Pictures of the Day: Spain and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Spain, West Bank, Pakistan and Florida.

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan.

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A Note to Readers

By JOSEPH BURGESS

Arthur S. Brisbane's tenure as public editor will end on Aug. 31. His final column appeared in print on Aug 26.

Margaret Sullivan's first day in the office as public editor will be Sept. 4. She hopes to begin blogging, posting on Twitter and responding to readers soon after her arrival. Her first column will appear in the Sunday Review later in September.

You can follow her on Twitter at @sulliview.

This blog will be undergoing layout changes over the coming weeks to incorporate new features. Stay tuned.

Joseph Burgess is the assistant to the public editor.

A Fresh Take on the Oldest Profession

By MATT MCCANN

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With sweaty palms, a heavy step and a stutter, Marc McAndrews entered a brothel in Elko, Nev., without much of a pitch or a plan. Facing the line of half-naked sex workers, he had to choose one and pose a question that made him blush.

Could he take some pictures?

He had never before set foot in a strip club, much less a brothel, and his first try at gaining access was unsuccessful. He told one of the young women that he was merely interested in taking photos for his work, that he wasn't in pursuit of pleasure - this was his job, after all - and he was booted out.

This was a place with rules. Just because it was a brothel, didn't mean that anything could happen.

Nevertheless, Mr. McAndrews visited the lega l brothels in 11 Nevada counties over a period of five years. He was working on a project that became the book “Nevada Rose,” which documents these brothels and their workers, owners and customers.

What he uncovered was a view of prostitution that didn't adhere to culturally appointed preconceptions: of sex work as a living as humdrum as any other.

Mr. McAndrews, who grew up in Reading, Pa., had been drawn to stories of a strictly American stripe. The project that became “Nevada Rose” emerged from a series of cross-country van trips, on which he sought to photograph different aspects of American life and culture - mechanics, motel workers, truck stops, bikers, lots and landscapes.

Though the book, published last year by Umbrage, contains plenty of saucy photos, the themes are more prosaic than one might expect from a book about sex as industry, and they're profoundly American. With “Nevada Rose,” Mr. McAndrews presents a story about work, commer ce, capitalism and community. Mr. McAndrews was as interested in the landscape, the spaces, the mundane, the untouchables and staff members - as he was in the kinky and the taboo.

And, in seeking a straightforward approach to a subject that skirts the taboo, Mr. McAndrews found himself confronting misconceptions. “I think it is hard for people to imagine a woman owning her own sexuality and being O.K. with something like this,” said Mr. McAndrews, 36. “We're taught and socialized to believe certain things about sexuality and women's sexuality and prostitution in general.”

The problem, Mr. McAndrews explained, is that, broadly speaking, people tend to equate prostitution with illegal prostitution - a grim world of exploitation, crime and desperation. His experience photographing these brothels presented a contrast - the legal brothels of Nevada have relationships with community lawmakers, with health care professionals, and there are rules, values and prot ections in place. (For instance, Mr. McAndrews noted that there is a panic button in every room, and that in the accumulated years he spent in Nevada on the project, he said he only witnessed the alarm go off once - when he nudged it with his gear.)

Though there were obstacles to his access at first, eventually word got around about his activities and intentions - he would furnish Polaroids of his work to show what he was up to - and they let him in, even assisting Mr. McAndrews with calls on his behalf to other brothels. He observed a close-knit community, a vibe that more resembled a chummy neighborhood bar than a fetid den of sin. He lived at these brothels, had breakfast with the workers and owners, and his work at times felt like a collaboration - he would invite input from his subjects, asking the women to choose their outfits, working together to help them present themselves.

But, of course, these brothels mean business. They cater to markets, work to appe al to certain tastes, Mr. McAndrews said. There are “country houses,” homey, simple and intended to make customers feel comfortable, and “city houses,” with sleeker designs sporting more of a strip club aesthetic. When a brothel entertained the notion of a male prostitute in 2010, to broaden its customer base, the market spoke and said “no.” (The first legal male prostitute quit the Shady Lady Ranch in Beatty, Nev., after five months and only 10 customers. Apparently, there is no outspoken demand for gay prostitutes in Nevada.)

But it's not a perfect system and concerns - ethical, political, cultural, commercial - abound. Last year, Harry Reid of Nevada, the United States Senate majority leader, called for a ban, and though legalized, with a degree of regulation (the law requires weekly cervical exams and monthly blood work, for example), these brothels - from a commerce point of view - present some contradictions. Coercive, shameful or liberating? Libertar ian yet regulated?

For Mr. McAndrews, the topic was a historical aspect of American culture that had not yet been surveyed straightforwardly, without hand-wringing and finger-pointing. His task, as he understood it, was simple: present what's there.

“At a certain point a lot of women wanted to be a part of it because they weren't ashamed and their proud of the light being shown on what they are doing,” he said. “I wasn't glorifying. I wasn't demonizing. I was just showing as it was. That was my intent, anyway.”

That project ended, and moving on, Mr. McAndrews has been photographing youth groups in uniforms as part of his effort to better understand how America socializes its children. He is interested in what signifies one as belonging to a particular group.

