South African Miners Strike at Fear

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Greg Marinovich is an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker from South Africa. As a member of the famed “Bang-Bang Club” - which included Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva - he chronicled his homeland's rocky transition from apartheid to democracy. His photo of a suspected spy being hacked and burned alive by suppor ters of the African National Congress earned Mr. Marinovich the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography in 1991. He recently spent several weeks investigating a brutal clash in August when security forces killed 34 miners who had gone out on a wildcat strike.

WONDERKOP, Marikana, South Africa - Tholakele (Bhele) Dlunga was impassive as he pulled the plastic shopping bag over his head to reveal the torture he had endured. His hands did not tremble as he mimicked how police officers clamped their hands over his nose and mouth when they thought he was somehow managing to get enough air to breathe despite the black bag.

That was just a hint of the beatings and torture that would last for five days.

Mr. Dlunga is a rock-drill operator at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, in South Africa's North West Province. He is also one of the ad hoc strike committee members elected by miners who had rejected the established unions as ineffective and corrupt in their de alings with Lonmin's management. More important, he was a key witness to the events leading to Aug. 16, when the police shot 112 of the wildcat strikers, killing 34.

That clash - dubbed the Marikana massacre - was a grim watershed for South Africa's teenage democracy, coming 18 years after Nelson Mandela took over as the first post-apartheid president. The hated and politically burdened police force was supposed to have been transformed from a force of repression into the protectors of the constitution and human rights.

In a flashback to the old days, five plainclothes police officers broke down the door to Mr. Dlunga's one-room shack around 5:30 in the morning on Oct. 25. After suffocating and beating him, they found the pistol that he kept next to his television. Mr. Dlunga claims he had not used the pistol, but kept it, fearing for his safety in the dangerous mining settlement.

Arrested on charges of possessing an unlicensed weapon, they hauled him off t o several different police stations, where the torture continued as his interrogators sought to learn the whereabouts of other strikers and their leaders. After six days, he posted bail and was released.

A judicial commission was appointed by South Africa's president, Jacob G. Zuma, to investigate the violence in August, even though ministers within the ruling African National Congress have backed the police, who said they fired in self-defense after being attacked by heavily armed strikers.

The miners had gone on strike for fair wages and reasonable work conditions. Some of them broke the law. A few among the thousands who went on strike did indeed kill people. Several implicated in those murders have been in police custody since before the Marikana massacre.

Still, the events have only confirmed fears that the police have gradually regressed into a tool of oppression. Residents of impoverished communities speak of late-night raids by the “intervention unit” following street protests against corrupt local governments that fail to meet basic needs for water, sanitation and electricity. The raids are brutal, with alleged ringleaders beaten, tortured and on occasion, killed.

The various state security agencies are said to support political factions within the ruling A.N.C, with key figures regularly purged. E-mails have emerged that appear to show former unionists and a current A.N.C. executive committee member Cyril Ramaphosa - a billionaire who owns some 9 percent of Lonmin through Shanduka, a company he founded - tried to influence the state to intervene in the labor dispute.

After 1994, the ruling party has increasingly close links to mining and other corporations, with several top members being deployed to businesses through state rules on black ownership of companies.

The massacre at Marikana was not hidden, but played out in plain sight of local and international television crews. It shocked the na tion - yet the outcry was initially muted, even among South Africa's robust civil society organizations. The official police line was that the heavily armed miners had charged at officers when they attempted to disarm them, and had fired in self-defense.

Yet out of sight of the journalists, another tactical response team hunted down fleeing miners, some of whom where shot at close range while trying to surrender. Fourteen of the 34 dead were shot in the back. Dozens of surviving miners have made statements saying that some police went among the miners who lay on the ground, checking if they were alive, and finishing off some who were not yet dead.

The Farlam Commission of Inquiry - which began on Oct. 22 - has been hearing opening statements by counsel for the police, unions, Lonmin and relatives of the dead. At the same time, police have been arresting the strike leaders on charges that seem to change daily. They have been shuffled from police station to police station, to thwart lawyers looking for them.

Advocate Dali Mpofu's team, which represents more than 300 miners and their families, including 78 of the wounded miners, secured the release of nine of the jailed leaders by posting bail. Some of the leaders had spent up to 14 days in custody. Four of them had been severely tortured.

Anele Zonke, 26, was among the leaders arrested on Oct. 23 by plainclothes police officers. Now free, he arrived at Mr. Dlunga's shack looking dazed, his face trembling. As he sat down on a backless plastic chair, he seemed pained. Mr. Zonke, too, had been beaten and suffocated, though he tried to gloss over the details of his torture.

Mr. Dlunga gently prompted him.

During his ordeal, he admitted, he lost control of his bowels and soiled his pants. Unable to get clean clothes from the police, he washed his trousers in the basin and was left naked, waiting for them to dry. He did not wash his underpants, but kept them to pre sent as evidence when he and other jailed miners bring assault charges against the police.

When he finally appeared before a magistrate - inexplicably charged with the murder of 34 men the police have already admitted to shooting - he wore no underwear. Mr. Zonke was likely being charged under a law known as “common purpose,” in which members of a crowd can be prosecuted as accomplices to a crime. The doctrine was used to arrest over 270 survivors of the massacre.

Though a magistrate recently threw the charges out,  police rearrested Mr. Zonke outside the courtroom. He could not say exactly what he was charged with. “Murder and a few other crimes,” he stammered uncertainly. He cannot say whose murder he was being charged with.

Mr. Zonke is not a well man; he cannot control his bowels. He has pain deep inside his abdomen, and squirmed as he sat. The torture he suffered has left him withdrawn and ashamed, because he was rendered powerless and at the mercy of his tormentors. He is also ashamed that he gave the police answers to many of their questions. Besides Mr. Zonke and Mr. Dlunga, two strike leaders, Xolani Ndzudzu and “Rasta” Thembele Sohadi, were also tortured.

Elite soldiers and spies are trained to survive torture, not resist it. They know it's simply a matter of when you will break down under extreme duress. These miners have not undergone that kind of conditioning, and were at the mercy of men clearly versed in savagery.

It is clear that the police are abusing their power to intimidate and terrify the miners, who are expected to be important witnesses against them in the Farlam Commission.

The miners are scared. They fear the police and the consequences of speaking out. Yet they have spoken.

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Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, Gaza, Turkey and Spain.

