but in the end realized that due to the lack of information it’s no longer possible, and everything I can do is just look at them as they are, old photographs, probably with my grandmother. So I put them back into the plastic bags.”

If anything, she listened and looked. One relative led to another, some close by and others in distant cities. She suggested her idea of a series of “chained portraits.” The logistics seemed daunting, but they worked themselves out on subsequent trips.

“In the end, the chain was who could go with me to another relative; who wanted to be in a photo with people from different towns,” she said. “Usually, it was the person who wanted to see somebody they had not seen in some time, or who just wanted to go to another city. It was a very organic thing.”

Word got around fast, so by the time she arrived inanother town or village, people were ready and waiting. A lot of them remarked that she looked like her grandmother, especially in the eyes. Many knew about her grandmother’s life in St. Petersburg because she had constantly written letters and sent pictures. In every house she entered, the pictures and postcards were ready to be shown.

DESCRIPTIONJana Romanova “My uncle Oleg and my grandmother Keto. Date and place unknown.”

“I had no idea how she lived,” Ms. Romanova said. “Looking at those images was like an offline Facebook. This was, to me, the way she wanted to present her life to her relatives. It looked like a happy life. Walking with her children â€" my father and my uncle. Travel shots and photographs of her home. Regular life, but very warm.”!

Ju! st as ubiquitous as the pictures was the question posed to her: How did her grandparents die? All that these relatives had known, from a letter sent by a friend, was that the elderly couple had been killed. And with the one common connection between the Georgian and Russian sides of the family gone, all that ensued was silence.

“They were upset that neither my father or uncle had told them,” Ms. Romanova said. “It was a complete misconnection. They asked me all the time, but I couldn’t tell them. It was not me who had to tell them this fact.”

But once she told her father, Archil, about the incessant questions, he went to Georgia and told the relatives what had happened.

“My grandparents were killed by my cousin,” Ms. Romanova said. “That’s why I called my project ‘Shvilishvili,’ because it was a grandchild, a child of a child. In the end, you find out they were killed by their grandchild. When you close the book and go to the title, ‘Grandchild’ â€" what does it man to be a relative? It all changes. It becomes a different story.”

But, as the rules she is writing in her handbook say, blood endures even after blood has been spilled.

“They forgave everybody for this,” she said of her Georgian family. “Now they’re calling each other. They write to me on Facebook. Now, I suddenly got a lot of new people in my life.”

It’s all in the pictures, from beginning to end. In the first image of the series, an older relative is shown with a glass of sand from the grave of Ms. Romanova’s grandmother’s grandmother.

“They gave me this bottle of sand from her grave and asked me to bring it to St. Petersburg, to the grave of my grandmother,” she said. “That’s how it appears in the last picture, with my uncle at her grave. It’s a chain, but it’s also a circle.”

Jana Romanova “My grandparents Keto and Peter with Keto’s father Archil, and their children Oleg and Archil (named after his grandfather).”

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Preserving the Voice of Vanishing Cultures

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Chris Rainier has spent three decades photographing ancient cultures, often in places that cartographers have labeled uncharted, among “peoples from the past who were living in the present.” As he has repeatedly returned to New Guin ea, South America and Africa, he has witnessed an onslaught of global American culture and technology erode the remnants of those cultures. Time is running short to preserve knowledge that he believes is important for all of humankind.

Mr. Rainier has dedicated himself to helping save the intellectual and linguistic diversity of endangered societies through the National Geographic Enduring Voices Project. He has also used technology to help create opportunities for people who are not technologically connected to tell their narratives in his Last Mile Technology Program.

“We consider biological diversity of these different flora and fauna crucial to our survival, but don't think about intellectual diversity - in fact, we kind of look at it in a global market level, wouldn't it be great to have one language?” said Mr. Ranier, 5 5. “Well, if all we're doing is communicating about commerce, perfect. But what about diversity that comes up in a language. Each language has its own unique way of looking at things.”