His next topic? Religion.

Pictures of the Day: Louisiana and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Louisiana, Mississippi, Kenya and Syria.

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Pre-Publication Disclosure of Dowd Column: A Breach of Two Boundaries

By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

My final column as public editor was published in print on Sunday. However, I remain on duty through Friday and want to offer my take on the controversy this week over the pre-publication disclosure of a Maureen Dowd column. I see this as a problem of boundaries â€" the failure to maintain them.

The facts, in brief: a year ago Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd asked Mark Mazzetti, a Washington-based national security reporter for The Times, to help her fact-check one item in a column she was preparing for publication in print on Sunday, Aug. 7, 2011.

Mr. Mazzetti did this for her but then emailed the entire column text to Marie E. Harf, then a public affairs official at the C.I.A., writing: “this didn't come from me… and please delete after you read. See, nothing to worry about.”

The e-mail came to light through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group. The Mazzetti e-m ail was just a piece of a larger picture Judicial Watch was interested in filling in â€" which centered on the claim that the Obama administration has tried to exploit the killing of Osama Bin Laden for political gain.

The Dowd column reported that filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal were accorded special national security access to assist them in the making of a film about the Bin Laden operation. Ms. Dowd's column said:

“The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama's growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president's cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 - perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

“The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

“It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president's image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently - to the surprise of some military officers - at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.”

It was the nugget in the previous paragraph â€" concerning Mr. Boal's appearance at the C.I.A. ceremony â€" that Mr. Mazzetti was asked to fact-check.

However, it is clear that Mr. Mazzetti went beyond fact-checking a single item when he passed the column in its entirety to Ms. Harf. His message â€" “see, nothing to worry about” â€" seems to suggest that he thought the full text would allay concerns about what Ms. Dowd was planning to say.

The Times's public statement on the matter from spokeswoman Eileen Murphy was minimal:

“Last August, Maureen Dowd asked Mark Mazzetti to help check a fact for her column. In the course of doing so, he sent the entire column to a C.I.A. spokeswoman shortly before her deadline. He did this without the knowledge of Ms. Dowd. This action was a mistake that is not consistent with New York Times standards.”

I asked Jill Abramson, the executive editor, whether Mr. Mazzetti was doing a source a favor by providing the text of the column and she replied, “I can't provide further detail on why the entire column was sent. I can assure you that Mark was not doing the C.I.A. a favor. He is an experienced, terrific reporter. Your suggestion is flat wrong.”

Mr. Mazzetti was also circumspect, saying: “I did make a bunch of calls and was doing this on deadline. As part of the process, I also did send the column. It was definitely a mistake to do. I h ave never done it before and I will never do it again.”

I have searched The Times's body of ethics-related guidelines and can't find anything that directly addresses circumstances like this. The formal ethics policy has a statement saying that staff members “may not seek any advantage for themselves or others by acting on or disclosing information acquired in their work but not yet available to readers.”

Times editors, however, tell me they interpret that section to refer to financial or other material gain or advantage. I am advised further that The Times does not have a formal policy on sharing an entire article pre-publication for the purposes of fact-checking.

Whatever Mr. Mazzetti's motivation, it is a clear boundary violation to disclose a potentially sensitive article pre-publication under such circumstances. This goes well beyond the normal give-and-take that characterizes the handling of sources and suggests the absence of an arm's-length rel ationship between a reporter and those he is dealing with.

Mr. Mazzetti told me: “I absolutely believe we should have an arm's-length with sources and my only priority in this case was to help a colleague and help The Times.”

The second boundary violation relates to the oft-cited wall separating news from editorial. After all, in this case a news-side person was fact-checking for a colleague working on the opinion side. The wall is extremely important to The Times because it insulates the news side, which embraces a standard of neutrality in news coverage, from the opinion side, which is free to take sides.

Mr. Mazzetti argued that this simply a case of helping a colleague: “There absolutely should be strong separation but I think in the case of checking facts and helping colleagues, I don't see there is any breach. She is not assigning me stories, I am not assigning her columns. It is colleagues helping each other.”

The problem, I think, is t hat many will not see it that way. The facts and appearances of this case strongly suggest that The Times should redouble its efforts to strengthen the boundaries that are so essential to cultivating reader trust.

Rethinking the Family Portrait

By KERRI MACDONALD

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For most children, household rules are fairly simple. Love your family, take care of your things.

That's usually the case for Emmett Hillerbrand, too. But not always.

Consider, for instance, a short video from the series “Family Portrait” in which Emmett, 5 years old at the time, stands in the family kitchen, hurling dozens of white Ikea plates to the ground.

“He said, ‘I can't smash this,'” said Stephan Hillerbrand, his father. “‘I've been told for five years not to break plates and then you want me, in the middle of the kitchen, to break 100 of them?'”

As the video progresses, the reaction on Emmett's face exposes his changing level of comfort. By the end, his timidity is gone an d he's smashing plates like it's his job. In a way, it is.

