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Pictures of the Day: Nigeria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Nigeria, South Korea, Egypt and Indonesia.

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On a Trapeze, Reaching for an Elusive Dream

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Christian Rodriguez has pictures of upside-down people â€" and upside-down elephants â€" in his series on the seemingly glamorous occupation of being a circus artist.

But his images are not really about the circus. They’re pictures of daily life, which just happen to be at two Vietnamese circuses, one in Hanoi, the capital, and the other in Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest city.
“It’s a story of work,” said Mr. Rodriguez from Madrid, where he lives. “They fight to live every day. The conditions are very hard.”

Mr. Rodriguez, born and raised in Uruguay, has traveled to Vietnam three times. Together, his projects, “Xiec” â€" circus in Vietnamese â€" and “Chut Chut” â€" a little bit â€" are a powerful documentary, showing not the glamour of the circus, but the moments in between.

DESCRIPTIONChristian Rodriguez Nguyen Van Giang is the elephant trainer at the Vietnam Circus Federation.

The performers at the Vietnam Circus Federation, in Hanoi, work for the government. The city â€" the seat of political power â€" is more conservative than Ho Chi Minh, and the people living there are more traditional, Mr. Rodriguez said.

Members of the troupe begin training early every morning. They host three or four performances daily, in shifts, often traveling outside of the city. Mr. Rodriguez was surprised to see the reaction of the onlookers, particularly in small towns nearby. The entire population of one village went to see the show. “In the past, the circus was very famous,” Mr. Rodriguez said of western countries, “but now nobody wants to see a circus show.”

When Mr. Rodriguez first traveled to Asia, in 2009, he had planned to spend three days in Hanoi. He rethought his itinerary when he found the circus, staying instead for three weeks. On his second visit, two years later, he lived in a house with a male circus performer, riding by motorbike to the circus grounds.

“In the beginning, all the time, I was thinking about how to make the best picture, just thinking in photos,” he said. “But when you share the life with the people â€" share special moments, share meals, travel there â€" you are in the place you need to be to make a good picture.”

DESCRIPTIONChristian Rodriguez From left, the team leader Toan Thang Tong and Bui Khanh Du, who fell after breaking the rope that held her foot, and Pham Thi Houng and Hai Quan Bui, who had an accident two days before and injured his neck.

Mr. Rodriguez began following the lives of four female roommates: An 18-year-old aerialist, an elephant rider and two acrobats in their early 20s.

On the same visit, he traveled to Ho Chi Minh and began following a group of siblings with the Ho Chi Minh Circus Group. In particular, he has been interested in the story of one of the siblings: Ma Hoang An, 26, and his wife, Nguyen Thi Thu Hiep, a 20-year-old contortionist. He was invited to their wedding, in their hometown. Like most of the artists, they are from smaller, rural towns.

Vietnamese circus hopefuls spend about five years in school, most hoping to land jobs with the Hanoi-based troupe, Mr. Rodriguez said. Those who don’t get in head to Ho Chi Minh City, where the troupe is smaller and somewhat less prestigious. The circus is more central, and lures more tourists than in Hanoi. Yet life for the artists is not easy.

“They live in an old theater, totally destroyed,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who slept there.

At first, he said, most of the performers tried to hide the difficulties. “Many of the people of the circus have iPhones or have iPads, but they don’t have a good place to live,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “At the beginning it was a little difficult to show it like they really live.”

Photos of the circus in Hanoi shot years ago by Mary Ellen Mark inspired him to pursue the subject, but his images are much different in style.

“I wanted to work in another way - yes, in the same circus, but focus on the daily life, looking for an intimate and close image,” he said. “Show another aspect of the circus.”

Last year, Mr. Rodriguez landed in Vietnam with 130 euros (about $167) to spend. He stayed for three months, returning to the same house in Ho Chi Minh and sharing a room with Nguyen Hoa Hoan Vu, Mr. Ma’s 13-year-old brother.

One of his favorite images from Ho Chi Minh shows Mr. Vu staring blankly as he eats a cherry tomato, perched on the edge of the bed where his brother sleeps with Ms. Hiep (below). The wall in the background is adorned with Winnie the Pooh stickers.