Like Edward Curtis, who photographed American Indians, Mr. Rainier has helped preserve tribal languages and rituals in remote areas. Mr. Curtis is sometimes maligned for portraying his subjects as noble savages and for staging images, but his work has allowed some American Indian tribes to reclaim their language, customs and rituals.

DESCRIPTIONChris Rainier/National Geographic Butterfly mask, Boni tribe. Houndi, Burkina Faso.

Mr. Rainier undertook a docum entation of more than 50 tribes that inhabit both sides of the island of New Guinea. Some groups he lived with, he said, had never been photographed, and one had never seen a white man before. He hopes that as cultures change rapidly, his photos might be a resource for future tribe members.

While Mr. Rainier has devoted his life to preserving vanishing cultures, he has no illusions about his role as an outsider. In the introduction to his most recent book “Cultures on the Edge,” published by National Geographic, he wrote:

I have come to realize that the further I evolve as a photographer, regardless of where I point my camera, I am taking a self-portrait - a reflection of my own story, my own beliefs, my own point of view. Nothing more. Nor do I presume that where I point my camera and take a picture is a refle ction of the absolute truth. There is no such thing as an absolute truth. All images merely reflect the emotion of the photographer and the opinion of the reviewer. As it is stated in photography, there always exists two individuals in every image, the artist and the observer, and their sets of beliefs and cultural biases.

Mr. Rainier has spent years digging deep into ancient societies, and he is neither a tourist nor a parachute photojournalist. Yet he has become acutely aware that as a white man photographing other cultures he is capable of telling stories only from his point of view. This realization has led him to encourage and empower indigenous people to tell their stories.

“What would happen if you gave a camera to the Afghan girl in Steve McCurry's iconic photo?” he asked. “How different would those photographs be? Not to replace the Steve McCurrys, but rathe r to create another chair at the table of the dialogue of what it means to be human. It's not an either/or. It's not a good or a bad. It just simply is.There are voices out there that have incredible vision, and we aren't accessing them enough.”

Working with like-minded photographers, Mr. Rainier started the All Roads Photography Program for National Geographic. It was dedicated to mentoring photographers from countries outside the United States and Western Europe. Though it lasted only eight years before National Geographic stopped financing it, All Roads influenced other programs to support underrepresented photographers around the world. Mr. Rainier continues to work on assisting indigenous peoples in creating different visual narratives. He and the advisory board of All Roads have since founded Global Voices to further the same work.

He traveled to Burkina Faso in West Africa several times in the 1990s to document tribes in remote areas that were living mu ch like their ancestors did centuries before. When he returned in 2011, so much had changed that he could barely recognize the places he had been.

DESCRIPTIONChris Rainier/National Geographic Shaman. Mongolia.

One day, he drove 50 miles off the road to a village that was holding a traditional festival. Unlike 15 years earlier, there were cellphone towers everywhere, Mr. Rainier said, and everybody younger than 30 was “in rapper clothes, taking smartphone photographs of the white guy photographing” their elders in traditional dress.

“In a Western framework, we look at that and go, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing to the rest of the world,' but I think that's a form of colonialism, even with the presumption that we're the ones that d ecide,” Mr. Rainier said. “First of all, we're in the minority, and the vast majority of the developing world is up and running. There's huge amounts of people coming online, and cellular is taking over from the Internet.”

He started the Last Mile Technology Program to bring Internet and cellular technology and skills to isolated communities so they could tell their own stories and create awareness of the problems in their daily lives through photography, video and social media. So far, they have trained indigenous people in Botswana, Nepal, New Guinea, Paraguay and Peru.

It might seem counterintuitive that a man who has spent decades trying to help document and preserve remote societies before they were destroyed by development and Western culture now believes that the Internet could help people in isolated areas control their lives and preserve the integrity of their culture as they adapt to the 21st century. But Mr. Rainier believes that the Internet mig ht be the last chance for vanishing cultures to survive by promoting communal businesses or communicating about development issues that are changing the environment that they rely on.

“There's so many cultures that are still now not connected and are getting left behind in the digital divide,” he said. “More and more, this is a world where you don't exist unless you're online, and you don't have access to information to education to empowerment, to women's issues, to job opportunities, unless you're connected.”