A conversation with Mr. Hillerbrand and his wife, Mary Magsamen, feels like an exchange with one person. The artists, who have been married since 2001, envision and execute ideas collaboratively. In name, they function as one: Hillerbrand+Magsamen. In art, they meditate on little questions about daily life in Houston, where they live with Emmett, now 6, and his sister, Madeleine, 9.

Why do we have so much stuff?

What does the family couch mean?

And they take these questions one step further, spending Saturday afternoons smashing holes in their bedrooms walls; Tuesday mornings sawing that sacred couch in two. What results are projects like “House/hold,” a cinematic series of staged documentary photos that question family, culture and consumer society.

So how do you raise children in a home like this?

“It was weird,” Mr. Hillerbrand said of the birth of Madeleine. “We would hire a baby sitter to take care of her so we could go into the studio when we were living in Ohio. Then we felt terribly guilty when we were in the studio because we weren't spending time with our child. But then when we were with our daughter, we felt guilty because we weren't practicing our art.”

The couple have always been preoccupied with the notion of the everyday. So it felt natural when art began to mirror - and consume - family life.

“We realized that maybe our studio is our family - it's our house; it's our garage,” he said.

On the surface, they're a typical American family. Mr. Hillerbrand, 47, teaches digital media at the University of Houston. Ms. Magsamen, 43, is a curator for a micro-cinema in Houston, where they moved from Ohio in 2006. They live in a 1960s-era bungalow in a subdivision called Garden Oaks.

It was the move to that so-called normalcy - the jobs, the children, the house - that encouraged Hillerbrand+Magsamen to push the boundaries.

“We realized, ‘Oh we're going to Costco; all of our friends are engineers that work for Halliburton,'” Mr. Hillerbrand said.

“He's embellishing,” Ms. Magsamen interjected. “We know a lot of geologists, but I don't know that that really comes into our work.”

She continued, “But, it's a different landscape than we would have had other places.”

That view of Houston is similar to their work. While it could be construed as being critical of big-box America, it is more about asking questions than it is about pointing fingers.

The photos and videos are imbued with an unintentional kind of humor - dark, like a New Yorker cartoon brought to life. “It's not like we're making fun of ourselves, or trying to think of funny ideas,” Ms. Magsamen said. “But it's just kind of the way we work. It just comes out and it's just kind of who are; the kind of work we enjoy.”

Usually, both children are eager to participat e. Because the images and videos are staged documentary, it often takes many days to achieve the right snapshot aesthetic. The repetition can be tedious for the children. When it is, they take a break.

“Can I say my theory?” Mr. Hillerbrand asked. He looked at Ms. Magsamen and they laughed. “I have a really crazy theory.”

A hundred years ago, if he'd been a cobbler, a farmer or a blacksmith, he supposes, his children would have learned the tools of his trade. Rather than spending thousands on summer camps for their children, he and Ms. Magsamen are teaching them their trade.

When they showed the video “D.I.Y. Love Seat” in Houston in 2011, they brought their television and the battered couch â€" the first thing they'd purchased together as a couple â€" into the exhibition space, leaving nothing but a rug in their den. Madeleine's friend who stopped by for a sleepover was confused. Where was the TV?

“Madeleine looks at her, without skippi ng a beat, and says, ‘It's at their work.'” Mr. Hillerbrand said.

This fall, Hillerbrand+Magsamen have exhibitions in Florida, Connecticut and Texas.

“We're doing a show in Michigan that's almost all blankets,” Ms. Magsamen said.

“Did you see them?” Mr. Hillerbrand asked. “I'm getting all excited,” he said, laughing.

The project, “Comfort,” is a series of photos of their belongings, piled carefully into wall of stuff. The images were printed on polar fleece blankets at Walmart.

“They ship you the blanket,” Ms. Magsamen said, delightedly.

“But seriously,” Mr. Hillerbrand added, “it's really beautiful.”

Hillerbrand+Magsamen will be showing various works at the Dunedin Fine Art Center in Dunedin, Fla., Sept. 7 to Oct. 14. From Sept. 11 to Oct. 28, two videos will be on display at the Real Art Ways Video Gallery in Hartford, Conn. And from Sept. 19 to Oct. 7, some works will be on display at Kendall Galler y in Grand Rapids, Mich., where they will also be competing for the ArtPrize hosted there.

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, Kenya, Venezuela and Afghanistan.

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Puerto Rican Identity, In and Out of Focus

By JAMES ESTRIN

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Adál Maldonado has been a photographic documentarian, a Dadaist visual satirist and a Nuyorican conceptual artist.

But most of all, he has been a cultural provocateur, who has focused on issues of identity throughout his broad career.

Though often reduced to a few pat phrases, identity is not always a simple matter. Adál - his professional moniker - says his identity is fluid and has changed to circumstances. But at its core has always been the Puerto Rican culture which is itself a blend of Spanish, African and indigenous Taino influences, among others.

In his own life, he has gone from being the child of farmers in the mountains of Puerto Rico to living as a teenager in the Bronx, becoming a hippie, study ing photography in San Francisco and being an artist in SoHo.

“We are multilayered because so many different cultures and races came through Puerto Rico with the slave trade,” Mr. Maldonado said. “We became a sort of fusion of all those experiences and ideas. I was raised to feel that I had many different dimensions that I could choose from.”

