Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from Syria, China, Mexico and the Philippines.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Editing Pictures, Influencing Photographers

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Not only do photojournalists get to travel the world, wear funky scarves and meet all kinds of people, they usually get their name underneath their images when they are published in magazines and newspapers or online. Photo editors, on the other hand, are usually stuck in an office, toiling anonymously. No matter how good a job they do, their name won’t appear in the newspaper the next day. (Unless they commit a crime.)

Yesterday and today on Lens, photographers pay tribute to the photo editors who most influenced their careers. As Yunghi Kim and Kenneth Jarecke wrote in yesterday’s introduction, these editors are “the people who pushed, pulled and occasionally strong-armed them into producing exceptional work. The people who believed in them when nobody else did â€" who recognized the photographer’s strength and took the time to develop it.”

Alexandra Avakian

I first worked for Robert Stevens in 1988 when I covered the Palestinian intifada for Time magazine for three months. Those were great days for Time, with bureaus in many foreign capitals, and Robert was the photography editor of the World section. For nearly a decade he assigned me stories I cared about in places like the Middle East, Russia, Central Asia and Africa. Working for Time was deeply satisfying, in part because I was focused on stories of conflict, peace and the human will to survive.

Robert wanted his photographers to capture a piece of world history, which Time did every week under his direction. The bottom line for Time was: nail historic moments, on deadline, in pictures that speak powerfully. Few outside the photography world understand the broad influence Robert had on the public when they looked at Time for more than two decades.

Robert fostered loyalty. He empowered photojournalists like myself to take risks; I knew he had my back, and there was creative synergy. He promoted women photojournalists in an arena dominated by males.

He knew that I would shoot in the style that Time needed; that was a source of pride and passion for me. He also knew that, within the same take, I was making what are known as personal pictures. I would save these for future use.

Robert has a distinguished editorial eye and deep, varied photographic taste encompassing not only photojournalism, but landscape, portraiture, art and much more.

Alexandra Avakian Lake Sevan, Armenia. November 2012.

Donna Ferrato

John Loengard was Life magazine’s picture editor from 1978 to 1987. He was unflappable, tough â€" not known for facile words of encouragement. In 1983, I walked into his office fantasizing about walking in the footsteps of Margaret Bourke-White when the only thing I had to offer was a black box of prints of a man beating his wife. Flipping through, John said, “I always thought domestic violence was an unphotographable subject until I saw these.” His words gave me the courage to ask for an assignment.

John became my first overseer in the competitive land of Time/Life. I began working on stories about battered women. More than once he banged my head into an imaginary wall to teach me the secrets of seasoned photographers. John believed that pictures were not always the byproduct of simply “being there.” Sometimes photographers can’t afford to wait till the cows come home. I’ll never forget that tongue lashing when I returned from an assignment without certain promised pictures. He said a professional would have come back with the big “double-truck” picture, no matter what.

Eventually, he taught me how to “previsualize” and put my desires out into the unconscious realm of storytelling â€" to get closer to what I wanted without distorting or changing reality. Picked from the A-list of editors I worked with during the halcyon years of editorial photography, John Loengard’s voice stays.

Stan Grossfeld

The late, great Boston Globe editor Tom Winship and I had a father-and-son relationship. He liked the fact that I had sneaked into the Globe in the mid ’70s when security was extra tight. Back then, bullets were pumped into the newsroom because of the paper’s stance on busing to achieve racial integration. I was a disheveled Jewish kid from the Bronx, and Winship was a Harvard-educated WASP whose dad was Globe before him. We couldn’t have been more different. He wore a bow tie and suspenders, for crying out loud. I have never owned either.

Winship covered the D-Day landings of World War II. He taught me that you could make a difference in the world with a camera or a pen. Sometimes it was little things, like ordering every Globe photographer to shoot photographs of Boston’s dirty streets, then running the photos on Page 1. Boston became cleaner, quicker.

Winship used to scrawl handwritten notes on little scraps of paper. We used to call them “Tiger notes,” as in “attaboy, Tiger,” and they were treasured. He had a very short attention span. Make your point quick or lose your audience.

