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Pictures of the Day: Brazil and Elsewhere

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Photos from Brazil, South Africa, Russia and England.

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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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Dog Food for the Mind and Soul

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We highly recommend viewing the slide show in full-screen mode.

Two thousand five hundred years after the cynics of Greek philosophy were stomping around in their sandals in the fifth century B.C.E., Jason Eskenazi and some friends opened a can of dog food. Or rather, put together a zine called Dog Food, the second issue of which was released this past spring.

It came out of an idea conceived in Istanbul over conversation and some wine. With friends, both Turks and foreigners, Mr. Eskenazi set up a series of presentations for local photo groups called the “Cynics Photo Symposiums.” They offered respite from what they viewed as the rigid landscape of photography in Turkey and - in keeping with the ancient cynics' embrace of the simple and virtuous - were free of charge.

“We were kind of down on the very, kind of not out-of-the-box way the Turkish photo schools were working,” said Mr. Eskenazi, who developed Dog Food with Berge Arabian, Laurence Cornet, Laura de Marco, Frederic Lezmi, Hüseyin Yilmaz and Arjen Zwart. “At one point we were sitting in a cafe, having a glass of wine and just saying, ‘We should make a newspaper,' ” he said.

Previously, Mr. Eskenazi - whose not out-of-the-box C.V. includes work as a nighttime watchdog at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - had been asking students in a workshop in Turkey what movies they had seen and what books they had read. They could barely name anything with a reference outside of photography, he recalled. It was frustrating to learn that these stiff-collared university types basically did not know anything.

But the playful, inclusive feel of Dog Food is anything but cynical as we mean it today. “We love photography in all it's glory,” is one of the zine's opening lines on a page called “Dog Barks.” The rest of the page is devoted to giving a passionate and generous definition of what a photo is and what it can do - all opportunity and no closed doors.

DESCRIPTIONErsin Pertan, courtesy of Annie G. Pertan A still from the set of “The Tired Soldier.”

The free zine is, in some ways, a gleefully eclectic improvisation, with different pages curated by different contributors. The first issue is sort of a Turkey-based issue (its next issue will be New York-based), but it includes a brief history of the Studio Jonker in the village of Egmond aan Zee in the Netherlands, an essay on photographs taken on the set of a 30-year-old censored Turkish movie, full-page fingerprints of Istanbul photographers' “trigger fingers,” a racy double-spread still from the 1967 film “I Am Curious - Yellow” and a handwritten interview in which the photographer Michael Ackerman reveals that his favorite breakfast cereal growing up was Captain Crunch. (Ever faithful to the ancient cynics, he is asked if there is an object, big or small, that is most dear to him. The answer? No.)

The materials frequently reference the past, whether it's Mr. Ackerman's childhood, or decades or millenniums ago. “There is no news, it is not news-related at all,” said Laurence Cornet, Dog Food's roving reporter. “It is inspired by untold stories, archival stories, with intimacy. It collects perspectives of past and present to create a sense of community,” she said.

And the emphasis on a holistic approach to being a photographer - or any variety of alert, active human beings - is marked. Both issues invite photographers to list the films and books that inspire them. It's like punk-rock pamphleteering, but with a much nicer ethos.

As print media becomes as antiquated a concept as polytheism or classified ads, one might wonder why anyone might invest any time cutting and pasting a 36-page paper object by hand. Both issues are available online as a PDF, but its creators intended Dog Food to exist outside of the digital world. “It was really important for us to have a tactile magazine,” Mr. Eskenazi said. “We really want people to have that kind of '80s feel, and in some ways, the Soviet-era kind of feel, of people passing literature around under the table,” he said.

“It's about intimacy,” Ms. Cornet said, “like when you have a photo that you keep in your wallet - that's a physical reminder of that memory.” It's a conversation that insists on being shared, she said, summoning a definition of sharing that means two people in the same room looking and discussing one thing together. “You can imagine the magazine as good sharing time, between photographers or people involved in or interested in photography, and this material is really important in giving this feeling,” she added.

It's also been a learning experience for everyone involved. Dog Food is nourishment for the wide-eyed cynic in a cynical age. “I guess I didn't really realize this before - the word cynic has almost the opposite meaning from how it is now,” Mr. Eskenazi said, who pointed out the many links between the words “dog” and “cynic,” not least that they share a root word in ancient Greek.

“It's sort of pejorative now, like this person's jaded, they know too much, and before it was the ancient Greek understanding of living virtuously and in harmony with nature and not to be too caught up trying to pursue fame or glory or material things and so on,” he said. “And I just thought that was a fascinating thing to pick up on.”

DESCRIPTIONDog Food magazine A photo recovered from Studio Joe, an old shop in Beirut, Lebanon, as described in an essay by Laurence Cornet in the first issue.

Hard copies of Dog Food are currently available at Dashwood Books on Bond Street in Manhattan.

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Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, Somalia, Syria and China.

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Black Star Shines Anew

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Before Henry Luce could publish his first picture-packed issue of Life magazine, he first had to figure out how to get enough photographs. In the mid-1930s, most people thought there were simply not enough American photographers to supply the more than 200 images needed for each issue of the magazine.

But, as Michael Torosian recounts, the Black Star photo agency had the capacity to do so. With a worldwide network of photojournalists, the fledgling agency struck a deal with Life that ensured its success and that of the magazine.