For his book, “Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience” (IPRUS, 1984), Mr. Maldonado photographed 100 Puerto Ricans who had excelled in all aspects of society, including science, the arts and community service. The portraits and accompanying interviews became a part of the social studies curriculum in the New York school system beginning in 1985.

He also did a portrait series of Latin musicians including Celia Cruz (Slide 12) and Tito Puente (Slide 13). After he published the book “Mango Mambo” in 1987, Mr. Maldonado conceived and directed a performance piece, “Mondo Mambo: A Mambo Rap Sodi,” which was written by his longtime collaborator, the poet Pedro Pietri. With a monologue, video, dancing, and music composed and performed by Mr. Puente, it played at the Public Theater in New York.

But it was a later series of portraits that struck at the heart of what Mr. Maldonado sees as the New York Puerto Rican - or Nuyorican - identity.

“I think there is for us a personal identity, and then there's a collective identity,” Mr. Maldonado said. “I think that the collective identity for a Puerto Rican is what I call an ‘out-of-focus identity' because it was caused by trauma - emotional and psychological trauma - by a sort of mental colonization, first by Spain, and then by the United States.”

Mr. Maldonado's “Out of Focus Nuyoricans” includes portraits of noted poets, musicians, artists, community activists and even the super of the Lower East Side building where Mr. Maldonado lived. The images were deliberately printed out of focus in the darkro om, then enhanced digitally. With text by Mr. Pietri, the photographs were published in 2004 by Harvard Press in “The Out of Focus Nuyorican.”

He has produced five photo novellas: small photo storybooks with words. The format is based on photo novellas that mainly originated in Mexico and were precursors to the emotionally (and sartorially) overwrought telenovelas. Mr. Maldonado's novellas display the humor and Dadaist influence that runs through much of his work.

In Mr. Maldonado's “Coconauts in Space” (Slides 5 through 7), an American astronaut lands on the moon in 1969 and discovers a capsule with artifacts that apparently belonged to Puerto Rican explorers who had been to the moon before him. When he looks up and sees a Puerto Rican flag on the capsule, he radios back, “Houston, we have a problem.” “Coconauts in Space” highlights historical revisionism, how conquering countries “tend to rewrite history to suit their agenda,” he said.

One of his early photo novellas, “Falling Eyelids,” will be exhibited in San Juan, P.R., beginning Thursday, as part of the Fotovisura Photography Pavilion. In the series, a photographer becomes dissatisfied with the way he looks at his reality, invents his own and eventually wakes up inside one of his photographs.

Mr. Maldonado was born in Utuado, P.R., in 1948 in the mountainous countryside. His parents divorced, and he and his sister moved with his mother to Trenton, N.J., when he was 13. By coincidence, they ended up in an apartment above the studio of a portrait photographer, who taught him how to process film and print.

His mother remarried, and the family moved to the Bronx where Mr. Maldonado went to high school. When his mother moved back to Puerto Rico in 1967, Mr. Maldonado stayed, and “became a hippie.” He studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Southern California and at the San Francisco Art Institute.

He returned t o New York in 1975 and started Foto Gallery on Broome Street in SoHo with Alex Coleman. He published his first book, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” (Da Capo Press, 1975), consisting mostly of post surrealist collage self-portraits along with his photographs of Duane Michals, Andre Kertesz, Lisette Model and other photographers who influenced him. He started his photo novellas including the “I Was a Schizophrenic Mambo Dancer for the F.B.I.“  (Slides 19 and 20).

Perhaps his most famous artistic endeavor, in partnership with Mr. Pietri, the poet and playwright, was the conceptual piece “El Puerto Rican Embassy,” in which they created an imaginary embassy for an island that is not an independent country. It was, Mr. Pietri's manifesto said, a place where “sovereignty is a state of mind.”

They mixed politics music, poetry and performance art at floating embassy events held in New York City, including El Museo del Barrio and the Nuyorican Poets Caf e. A highlight was Mr. Pietri, always dressed in black, leading the crowd in singing “The Spanglish National Anthem,” a satirical and serious song which chronicles the hard-knock life of stateside Puerto Ricans. The anthem was written by Mr. Pietri to the tune of “En Mi Viejo San Juan.”

Mr. Maldonado created realistic-looking passports - the official documents that define an individual's nationality and identity.

Though it was created as a statement on Puerto Rico, and New York Puerto Rican identity, the “Embassy” was not limited to people of Puerto Rican descent. Anyone could participate. Anyone could become a Nuyorican through a “baptism” performed by Mr. Pietri who represented his own sect La Iglesia de la Madre de Los Tomates (the Church of the Mother of Tomatoes).

Which brings us full circle, to the end of our tale.

If Puerto Ricans are a mix of indigenous Taino, European and African influences, and Nuyoricans combine that with Ne w York's polyglot ethnic stew, perhaps we are all becoming more interrelated - and maybe “Puerto Rican” is a good metaphor for that.

“Eventually, everyone will be a hybrid of something,” Mr. Maldonado said. “Whether it's Asian or Latino, we're all going to look alike.”