DESCRIPTIONChris Rainier/National Geographic Bull mask, Boromo area, Burkina-Faso.

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Hong Kong, Arizona and South Africa.

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Dog and Owner, Yin and Yang

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Dan Balilty never photographed people looking as natural and beautiful as when they were with their dogs. If anything, he said, they became “better versions of themselves.”

But he learned that only after he had taken a series of on-stage and behind-the-scenes pictures of dancers at a Tel Aviv burlesque show. The series won Mr. Balilty, 34, a prize in Israel's 2011 “Local Testimony” photojournalism contest, as well as some new friends - the dancers, not only in real life but also on Facebook, where he noticed many photographs of them with their dogs.

“They were looking good,” he said in a recent interview. “And I realized they all had dogs.”

That moment of recognition led him to his latest series, “Dog's Best Friend,” which consists of portraits of people in their apartments with their pets - the dancers, their friends and even strangers he met on the streets of his Tel Aviv neighborhood and elsewhere. The apartments were usually small, and Mr. Balilty found that the sofa was the only place with enough room for people to pose with their do gs. Even the toughest-looking owners looked “like puppies” around their pets, he said.

“It's like the dogs are the owners in the people's lives,” Mr. Balilty said. “People sleep with their dogs, let their dogs lick their children.”

Most of the dogs in Mr. Balilty's photographs were rescued from shelters. He himself adopted a 30-pound Dutch Shepherd mix from a shelter in Jerusalem and named her Shuka, after shakshuka, a signature Israeli breakfast dish of eggs simmered in spicy tomato sauce. They appear in one of the photographs, Shuka sporting a green collar and looking toward Mr. Balilty, who is sitting by an electric guitar and a desk laden with sound equipment.

“I have a dog, and I realized how sweet the connection between people and their dogs can be,” he said. “It's something worth photographing.”

Malkiella Benchabat, 27, a student at Tel Aviv University who writes a blog about Tel Aviv nightlife under the name Malkiella Page and also produces burlesque parties, met Mr. Balilty at “She Devils a Go-Go,” a burlesque. She and her 4-year-old Husky mix, JouJoun, posed for “Dog's Best Friend” with a half-eaten ice-cream cone at a local parlor. They were one of the few pairs not photographed at home.

“From the pictures, I see that the dogs complete their owners' identities,” Ms. Benchabat said, adding that she believes dogs and their owners often resemble each other physically because they pick up and reflect each other's attitudes.

DESCRIPTIONDan Balilty Yaara Kaisler, 28, and Shualy. Tel Aviv.

Ms. Benchabat said she saw such a resemblance between JouJoun's face and her own. “I am a relaxed person. I try not to get in fights with people,” she said. “He's the same way. He's attentive to the dogs around him.”

With the help of watchful friends around the city, Mr. Balilty scouted out his subjects on the sidewalks of Tel Aviv, looking for owners with unusual fashion choices or strong characters, as well as good relationships with their pets. Some owners were happy to pose, while others were resistant at first. But by sending them examples of his previous work, Mr. Balilty managed to persuade all but one of the owners he approached to participate.

The project convinced Mr. Balilty that a portrait of a dog owner cannot fully capture the person if the dog is not present. “The dogs are part of their story,” he said. “This is something nice that exists all over the city.”

In one image from the series, a couple and their two young daughters pose on a couch while Shush, their 6-year-old mixed breed, lies on the floor, one paw tucked under his body. In another, a paramedic in a T-shirt lets Chroosha, a pit bull that narrowly escaped a life of dog fighting, lick his face. “You can see his smile through the tongue of the dog,” Mr. Balilty said.

That kind of scene is a welcome departure for him.

A former photographer for Israel's leading daily, Yedioth Aharonot, Mr. Balilty now works as a freelancer and has had images published by The New York Times, Reuters, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Time and Newsweek. As a photojournalist, he said, he constantly felt that he was “the messenger of bad news.” The “Dog's Best Friend” series marks a professional shift toward what he called “positive messages.”