“In their first five years of publication,” Mr. Torosian estimated, “Life reproduced more than 3,000 pictures credited to Black Star.”

A striking selection of those images commissioned or brokered by the agency has recently been published in “Black Star,” a limited edition book from Lumiere Press with text by Mr. Torosian. The book details how Black Star sated the ravenous appetites of picture magazines like Life that were so extraordinarily popular and influential in shaping public discourse and values in mid-20th-century America.

Black Star was established in the early 1930s by Jewish émigrés, Kurt Safranski, Ernest Mayer, and Kurt Kornfeld, who were innovators in Germany's picture press and publishing world and fled from the Nazis. Their New York-based company commissioned and brokered the use of photographs that documented important events, the comings and goings of notables, and human interest stories.

DESCRIPTIONMax Pohly/Ryerson Image Centre/Black Star “First World War.” Russia, circa 1916.

Black Star's earliest clients, which also included Look, The Saturday Evening Post, and Collier's, understood the efficiency and popularity of photographic images and shrewdly exploited their power. In later decades, Black Star photographers, including W. Eugene Smith, Philippe Halsmann, and Charles Moore, shot many of the indelible images of World War II, the cold war, civil rights movement, and the social and cultural tumult of the 1960s and 1970s.

But as TV news undermined the novelty and market for weekly magazines, the photo agency business needed to evolve. And under the leadership of Howard Chapnick, who directed Black Star from 1964 to the 1980s, it did. Mr. Chapnick not only championed and helped to rethink photojournalism for a new era, but broadened the agency's mission. News photography remained central to it, but Black Star (and other agencies like it, like Magnum) began to supply more and more images, and color ones in particular, to the deep-pocketed corporate clients who paid handsomely to use photography differently, to burnish their public image and fill the pages of lavish annual reports.

DESCRIPTIONAlexander Alexander/Ryerson Image Centre/Black Star “Jean Cocteau With Portrait by Picasso.” France, circa 1930.

The first generation of Black Star's principals was revered in the field, and so was Mr. Chapnick, whose charisma was legendary. “He was a friendly man, a curious man,” said Robert Pledge, a competitor and ultimately a friend of Mr. Chapnick's, who led both the Gamma and Contact agencies. “He transitioned from great tradition of picture magazines to an era of smaller formatted newsweeklies and adjusted remarkably well, taking risks, and nurturing a new generation of dynamic photographers,” Mr. Pledge said.

That group included James Nachtway, twin brothers Peter and David Turnley, and Christopher Morris, who started out as a Black Star intern. Mr. Morris, who has become an award-winning photojournalist, is among the founders of the photo agency VII. As he succinctly put it, “Howard was instrumental to who I am today.”

Founded in a pre-digital era, photo agencies inevitably built up huge archives that became costly to maintain. By the late 1980s, Black Star had stockpiled about one million black-and-white prints and 10 million color transparencies. And while a small percentage of those archival images can be repurposed and resold - through licensing for nostalgic ads, books or online - most cannot, since old news, even if it's photographic, is old news. That means many archives wind up being returned to the individual photographers or stored, which can be expensive. Sometimes photographs just got thrown away.

Rather than endure that ignominious fate, Black Star's vast archives were saved thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor who helped Ryerson University in Toronto acquire 300,000 vintage black-and-white prints. Now, and somewhat ironically, an iPad-sized, luxuriously produced book tells their story. In it, in addition to learning about Black Star's history, is a reminder of the power and legacy that photographs embody as three-dimensional and material objects.

If anything, they show that there is indeed life after Life.

DESCRIPTIONRalph Crane/Ryerson Image Centre/Black Star Untitled. California, circa 1950.

Marvin Heiferman is a curator and writer who has organized projects about photography and visual culture for institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the International Center of Photography, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum. His most recent book is “Photography Changes Everything,” and you can follow him @whywelook and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.



Pictures of the Day: South Sudan and Elsewhere

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Photos from South Sudan, Zimbabwe, India and United Arab Emirates.

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Instagram Dispatches of a ‘Baseball Freak\'

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The O.co Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., is the least-loved ballpark in the major leagues. Hitters moan about the vast foul territory. Fans squeeze through narrow concourses and squint at tiny scoreboards. Clubhouse workers recently confronted raw sewage seeping into the locker rooms.

But for Brad Mangin, a veteran photojournalist based in the Bay Area, there is no better place to work. Mr. Mangin loves that there are no railings in front of the dugouts. This is unique in the major leagues, and it makes his work much easier.

“I'll go there and hang out in the visitors' dugout on the first base side,” said Mr. Mangin, 48. “I can sit on the steps and talk to players. Sometimes guys will sit before they go down the right field line and stretch, and then they'll come back to the bat rack, and I'll be shooting.”

DESCRIPTIONBrad Mangin Hunter Pence during the Giants' World Series parade on Market Street in San Francisco.

“It's California, it's laid-back, and the security guard in that dugout is a buddy of mine,” he said. “The players don't seem to mind. They're loose, they're hanging out, and you can't get that stuff anywhere else. That dugout is so grimy, too. It's wonderful.”

Mr. Mangin celebrates the little things - the pine-tar rags, the bubble gum wrappers, the catchers' masks, the crushed paper cups - in his book “Instant Baseball,” a photo essay of the 2012 season produced entirely with Instagram.