DESCRIPTIONChristian Rodriguez Nguyen Hoa Hoang Vu, 13, ate a cherry while Ma Hoang An and Thi Thu Hiep continued to rest.

“It’s a moment of vulnerability,” Mr. Rodriguez said.

Mr. Rodriguez, 33, formerly worked as a wire and newspaper photographer in Uruguay. In 2009 he moved to Madrid to do his masters in photography. His work in Vietnam has taught him how to see things in a new way, he said. Since his completing his master’s degree, he has focused mostly on women, documenting immigrants in Spain and teenage mothers in Latin America. It was a single mother and circus artist, Nguyen Thi Sau, who first introduced him to the circus.

Mr. Rodriguez plans to return to both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh, hoping to make a documentary film about the circus. He is inspired by the artists’ determination. “They love training, they love working for the people,” he said. “They love when the people clap.”

In a way, the circus â€" the lights, the clothes, the colors â€" represents the lifestyle they dream of having, he said. “They want to live in a dream,” he said, “but they can’t.”

DESCRIPTIONChristian Rodriguez Nguyen Thi Sau rode motorbikes with her son, Nim, and other circus artists on a night out in Hanoi.

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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 anytime. 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” - child of a child, or grandchild. It consists of a series of portraits, each linked to the next by a common relative. It also features 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 in another 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 The last image in Ms. Romanova's series - her uncle at her grandparents' tombstone, with the same jar of sand that appears in the first image.

“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 - my father and my uncle. Travel shots and photographs of her home. Regular life, but very warm.”

Just 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' - what does it mean 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.”

DESCRIPTIONJana 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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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Indonesia, Austria and South Africa.

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You May Touch a Stranger

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The photographer Richard Renaldi is a matchmaker for tense times, asking complete strangers to pose with their bodies touching, as if they were intimates. On a recent afternoon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it was not going well. He wanted to pose an Orthodox Jewish man with someone from outside the Orthodox community.

“It's going to take all the cajoling I can do,” Mr. Renaldi, 45, said. “There's a lot of barriers.”

There were, in fact, more barriers than he knew. After terse rejections from several people, a man named Abraham Weiss stopped to look at Mr. Renaldi's large-format, 8-by-10 view camera. Mr. Renaldi made his best pitch.

Mr. Weiss seemed to go back and forth. He ran a photo printing business and understood the project, he told Mr. Renaldi. But he feared censure from his fellow ultra-Orthodox neighbors. “You have to understand the culture,” he said. If he posed for Mr. Renaldi, someone might see him, take a picture and post it on Twitter. “That could be bad for me,” he said. “Posing for it, that's the problem. They don't like imaging.”

As if on cue, a car slowed and the driver photographed Mr. Weiss with his cellphone. “You see,” Mr. Weiss said. He had one suggestion for Mr. Renaldi: “Try Crown Heights or Borough Park. They're more open there.”

DESCRIPTIONRichard Renaldi Pape, Alioun, Gracya, Terry and Cheikh. New York, 2007.

Mr. Renaldi has been working on his portrait series, which he calls “Touching Strangers,” since 2007, and plans to publish a book with Aperture next May. One of his goals, he said, is to get people to think past the divisions - ethnic, religious, socioeconomic - that often go unexamined in urban life. “For a lot of people, it's an exercise for them to be able to push their own comfort level,” he said.

Some pairs embrace wholeheartedly; some even kiss, though none on the lips (so far). Others pose as if under duress.

Mr. Renaldi said he strove to show tenderness but understood why people liked the fraught pairings, like Alex and Carlos from 2007 (Slide 3). “The viewer gets to ask himself, ‘How would I react if a photographer asked me to do that?' ” he said, adding that he had “a love/hate relationship with this picture and with Alex. Alex was out of there so fast I didn't get his contact information to send him a print.”

In Williamsburg on this day, he was experiencing only refusal, a hazard of his chosen project. He has dealt with rejection before: “It took me three years to get a Muslim woman,” he said. But Mr. Weiss's words, which another man seconded, were discouraging. In six years, Mr. Renaldi said, “I've only had one time when I couldn't get a shot.”