Two years ago, Mr. Maldonado moved back to Puerto Rico, where he began his exploration of identity. He lives on his uncle's watermelon farm near where he grew up. The mosquitoes drive him crazy, and his family doesn't believe in air-conditioning.

But he is happy to be near one of his artistic sources.

“Country folks like to tell tall tales,” he said. “We have part a bit of that influence in my family. Tall tales with mystical elements. They are in like a stream of consciousness.”

All the same, he is moving into an apartment in San Juan next week.

He is still working: he just finished writing a novel titled “Mambo Madness,” and he is still shifting ide ntities. “I shift identities at will,” he said. “But I feel comfortable doing that. I'm a product of many different cultural identities. You know?

“Eventually everyone's going to be Puerto Rican.”

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea and Maryland.

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The Brotherhood of the Bears

By PETER MOSKOWITZ

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There are between four and six stages to coming out as gay, according to people who study these sorts of things. Many assume all gay people will first be confused about their sexuality, figure out they're gay, accept that they are and finally, take pride in it. But for many gay men, including the photographer Alan Charlesworth, there's another step of confusion thrown into the mix.

As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia during the 1990s, all that Mr. Charlesworth knew about gay culture came from television shows like “Will and Grace.” Mainstream culture tends to depict gay men as either comically effeminate, or supersculpted and image conscious. Mr. Charlesworth had a hard time relating, or being attracted to, those kinds of images. He said that while he questioned his sexuality in high school, he couldn't find anything that reflected it, or an outlet to express it. He said he had a hard time figuring out who he was, but he knew he wasn't like the well-manicured, muscular men with a penchant for designer clothes and musicals on those television shows.

So Mr. Charlesworth remained confused, first about his sexuality, then about his place within gay culture, until he stumbled upon a Web site dedicated to “bears.” It was the first time he'd seen images of big, burly men who were attracted to other men. He said he felt like he'd finally found a home.

“It's not perfect body, gym-toned, and no facial hair,” said Mr. Charlesworth, who recently completed a Master's of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. “That's what society deems as being a normal, stereotypical gay male. That's not what I identify with.”

Mr. Charlesworth, 30, definitely does n't look like that ubiquitous image of the stereotypical gay man, but he's not large or hairy, either. For him, identifying as a bear is more about taking pride in his attraction to men with bodies that look as though they were formed by years of chopping trees, and not by years of running on treadmills and drinking protein smoothies.

But Mr. Charlesworth said his lack of heft made it hard to immediately identify with a group predominantly made up of large men. He said, for all their disdain for superficial gay culture, Bears can be obsessively body-focused, too, just on bigger bodies. So he used photography as a way in.

Four years ago, as part of an undergraduate project at Rochester Institute of Technology, he began photographing bears in the area around his school.

“I use photography as a social crutch, engaging with each scene or individual before and after the shutter is clicked,” Mr. Charlesworth wrote in his graduate school thesis.

Document ing bears with his 4×5 camera eventually helped Mr. Charlesworth get his foot in the door of bear communities from Provincetown, Mass., to San Francisco. Once in, he was able to explore the diversity in a culture that from the outside can appear to be homogeneous.

Yes, bears tend to idealize larger, hairier men, he found. But Mr. Charlesworth also found that there was room for cubs (younger bears), otters (skinny, but still hairy), polar bears (older men) and, “whatever other strange woodland creatures” as well.

The more he photographed, the more he came to see that being a bear had little to do with adhering to one body type. He said he now sees the culture as a way for gay men to be accepted as part of a group, no matter what its members look like.

Mr. Charlesworth plans to diversify the types of men he photographs, but he admits it will be hard to fully convey the multitude of bodies and attitudes in bear culture solely through images.

But, he said, he feels the need to try, because he's realized the project has more profound implications for his life than he originally thought.

It's about the same question that he struggled with back in the Philadelphia suburbs, and one that so many other gay men grapple with throughout their lives: if being gay isn't about conforming to the stereotypes broadcast on television, peddled in magazines and reaffirmed on dating sites and in clubs across the country, then what is it about?

“I started the project really wanting to show this masculine engenderment,” he said. “Now I'm realizing four years later, it's about my own personal affirmation.”

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photographs from Syria, Iraq, New York and Egypt.

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A Tiny Life Ends in South Sudan

By NICHOLE SOBECKI

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The Intensive Therapeutic Feeding Center in Batil refugee camp's only hospital is a series of dusty white tents, their flaps open to reveal rows of rope beds where parents hold their emaciated children and wait to see whether they will live or die.

Batil is just one in a series of refugee camps in Upper Nile state, South Sudan, where at least 114,000 have fled violence at the hands of Sudan government forces in bordering Blue Nile state. Refugees arrive daily at the camp with harrowing stories of being bombed out of their homes in the north, or having their villages burned by northern soldiers. The campaign began late last year when the government in Khartoum began a fierce counterinsurgency against former civil war foes i n Blue Nile, and has continued in waves.

When I was there in late July, more than 1,000 children had been admitted to the nutritional program at this camp alone, but the feeding center is reserved for the worst cases. Many could no longer absorb food or water; several had been orphaned on their long journey to the camp.