Mr. Balilty said the most significant thing he learned while shooting “Dog's Best Friend” was that owning dogs can bring out the best in people. Even when they are not with their pets, he believes dog owners act differently than others.

“Taking care of dogs,” he said, “is something that teaches people to just be better people.”

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, South Africa, Afghanistan and Kashmir.

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The Public Editor\'s Sunday Column: Who Sets the Terms for Interviews?

Who Sets the Terms for Interviews?

TAKING a summertime break from the weighty issues of leaks, false balance and anonymous sources - to which I'm sure to return - I am again hanging out the public editor's shingle. I will do my best here to answer what I call Perfectly Reasonable Questions from those who read The Times closely and with a critical eye.

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Ira Stoll of Newton, Mass., a journalist who is a frequent Times critic, was one of many who wrote concerning an article in the Home section about a Brooklyn house owned by the musician Mike D of the Beastie Boys. The article included this sentence: “Mr. Diamond, who prefers not to give his age, now has two boys of his own, Davis, 10, and Skyler, 8, with his wife Tamra Davis, a filmmaker, who also prefers not to give her age.” Mr. Stoll noted: “Plenty of other people The Times writes about would prefer not to give their ages, but The Times either figures them out using public records and puts them in anyway, or just leaves them out rather than making a big fuss about it.” He wondered if this was a deal cut in exchange for being allowed in the house.

The Home editor, Noel Millea, told me that there was no deal cut in advance and that she would never agree to one. She said she tries to give ages when possible “but not to force the issue since these are feature stories about people's homes and their private lives, not investigative pieces, and I'm reluctant to embarrass someone whose only offense is having a well-designed home.” In this case, she said, telling readers that Mr. Diamond wasn't willing to give his age “was actually far more revealing of his character than the age itself would have been.”

The associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, said that in the case of a celebrity, where the age was readily available from other sources even if the subject himself was reticent, “I would have preferred to include it.” Wikipedia lists Mike D as 47, as anyone who recalls “Licensed to Ill,” which topped the charts in 1987, might have estimated. Mr. Stoll, the reader, was quick to volunteer his own age: He's 40.

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Steven Schechter of Brooklyn complained about an article on Ryan Braun, who plays for the Milwaukee Brewers. “I was dismayed to see that the reporter, Tyler Kepner, discloses that he agreed to an interview that would only address baseball issues. Given that much of the article focuses on Braun's alleged use of performance enhancing drugs, and a prior disputed test, it would have been enlightening to see questions directed at Braun. Is it typical or appropriate to agree to interviews where the interviewee sets conditions? That may be the norm with celebrities, but seems out of place in a news article, even one in the Sports section.”

Here is the response from Jason Stallman, the sports editor: “The interviewee sets the conditions in every interview because he or she is always at liberty to decline to answer any question we have. We can't force anyone to talk to us. All we can do is ask. In this case, Mr. Braun's handlers told us ahead of time that questions about doping were off-limits.”

The Times could have walked away from such conditions, on the grounds that they were too restrictive or self-serving, but chose not to. “We decided that the interview was still worthwhile because Tyler was not planning to write entirely about doping accusations,” Mr. Stallman said. “We wanted to get Mr. Braun's voice on other topics. Basically, Mr. Braun was choosing not to defend himself against anything we were noting in our story regarding his ties to the South Florida anti-aging clinic. That was his prerogative.” Mr. Stallman noted that the piece was open with readers about that arrangement.

There are occasions when the conditions are not acceptable, and The Times rightly declines. For example, the executive editor, Jill Abramson, made it clear recently that The Times was not interested in attending an off-the-record session with Attorney General Eric Holder about the government's leak investigations, and The Times no longer agrees to interviews that require after-the-fact quote approval from sources. The arrangement with Mr. Braun might have been acceptable, but this is clearly something that requires careful judgment each time, including with sports figures. (Consider if Aaron Hernandez were allowed to put limits on an interv iew now.)