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Journalism Ethics and the Ethicist

Given the fast-moving and utterly weird story of the former general, the biographer, the shirtless F.B.I. agent, the other woman and the other general, you may not remember that just a few days ago an intriguing rumor was circulating about The New York Times Magazine column known as the Ethicist.

Without any evidence, many prominent media outlets â€" from The Atlantic Wire to New York magazine - were speculating that Paula Broadwell's husband was the person who had written a letter to that weekly advice column last summer, concerned about his wife's extramarital affair with David H. Petraeus, the former general and now former C.I.A. director.

Twitter was abuzz, too. How delicious, the notion went, that a situation so fraught with high-level figures would have been treated in an advice column to a newspaper months before.

Then came a definitive-sounding Twitter message from the magazine's editor, Hugo Lindgren. The rumor had be en fact-checked and it was false, he said. This was duly sent around the globe in further Twitter messages, and the rumor died a relatively quiet death.

Some readers (and a blogger for The New Republic) have questioned this move. One reader, Lou Kramberg, was among them. He wrote to me:

A New York Times editor has denied that a letter to the Ethicist last summer was sent by the husband of the woman accused of having an affair with General Petraeus. The sender requested that his name be withheld and it was withheld by the Ethicist. Let us assume that the letter was indeed sent by another husband and let us suppose that a similar incident occurs in the future. Only this time, the letter writer is indeed the husband of the accused woman. Any response other than a false denial would be in violation of the wishes of the writer to have their name withheld. Wouldn't it have been better in the Petraeus situation for The Times to have stated that they would no t ask the Ethicist who wrote the letter as a matter of confidentiality and leave it at that?

As Jeff Winkler wrote online for The New Republic:

Did the editor reveal exactly who the person in the July 13 column was? No. But he did reveal who it wasn't. That seems like a deal breaker of the trust that reader-submitters have when writing to advice columnists. Unless the advisee expressly offers details about their life, it seems the adviser should have no comment on any such matters. Even if the detail is a non-revelation, it's still a revelation. And, without putting too fine a point on it, the non-announcement sets a terrible precedent. Should a similar situation involving the anonymity of advice column patients happen again, people will demand confirmation of identity - and assume that the editor's silence means they are on the right track.

I asked both Mr. Lindgren and The Times's standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, about the denial. Both said that the decision was a carefully considered one, and one that they had discussed with Dean Baquet, a managing editor.

“The point of my denial on Twitter was to provide accurate information,” Mr. Lindgren said. “There was a great deal of speculation out there that this letter had been written by Paula Broadwell's husband, and since we had good reason to believe that wasn't true, I said so.”

As for what might happen in the future, both editors said that it's hard to address a hypothetical situation.

“We'd do our best to provide accurate information while respecting the confidentiality of those to whom it has been promised,” Mr. Lindgren said.

Mr. Corbett said: “It's tricky. This is an unusual situation and it's difficult to extrapolate.”

There are competing journalistic values here. Accuracy is important. So is confidentiality.

Does this in any way suggest that The Times won't protect its news sou rces? No. A person who writes to an advice columnist expects not to have his or her name revealed but is, as Mr. Corbett noted, “not a confidential source in the classic sense.”

The editors did not reveal an identity, or make any promises about what they would do in a future situation.

They chose to quell a rumor for the sake of accuracy, and without breaking trust with the letter-writer.

It's a close call. The opposing argument has merit, particularly because the editors' decision may seem to set a precedent. But, given the specifics of this situation, I think that Times editors made a reasonable decision.

Once Upon a Time in Tabernas

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Clint Eastwood's bizarre debate with an empty chair at the Republican National Convention left many puzzled over the actor's legacy. Will his cameo as a political gunslinger overshadow the star who rose to fame as the raspy-voiced, lone hero of spaghetti westerns?

But the Spanish photographer Alvaro Deprit had a more essential question: whatever happened to the barren landscapes that were the backdrop to the strange, forgotten world of the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone? His films with Mr. Eastwood - “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” - defined a new genre and became wildly popular the world over.

“Everyone in my generation was born with those movies,” said Mr. Deprit, during a phone interview from his home in Rome. “They always remain in our collective imagination.”

Alvaro Deprit Left, a stuntman for a Luna Park show. Right, an actress at a saloon.

For a month and a half last winter, Mr. Deprit lived in southeastern Spain's Tabernas Desert and photographed the lo cations where European directors like Mr. Leone filmed their movies, mainly because the desert resembled the American West - dry, rugged, dusty - and because it required a comparatively lower budget.

Mr. Deprit, 35, who is from Madrid, said a strong sense of fiction and nostalgia pervades the Tabernas Desert today. His photographs are part record, part homage. They are his attempt to capture the surreal quality of a forsaken film location inhabited by people bound to a way of life that has long since ended.

“The feeling you get is of a world which is disappearing,” he said. “It's a bit melancholy.”

Three studios - Fort Bravo, Mini Hollywood and Western Leone - still sit in the middle of that desert, although they are no longer frequented by the likes of Mr. Eastwood. To the contrary, Mr. Deprit said, the studios have morphed into theme parks and tourist destinations, and have become something of a parody of their former selves.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Tabernas Desert was a hive of cinematic activity. Hundreds of spaghetti westerns were shot there and, for a while, the desolate landscape was awash in gunslinging, gravelly-voiced actors looking for treasure, bandits or revenge.

But after two decades of movie making, Tabernas was abandoned as a film location. Today, for a fee, tourists can wander among the old sets - many built by Mr. Leone and renovated by a hotel chain - or visit the cinema and wagon museums. One theme park offers daily “western shows” in which actors stage a gunfight in the town square, hang an outlaw near the sheriff's office, and dance the Cancan in the Yellow Rose Saloon. There is also a zoo, a restaurant and souvenir shop.

According to Mr. Deprit, 35, many of the people still living in Tabernas today are actors and stuntmen left over from Mr. Leone's time. Like Laurence Burton, a member of the Blackfoot Indian Nation in Canada (below), they stayed behind long after t he film crews disappeared, hoping to find work in the tourism industry that thrived briefly, and then declined as the economy soured.

Times are tough for those actors, Mr. Deprit said. Many still dress like the cowboys they played in the movies. Some are aging and others struggle with alcoholism. In any case, it's hard to find work when you're no longer nimble enough to jump on and off a galloping horse.

Alvaro Deprit Lawrence Burton, a member of the Blackfoot Indian Nation in Canada. Long after the film crews vacated, Mr. Burton remained, living in a hut in the desert.