Sports Illustrated, which sends Mr. Mangin to spring training every year, published 18 of his photos last summer, sparking the idea for a book. Major League Baseball, which has used Mr. Mangin as a freelancer for 19 years, sent him to the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers, and Mr. Mangin took a side trip to New York late in the season to give the book an East Coast vibe, too.

DESCRIPTIONBrad Mangin In the dugout, the bullpen phone of the Kansas City Royals, before a game between the Royals and the Oakland Athletics at O.co Coliseum.

“I went to Citi Field with just my credentials and my iPhone - no cameras,” he said. “I had a blast. I got R. A. Dickey to pose for me with his knuckleball grip. I went to Yankee Stadium and got a lot of neat pictures of Little League kids getting ready for a game in the park across the street. Just a lot of fun stuff that shows New York baseball.”

Mr. Mangin is back in New York this week for the All-Star Game at Citi Field, and he will carry more than just his iPhone this time. Although his Instagram photos have become something of a trademark, he said, 90 percent of his work is done with real cameras. The iPhone is always nearby, though, and his Instagram feed, bmangin, has more than 7,800 followers.

“I feel like I'm working for a wire service - I'll text a quick caption and send it out,” Mr. Mangin said. “People seem to enjoy it, the whole immediacy thing.”

Now, more than 200 of his collected moments from last season have jumped from the phone to the Internet to a book, a new frontier for baseball photography with a common app in the hands of an expert.

“I'm just documenting the game of baseball,” Mr. Mangin said. “I'm a baseball freak. That's what I do.”

DESCRIPTIONMarc Levine/New York Mets Brad Mangin with Mr. Met on the field before a game between the Washington Nationals and the Mets at Citi Field.

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Democratic Republic of Congo, Israel and Pakistan.

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A Russian-American Photographing Native Alaska

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The black-and-white photograph taken in Killisnoo, Alaska, at the turn of the 20th century depicts a group of fishermen reeling in a gigantic halibut. The image is lighthearted and almost comical: workers smile as the imposing creature writhes perilously close to them.

What makes the photograph (Slide 5) unusual is not its subject matter but its subjects. The fishermen, working in apparent harmony, represent a cross section of the population of Killisnoo, an island off southeastern Alaska that was an important outpost for American businesses and tourism. Several of the men are white; at least two are Native American, members of the Tlingit community; and one is Asian. Taken at a time when racial integration was the exception and not the rule in the United States, the image by Vincent Soboleff, a Russian-American amateur photographer, is noteworthy.

As the Dartmouth anthropologist Sergei A. Kan argues in his new book, “A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska” (University of Oklahoma Press), Mr. Soboleff's images of the United States territory, especially its Native population, are also significantly different from others of the period.

Mr. Soboleff, who was born in Killisnoo in 1882, the son of the town's well-regarded Russian Orthodox priest (Slide 9), set out to document his community almost as soon as he commandeered his family's small Kodak camera as a teenager. His project ended in the late 1910s, when the need to help support his family after the death of his father drove him to seek more gainful employment, first as a postal worker and later as the owner of a popular general store and movie theater. While Mr. Soboleff later made some of his photographs into hand-tinted postcards and permitted a handful of local business to use his images as logos, he remained disengaged from the medium until his death in 1950.

Mr. Soboleff approached his subjects familiarly, with youthful enthusiasm. Nevertheless, he was reasonably knowledgeable about Native social organization, ceremonial life and history, a facility aided by his close relationship with the Tlingit community and his ability to speak its language fluently.

His pictures are competent but not artful or studied, unlike the work of more commercial photographers of Alaska's Native population, like William Case and Horace Draper. This informality was part of his unconventional point of view. He rarely staged photographs or posed his subjects, favoring natural settings and straightforward depictions of everyday life and customs.

As 19th-century Native Americans were forced to adapt to a world dynamically altered by war, racial brutality, disease and displacement, photographic depictions of them habitually trafficked in stereotypes built on an implicit comparison between the new, “civilized” Indian and the tradition-bound “savage.” Mr. Soboleff's pictures were more respectful of, and ultimately more informative about, his subjects, despite the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, which began working in Alaska in the mid-18th century, was actively proselytizing in the Tlingit community.

The contents of Mr. Soboleff's archive, some 780 plate negatives donated to the Alaska State Library by his sister in 1968, suggest that he was interested in capturing a wide-ranging view of life in Alaska. His photographs depict local buildings and landscapes, maritime culture, and the Tlingit, Russian-American, European-American and Asian-American residents of Killisnoo and a nearby town, Angoon. Mr. Kan's rigorous study focuses on the pictures of people, particularly scenes of work, celebration and play, as well as of the interface between Native and non-Native populations.

This interaction was not as sanguine as it first appears in the photos. On the surface, Killisnoo seems like a racial paradise. Tlingit and Russian-American men labor together in factories, and the Russian-Americans, then referred to as Creoles and seen as not quite white by the nation at large, seem to be more empathetic to the plight of their Native co-workers. A leader of the Russian Orthodox Church poses with a Tlingit aristocrat in traditional Native ceremonial vestments. White and Native villagers participate in a Fourth of July celebration.