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Tom Mehnert of Somers, N.Y., wrote to ask about the practices for Times restaurant reviews: “I had always assumed that the reviewer went in unannounced, quietly had several meals over a few nights and then did a review.” But recently, he said, he wondered about the review of a restaurant in Westchester after hearing discussion in the community that the staff might have known of the reviewer's plan to come. “Is the process to give the restaurant advance notice, thus giving them the opportunity to ‘show their best,' or was this an aberration?”

Amy Virshup, who edits the Metropolitan section in which the review appeared, responded: “Just as with the reviews in the Dining section, our reviewers take pains not to identify themselves when they are reviewing.” A writer might call a chef or a restaurant for a feature article - “but never for a review.” Restaurants do get called to set up the photo shoot for the reviews, she said, but that doesn't happen until after the reviewer has visited and formed his or her opinion.

I also asked the restaurant critic Pete Wells about his practices. He responded: “In a perfect world, restaurant critics would never be recognized and we'd get the same treatment as any other customer. In this world, that's not always the case, but by reserving under another name we can at least keep the element of surprise on our side.”

Mr. Wells told me that this practice becomes habit after a while. “I'm never going to review my corner pizzeria, but I've given them a fake name when I've ordered a pie for my kids.”

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Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com. A post last week took up the question of who should be called a journalist, within the context of government prosecution of leakers.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 30, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Who Sets the Terms for Interviews?.

Thoughts From All Over, and Plenty of Heat, on ‘Who\'s a Journalist?\'

In a recent post, I asked the question, “Who is a journalist?” The topic is a hot one, largely because of the recent focus on government prosecution of leakers and because of Glenn Greenwald, who broke a number of stories on the National Security Agency's surveillance practices for The Guardian last month and is an outspoken civil liberties advocate.

The post generated a lot of discussion in the online comments section, on Twitter and elsewhere.

Because I promised a few months ago to make this blog a forum for discussion, and because many people have worthwhile things to say, I want to acknowledge some interesting writing from recent days.

< p>David Carr, who writes the “Media Equation” column in The Times, took up the question in Monday's paper. In a nuanced piece (which I'm sure was in the works before my post appeared), he offered that “activism - which is admittedly accompanied by the kind of determination that can prompt discovery - can also impair vision. If an agenda is in play and momentum is at work, cracks may go unexplored.”

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York's journalism school, argued in a post on his BuzzMachine blog that asking who is a journalist misses the point. “It's the wrong question now that anyone can perform an act of journalism: a witness sharing news directly with the world; an expert explaining news without need of gatekeepers; a whistle-blower opening up documents to sunlight; anyone informing everyone,” he wrote. “It's the wrong question when we reconsider journalism not as the manufacture of content but instead as a service whose goal is an informed public.”

Jonathan Chait, in New York magazine, compared Glenn Greenwald to the consumer advocate and lawyer Ralph Nader: “Greenwald, like Nader, marries an indefatigable mastery of detail with fierce moralism. Every issue he examines has a good side and an evil side.”

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, responded to Mr. Chait and took up related issues on his PressThink blog, adding to the criticism of the NBC “Meet the Press” host David Gregory. Several days after M r. Gregory practically accused Mr. Greenwald of aiding and abetting a criminal, Mr. Rosen wrote: “Gregory has made no public statement or even indicated that he's listening. This does not meet the standard any longer, even for media stars. In the New York Times newsroom there's no bigger star than Andrew Ross Sorkin, and he apologized the next day for some dumb things he said about arresting Greenwald. For someone like Jake Tapper of CNN, not responding to such a wave of criticism would be unthinkable. This is another reason David Gregory belongs on the Today Show, grilling salmon with some celebrity chef.”

I want to acknowledge a good point that many readers made about my post: that a willingness to speak truth to power should not be limited to government, but extended to corporations and other powerful institutions. As many people noted, my definition of “who's a journalist” is a narrow one, and I appreciate those who broadened or refined it.

I've written about changing views on objectivity before, as has Tom Kent of The Associated Press, who a few months ago persuasively made the case for maintaining impartiality.

Now the topic has come around again. I have a feeling it isn't going away any time soon.



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