Finally, he left for Crown Heights, where the first person he approached - a 24-year-old Yeshiva student from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement named Shalom Lasker - listened to him and said, in halting English: “No problem. Only men, right?”

And so it was. Mr. Renaldi gathered Jeff Desire, 27, who works in a fish market across the street, and directed the pose: hold here, lean here. Mr. Lasker gave a thumbs up. In 10 minutes they were done. “It's exhilarating,” Mr. Renaldi said.

DESCRIPTIONRichard Renaldi Shalom and Jeff. New York, 2013.

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Indonesia, Washington, D.C., and South Africa.

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Hard Labor in Nepal\'s Brick Factories

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Correction appended.

Brian Sokol worked as a guide in Nepal until 2005, when its civil war compelled him to pursue documentary photography. He became interested in the hundreds of brick factories scattered throughout the 220-square-mile stretch of the Katmandu Valley. Millions of workers, many of them poor migrants, depend on the labor-intensive process. In the late evenings at the Kadambini Brick Factory, it's not uncommon to find children drinking wine or lighting up a cigarette after a hard day's work.

Mr. Sokol, originally from Missouri, spent roughly a year exploring a factory 12 miles from the capital, where he documented all of the images for his black-and-white photo series, “Kadambini.” Though he started out shooting in color with a digital S.L.R., he switched to black and white using a smartphone, which he said made him look at the world in simpler visual terms.

Q.

How did you come across this issue?

A.

The air quality in the Katmandu Valley is among the worst in the world, due in part to the smoke pouring from hundreds of brick factories. I had been living in Nepal for some time, and like most Katmandu residents, each winter developed a bad case of bronchitis or some other respiratory infection. Curious about the link between illness and air quality, I decided to find out about the giant chimneys dotting the eastern end of the valley.

Q.

How regulated is this industry?

A.

During the several months that I've spent working on this project, I've never seen any sign of governmental or other industrial oversight. Of the estimated 750 brick factories operating in Nepal, only 450 of them are even registered with the government. While there may be laws in place that theoretically should guide labor practices and mitigate environmental impact, I haven't personally come across anything to suggest that they are being implemented.

DESCRIPTIONBrian Sokol/Panos Pictures Resting among the bricks.
Q.

Where do the majority of workers come from?

A.

The brick workers at Kadambini, the small factory that I've focused on, are all migrant laborers, primarily from two regions. The first group are domestic migrants from the Rolpa region of northwest Nepal. This is one of the poorest and most remote corners of an already-impoverished country, and the region perhaps hardest hit by the decade-long civil war that ended in 2006. The second group is composed of international migrants who cross the open border between India and Nepal. Males and females work side by side and ages span from small children to the elderly. I've seen toddlers attempting to help their mothers press bricks from clay and photographed an 8-year-old who carried heavy loads atop his head for long hours each day.

Q.

What are the living conditions like?

A.

Typically, brick factories open in the autumn, operate through the winter and close in the late spring, at which point migrant workers head back to their homes and families. During the approximately six months of operations, workers live on site in small, cramped shelters composed largely of uncooked bricks covered with sheet metal or plastic tarpaulins. At points throughout the season, the structures are cannibalized, brought inside of the kiln, and fired, then rebuilt out of a new slew of raw, unfired bricks. Most workers wake up in the dark, take tea and begin work around dawn. The work day continues until shortly before dusk, at which point people wash off their ruddy coating of sweat and brick dust. It's not uncommon to see a 9-year-old unwinding with a glass of strong rice wine and a cigarette, shortly after setting down a load that weighs more than he does.

Q.

What are the environmental factors that have contributed to Nepal being the hub for brick-building factories?

A.

The Katmandu Valley is an ancient lake bed, and the clay in certain areas is apparently well suited to producing bricks. The topography of the region, however, is not at all favorable. As it's a mountain valley, the winters - the season of peak brick production - are prone to thermal inversions. A layer of cloud forms over the valley floor, trapping in the smoke produced by hundreds of kilns and leading to some of the worst air quality on earth.