But closer inspection of that last image reveals disharmony. Although the white men are active participants, their Native counterparts are relegated to the sidelines as passive spectators. While workers of all races did labor together, Mr. Kan says, their leisure time was often spent apart: a number of photographs depict whites hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and playing in a small orchestra, largely without their Tlingit co-workers. Even in employment, integration went only so far. Jobs requiring specialized technical knowledge were restricted to whites.

Mr. Soboleff's intimate portraits, especially of Tlingit aristocrats, are his most visually compelling images. The aesthetics of these photographs reside less in their formal or stylistic mastery and more in the artfulness of their subjects and environment. Such images afforded a culturally marginalized people an uncommon opportunity to represent themselves as they wanted to be seen, surrounded by stunning artifacts, especially the ceremonial objects and garments bearing the crests of individual clans.

Instead of transforming his subjects into exotic and anonymous icons, the 19th-century standard for images of American Indians, Mr. Soboleff treated them as individuals, identifying many by name in his captions. His subjects were also solicitous: “Local clan leaders, like most Tlingit people in general, were quite fond of being photographed,” Mr. Kan writes, valuing the images as “permanent proof of their high rank and status” or of the richness of their lives.

“Try putting yourself inside these photos,” writes Edwin Schupman, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and an educator at the National Museum of the American Indian, and “you might begin to understand the world from their points of view.” Mr. Schupman speaks to the importance of empathy in interpreting photos of Native peoples. For Mr. Soboleff, an honorary citizen of Tlingit country, an intimate understanding of his subjects was an important prerequisite for photographing them as well.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.” He curated a show, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” and contributed essays to “Gordon Parks: Collected Works” (Steidl, 2013).

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Pictures of the Day: India and Elsewhere

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Photos from India, Syria, Lebanon and Washington, D.C.

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Alice Austen\'s Type of Town

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Ten years ago, Paul Moakley discovered the archives of the Staten Island photographer Alice Austen when he started curating shows at Clear Comfort, a museum that was once Ms. Austen's home. That initial discovery began a long process that has pretty much taken over his life: he now lives at the museum and works as its caretaker.

He sometimes feels that Ms. Austen suffers the same fate as the borough, mentioned briefly in surveys but mostly overlooked.

“It's always quite a narrow view of what she does and her place in photography,” said Mr. Moakley, deputy photo editor at Time magazine. “She's always depicted as the documentarian of social life on Staten Island, or Victorian girls' life, but she really was a documentarian who went out into the city and made this interesting body of work about street types.”

DESCRIPTIONAlice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House An egg stand on Hester Street in Manhattan. April 18, 1895.

Her portfolio, “Street Types of New York,” published in 1896, was the product of several years spent making formal, almost archetypal, portraits of various people at work. It is also the inspiration for a show Mr. Moakley helped curate, “The New Street Types of New York,” which features contemporary portraits by photographers including Ruddy Roye, who has a widely followed Instagram feed of his Brooklyn neighbors, and Susannah Ray, who has been documenting the surfing community in her neighborhood in the Rockaway section of Queens.

Mr. Moakley said he hoped the show would spur others to delve into Ms. Austen's work in New York City and make the connection between her and today's artists.

“People have had a hard time grasping her,” he said. “She photographed everything she encountered and was curious about. Altogether, she created a portrait of someone who was complex, layered and fun.”

In some ways, Mr. Moakley said, her story was a modern one. Although she was born into wealth in 1866, she and her mother had to move in with her grandparents when her father deserted the family. There she lived with an extended family, including an uncle, Oswald, who gave her a camera he had brought home from an overseas business trip. She was about 10 years old.

Mr. Moakley said the young Ms. Austen took to photography but broke away from the era's conventions. She experimented a lot, taking her camera on sailboats or shooting from moving trains. An avid tennis player, she photographed other players, producing early action shots.

“I sometimes feel that she photographed the way people photograph today with their phones,” Mr. Moakley said. “She would take pictures of every room in her house. When she had a party she would make a photo and have a fun joke in it, like a card game where every card faced the camera.”

Some of the setups were as much commentaries on the expectations society had of women at the time. Ms. Austen never married, but she spent 32 years with her companion, Gertrude Tate. Her photographs of other women revealed an interesting attitude.

DESCRIPTIONAlice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House Alice Austen, left, and Gertrude Tate at Pickard's Penny Photo in Stapleton, Staten Island.

“There is something a little tongue in cheek about those photographs,” Mr. Moakley said. “There is one picture of women in their underwear, with their hair down, smoking in a church rectory. It's literally a photo of everything a Victorian woman shouldn't be doing, all at once.”

Ms. Austen's street types, he noted, were a departure. Taken over a period of several years in the mid-1890s, they were formal and straightforward, like a tourist's guide to the city. While her biographer gave the portfolio short shrift and said they were a product of Ms. Austen's curiosity, others feel her motives were more complicated. Mr. Moakley cites the research of Anna Conlan, who surmised that Austen may have been influenced by similar portfolios done in other cities at the time. Her work, Ms. Conlan wrote, also touched on the theme of a city changing rapidly with the arrival of new, and sometimes impoverished, immigrants.

“ ‘Street Types' actively contributed to the popular notion of the urban picturesque,” Ms. Conlan concluded, “designed to simultaneously celebrate and control diversity, titillating the middle classes whilst reassuring them, and perhaps reassuring Austen herself, of their privileged place in the new city.”