“It's not just a set,” Mr. Deprit said. “There are people that live there. They remind you all the time about the old times, the golden times, when many m ovies were made there.”

But those memories cannot trump the area's reality: even the tourists who visit the area seem disappointed.

“They arrive there and realize that it's a sort of an improvised show,” Mr. Deprit said. “There are a couple of gunshots and that's it. It's quite superficial.”

For Mr. Deprit, documenting the fading film industry in Tabernas is part of an ongoing project about the Andalusia region in Spain. The area is changing quickly, he said, listing the economic crisis and the erosion of traditional lifestyles as evidence.

Sifting through Mr. Deprit's photographs does feel like exploring a place fading into its afterlife. Nonetheless, fans of Mr. Leone's films may still hear a familiar soundtrack playing in the background: the clip-clop of horse hooves, a swinging saloon door, rapid gunfire and then, a high lonely whistle echoing across the desert.

Alvaro Deprit Tourists on the old set of “For a Few Dollars More.”

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Pictures of the Day: Turkey and Elsewhere

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Photos from Turkey, Golan Heights, Myanmar and Japan.

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As Mark Thompson Starts New Job, the BBC\'s Implosion Is Felt in New York

When Mark Thompson started his job on Monday as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, a British television network was there to capture the moment.

Responding to a shouted question, Mr. Thompson stopped briefly, standing under The Times's logo, to say on camera that he's very saddened by the events at the BBC, which is imploding in the aftermath of a child sex-abuse scandal and cover-up. And he repeated that nothing that has happened there, where he was director general and editor in chief, for the past eight years, should have an impact on his mission at The New York Times.

I wrote on this topic on Oct. 23, urging The Times to report aggressively on Mr. Thompson's role in the BBC's troubles. On Oct. 25, I noted that such an effort was already under way. Times top editors had sent Matthew Purdy, the head of The Times's investigative reporting team, to London to join the efforts of bureau reporters there and media reporters in New York.

Since that time, more than a dozen staff-written articles have appeared in The Times, most notably one by Mr. Purdy on Nov. 5 on the Business Day front, with the headline “As Scandal Flared, BBC's Leaders Missed Red Flags.”

I've been reading them carefully, as I have everything on this subject from other news organizations. Although Mr. Thompson's role is on the business side of The Times, his tenure here cannot help but have a profound, if indirect, effect on its journalism.

My conclusion is that The Times has pulled no punches in reporting on Mr. Thompson's role and on the wider BBC story. And that's not always easy.

I asked Mr. Purdy about the difficulties of reporting on a story that involves one's own employer. He said:

Obviously there are all sorts of potential sensitivities and complications when writing about your own company. And this story had an extra level of complication since it was a bout events that happened elsewhere but involved our incoming C.E.O. But I put all that aside and reported it like any other story. I did not see it as an internal investigation, since the Jimmy Savile case didn't happen at The Times, or The Times's official take on Mark Thompson, but as a story that tried to explored what Thompson did or didn't do as the Savile scandal unfolded and also to put it in the context of his time as director general of the BBC.

Mr. Purdy told me that there was “a lot of interest” from top editors like Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet but “no interference.” Mr. Purdy declined to comment on whether his reporting is concluded, but said The Times is clearly continuing to cover the events at the BBC.

What was turned up? Nothing close to a smoking gun â€" certainly no evidence or even a hint that Mr. Thompson pulled the plug on or covered up an investigation.

Most notable were two conclusions:

â€" That, as ed itor in chief, as well as director general â€" Mr. Thompson probably should have known what was happening within his organization, and that he had multiple opportunities to gain that knowledge. A Times story that appeared in the Oct. 25 print edition quoted a former BBC producer and current member of Parliament, Roger Gale, saying that Mr. Thompson was well paid “to, apparently, not know what was going on under his own roof.”

â€" That Mr. Thompson's depiction of when and how he learned about the “NewsNight” investigation has “evolved.” That is, he started out saying he had no knowledge about a pulled NewsNight investigation of claims about Mr. Savile's child abuse; he later said that he had heard something about it, but never pursued deeper knowledge of it.

I asked The Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on Monday if he believed his newspaper had reported thoroughly and well on Mr. Thompson.

“Absolutely,” he wrote in an e-mail. “ Mark thinks so, too, by the way.”

Nothing in that reporting changed his mind; his support for Mr. Thompson has not wavered and continued in an e-mail to Times staff members Monday.

Mr. Sulzberger wrote:

We welcome him at a time of tremendous change and challenge, which must be met with equal focus and innovation. Mark will lead us as we continue our digital transformation, bolster our international growth, drive our productivity and introduce new technologies that will help us become better storytellers and enrich the experience for our readers and viewers. That is what he did as director general of the BBC.

The challenges at The Times are very real, as they are throughout journalism. Failing to meet them could damage one of the world's great news organizations at a critical time. It's safe to say that everyone here â€" from The Times's board of directors to the mail clerks - hopes that Mr. Sulzberger's faith in Mr. Thomp son will be rewarded.

But here's the twist: The same global and digital media explosion that Mr. Thompson must lead has conspired to shrink the universe. Even as Mr. Thompson came to work, a headline on The Times's home page described those he left behind: “BBC Fallout Spreads as More Executives Step Aside.”

The world is smaller now. What happens in London reverberates in New York. And the chaos at the BBC â€" in which many of the people Mr. Thompson has supervised stepped aside as recently as this past weekend - feels uncomfortably close to home.

A Question of Color - Answered

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From his street photography in New York to his soft seascapes on Cape Cod, Joel Meyerowitz's pioneering work has been crucial to the acceptance of color photography among curators and collectors. The notion that color was somehow less worthy than black-and-white may seem quaint now, but it was a serious question in the 1960s.

He h as answered that question - and posed new ones over an impressive half-century career that is the subject of “Joel Meyerowitz: Taking My Time,” a two-volume monograph published this month by Phaidon. He addresses the debate in the first volume, with an insert tucked inside titled “A Question of Color.” In it, he published a series of diptychs that contrast almost identical scenes he took in color and black-and-white.

The following essay - which, along with the captions of the slideshow above, has been edited - is from that insert. The images are also currently on exhibit at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and will also be featured in January at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. He is also part of a current show in London, “Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Color,” which compares some of Henri Cartier-Bresson's black-and-white images with work by him and other noted color photographers.