DESCRIPTIONBrian Sokol/Panos Pictures A smokestack from the factory's kiln.
Q.

This environment is obviously hazardous for their health, especially for children.

A.

The kiln is a tough environment. Probably the greatest threat to health is the perpetual cloud of red dust that gets thrown up by the baking and excavation of bricks. People carry incredibly heavy loads either via tumplines suspended off their foreheads, or stacked on short horizontal boards balanced atop their heads. Headaches are common, as is dehydration. There are no toilets or latrines, so sanitation is poor, leading to diarrhea and other maladies.

Q.

Can the workers make a viable living based on their wages?

A.

At Kadambini, the pay scale was based upon number of bricks carried, pressed and baked. Workers are given a number of small tokens to designate how many bricks they've “produced” by a supervisor each time they walk past. The tokens are collected in pockets and periodically tallied, then recorded in a ledger kept by the management. Payment isn't settled until the end of the season, which is why the majority of workers end up purchasing food and alcohol - and thus tremendously reducing their earnings - at the company store. A strong young man who is able to carry heavy loads may earn up to 1,200 or even 1,500 Nepalese rupees (around $13 to $16) a day. This may not sound like much, but it's actually quite a lot of money in a country where the average per capita income is $735, or $2 a day. However, once deductions are made for booze and noodles, people can easily have spent the majority of their daily earnings, often without realizing that they're doing so.

Q.

During the time you spent documenting this series, where did you live?

A.

On several occasions I slept at the factory, wrapped in a sleeping bag and sharing the office floor with one of the very drunk managers. More often, however, I stayed with a friend on the opposite side of Katmandu and commuted back and forth. I rented a motorcycle while working on this project, and would drive each day between Katmandu and Kadambini. There were some close calls with buses and oblivious drivers, but I don't think anything more serious than a few flat tires, a dead spark plug and an empty tank of gas ever happened.

Q.

This could not have been an easy process.

A.

The more time I spent at the factory, the more people opened up around me, and I, them. The more invisible I grew, the more accepted I felt. The random blur of faces became individuals, some of them friends. As days ticked past, the situation never grew stale, though I was seeing largely the same repetitive motions again and again. I understood more of what was happening around me, both mechanically and emotionally, the longer I stayed. Little interpersonal dramas would play out, and the more I observed, the more I had to say, verbally and visually. The things that initially caught my eye ceased to be as important and quieter details, ones I wouldn't have noticed in the first days or weeks, became visible. It had been a long time since I was excited about anything, and while photographing Kadambini, I would fall asleep at night thinking about the day's sounds and scents, conversations and images, already anxious to return and continue shooting. The following morning, editi ng the previous day's take was at times difficult.

Q.

As a post-conflict photojournalist, what do you hope to accomplish with your stories?

A.

That's something that continues to change. Right now, I'm primarily driven by a desire to humanize people who have been dehumanized by their circumstances. In crises, people can easily be turned into statistics by the sheer volume of suffering. It's important to remind audiences that these aren't “just” Syrians or Sudanese or Nepalis who are being driven from their homes or dying, they're individual people.

DESCRIPTIONBrian Sokol/Panos Pictures Resting at Kadambini.

Correction, July 8: An earlier version of this post inaccurately stated that Brian Sokol left his job as a guide to photograph the brick factories of the Katmandu Valley. When he began the project in 2011, he had been photographing professionally for six years - having left his guide job, years earlier, in 2005, to document Nepal's civil strife.

Brian Sokol is a New York-based photojournalist represented by Panos Pictures. This fall, his work will be shown at the Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia.

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Syria, India and Canada.

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The Sweet Sounds of Endangered Birds

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David Guttenfelder has spent much of his 17-year career at The Associated Press photographing armed conflict in Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan. His 2009 photo of a soldier fighting the Taliban while wearing pink boxer shorts after being awakened was one of the most discussed images from the Afghanistan war.

So the thought of Mr. Guttenfelder photographing songbirds for National Geographic magazine might seem odd at first glance. After all, their sweet sounds couldn't be more different than the cacophony of war.