Ms. Austen's own fortunes tumbled after the stock market crash. Little by little, she sank into poverty, losing her home and moving into a farm colony for paupers. Luckily, thousands of her glass-plate negatives were safeguarded, and when a researcher working on a book on the history of American women discovered them in 1950, it led to a revival of interest in her life and art. The publication of her photos, and stories in Life magazine, led to donations that allowed her to move into a nursing home, as well as to a serious assessment of her work and the idea of preserving Clear Comfort as a museum. She died in 1952.

Since becoming caretaker of the house, Mr. Moakley has had time to reflect upon Ms. Austen's legacy even in his own work. It reminds him to experiment and not to be too rigid about how he approaches photography.

“Photography is fun when you challenge yourself, work with a little bit of doubt and not be sure how things are going to turn out,” he said. “Plus, just being in that house and landscape, the light is always incredible. Alice must have been inspired by that. It's beautiful every day in a different way.”

DESCRIPTIONAlice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House In a brook below Hector Falls, Watkins, N.Y. July 25, 1892.

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How Acceptable Was Anonymous Speculation About Snowden\'s Laptops?

It's the story that just won't quit: The tale of Edward J. Snowden and his leak of classified information about the United States government's secret surveillance of citizens.

Rife with skirmishes and subplots, overflowing with schadenfreude, one-upsmanship and bruised egos, it's also a matter of extraordinary national and global importance.

One of the latest developments is the question of whether Mr. Snowden â€" as was suggested in a Times article on June 24 â€" may have unwittingly provided classified information to China.

The Times article, the essence of which looked at the reasons that China allowed Mr. Snowden to leave Hong Kong, included this sentence about two-thirds of the way down: “Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said that they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong, and that he said were with him during his stay at a Hong Kong hotel.”

Mr. Snowden denied that his laptops were compromised by the Chinese (or the Russians): “I never gave any information to either government and they never took anything from my laptops,” he said in an interview with Glenn Greenwald, the columnist for The Guardian who broke much of the biggest news over the past month as a chief recipient of Mr. Snowden's information.

In that piece, Mr. Greenwald took The Times to task for printing that “incendiary” speculation.

“In lieu of any evidence, The New York Times circulated this obviously significant assertion,” he said, by “citing two anonymous sources saying they ‘believed' this happened.”

He continued: “From there, it predictably spread everywhere as truth.” The New Yorker soon repeated it, citing The Times. “It was then used to demonize Snowden” in a wide variety of venues, Mr. Greenwald wrote. (The Huffington Post's Michael Calderone reported on this topic on Wednesday.)

Paul E. King, a Times reader in Fort Worth, said he was disturbed by what he read in Mr. Greenwald's column, and he raised good questions, wanting to know about The Times's standards on the use of anonymous sources. He also was concerned about the way such information in The Times can be manipulated for political purposes.  (For example, government sources have reason to want to portray Mr. Snowden as a traitor.)

I asked The Times's foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, about how the sourcing was handled and about Mr. Greenwald's criticism.

Mr. Kahn said that it's important to see this passage in the story for what it is: An exploration of what might have happened, based on experts who did not claim to have direct knowledge. He also noted that, in a front-page article last year, The Times detailed the ways in which the Chinese government is able to penetrate digital devices; such cyber theft is a common enough practice that American government and business officials traveling in China take extraordinary measures to prevent it.

The recent article, he noted, said that the sources “believed, not that they were told.” The Times provided further context and conditionality, he said, in the next sentence: “If that were the case, they said, China would no longer need or want to have Mr. Snowden remain in Hong Kong.”

“It's a couple of steps removed from a strong assertion,” he said.

Mr. Kahn was not the direct editor on the article and he said that foreign desk editors did not press the reporters to know their sources, nor did he think they needed to do so. That practice arises, he said, when an anonymous source is the basis for an article's premise or a central assertion.

“I don't think any of us saw this set of beliefs as being worthy of that high level of scrutiny,” he said. Because of a concurrent discussion of another, related article, Mr. Kahn does know who one of the two sources is and remains confident of that person's knowledge and reliability.

In retrospect, knowing how the passage has been exaggerated and spun, would Mr. Kahn have wanted to see it handled differently?

“It's Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said, but The Times could have added a sentence that made it clear that the sources did not have direct, specific information of what happened with Mr. Snowden's laptops.

Mr. Greenwald's argument is worth thinking hard about. Two sentences in the middle of a Times article on such a sensitive subject â€" though they may be off the central point â€" have the power to sway the discussion or damage a reputation.  What The Times writes can quickly, and sometimes harmfully, become pundit fodder.

“The way it gets picked up is hard for us to control,” Mr. Kahn said. “Obviously, we have to think about it.”

He's right. So is the reader, Mr. King, who wrote: “I read the Times for the truth. I can read publication of speculation almost anywhere.”

 



The Public Editor\'s Sunday Column: Making Sense of a Sensational Case

The Times has made up for a slow start on the Trayvon Martin story.

‘Sex on Campus\' Writer Responds to Questions and Complaints

With its photo illustration of a bare thigh and dark-painted nails amid the bedsheets, Kate Taylor's nearly 4,800-word “Sex on Campus” article dominated the Styles cover on Sunday.

The article, titled “She Can Play That Game, Too,” had the ability to startle. For example, in a paragraph very likely to give pause to parents of college students everywhere, Ms. Taylor wrote:

One girl, explaining why her encounters freshman and sophomore year often ended with fellatio, said that usually by the time she got back to a guy's room, she was starting to sober up and didn't want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.