Refugees arrive weak and exhausted after weeks, or months in some cases, of travel along what has become known as the “road of death.” The camps are on a vast flood plain, leaving tents flooded and refugees vulnerable to disease. Poor hygiene conditions and a lack of food have exacerbated the health situation.

I was taking pictures on the far side of one of the tents when I noticed a flurry of activity around one of the beds. Hassan Mahmour, a 9-month-old boy, had just died of severe acute malnutrition. Lynn Pearson, an American pediatrician who had been treating Hassan, closed his eyes. A translator quietly explained to his mother, Albe it Mohamed, that he had died.

As many as four young children die at Batil camp every day, according to Doctors Without Borders: more than double the established emergency threshold.

Within minutes, Albeit was on her way home, her son's body wrapped in a gray hospital blanket. The mile or so it took to arrive at her family's tent became an informal procession. A few were given the honor of carrying Hassan's body part of the way home. The body was passed for the last time in front of the family tent, where Albeit's father embraced the child.

Over a dozen women from the area met in the tent to mourn. Albeit sat in the corner, quietly shaking beneath her sky-blue scarf. A family member lay convulsing on the floor, while several thin, strong women struggled to hold her down. Outside, the men gathered, speaking in hushed tones. Hassan's tiny body was measured with a stick, and Albeit's father sat in a corner as he sewed a rough shroud for the child from a mosquit o net issued by a nongovernmental organization.

In the back of the tent, a sheikh carefully washed Hassan's body. His features appeared impossibly small against the grown man's hand as he dressed and wrapped the body in netting.

A ring of thorn bushes surrounded the makeshift burial site. The hole that had been dug was the fourth in a series of tiny graves. Hassan's body was placed in the direction of Mecca, and hands raised, the men prayed. Underneath the shade of a plastic awning, the body was lowered into the ground, covered with emerald foliage, and filled with dirt.

In the United States, we are used to death being behind closed doors, and to the privacy of grief. When people are living shoulder-to-shoulder, death becomes much more public, and in South Sudan, far too common.

Nichole Sobecki is a freelance photojournalist and writer based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Pictures of the Day: South Africa and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photographs from South Africa, Lebanon, Israel and Ethiopia.

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Looking at the Tangled Roots of Violence in Northern Nigeria

By MATT MCCANN

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With a victor named Goodluck and the appearance of fair and decisive voting in Nigeria, last year's presidential elections seemed to bring about a bit of hope. But things quickly unraveled.

Within days, there were chants and curses, killings and chaos. The voting, and the ensuing violence, cleaved to ethnic and religious lines. Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the economically advantaged south, defeated Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim and former major general from the north, and when Mr. Buhari failed to concede, his supporters broke into a rhythm of riots and disorder.

Benedicte Kurzen, a French photographer who has been based in Johannesburg since 2005, came to Nigeria last year with a Pulitzer Center grant and a sense of the roiling tensions there: long-seeded resentments, rooted in the breathtaking disparity of wealth, widespread corruption and a pervasive, implacable fear.

“I was not expecting to be caught by the news so fast. We wanted to start by being introduced to the different dynamics,” said Ms. Kurzen, who originally conceived of the project as an exploration of religion in the area. The project, which she calls “Nigeria, a Nation Lost to the Gods,” will be shown at the Visa Pour L'Image festival in Perpignan, France, beginning Sept. 1.

Skeptical of the easy binaries of “north vs. south,” “Islam vs. Christianity,” rich and poor - as the conflict is conventionally presented in many news outlets - Ms. Kurzen, on several trips to Nigeria beginning in April 2011, sought to reveal an intricate underlying set of circumstances. “It's a convenient divide - it makes things a bit more readable,” said Ms. Kurzen, 32, “but the reality is that it's way more comp lex than this. We should keep in mind that it's more complex than just ‘northern Muslim impoverished uneducated forgotten north' versus the ‘oil-rich, educated and entrepreneurial south.' ”

“The differences are very striking,” she said, “but from a political, ethnic, and social point of view, things are more intricate and codependent.”

So intricate and codependent that documenting the situation in a way that supplied context or insight proved to have its limits for Ms. Kurzen. At its outset, the violence seemed politically motivated, though it soon fell along religious lines, and as it intensified, its causes became harder to discern. The resurgence of Boko Haram, an Islamist group that haunts the north, has added a confounding element. Mysterious and unflinchingly brutal, they conduct frequent bombings in Maiduguri and elsewhere, and they continue to terrorize and are difficult to track down.

Corruption, abuses of power and efforts by interes ted parties - the government, the military, Boko Haram - to present different realities mean that nothing could be taken for what it seemed. Regular bombardment against Christians raised the question of whether it was caused by Boko Haram or just thugs; violent reprisals against Muslims further obscured clarity. The local police, and the government, on some levels, sometimes projected ambivalence in dealing with Boko Haram's influence and destructive ways. Often, it wasn't even clear who was more afraid of whom.

“This is also the limits of photography in that sense; it only goes so far in understanding what's in front of you,” Ms. Kurzen said. “I'm only photographing the symptoms of phenomena, of dynamics: symptoms translated through the daily life of the people. But I don't think I'll ever really know or really understand what's cooking underground.”