Yet documenting the story about the survival of songbirds throughout the Mediterranean involved many skills that were familiar to him, including, he said, “the ability to befriend and travel with men with weapons, work in an embed style with rangers, and go to places that are potentially dangerous.”

But for Mr. Guttenfelder, it is too simplistic to see the songbird story as a conflict story just because of how he covered it. Rather, it is a conflict story because of the slaughter of innocents.

“I tried to cover this like any another conflict that I have in the past,” he said. “I tried to give a voice to those under attack. I've spent the past 20 years covering human cruelty and human suffering. This time I'm covering human cruelty, but it's the persecution and suffering of other animals. A lot of what I saw was very cruel. Cruel to species that I came to really cherish. Beautiful, fragile, wild, free birds.”

Billions of birds migrate across the Mediterranean Sea twice a year, and hundreds of millions of them are shot, snared, netted or stuck to lime sticks. Their habitats are being destroyed, and bird populations are declining rapidly. Much of the killing is indiscriminate.

In the article “Last Song for Migrating Birds” published in the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, Jonathan Franzen writes:

To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes.

Mr. Guttenfelder admires the serious conservation stories of wildlife photographers like Nick Nichols and Brent Stirton but says that most photojournalists tend to focus on human conflict stories. “I don't mean to diminish the importance of human suffering, human rights, war and its aftermath, but other species need a voice too,” he said.

“I was very moved as I learned more and more about the scale of the attack on birds and the viciousness of the methods. I think I've developed a thick skin over the years covering war. I was surprised to be so moved by the life and death of birds.”

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Pictures of the Day: Lebanon and Elsewhere

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Photos from Lebanon, Syria, India and South Africa.

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Chronicling China\'s Changing Cities

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After carefully observing China for 20 years, Jimmy Lam has come to the realization that the only constant is continual change. Over the course of about 150 trips to all corners of China, he has witnessed rapid urbanization, rampant development, the rise of consumerism and the disappearance of some traditional rural cultures.

Though China is still tightly controlled by the Communist Party, it bears little resemblance to the country he first saw in 1994.

“This is what I would call ‘New Wine, Old Label,'” said Mr. Lam, 49. “The old label that is attached to the country is ‘Communism,' but everything that breathes there is hard-core capitalism. Everyone is out to make a profit.”

And he should know.

He has been photographing China for 20 years. Beyond that, during his “day job” as a hedge fund manager, Mr. Lam invested in China - as well as the rest of Asia - and made a great deal of money for his customers, employers and himself. So much money that he retired from the financial industry in 2011 to focus on his passion - photography - and use the insights that he found traveling through China on business trips to help him document the rapidly changing country. And he is able to self-finance his photo projects.

DESCRIPTIONJimmy Lam In Sanya, beachgoers were charged a fee to be photographed with a snake.

He now splits his time between photographing throughout Asia and raising his 7-year-old twin sons in Singapore, where Mr. Lam was born. His own father migrated to Singapore from southern China as a young man in search of better financial opportunity.

Mr. Lam moves easily through the streets of China's cities, speaking the Hokkien dialect. In the 1990s, he started out photographing what was old - the vanishing cultures of rural southwestern China - but now he is focusing on the country's rapid urbanization.

In the past five years he has photographed in 40 Chinese cities and recently completed a mammoth project, “The New Face of the Cities of China.” It is a series of photo essays on individual cities in China, showing the great changes as old buildings are torn down, agricultural lands become industrial and new cities seem to arise almost overnight.

DESCRIPTIONJimmy Lam Painting a mall in Hefei.

While many urban centers have their own distinct characteristics, more and more he finds that “every aspiring city seems to have the same things, a new, vibrant pedestrian shopping street, a national theater, numerous theme parks and an observatory tower to see the whole city.”

Mr. Lam believes that China is often misunderstood by Western photographers and journalists. There have been photographers who have romanticized China or only photographed people in the margins - which he says is fine because there are many poor people. But his focus has been the many people being lifted out of poverty by 10 percent annual growth and the rise of the middle and upper classes in a country that is at least nominally Communist.