But no one should be startled by the article's rapid rise up the most e-mailed list to the top spot on Sunday and Monday morning, or by the almost 800 readers who wrote comments, or by the way it was discussed among college students and the parents of college students - though not necessarily in the same room with one another. It was also the topic of outside comment, including from Philly Magazine and The Atlantic.

I heard many comments and concerns about the article from readers, and I asked Ms. Taylor to respond to some of them â€" as well as to some of my questions. What follows is a condensed version of my e-mail exchange with her over the past two days, as reader e-mail arrived. (Ms. Taylor mentions Glenn Kramon in answering the first question; he is a Times editor who works on enterprise stories.)

Q.

How did this get started and how did you decide to focus on Penn?

A.

Glenn Kramon had the idea of sending a reporter to a college for a semester to talk to young women about their social lives. We wanted a school that was elite but also had a fairly typical collegiate social scene, and after considering a few different schools, and talking to some students at various schools, I chose Penn, because it fit that bill, was large and diverse, and not in New York City but not far from it either. Originally we had thought of focusing on drinking, but as I started talking to women, their feelings about relationships and sex seemed more central and interesting, with alcohol obviously playing an important role in their sexual interactions.

Q.

Are you surprised by the amount of reaction, and how would you characterize the reaction over all?

A.

I am surprised, though not completely, since I was pretty fascinated by what I was learning as I did the reporting. I feel as if the readers who appear to have read the article carefully â€" which is important, because it has many layers, not reflected in the snappy headline â€" have had very thoughtful reactions. From the comments, many older people seem to have been disturbed and saddened by the picture painted of college sex. Some commenters have reflected on some of the factors that have shaped young women's attitudes about sex and relationships, like the economic pressure they're under to succeed. I've been particularly interested in the reaction of current and recent college students, and a good amount of that has been positive. The response I've gotten so far from the women I interviewed has been very positive, and I've gotten very interesting e-mails from women at other schools about their experiences.

Q.

One thing I'm hearing is that by focusing on one Ivy League university, you got a certain kind of young woman - highly competitive, career-oriented, etc. Some people think reporting it more broadly would have been worthwhile. Why this particular choice?

A.

From the beginning the editors felt that it was important to do the reporting at one school, to give the story a sense of place and as much of a narrative as possible. There would have been other benefits in an approach looking at several schools. It would be very interesting to know how these issues play out at, say, a big state school, and even at community colleges. If this had been a series instead, that would have been wonderful.

Q.

How difficult was it to get the women to speak freely?

A.

It was very difficult, which is why I had to use middle names and even middle initials. Understandably, students were worried about future employers Googling them and seeing that they once talked about their sex lives. But beyond that, even students who said that they themselves didn't have any regrets about their sexual experiences were concerned that other people would judge them for being too promiscuous.

Q.

What has been the criticism you've heard most and how would you address it?

A.

I've heard criticism from some young women at Penn that they think I painted the picture of relationships there too bleakly â€" that I didn't pay enough attention to the women who do have boyfriends, whether at Penn or long-distance. I certainly met girls who had boyfriends, but they were the exception, not the rule, and I included the voices of several girls who either were dating people or had dated people in college in the story. The most prominent voice was that of Mercedes, whose experience was also distinct in that she came from a working-class background, did not participate at all in the “hookup” culture, and was still a virgin. It seems as if some students felt that having the only major character in the story with a boyfriend also be a virgin made things seem too black and white.

Q.

How long did you work on this? Were you working on it exclusively?

A.

I worked on it exclusively from September through January, and then on and off (while reporting on the mayor's race) since February.

Q.

Why now? Was it pegged to a study or did it just grow organically from your interest? Is there any time peg to it?

A.

It grew organically â€" first from Glenn presenting me with the opportunity, and then (as I started talking to women) from my interest in how things had changed even in the 12 years since I graduated from college. But I think it turned out to be unexpectedly timely, with Hanna Rosin's “The End of Men” and Susan Patton's letter to The Daily Princetonian bringing up similar issues, and, in the case of Patton's letter, causing quite a furor.

Q.

There are no men quoted in the story - students or experts. Was this a decision you made in advance? Wouldn't including men's voices have provided a more well-rounded story?

A.

Because of the way the story evolved, it was always focused on women. I did interview male students, though not as many and not in as much depth as the female students. At a certain point their voices were in the story, as a discrete section, but my editors found that awkward, so it got cut. Obviously what men want and how men feel is a critical part of the picture, and in my fantasies it might have been a pair of articles, but that wasn't possible.

Q.

What about gay and lesbian students? They aren't mentioned here. Why?

A.

I did interview several lesbians and bisexual women in my research, and found their experiences and perspectives fascinating. One argued that the “hookup” culture was itself inherently heterosexual, and said that, while there was certainly its equivalent among gay men on campus, there was not among lesbians. Another lesbian expressed attitudes similar to that of many of the heterosexual girls I interviewed, that career preparation was her first priority and she was not going to have a relationship that was too time-consuming. I would have loved to discuss the similarities and differences between heterosexual and L.G.B.T. students, but I just didn't have the space.

Q.

Finally, some readers believed your article didn't give enough attention to the fine line between the alcohol-fueled “hookup” culture and sexual assault. Although one section described Haley, who experienced sexual assault, how do you respond to those who say it was not enough?