He taught me to be more than a photographer and to try to help those without a voice.

Courtesy of The Boston Globe Photo Deptartment Stan Grossfield, right, and Tom Winship.

“Do the right thing,” he preached. He loved it when you donated the Pulitzer Prize monetary awards to charity.

Seconds before he announced his resignation to the newsroom in 1984, he took me aside. He had an idea. “You ought to figure out a way to sneak into Ethiopia and cover the famine,” he said.

The reporter Colin Nickerson and I did just that in Tigray and Eritrea. We hooked up with a rebel group bringing food supplies that only traveled at night to avoid Ethiopian MiG’s. The hardest part was not the civil war, but having to photograph while the viewfinder is filled with tears. I can still hear the muffled cries of starving children too weak to shoo away moisture-seeking flies some 30 years later.

Tom Winship was so proud of us, he hugged us when we made it home safely. For Winship, it was the journalistic equivalent of Ted Williams hitting a home run in his very last at-bat.

Joseph Rodriguez

In 1985, I studied at the International Center of Photography under Fred Ritchin in the photojournalism program he created. I still remember, 28 years later, how hard he pushed me and all of his students during our project to document the gentrification of East Harlem. My hard work under his leadership resulted in a book, “Spanish Harlem,” and the May 1990 National Geographic cover story, “Growing Up in East Harlem.” When I began the project, I could only afford a couple of rolls of Kodachrome each week, and I showed Howard Chapnick from Black Star every frame (when I graduated I.C.P., It was Fred Ritchin who had suggested that I work at the Black Star Photo Agency).

Fred published my photos when he was at The New York Times in the early 1990s and when he was at Pixel Press. He was more than a photo editor. He made himself available at any time, day or night. He pushed me into challenging myself to be more creative. He encouraged me to develop stories in deeper and more meaningful ways. He pushed me to find the best way to tell a story using alternative methods of storytelling. I learned new platforms, in which audio, video and multimedia was used to enhance the viewer’s experience without totally discarding old-world influences like painting, poetry and sculpture.

Fred was with me during every step of my project on Los Angeles gangs from 1992 to 1995, which also resulted in a book, “East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A.” Yes, editing is a talent, but the ability to sit down and connect with someone through their work is something altogether different. Through Fred, I was able to identify my motivations: a care for community, my home, the inner city, social justice and the poor. He knew where I was coming from and helped me to embrace it.

Joseph Rodriguez A pit bull and an automatic pistol in a gang member’s apartment in east Los Angeles. 2013.

Darcy Padilla

I was one of two college students presenting work at the National Press Photographers Association women’s conference in San Francisco in 1990. Honestly, I was intimidated. The keynote speakers were Donna Ferrato and Ruth Bernhard, both icons. I spoke about my long-term project on H.I.V./AIDS in prison that I had been photographing for about nine months. After my presentation, Geri Migielicz of The San Jose Mercury News said Nancy Lee from The New York Times would like to see my portfolio. After quietly looking at my photographs, Nancy said, “We do not have an internship program, but if we did, would you be interested?” I said yes. I felt like I was in the movie “The Godfather.”

The following week Nancy called: “So, we have an internship.” She also suggested during our call that I should apply for this new grant from the Alexia Foundation. It became the first major award I would receive.

Nancy had a way of making everything work, and work smoothly. At the time, interns were not allowed to work as photographers. But Nancy understood the importance, and thrill, of being published. She would hire me as a freelancer when I was off duty. My summer was spent shadowing the great photographers of The New York Times during the day and working as a freelancer at night and on weekends. Nancy encouraged me to work on my own stories and published one, “The Boys Choir of Harlem,” six columns.

Because of what Nancy saw in my photography and me, it made me feel I could do this.

Vic De Lucia/The New York Times Nancy Lee, left, and William E. Sauro examined contact sheets in the photo lab of The New York Times’s third-floor newsroom. Circa 1984.