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From my first moments as a photographer - the very first roll of film, actually - I worked in color and believed in its potential. Why wouldn't I? The world was in color! There was no question about what film to use and, besides, in that passionate first moment of discovering photography I wanted to see what I had made photographs of as fast as I could get them back from the lab.

Of course, at that time I was young and inexperienced and wasn't aware that there was a nagging issue about color in the serious world of photography. Color was thought, back then, to be too commercial, or too much an amateur's material, or too damn colorful. On top of that, it was almost impossible to print it yourself in your own darkroom. Of all of these reservations, only the last was true: processing and printing color was difficult, especially if you were a young photographer without deep resources.

By 1965 I began to carry two cameras every day, one with color f ilm and the other with black-and-white. But I had never tried to make a side-by-side comparison of two nearly identical frames, and by doing that to see for myself which one carried the argument about color to a conclusion that I could be comfortable with. Around that time I read something that John Szarkowski had written in which he said that all that a photograph does is describe what is in front of the camera. That simple statement made me think more seriously about the idea of description and how the accumulation of information in the photograph is its primary state regardless of what else the photograph might seem to be about.

During 1966â€"67 I spent a year in Europe, where I had the opportunity to do just such a test for myself, and when I came back home I was able to examine and analyze these pairings. What I saw was that the color image had more information in it - simple as that! There was much more to see and consider, whereas black-and-white reduced the wor ld to shades of gray. And while that reduction had provided us with more than a hundred years of remarkable images, we were entering a new era and color, for me anyway, seemed to offer a challenge to the conventions that always undermine every medium.

Color film was more demanding - one's exposure had to be perfect since there was little forgiveness, as there was with black-and-white. But it was much more elegant in the way it described things. The sharpness and cohesive quality of the image compelled me to “read” everything in the frame more carefully, as if that small “ping” of color in the distance actually added something to the meaning of the whole frame, and it did. At least when I started thinking about it that way it began the process that then became the way I read and understood my work. I had the sense that colors mean something to each of us, historically as well as in the present moment.

We carry color memories just as we do smell memories (s mell being our purest sense), and they evoke sensations. And from that recognition, we develop our own vocabulary of color responses. Who knows why we choose the colors we live with, or wear, or why one color makes us feel calm and another irritable? But these biases are there for all of us and have played a role in my instinctive responses when I make photographs, and I have trusted that their power underlies and informs all my work. The color and black-and-white pairings that follow suggest some of the ideas that appear as soon as one questions why a photograph should be made in one medium or another.

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Pumping Up the Visual Volume

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Photography was the last thing on Hiroyuki Ito's mind when he moved to New York City 20 years ago. Like countless others over the generations, he was entranced by the sound of the city - everything from Talking Heads and Television, John Zorn and John Coltrane or D.J. Kool Herc and Nas.

It's a sound that can only have been forged in New York.

In many ways, the same can be said of the photographs he has been making on the streets of his adopted hometown. They are kinetic, jittery and in-your-face high contrast black and white. Patterns repeat like drumbeats. Shadows duke it out with highlights. Figures peer back with a moody air of mystery and defiance.

“What I am trying to come up with is the photographic equivalent of ‘sound,' which is ‘look,'” said Mr. Ito, 44. “The look has to resonate with the uncertain feelings I have while roaming on the streets of New York everyday.

Though he wasn't a club kid, he spent a lot of time in clubs. He was just another fan who didn't pay an instrument, just records. But when he brought his camera, he found a way to be creative amid the music. While his pictures of musicians and performances got him work, his love of music kept him on the streets. Just as a musical composition imposes order on w hat could just be noise, he found himself having to apply rules of visual composition in a fraction of a second.

A similar impulse drives his high contrast work.

“If you play hip-hop, you have to pump up the bass or people won't dance, he said. “You have to exaggerate and simplify. Every detail counts, so you have to eliminate some parts and leave in others. That helps in black-and-white photography.”

Music is still his muse when he goes out and shoots. If he finds himself in the Queensbridge Houses near his Astoria home, he'll listen to Nas. In the Bronx, he'll listen to KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions.

“It puts me in a certain mood,” he said. “It's like when you're a musician and you play with someone else, you have to understand their rhythms. You have to understand how people walk. Music helps me to get into and understand the rhythm of the city.”

He jokes that music is one of the few things that make sense to him. He doesn 't consider himself a photojournalist. He is not interested in social issues. He is not really a fan of photography. And the fine arts confuse him.

Yet a few days ago he was reading about the Rinpa style of Japanese art when he came across this passage:

“The Rinpa aesthetic embraces bold, exaggerated or purely graphic renderings of natural motifs. … Underlying Rinpa design sensibilities is a tendency toward simplification and abbreviation, often achieved through a process of formal exaggeration …”

It hit home.

“Surprisingly, this pretty much explains my attitude toward photography,” he said. “I used to think that my photography was an illegitimate child between D.J. Kool Herc and Lou Reed. But I guess I am Japanese after all.”

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Pictures of the Day: Bahrain and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Gaza Strip.

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Life on the Track and In the Stretch

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Every morning, as he has for more than 65 years, my grandfather rises early, hitches a filly to a harness and jogs her around a dusty track. With one leg dangling from the training cart, he clutches his stopwatch and holds the reins tightly. He works her up slowly, building up speed, and hopes that one day she will finish in the money.

He feels. He count s. He listens.

Richard “Dick” Taylor - my mother's father - was a young man who made it through the Depression and World War II when he began this daily ritual as a small-time breeder and trainer on a modest farm he had started in Central Indiana. Back then, fields surrounded the track. Today, stately suburban homes with manicured lawns creep up to the fence posts.

But he keeps the sprawl at bay, living life on his terms and with his horses.

“There's something about a horse,” he likes to say, citing Winston Churchill. “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.”

Before the big tracks and casino money took over the sport, he was immersed in the world of county fair racing for Indiana-bred horses and their trainers. He found modest success in nearby states, raising champions that were victorious in Chicago and Lexington, Ky. Sometimes he trained for other owners. But his own horses, his patience and careful training - as well as his attention to maternal bloodlines - brought him success that outstripped his small operation.

It's no surprise he's a character. He is tough, with a quick temper that brooks no foolishness. Yet he can also be quiet and polite, warm and interested in others. Like many who endured the Depression, he doesn't spend much. On his farm there isn't a broken harness or busted inner tube that can't be saved and pressed back into service.