A.

I actually feel as if it was handled quite well. The role of rape was flagged up high. (A sentence early in the article read, “Some women described a dangerous edge to the ‘hookup' culture, of sexual assaults and degrading encounters enabled by drinking and distinguished by a lack of emotional connection.”) Haley's story came about halfway through the story, and, at 911 words, it was by far the longest of any of the individual sections of the article.  My intent was not to write a whole article focused exclusively on the problem of sexual assault in college.  That would have been a different story. Some readers have objected to including a discussion of rape at all within an article about the college “hookup” culture. I think people would prefer these subjects to be completely separable, but the take-away from my reporting, and what I think the article accurately shows, is that they are not. In a context in which young people are drinking a lot, and having sex ual encounters in which there is often little clear communication, there is a real danger of sexual assault.

Here's my take: The story, though certainly not the final word on this topic, was fascinating and worthwhile.  The article itself was more nuanced than the headline and presentation got across, which is hard to avoid.  (Try telling a complex story in six engaging words sometime; it's not easy.) Like many articles of this nature, which depend heavily on anecdotes and personal experience, this one can't be seen as definitive, but as a snapshot that gets people talking and thinking. Unquestionably, it did that.



Just the Facts - No ‘False Balance\' Wanted Here

7:46 p.m. | Updated Who would have thought that “false equivalency” could turn out to be fighting words?

Hardly anything sends Times readers for their boxing gloves as quickly as does the practice of “he said/she said” reporting. (Here's an extreme and made-up example just for the sake of illustration: “Some sources believe that the earth is flat; others insist that it is round.”)

When I wrote about this last fall, I got a lot of agreement from readers; they made it clear that news organizations ought to go out of their way to state established truths when they can and not give equal weight to both sides, if one side clearly represents what is true. (Not everyone, of course, can agree on what the facts are.)

Since then, the resistance to this longtime news-media practice - often done in the name of fairness - has only grown stronger, as it's become part of a broader discussion about journalistic principles and practices.

In general, The Times tries to avoid letting two sides of a debate get equal time when one of them represents an established truth, or equating two things that aren't equal. (This comes up, particularly, in Science section articles and even more particularly, in discussions about climate change.)

But those efforts aren't universally successful. In the service of keeping the pressure on, here are three examples to ponder. (And, please bear in mind, there's no equivalency here, either; they are all quite different from one another.)

On Jenny McCarthy. As Brendan Nyhan wrote in Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday, the naming of the actress Jenny McCarthy as co-host of “The View” has reignited the protests over her debunked insistence that some vaccines contribute to autism. Mr. Nyhan's piece took to task the false balance among media organizations in reporting this aspect of her ascension. He wrote that “the early coverage has generally failed to follow best practices for covering false or unsupported claims, giving greater reach to discredited claims that have potentially dangerous consequences for public health.”

He writes that one of the few organizations which got it right was The Times. Mr. Nyhan wrote that two writers “stood out for providing fact-based coverage”:

The New York Times television writer Bill Carter stated directly that McCarthy's claims are based on a “widely disproved theory [that] has led to unnecessary illnesses in children, according to child health experts,” while the Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter Meredith Blake immediately described McCarthy's views as “discredited” in an initial blog post yesterday.

It can be important to state both sides of an argument - but only when both sides are legitimate.

On Congressional Gridlock. James Fallows, a writer at The Atlantic, criticized for false equivalency a “Congressional Memo,” from The Times. In its initial online version, the piece contained this passage: “In both the Senate, controlled by Democrats, and the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest.”

By the time the article made it into print, it had been changed, but the earlier version set off some reader protests, including one from Jason T. Wright, a professor at Penn State University.

“In addition to being both a false equivalence and just false, this sentence contradicts the thesis of the article, which is that Congress cannot function because of partisanship.” He noted that “the minority in the Senate is very powerful indeed.”

I asked the reporter Jennifer Steinhauer to respond.

“When I wrote the piece, I was thinking specifically of the proposed Senate rules change, which in this case was something Republicans were unable to impact, as was on display on the Senate floor,” she said.

An editor pointed out around the time that it was published online that the sentence could be interpreted more broadly, and Ms. Steinhauer agreed to the change. But a series of miscommunications and process-related problems resulted in its not being changed until the print edition, she said. As the piece appeared in print (and as it would have appeared almost immediately if not for the mix-up), it read:

“In the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest. Senate Republicans at least have the power to filibuster, which helps explain why they are so adamantly opposed to the Democrats' gambit.” It now reads that way in the online version, as well.

Ms. Steinhauer added that she would have appreciated the opportunity to explain what happened to Mr. Fallows. “Unlike Mr. Fallows, I have to actually call the people I am reporting on,” she said.

On Michele Bachmann and the Vaccine for Cervical Cancer. A less clear case arises from a reader, Ira Glasser, who writes about what he sees as false equivalency in a recent Health section piece about the HPV vaccine. He writes:

The article quotes Michele Bachmann as saying that the vaccine “could have ‘dangerous side effects,'” followed immediately by “a concern that health officials say is unfounded.” If there is a legitimate dispute about side effects, this is hardly an informative way of dealing with it. If there isn't, why is this sentence there? My concern is the tendency of modern journalism to reflect “balance” by counterposing wholly noncredible claims from wholly noncredible sources with counterclaims by credible sources.