In an image of four boys swimming, for instance, the relatively peaceful scene belies an acute and longst anding strife. The Kaduna River (which means “crocodile,” from kada in the Hausa language) separates the Christian and Muslim neighborhoods, which have been essentially in continual conflict since the institution of Shariah law in Kaduna State in 2001. The riots in the decade that followed killed thousands. “There's always like a little twist to every picture,” Ms. Kurzen said. “Even if it looks like a quiet moment, there is always something that is underneath the surface.”

Indeed, the inclination is strong to hark back to easy definitions when seeking answers to grim, gauzy questions.

Ms. Kurzen - who has lived on the continent since 2005, when she moved from the West Bank - acknowledged the difficulty for some, in Africa and abroad, of seeing past preconceptions of Africa's myriad and intricate problems. For instance, many in Lagos, with its bustle and business, seemed oblivious to the conditions of living in the north, she said. And she acknowledge d these challenges in herself as well.

“In some instances, I just say, ‘I don't understand.' I'm not really upset with people who don't really know Africa and who haven't been here to challenge simplistic misconceptions, but that's what [journalists] are here for. To raise questions can be more important than to find answers.”

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photographs from Syria, India, Mars and North Carolina.

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Reinventing Instant Film in an Age of Instant Imagery

By ADAM MCCAULEY

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In the world of photography, innovation has a shelf life. By 2008, some 60 years after Edwin Land's invention of the Polaroid camera, analog photography had been usurped by the power of the digital age. The shuttering of instant film production left a community of Polaroid enthusiasts and professional photographers with uncertain futures: Would instant film ever be produced again? Could Polaroid be resurrected?

Four years after the end of that era, a passionate group of instant film fans - under the title of the Impossible Project - have worked hard to create another era. On Thursday, Impossible will take the next step toward reclaiming the photography of the analog age, exhibiting the first images of a new large-format line of in stant film in the group's New York City space. After more than four years, the world of photography will get their first look at the new 8-by-10.

While the 8-by-10 format was never Polaroid's most popular consumer product, the film's appeal for professional photographers had always been clear.

“Looking at an 8-by-10, you have so much information,” said Chloe Aftel, a photographer closely associated with the Impossible Project. “The film can handle changes in light better than digital and there is a pleasure, richness and density to the film.”

But in the rat race for financial success, beauty couldn't compete with the appeal of digital - it was faster, cheaper, more convenient.

That is why Polaroid's announcement in February 2008 should not have been surprising. The company's laggard returns in analog sales were not sustainable - these were the consequence of a newer and faster, digital world. While Polaroid's slacking profits stifled productio n of its camera line in 2007, the end of film production threatened the consumers they had already attracted. Their once-popular cameras would soon be obsolete.

“There was something so complete about it,” said Bill Phelps, remembering the magic of the SX-70 Polaroid camera. “It was the perfect camera and idea to fall in love with. It was this beautiful object, this accessible film. It provided immediate satisfaction.”

Conceived in the mind of Edwin Land, Polaroid's founder, the instant camera and film had been available for nearly 60 years. While the modern photographer now expects to review an image in seconds, inventing a film that would develop in front of the photographer's eyes was truly revolutionary. Mr. Land accomplished that in 1947.

As interest in the digital world of photography grew, however, Polaroid's appeal waned. There were many photographers who still practiced with the form. Mr. Phelps and many of his contemporaries started their c areers working with instant film. Large format was Mr. Phelps's specialty. When Polaroid shuttered its factories, Mr. Phelps rushed to his nearest supplier, buying as much of the 8-by-10 film as his bank account could afford. For professionals left with a finite number of rolls, 8-by-10 film seemed to be nearing extinction.

That's when the Impossible Project came along.

Started in 2008, the project was founded by Florian Kaps, André Bosman and Christian Lutz, after Mr. Kaps and Mr. Bosman resolved to stave off Polaroid's extinction during an event to make the closing of Enschede's Polaroid factory in July that same year. As Polaroid continued to close and demolish factories, the Impossible staff members worked feverishly to procure any decommissioned production equipment they could find. The goal was to secure enough of the basic materials to continue to produce film for the current and future generations.

By October 2008, the Impossible Project had secure d factory space on the old Polaroid plant in Enschede and went to work putting the production line back together. Three years later, the project had released three new lines of instant film, refurbished and redistributed hundreds of Polaroid cameras, and had breathed new life into a worldwide Polaroid following - hundreds of thousands excited that instant film was given a new lease on life. But despite such successes, Impossible had not tackled 8-by-10 film.

But appreciating the beauty of traditional Polaroid 8-by-10 film was easier than creating a brand-new line. For that, the Impossible Project needed more than expertise. Some luck was needed, too.

“The equipment was found by accident,” Mr. Bias said. The machinery had been removed from a Polaroid factory in Boston to avoid destruction. The giant machines had been left in the parking lot labeled with pieces of loose-leaf paper - crude black marker denoting the contents: “8 x 10.”