The key to understanding China today, he says, is nationalism, confidence and pride.

“The Chinese people have so much pride; they want to tell the world that they are no longer a third world country, and they want to be treated as equal partners, not as a backward society,” he said.

“It is shocking that this has happened this fast - in one generation,” he added.

DESCRIPTIONJimmy Lam Tourists surveyed a terra-cotta warrior in central Xian.

Mr. Lam has had five books published by Marshall Cavendish, including “Faraway Faces: The Vanishing World of Southwest China” (2006) and “Treasures of Indochina” (2008). His next book, “Christians in China,” will be published by Marshall Cavendish next year.

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Pictures of the Day: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Indonesia and Spain.

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Readers Protest David Brooks\'s ‘Mutts\' Column, and He Responds

In the course of a given week, I hear from many readers who don't like something that one of The Times's star columnists has written. I may agree or disagree, but I only rarely write about it. That's because by virtue of their job descriptions, columnists are supposed to stir things up and get people talking. Yes, they have to deal in the world of facts and truth, but their opinions â€" and the way they express them â€" are almost unassailable. So I let the protests pass.

But a column by David Brooks, titled “A Nation of Mutts,” has offended so many people that I thought it would be worthwhile to ask Mr. Brooks to respond. On Tuesday morning, I sent him one of the many e-mails I've received from readers and he quickly wrote back. Below is the e-mail I sent, his response, and my brief take.

Here is the reader's e-mail:

I am writing in response to David Brooks's column, “A Nation of Mutts,” published on June 27th (which I read online).

I am Irish-American and married to an Indian-American man. I actually can't put into words how incredibly offensive, insulting and downright painful I found David Brooks's use of the word “mutts” to describe our two biracial and bicultural children, ages 4 and 1.

Talking about people as dogs is problematic in any context, but it's worth exploring Brooks's blatant racism in that column. He writes first that the U.S. was an “outpost of Europe,” and then in the next paragraph writes, “Soon we will not be an outpost of Europe but a nation of mutts …” So, in his column, a word that is used for dogs only describes Americans when they are intermarrying with non-Europeans (i.e., brown and black people).

I find it completely shocking and angering that not only did David Brooks use this metaphor, it then went through the editorial process without being flagged and removed - everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

The idea of a “mongrel race” has a long history in this country (as Brooks, a student of history, should know), and these racist ideas should not be reflected in writing in The New York Times.

To put it more plainly: My kids do not deserve to be called dogs because of their racial heritage, and I think David Brooks and the New York Times editorial staff owe them and all biracial children and adults an apology.

Michelle Morrissey, on behalf of Sonali, 4, and Kieran, 18 months
Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Here is Mr. Brooks's response:

In that column, I was trying to embrace and celebrate a more ethnically intermingled America. I conclude with this sentence: “On the whole, this future is exciting.” To read this column as racist requires either a misreading or a strong desire to be offended, no matter what is on the page.

As for the use of the word “mutts,” history is filled with examples of groups who have taken derogatory terms and embraced them as sources of pride. To take the word “mutt” as a derogatory term, you have to believe that purebred things are superior to mixed-breed things, whether it is dogs or people. But if you don't believe that, there is nothing to be ashamed of in the word mutt.

I seized on the headline after I was in a group of people talking about the future demography of the country and one participant said proudly, “We're mutts.” That seemed to capture the message I was trying to convey, so I used it in the headline and the piece.

My take: As I noted above, columnists have the right to express opinion as they wish, in the way they want. And their editors generally make a point of staying out of the way. I believe Mr. Brooks when he says he didn't mean to offend. But comparing people to animals is always tricky, and “mutts” is a loaded term. There must have been a better way to say this, especially in the headline. I wish he had found it himself or that an editor had insisted on it.



No Quid Pro Quo by You\'re the Boss Writer, but Intrigue, Anyway

Ed Zitron may not be the savviest public relations person around. When he e-mailed a New York Times business editor, he asked for the strictest anonymity about his complaint: that a writer for the You're the Boss small-business blog was demanding money as a trade for mentioning his clients.