Victor J. Blue Richard Taylor inspected the hoof of one of his trotters. He constantly checks the strength and condition of their legs and feet, feeling for heat and soreness, and on the lookout for signs of lameness.

His politics are liberal, he reads widely and pores over The New Yorker each week. He k eeps a diary filled with short entries that repeat in a kind of rhythm: the filly's fastest mile, the bills that were paid, the relatives who called. Sometimes the entry reads: “Vic arrived.”

When I was a child, the horses, the races, even this tall, quiet man scared me. Later, I was fascinated by him and his world. I even moved to the farm when I was 25, thinking I would learn how to groom horses and become a trainer. We were two stubborn bachelors - one old and the other young - and after a few cold months I moved on to other adventures.

After years of traveling here and abroad as a documentary photographer, I returned to the farm two and a half years ago. Photography is about time, and I wanted to hold on to some of it with him. I wanted to have a way to always remember.

My grandfather is older. There have been fewer good seasons. But he keeps going on that dusty track, even if he is quietly frustrated by the physical limitations of his 84 years. He doesn't talk much of the future.

Yet he starts every spring like he did this year, with the promise of speed and soundness. He only wants to run fast, get out clean at the top of the stretch and blow by at the finish. After all these years, he has stuck to his credo:

“To know more about a horse tomorrow than I do today.”

Victor J. Blue Tracks left in the dust line on Richard Taylor's farm after a training session. He has had a number of health problems over the last year that have started to slow his training.

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A Microcosm of the New South Africa

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Few place names are as burdened with history as Soweto. Nelson Mandela once called it home. The infamous center of resistance to apartheid - South Africa's entrenched system of white supremacy - the township was a symbol of poverty and oppression on the one hand and heroism and sacrifice on the other. Fittingly, it gave its name to a 1976 u prising of young activists that forever changed the country's political landscape.

Today, 18 years after Mr. Mandela became South Africa's first democratically elected president, the sprawling township's cultural dynamism and growing prosperity have transformed it into a symbol of hope rather than despair. Home to from two million to three million people, it rivals nearby Johannesburg in size and is the perfect spot to document the surprises and contradictions of South Africa's transformation. Poverty has not disappeared, but it no longer defines the area, according to Per-Anders Pettersson, a Swedish photographer who has long documented the township.

“Soweto fascinates me,” he said. “It's one of the must-see places in South Africa, a microcosm of the new South Africa.”

It was this emerging Soweto that captured Mr.Pettersson's imagination the moment he first encountered it in 1994. Mr. Pettersson, who was based in New York at the time, had gone to S outh Africa to cover the elections that marked the end of apartheid. Although he was in the country for only a month, the experience affected him deeply. “South Africa just drew me back,” he said. “I lost interest in other stories, in other things that were happening.”

He relocated there in 2000 and now supports himself through photojournalism and commercial assignments, especially in Africa. His personal work, however, documents how democracy and development are changing South Africa. The country is his passion. “I found something that became my project,” he said. “Something that I really loved.”

For Mr. Pettersson, Soweto is much more than a subject. Having worked in the township for nearly two decades, he says, many of its residents have become friends. “It's actually my favorite place in South Africa,” he said, “and sometimes I would say, the safest and the most fun.”

Soweto's energy and creativity are as evident in Mr. Pettersso n's photographs as its many quandaries. He describes the photos as taking viewers on “a journey from the old into the new.” In almost all of the photos, the frames are packed with motion and color. In some, businessmen sip brandy in a upscale bar (Slide 4), children golf on manicured greens (Slide 9) and beauty pageant contestants strut across a stage (Slide 13). In others, street vendors sell their wares in a desolate urban landscape (Slide 15) and young women participate in a traditional Zulu rite of passage.

While Mr. Pettersson plans to publish a book of his Soweto photographs, he knows he still has a long road ahead of him. “I've shot quite a lot in the last few months, and I'm about 50 percent there,” he said. “If I can spend a couple of months full time, that would be really good. I'll get a long way to the end.”

Like many photojournalists, Mr. Pettersson has turned to emphas.is, a crowd-funding Web site that connects photographers with donors to raise the money he needs to allow him to settle in Soweto and finish the project. Those who pledge support can get in return anything from prints from the series to workshops with the photographer. Crowd-funding is no panacea, however; Mr. Pettersson is still some distance from his goal.

But he remains close to his motivation. Soweto has been attracting photographers for more than 50 years. The best of them have taught audiences something new and have shown them things they never expected.

“In Soweto you can see changing very fast - fancy shopping malls and car dealerships and festivals,” he said. “They even have a Fashion Week now.”

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. A photographer in his own right, he spends half of each year in Cape Town. He is on Twitter - @johnedwinmason - and so is @nytimesphoto.

More Detail on Why The Times Called the Presidential Election Later

In a post Wednesday, I noted that The Times took longer than most other major news outlets to declare the winner of the presidential election.

Rich Meislin, who is the other half of the “decision desk,” along with the associate managing editor Janet Elder, wrote to me Thursday providing this more detailed explanation of the Times's process.

Mr. Meislin, a consultant to The Times, was editor of news surveys and election analysis from 2003 to 2005, and he has been part of the decision team for the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

He wrote:

A bit of additional insight might be useful about our decision to call the race for President Obama later than the networks and The Associated Press. It was rooted in our lack of certainty about the result in Ohio, which pushed President Obama over the 270 electoral vote mark for the television networks beginning around 11:15 p.m.

First, some background: T he major television networks and The Associated Press are members of the National Election Pool, a consortium that shares the very high cost of conducting exit polls and collecting real vote counts from polling places across the country. The work of gathering and managing this information has been coordinated since 2003 by Edison Research, a survey and analytics firm.

News organizations other than the networks and A.P. subscribe to Edison's work, which provides us with exit poll data as well as guidance, based on Edison's own analysis, on when the winner in a state is ready to be called. The network members of the consortium and The A.P. have an information advantage over subscribers: they receive early access to exit poll results, faster real vote tallies and additional information on voting in key precincts that subscribers do not. This allows them to develop their own models to predict the outcomes in the states that are more sophisticated than subscribers like The Times can create with their more limited data.

We are cautious in our calls. We make our decisions based on a combination of sources: the exit polls, when they are decisive; the actual votes that are being reported compared with the historical performance in counties; the experience of our political staff; and the judgments of Edison's analysts and The Associated Press, which also has access to the expanded data. In the case of Ohio, the exit polls showed a very close race, and so did the real vote counts. The patterns we saw led us to believe Mr. Obama would win Ohio, but not with enough certainty that we felt comfortable to make a call when the networks did. (Indeed, the real vote total in Ohio tightened quite a bit for a while after the network calls before loosening again.) Edison also held back, even with the advantage of its data models, and that increased our caution; Edison ultimately called Ohio at 12:55 a.m.