I agree with his overall concerns but not entirely with this specific example. Given the Minnesota congresswoman's prominence â€" and the widespread coverage given to her statements during the presidential primary campaign last year - including a brief mention of her in this piece seems reasonable to me. And the debunking by health officials does the job of stating an established truth.

At any rate, it's good that Mr. Glasser was watching closely. I'm glad to be hearing more from readers about avoiding false balance. Nothing is more important in journalism, after all, than getting to the truth.



Alice Austen’s Type of Town

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Ten years ago, Paul Moakley discovered the archives of the Staten Island photographer Alice Austen when he started curating shows at Clear Comfort, a museum that was once Ms. Austen’s home. That initial discovery began a long process that has pretty much taken over his life: he now lives at the museum and works as its caretaker.

He sometimes feels that Ms. Austen suffers the same fate as the borough, mentioned briefly in surveys but mostly overlooked.

“It’s always quite a narrow view of what she does and her place in photography,” said Mr. Moakley, deputy photo editor at Time magazine. “She’s always depicted as the documentarian of social life on Staten Island, or Victorian girls’ life, but she really was a documentarian who went out into the city and made this interesting body of work about street types.”

DESCRIPTIONAlice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House An egg stand on Hester Street in Manhattan. April 18, 1895.

Her portfolio, “Street Types of New York,” published in 1896, was the product of several years spent making formal, almost archetypal, portraits of various people at work. It is also the inspiration for a show Mr. Moakley helped curate, “The New Street Types of New York,” which features contemporary portraits by photographers including Ruddy Roye, who has a widely followed Instagram feed of his Brooklyn neighbors, and Susannah Ray, who has been documenting the surfing community in her neighborhood in the Rockaway section of Queens.

Mr. Moakley said he hoped the show would spur others to delve into Ms. Austen’s work in New York City and make the connection between her and today’s artists.

“People have had a hard time grasping her,” he said. “She photographed everything she encountered and was curious about. Altogether, she created a portrait of someone who was complex, layered and fun.”

In some ways, Mr. Moakley said, her story was a modern one. Although she was born into wealth in 1866, she and her mother had to move in with her grandparents when her father deserted the family. There she lived with an extended family, including an uncle, Oswald, who gave her a camera he had brought home from an overseas business trip. She was about 10 years old.

Mr. Moakley said the young Ms. Austen took to photography but broke away from the era’s conventions. She experimented a lot, taking her camera on sailboats or shooting from moving trains. An avid tennis player, she photographed other players, producing early action shots.

“I sometimes feel that she photographed the way people photograph today with their phones,” Mr. Moakley said. “She would take pictures of every room in her house. When she had a party she would make a photo and have a fun joke in it, like a card game where every card faced the camera.”

Some of the setups were as much commentaries on the expectations society had of women at the time. Ms. Austen never married, but she spent 32 years with her companion, Gertrude Tate. Her photographs of other women revealed an interesting attitude.

DESCRIPTIONAlice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House Alice Austen, left, and Gertrude Tate at Pickard’s Penny Photo in Stapleton, Staten Island.

“There is something a little tongue in cheek about those photographs,” Mr. Moakley said. “There is one picture of women in their underwear, with their hair down, smoking in a church rectory. It’s literally a photo of everything a Victorian woman shouldn’t be doing, all at once.”

Ms. Austen’s street types, he noted, were a departure. Taken over a period of several years in the mid-1890s, they were formal and straightforward, like a tourist’s guide to the city. While her biographer gave the portfolio short shrift and said they were a product of Ms. Austen’s curiosity, others feel her motives were more complicated. Mr. Moakley cites the research of Anna Conlan, who surmised that Austen may have been influenced by similar portfolios done in other cities at the time. Her work, Ms. Conlan wrote, also touched on the theme of a city changing rapidly with the arrival of new, and sometimes impoverished, immigrants.

“ ‘Street Types’ actively contributed to the popular notion of the urban picturesque,” Ms. Conlan concluded, “designed to simultaneously celebrate and control diversity, titillating the middle classes whilst reassuring them, and perhaps reassuring Austen herself, of their privileged place in the new city.”

Ms. Austen’s own fortunes tumbled after the stock market crash. Little by little, she sank into poverty, losing her home and moving into a farm colony for paupers. Luckily, thousands of her glass-plate negatives were safeguarded, and when a researcher working on a book on the history of American women discovered them in 1950, it led to a revival of interest in her life and art. The publication of her photos, and stories in Life magazine, led to donations that allowed her to move into a nursing home, as well as to a serious assessment of her work and the idea of preserving Clear Comfort as a museum. She died in 1952.

Since becoming caretaker of the house, Mr. Moakley has had time to reflect upon Ms. Austen’s legacy even in his own work. It reminds him to experiment and not to be too rigid about how he approaches photography.

“Photography is fun when you challenge yourself, work with a little bit of doubt and not be sure how things are going to turn out,” he said. “Plus, just being in that house and landscape, the light is always incredible. Alice must have been inspired by that. It’s beautiful every day in a different way.”

DESCRIPTIONAlice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House In a brook below Hector Falls, Watkins, N.Y. July 25, 1892.

Follow @iAliceAusten, @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: India and Elsewhere

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Photos from India, Syria, Lebanon and Washington, D.C.

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