Yesterday, Eric Draper, Carol Guzy, Kenneth Jarecke, Yunghi Kim, Librado Romero and Maggie Steber discussed the influential editors in their lives.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Editing Pictures, Influencing Photographers

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

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Not only do photojournalists get to travel the world, wear funky scarves and meet all kinds of people, they usually get their name underneath their images when they are published in magazines and newspapers or online. Photo editors, on the other hand, are usually stuck in an office, toiling anonymously. No matter how good a job they do, their name won’t appear in the newspaper the next day. (Unless they commit a crime.)

Yesterday and today on Lens, photographers pay tribute to the photo editors who most influenced their careers. As Yunghi Kim and Kenneth Jarecke wrote in yesterday’s introduction, these editors are “the people who pushed, pulled and occasionally strong-armed them into producing exceptional work. The people who believed in them when nobody else did â€" who recognized the photographer’s strength and took the time to develop it.”

Alexandra Avakian

I first worked for Robert Stevens in 1988 when I covered the Palestinian intifada for Time magazine for three months. Those were great days for Time, with bureaus in many foreign capitals, and Robert was the photography editor of the World section. For nearly a decade he assigned me stories I cared about in places like the Middle East, Russia, Central Asia and Africa. Working for Time was deeply satisfying, in part because I was focused on stories of conflict, peace and the human will to survive.

Robert wanted his photographers to capture a piece of world history, which Time did every week under his direction. The bottom line for Time was: nail historic moments, on deadline, in pictures that speak powerfully. Few outside the photography world understand the broad influence Robert had on the public when they looked at Time for more than two decades.

Robert fostered loyalty. He empowered photojournalists like myself to take risks; I knew he had my back, and there was creative synergy. He promoted women photojournalists in an arena dominated by males.

He knew that I would shoot in the style that Time needed; that was a source of pride and passion for me. He also knew that, within the same take, I was making what are known as personal pictures. I would save these for future use.

Robert has a distinguished editorial eye and deep, varied photographic taste encompassing not only photojournalism, but landscape, portraiture, art and much more.

Alexandra Avakian Lake Sevan, Armenia. November 2012.

Donna Ferrato

John Loengard was Life magazine’s picture editor from 1978 to 1987. He was unflappable, tough â€" not known for facile words of encouragement. In 1983, I walked into his office fantasizing about walking in the footsteps of Margaret Bourke-White when the only thing I had to offer was a black box of prints of a man beating his wife. Flipping through, John said, “I always thought domestic violence was an unphotographable subject until I saw these.” His words gave me the courage to ask for an assignment.

John became my first overseer in the competitive land of Time/Life. I began working on stories about battered women. More than once he banged my head into an imaginary wall to teach me the secrets of seasoned photographers. John believed that pictures were not always the byproduct of simply “being there.” Sometimes photographers can’t afford to wait till the cows come home. I’ll never forget that tongue lashing when I returned from an assignment without certain promised pictures. He said a professional would have come back with the big “double-truck” picture, no matter what.

Eventually, he taught me how to “previsualize” and put my desires out into the unconscious realm of storytelling â€" to get closer to what I wanted without distorting or changing reality. Picked from the A-list of editors I worked with during the halcyon years of editorial photography, John Loengard’s voice stays.

Stan Grossfeld

The late, great Boston Globe editor Tom Winship and I had a father-and-son relationship. He liked the fact that I had sneaked into the Globe in the mid ’70s when security was extra tight. Back then, bullets were pumped into the newsroom because of the paper’s stance on busing to achieve racial integration. I was a disheveled Jewish kid from the Bronx, and Winship was a Harvard-educated WASP whose dad was Globe before him. We couldn’t have been more different. He wore a bow tie and suspenders, for crying out loud. I have never owned either.

Winship covered the D-Day landings of World War II. He taught me that you could make a difference in the world with a camera or a pen. Sometimes it was little things, like ordering every Globe photographer to shoot photographs of Boston’s dirty streets, then running the photos on Page 1. Boston became cleaner, quicker.

Winship used to scrawl handwritten notes on little scraps of paper. We used to call them “Tiger notes,” as in “attaboy, Tiger,” and they were treasured. He had a very short attention span. Make your point quick or lose your audience.