In the meantime, we began seeing enough resul ts from Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin and Nevada to allow us to call an Obama victory. (An advantage on Virginia came from Michael Shear, who was able to read the county results with the background of having covered the state for many years as a Washington Post reporter; we called Virginia well before the networks and A.P.)

And until we were able to make our own call, we told our readers that the networks had called the race, which we thought struck the right balance between keeping readers informed and being sure we had it right.

Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, China, Chile and Greece.

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An Inside View on Documentary Stories

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There was plenty of spot news for photographers to cover in Cairo in early 2011, when a popular uprising challenged decades of authoritarian rule. For Jessica Murray, the changes sweeping over politics and society were as much an opportunity to challenge another entrenched notion - how local photographers documented the world around them.

Ms. Murray had run workshops in New York, Spain and the Middle East over the previous decade. More recently she had partnered with Egypt's Contemporary Image Collective, conducting short workshops for local photographers. Before the uprising, it was a challenge.

“There was so much self-censorship,” said Ms. Murray, the Barcelona-based co-director of the Al-liquindoi Photography Workshops. “People had been living under an authoritarian regime for so many years. Especially when it came to photography, there was a fine line between photography and espionage. You'd suggest an idea and they'd say, ‘No, I can't do that.' They'd say no, even before they tried.”

She saw her opening in March 2011 while talking to friends in Egypt's photo community.

“They said this was a time when people could really use long-term training,” she said. “Things were opening up and people were hopeful that anything was possible.”

Those conversations led to a retooling of the local workshops, which were extended to include partnering local photographers with internationally known mentors for six months and helping to get their work published at home and abroad. The resulting photo stories include the plight of people blinded by security forces during the uprising, the ravages of hepatitis C and the plight of Coptic Christians.

Eman Helal Ashraf Hassan, 32, father of two and a rowing coach, lost vision in one eye when he was shot with rubber bullets during clashes in Tahrir Square last year. Twenty-one protesters were killed in the violence and thousands injured in the revolution. From “I Am Blind, but Proud.”

The workshop's partners and funders - the photo agency Noor and the Open Society Foundation - shared a greater goal that has been reflected in similar workshops in Central Asia and elsewhere. The hope is to give local photographers the time - and resources - to delve into issues with a degree of sensitivity and nuance that might go unnoticed by foreigners.

“For us, the local perspective is always important,” said Amy Yenkin, who directs the Open Society Foundation's Documentary Photography Project. “They see things differently than an outsider who might only bring preconceived notions about what the story's about. It's a different perspective that authenticates a story, that enriches a story.”

The Cairo workshops were modeled after similar ones that the Open Society Foundation had been doing with Ms. Murray in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Pakistan. The foundation also worked with her in the Middle East from 2006 to 2008 on five-day master classes that accompanied the Moving Walls exhibit. The idea had been to help photographers go beyond shooting a single event and explore more deeply the issues and lives behind the headlines.

Not that it was easy.

“Documentary photography is a new medium for journalists,” said Kismet El Sayed, whose project focused on the hepatitis C crisis in Egypt. “Most photojournalists only do news photography and are accepted in that. However, working long term on a project is not understood, and there are many challenges in getting access. And independent journalists are unfortunately treated with a lot of reservations and skepticism.”

That is where the mentors can play a crucial role in helping them explore how they think of stories, approach their subject and tell a story over time. Through face-to-face talks and follow-up conversations via Skype, they helped nudge their students toward rethinking their stories.

Nina Berman, a member of Noor who also teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Jo urnalism, cited Eman Helal as someone whose approach changed through the workshop. At first Ms. Helal wanted to do portraits of people who had been blinded by security forces. But Ms. Berman encouraged her to go deeper.

Kismet El Sayed From “A State Virus.”

“I said: ‘No, you need to see what their daily lives are like. Is someone helping them? Do they feel ashamed?' ” Ms. Berman recalled. “She did six or seven and spent time with them. Now, she's ready to do a book. She wants to start a foundation. She is totally into this project, it's brilliant to see.”

That encouragement helped Ms. Helal when she hit the inevitable obstacles of suspicion or fear. Some of her subjects did not like the politics of Ms. Helal's employer, while others were nervous about being seen as objects of pity.

“Most of the time before I had cared about shooting news,” Ms. Helal said. “But the workshop gave me the chance to think more about the human side, which helps me think about picture stories.”

Ms. Berman said one of the hardest challenges for her was keeping her students away from the relentless daily rush of hard news. One of the best shooters in the workshop, she said, was a no-show for many sessions. When he finally surfaced, he proposed a picture story about the presidential elections - until he saw the other stories being produced in the workshop.

“He had so much regret that he did not pull himself away from the hard news,” Ms. Berman said. “Editing his pictures, he realized the pictures he thought were important when he was making them were meaningless three months after the fact. Those who did long-term storytelling, those pictures have a life that goes on for years.”

That is why a premium was placed on how to think about creating the kinds of stories that often are off the radar of editors.

“I haven't seen stories about what happened to the people who had their eyes blown out,” Ms. Berman said. “I haven't seen a Western photographer do that. I don't see Western photographers shooting the victims of hepatitis C. Most Western editors don't want that. They don't want stories about the guts of Egyptian society. That's just the way the media works.”

And beyond the traditional media, there is also the onslaught of images posted every second online on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. The ease with which an image can be posted poses the danger of devaluing the impact of a well-composed set of pictures that tell a story with a clear and powerful arc.

“The grantees know how to shoot,” said Yuri Kozyrev, a member of Noor who has mentored Open Society Foundation grantees in Central Asia, the South Cauca sus, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Pakistan. “But what to shoot? I help them with that. They all choose tough subjects. There are questions about how to approach the subjects, but also about ethics. These photographers are mostly coming from my region. They are also facing some of the same problems I faced in the Soviet Union when I was starting. I teach them to be patient, and wait for your story.”

The participants in the recent Cairo workshops are looking forward to seeing their stories published. But even more, they are looking forward to being part of something hopefully more enduring - a collaborative community of friends and colleagues who can help each other as they pursue their own personal visions.