But he also sent a copy of that e-mail to the public editor. My office's automated e-mail response informs senders that their e-mail may be printed, and says, in essence, please tell us now if you don't want that to happen. (We, of course, comply with those requests.) He never did.

So while he spoke anonymously to Gawker to make his alarming complaint - which that Web site made much of earlier this week - I was able to interview him, on the record, by phone on Tuesday. I also spoke to the blogger, Cliff Oxford, and to Loren Feldman, the editor of the You're the Boss blog.

Accusations flew about. Mr. Zitron, who says that for about a year he has run a “one-man shop” public relations agency, claims that Mr. Oxford demanded a quid pro quo. (Mr. Zitron's credibility may not be gold-plated: for example, his Web site says Ez-Pr operates “out of New York City,” but he told me that he splits his time between suburban New Jersey and North Carolina - which is, quite literally I suppose, “out of New York City.”)

“From the word go, I was always talking about coverage,” Mr. Zitron said. The deal, as he came to understand it, was essentially this: Mr. Oxford would write about Mr. Zitron's clients if his expenses, and maybe more, were paid in trade. Such an arrangement would be in complete opposition to The Times's guidelines for ethical journalism. At first, he said, things went well. “I was really happy. I thought I was going to get my clients in The New York Times.”

But when they couldn't come to terms because Mr. Oxford was demanding more, Mr. Zitron said he felt he needed to go public with what he now saw as an ethical lapse. “I was getting freaked out” by the escalating demands, he told me.

Mr. Oxford and his editor said that none of that was ever the case, and an e-mail chain backs them up, if imperfectly.

In his role as a business consultant for the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs, Mr. Oxford said he considered taking on Mr. Zitron's tech start-up clients but ultimately rejected them. He is adamant that there was never any discussion of a payoff or trade for writing about the companies in the Times blog nor would he ever do such a thing, he said.

But, to my mind, he wasn't clear enough about that in his correspondence. And in his interview with me, some of Mr. Oxford's statements strained the belief that he is a straight shooter.

For example, he told me with a flat no that he doesn't find his association with The Times's small business blog helpful in his consulting business.

“I don't want to mix the two at all, “ he said. However, the home page of his Web site prominently features two references to his Times writing: several of his blog posts are featured there and, separately, viewers see a link to the You're the Boss blog.

As another example of this tendency, Mr. Oxford at first denied that he had threatened this week to sue Mr. Zitron. I asked because Mr. Zitron sent me an e-mail from Mr. Oxford that read: “You are deliberately falsifying information since your companies did not get free ride with Oxford Center. You are running a smear campaign and we will address in a judicial proceeding. We are looking right now into appropriate venue. It also appears you altered e-mails. Please do not erase anything on your hard drive.” When I pressed Mr. Oxford, he admitted to “a little too much passion” in his correspondence.

Mr. Feldman, who came to The Times from Inc. magazine and has run the blog for four years, understands the difficulties of asking business people who are not professional journalists to be his writing staff.

“The challenges are real, they're significant and I lose sleep over them,” he told me. But he believes that the blog's content offers something to small business owners that they can't get elsewhere: the expertise of more experienced small businesspeople, and the willingness to join discussions and share their stories. The blog's 232,000 Twitter followers (@NYTsmallbiz) suggest that many find it valuable. Mr. Feldman told me that he makes it clear to his writers that they must avoid conflicts of interest.

The blog “sometimes takes us into gray areas,” he said, “but this wasn't one of them.”

In the end, I don't believe that Mr. Oxford demanded payment for a write-up in the Times blog. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary.

In the very e-mails quoted in Gawker, Mr. Oxford wrote: “I would like to be very clear that this trip is for my own understanding and I am not representing NYT this time.” That's clear enough. But then, muddying the waters, he added, “If I see a worthy story, I will engage in that capacity.”

Given Mr. Zitron's behavior and Mr. Oxford's lack of clarity, the situation was troubled from the start. Let's err on the side of mercy and call it a misunderstanding.



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