He taught me to be more than a photographer and to try to help those without a voice.

Courtesy of The Boston Globe Photo Deptartment Stan Grossfield, right, and Tom Winship.

“Do the right thing,” he preached. He loved it when you donated the Pulitzer Prize monetary awards to charity.

Seconds before he announced his resignation to the newsroom in 1984, he took me aside. He had an idea. “You ought to figure out a way to sneak into Ethiopia and cover the famine,” he said.

The reporter Colin Nickerson and I did just that in Tigray and Eritrea. We hooked up with a rebel group bringing food supplies that only traveled at night to avoid Ethiopian MiG’s. The hardest part was not the civil war, but having to photograph while the viewfinder is filled with tears. I can still hear the muffled cries of starving children too weak to shoo away moisture-seeking flies some 30 years later.

Tom Winship was so proud of us, he hugged us when we made it home safely. For Winship, it was the journalistic equivalent of Ted Williams hitting a home run in his very last at-bat.

Joseph Rodriguez

In 1985, I studied at the International Center of Photography under Fred Ritchin in the photojournalism program he created. I still remember, 28 years later, how hard he pushed me and all of his students during our project to document the gentrification of East Harlem. My hard work under his leadership resulted in a book, “Spanish Harlem,” and the May 1990 National Geographic cover story, “Growing Up in East Harlem.” When I began the project, I could only afford a couple of rolls of Kodachrome each week, and I showed Howard Chapnick from Black Star every frame (when I graduated I.C.P., It was Fred Ritchin who had suggested that I work at the Black Star Photo Agency).

Fred published my photos when he was at The New York Times in the early 1990s and when he was at Pixel Press. He was more than a photo editor. He made himself available at any time, day or night. He pushed me into challenging myself to be more creative. He encouraged me to develop stories in deeper and more meaningful ways. He pushed me to find the best way to tell a story using alternative methods of storytelling. I learned new platforms, in which audio, video and multimedia was used to enhance the viewer’s experience without totally discarding old-world influences like painting, poetry and sculpture.

Fred was with me during every step of my project on Los Angeles gangs from 1992 to 1995, which also resulted in a book, “East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A.” Yes, editing is a talent, but the ability to sit down and connect with someone through their work is something altogether different. Through Fred, I was able to identify my motivations: a care for community, my home, the inner city, social justice and the poor. He knew where I was coming from and helped me to embrace it.

Joseph Rodriguez A pit bull and an automatic pistol in a gang member’s apartment in east Los Angeles. 2013.

Darcy Padilla

I was one of two college students presenting work at the National Press Photographers Association women’s conference in San Francisco in 1990. Honestly, I was intimidated. The keynote speakers were Donna Ferrato and Ruth Bernhard, both icons. I spoke about my long-term project on H.I.V./AIDS in prison that I had been photographing for about nine months. After my presentation, Geri Migielicz of The San Jose Mercury News said Nancy Lee from The New York Times would like to see my portfolio. After quietly looking at my photographs, Nancy said, “We do not have an internship program, but if we did, would you be interested?” I said yes. I felt like I was in the movie “The Godfather.”

The following week Nancy called: “So, we have an internship.” She also suggested during our call that I should apply for this new grant from the Alexia Foundation. It became the first major award I would receive.

Nancy had a way of making everything work, and work smoothly. At the time, interns were not allowed to work as photographers. But Nancy understood the importance, and thrill, of being published. She would hire me as a freelancer when I was off duty. My summer was spent shadowing the great photographers of The New York Times during the day and working as a freelancer at night and on weekends. Nancy encouraged me to work on my own stories and published one, “The Boys Choir of Harlem,” six columns.

Because of what Nancy saw in my photography and me, it made me feel I could do this.

Vic De Lucia/The New York Times Nancy Lee, left, and William E. Sauro examined contact sheets in the photo lab of The New York Times’s third-floor newsroom. Circa 1984.

Yesterday, Eric Draper, Carol Guzy, Kenneth Jarecke, Yunghi Kim, Librado Romero and Maggie Steber discussed the influential editors in their lives.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.