“We've thought about working together on photo stories in the future and trying to market it our way, maybe even founding something like Noor,” Ms. Helal said. “Being with a number of photographers where everyone is working on a project and thinking in d ifferent ways is very useful for me. It added a lot.”

Mohamed Al Eddin Hajj Manna, 50, was a kind of legend in the village of Dabaa, known for escorting his sheep deep into the desert to feed them. He lost his right leg because of a landmine left from World War II and had to stop being a shepherd. From “The Legacy of Landmines.”

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Pictures of the Day: Ghana and Elsewhere

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Photos from Ghana, Greece, Iraq and Syria.

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Times Was Slower, but Sure, in Calling the Presidential Election

A few observations on Tuesday night's online coverage and Wednesday's print edition:

The Empire State Building was in blue lights, Mitt Romney's Boston crowd was looking despondent, and even the careful Associated Press had taken the plunge, but The Times held off late Tuesday night in declaring President Obama the winner.

Well over a half-hour after most news organizations had projected the president's re-election, The Times was holding off and attributing victory to the television networks in its major home-page headline. The A.P. made its call at 11:38 p.m.

At 12:03 a.m., I got a mobile alert with The Times itself projecting the president's re-election.

Journalism history is full of cautionary tales about ill-fated instances of jumping the gun â€" whether the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in The Chicago Tribune or, much more recently, the many newspapers and cable networks who got the presidential result s wrong in 2000.

Unlike the television networks, which depend on their combined exit polls in calling elections, The Times prefers to look at real numbers in addition to exit polls, said Janet Elder, an associate managing editor who is part of The Times's election “decision desk.”

“We have been disciplined” she said, “and it has paid off.”

Both on the Web and in print, Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, The Times had rich offerings for its viewers and readers. In typical Times fashion, it was restrained in both places, with a quiet headline that read, simply, “Obama's Night.” (For extreme contrast, one could look at The Huffington Post on Wednesday morning with its huge “¡Viva Obama!” headline, including Spanish-language exclamation points.)

I especially liked Jodi Kantor's essay in The Times about how Mr. Obama has sought a role in history â€" a smart piece of thinking ahead â€" and forward-thinking analytical pieces by Peter Baker and Carl Hulse.

Online, I enjoyed Megan Liberman's TimesCast video interviews, none more than with a quietly satisfied Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight blogger and statistical wizard who had the night of his life. (I couldn't help but note their good-natured and joking reference to my blog post last week on Mr. Silver's wager offer to a TV talk show host.) And I thought the front-page photograph of the Obama family was a heartwarming choice, no matter which candidate you supported. It was an inspired touch to use, as a detail, a similar photo of the family from four years ago. (For one thing, it gave everyone a chance to gauge the height differences of the Obama daughters, four years later.)

Coverage of the election â€" reasonably enough â€" drove follow-up coverage of Hurricane Sandy's damage off Wednesday's front page. But I was glad to see that the storm coverage was given plenty of space inside. That coverage included Jim Dwyer's moving About Ne w York column about the hardship in New Dorp in Staten Island.

The election is decided - causing jubilation for some and disappointment for others - but real devastation continues, especially for those who have the fewest resources.

An Outsider\'s Life in Pictures and Boxes

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The still unfolding legend of Vivian Maier has been one of photographic genius discovered only after a lifetime of shooting. Now hailed as a master of street photography, she spent most of her working life in obscurity as a nanny in New York, where she was born, and Chicago, where she died in 2009 at age 83.

In her later years, her oeuvre â€" more th an 100,000 images â€" sat unseen in storage, along with much of her earthly possessions. When she was unable to keep up with the storage fees, they were auctioned off in 2007. After her death two years later, a collector who had bought one of the lots began to put her images online. Within weeks, she had a global following.

The latest chapter in this endlessly fascinating tale is the publication this year of  “Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows,” by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams (CityFiles Press). The following essay is excerpted from that book.

It's the end of the day. The TV has been flipped on. A small fire is tended in the backyard. The marquee of the Wilmette Theater is being changed over. Parents' night at the local school is wrapping up. The children are asleep as Vivian Maier heads home with her camera by the glow of the streetlights.

Maier continued to document her life throughout the 1980s and 1990s. She shot Ektachrome, packing tens of th ousands of the color transparencies into sleek yellow Kodak slide boxes. But her days with the Rolleiflex, with which she had taken her most personal and important photographs, were mostly over by the 1970s.

Vivian Maier On the beach at Coney Island during the early 1950s. Vivian Maier learned to photograph using a box camera, which lends an impressionistic look to her early work.

Work as a nanny continued. When Zalman and Karen Usiskin interviewed her to be their housekeeper and baby sitter in the 1980s, she announced: “I come with my life, and my life is in boxes.” Zalman told her that would not be a problem since they had extra room in the garage. “We had no idea how many boxes,” he later said.

Around 1990, Maier took a job caring for Chiara Baylaender, a teenage girl with severe developmental disabilities. Maier was good company for her: they played kick the can and amused themselves with pop beads. Maier dressed Chiara in mismatched clothes from the Salvation Army. “But it's Pendleton,” Vivian told the girl's sister when she protested. It didn't matter. “My sister looked like a junior Vivian,” she recalled.

And Maier proved an uninterested housekeeper, too. “It's just going to get dusty again,” she would say. Having filled the Baylaenders' storage room, she piled her bedroom five feet deep with books, leaving only a narrow path to her bed. Then she covered that - and slept on the floor.

In the mid-1990s, Maier went to work as a caretaker for an older woman. After the woman moved to a nursing home in 1996, Maier stayed on in her Oak Park house for a couple of months to get it ready to sell. Maier made overtures about working for the family of the woman's daughter, but she was not needed.

Over the years, leaving was never easy. Despite being close to these families, Maier was an outsider. During the late 1960s, she photographed the light coming from the homes she passed. Always looking in. At seventy, she was looking for work in North Chicago or Waukegan, almost an hour north of Chicago. With little saved and no family of her own, she was determined to keep living independently.

Acquaintances recall Maier as an imposing, confident, stolid woman in her later years. Jim Dempsey, who worked the box office at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, saw her most every week for over a decade. She would dig through her purse looking for money, sighing until Dempsey let her in. She often stopped to talk - about movies, life, anything but herself - although he never got her name.

Bindy Bitterman, who ran the antiques store Eureka in Evanston, knew Maier only as Miss V. Smith, the name she gave to hold an item. She was the only customer who ever bought Ken, a long-forgotten liberal magazine from the 1930s. Roger Carlson, who ran Bookman's Alley nearby, knew her full name but was scolded when he introduced her to another customer by it. She visited his shop as late as 2005 and bought Life magazines, talked politics (“Her judgment was pretty harsh on everyone”), and agonized about how difficult it was to find work.

She was a fighter to the end, Carlson said.

The boys who had thought of Vivian Maier as a second mother tried to keep track of her for years. They made overtures to help, but she resisted. She loved the Gensburgs and kept up with the family - going to weddings, graduations, baby showers - but it was hard for her to ask for help.

Vivian Maier Self-portrait, Los Angeles. 1955.

Because of her pride and her need for privacy, Maier remained elusive for years. When the Gensburgs found her, she was on the verge of being put out of a cheap apartment in the western suburb of Cicero. The brothers offered to rent a better apartment for her on Sheridan Road at the northern tip of Chicago, but they told her she needed to clean up her Cicero place before she left. She agreed, showed them the Clorox and rags, pulled up a chair, sat back with The New York Times, and told Lane to start with the walls and bathroom.

Even in her new apartment, Maier made it difficult for the family to keep track of her. The Gensburgs bought her a cellphone, but she refused to use it. So they just dropped by when they wanted to see her.

In November 2008, Maier fell on the ice on Howard Street not far from her home and hit her head. She was taken, unconscious, by paramedics to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. When she came to, she refused to tell the emergency room staff what had happened and demanded to leave. Lane Gensburg was called. Doctors assured the family that she would recover, but she never did. For the next several months, she resisted eating and was barely responsive. Too weak to return to her apartment, Maier was transported in late January 2009 to a nursing home in Highland Park, where her health continued to decline. She died there on April 21, 2009.

The Gensburgs had Vivian Maier cremated and scattered her ashes in a forest where she'd taken the boys fifty years earlier. They considered having a funeral but knew she would have abhorred such an observance. So they paid for a death notice in the Chicago Tribune: “Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully on Monday. . . . A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her.”

To the faithful Gensburgs, Vivian's story had c ome to an end. To the world, it was only just beginning.

Vivian Maier Vivian Maier, Highland Park, Ill. 1965.

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Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Pakistan.

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An Election Day Look at How Language Changes in The Times, and in the Culture

Here's an Election Day diversion, courtesy of the research and development people at The Times. It's called Chronicle and it measures the number of articles in which a particular word or phrase has appeared since 1981.

The brainchild of Alexis Lloyd, a creative technologist, Chronicle has a serious purpose.

“You can see how topics have risen and fallen over time, but you can also see the way language and terminology change over time,” she said. For example, she said, the term “greenhouse effect” has given way to the broader discussion of “climate change.”

She built a rudimentary version of the tool about six months ago and has been refining it every since. Eventually, she intends to take its reach back to include more than another 100 years of Times usage.  It is intended for internal use, at least for now.

My use of the tool started with some brainstorming involving not only Ms. Lloyd, but also Matt Boggie, director of technology strat egy, and my assistant, Joseph Burgess. Because this post is appearing on Election Day, we concentrated on phrases from the political realm - from “activist judges,” which peaked in late 2004, to jobs and economy, phrases that have been increasing and falling for years but are at an especially high level now for obvious reasons.

Readers who have interesting ideas for words or phrases to search or compare can e-mail me at public@nytimes.com. (One particularly interesting one that is sometimes used as an example is the fall of “yuppies” and the rise of “hipsters.”) I'll do a follow-up post soon to show the results of some of the best suggestions.

From “climate change” to “recount,” here are some of the results we came up with.  (One further Election Day note: I'll be staying in The Times's newsroom later and into the night and intend on being active on Twitter, where you can follow me at twitter.com/sulliview.   I' ll put the messages in Storify form on Wednesday and add them as a link to this blog.)

Jobs vs. Economy: Rising and falling but at a higher level over time.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Bailout: It increased and has remained in the conversation.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Election: Predictable rises and falls.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Time s

Climate Change: Almost unheard of until 1990.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Activist Judges: We were talking about them most in 2004.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Chads: The aftermath of the 2000 election made them a household word.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Job Creation: A growing concern.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Health Care: Usage reached its height a few years ago

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Death Tax: On everyone's lips in 2000 and fading ever since

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Recount: Is another big increase on the way?

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

An Election Day Look at How Language Changes in The Times, and in the Culture

Here's an Election Day diversion, courtesy of the research and development people at The Times. It's called Chronicle and it measures the number of articles in which a particular word or phrase has appeared since 1981.

The brainchild of Alexis Lloyd, a creative technologist, Chronicle has a serious purpose.

“You can see how topics have risen and fallen over time, but you can also see the way language and terminology change over time,” she said. For example, she said, the term “greenhouse effect” has given way to the broader discussion of “climate change.”

She built a rudimentary version of the tool about six months ago and has been refining it every since. Eventually, she intends to take its reach back to include more than another 100 years of Times usage.  It is intended for internal use, at least for now.

My use of the tool started with some brainstorming involving not only Ms. Lloyd, but also Matt Boggie, director of technology strat egy, and my assistant, Joseph Burgess. Because this post is appearing on Election Day, we concentrated on phrases from the political realm - from “activist judges,” which peaked in late 2004, to jobs and economy, phrases that have been increasing and falling for years but are at an especially high level now for obvious reasons.

Readers who have interesting ideas for words or phrases to search or compare can e-mail me at public@nytimes.com. (One particularly interesting one that is sometimes used as an example is the fall of “yuppies” and the rise of “hipsters.”) I'll do a follow-up post soon to show the results of some of the best suggestions.

From “climate change” to “recount,” here are some of the results we came up with.  (One further Election Day note: I'll be staying in The Times's newsroom later and into the night and intend on being active on Twitter, where you can follow me at twitter.com/sulliview.   I' ll put the messages in Storify form on Wednesday and add them as a link to this blog.)

Jobs vs. Economy: Rising and falling but at a higher level over time.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Bailout: It increased and has remained in the conversation.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Election: Predictable rises and falls.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Time s

Climate Change: Almost unheard of until 1990.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Activist Judges: We were talking about them most in 2004.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Chads: The aftermath of the 2000 election made them a household word.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Job Creation: A growing concern.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Health Care: Usage reached its height a few years ago

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Death Tax: On everyone's lips in 2000 and fading ever since

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Recount: Is another big increase on the way?

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times