The employees †œknew what they had to do to avoid the wrecking ball,” Mr. Bias added.

The salvaged equipment was shipped to Impossible's headquarters in the Netherlands, a process Mr. Bias described as “moving a piano that was never intended to be moved.” But even though the 8-by-10 materials had been saved from destruction, the Impossible staff members knew that they wouldn't be able to replicate Polaroid's process exactly.

The public “thought we bought the factory and simply started production,” said Kisha Bari, a staff photographer for Impossible who has been involved in film development since its founding. “Out of 23 components, only four were still available to us.”

Without the machinery, Impossible had to create its own, new materials. For that, they needed a steward. Enter Jennifer Trausch.

The former director of Manhattan's 20 x 24 Studio, Ms. Trausch began work on the 8-by-10 film more than a year ago, before becoming the Impossible Project's director of photography in January.

Ms. Trausch said her the film was cut by hand, with staff members measuring all materials to specification and testing “every kind of Scotch tape in existence.” They also had to tackle the complex chemistry of instant film; the dreaded and loved emulsion that can provide stunning clarity and depth when the mixture is perfected, but can also create a panoply of unexpected effects - from light flares and “snowy bits,” to dark edges and overexposed sections - when it's not.

“Throughout the process, the question was always: ‘How is this film thinking? How are the chemicals dealing with light, temperature and camera settings? And, can we follow it?' ” Ms. Trausch said. It took Ms. Trausch and her team two weeks to produce 100 film sheets by hand.

In August 2011, the public got a glimpse of Impossible's new project at the Venice Film Festival. With Maurizio Galimberti behind the lens, celebrities like Patti Smith, John C. Reilly, Monica Belucci and Willem Dafoe sat for portraits on the handmade test film. The series, according to Ms. Trausch was “a monumental success” and sparked further interest in the 8-by-10 project.

In the months that followed, improvements were made, new techniques created and Impossible reached out to photographers for the 8-by-10 film's first “beta test.” In addition, the team made test packages available for purchase - a set of 15 frames was selling for $99.

The response was extremely positive.

“The 8-by-10 is a beautiful product,” said Thom Jackson, a Dallas-based fashion photographer, whose 8-by-10 images will be exhibited Thursday night. Mr. Jackson said the film takes concentration, devotion, and, unlike some digital processes, demands reverence (read: attention) for the occasion. Perhaps most important, he said, photographers have to be willing to take a risk.

“The fascinating thing is that you never know what is goi ng to come out of the product,” said Mr. Jackson, comparing the digital age of duplication with the more furtive experience of instant film. Depending on the specific batch of film, results can vary widely - from overexposed and grainy to underexposed with “snow” and “ghosts.” But these imperfections in the film make each image special and impossible to duplicate.

“There's a drive in technology, and in the advancement of digital processes, to make everything perfect - almost of military precision,” said Mr. Phelps, who has practiced analog photography for more than 25 years. “I am fascinated by the technology, but I'm not romanced by it.”

Ms. Aftel said: “With film it's the possibility of what could happen. Those mistakes might be better than what you could have imagined.”

In the end, instant film has its own way of interpreting the world, Ms. Aftel said. That unusual interpretation is what has captured the attention of photographers b oth old and new.

Mr. Jackson agreed that there is a rebellious aspect to the adoption of instant film - a push back against the digital photography world as today's innovators look into the past to make something new again. Such processing is not lost on today's instant film connoisseurs, either, whether through applications or Photoshop people actively trying to reclaim the look of analog photography.

Leaning up against a Polaroid camera-filled display cases in the Impossible Project's large white-walled studio space in New York, Mr. Bias is even more succinct about the charm of instant film photography.

You just point and click, he said with a smirk, adding, “No apps required.”

The first test batch of the Impossible Project's new 8-by-10 Polaroid film will be on display at the Impossible Project Space from Aug. 23 through Sept. 24. There will be an opening reception on Thursday at 6 p.m.

Follow @ImpossibleProj and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.

Streetfighting in Aleppo

By JAMES ESTRIN

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Goran Tomasevic, a staff photographer for Reuters, photographed the fighting in Aleppo, Syria, from Aug. 1 to 17. While he was there, his dramatic images ran on the front pages of newspapers throughout the world. Mr. Tomasevic, 43, has been covering armed conflicts since 1991. On Tuesday, James Estrin interviewed him via e-mail. The exchange has been edited.

When you arrived what were your plans? What did you expect?

Honestly, I didn't have any expectations. I didn't know how the urban environment would look, but I wasn't surprised by the things I saw. I knew there was going to be some destruction because of the scale of bombardment. I also knew there would be guys running around with Kalashnikovs and RPGs. I was ju st focused on the things happening around me.

In your photographs, it is clear that you were often with the rebels on the front lines. Who were they? Can you describe the fighting that you saw?

The rebels came from different parts of Syria. Most of them came from the villages and towns north of Aleppo. Most were not soldiers, just civilians with guns. They were highly motivated and had modest weaponry, including Russian-made guns such as Kalashnikovs, Dragunov rifles, PKMs and a small amount of RPGs. During the last week I was with them, they showed up with some anti-aircraft guns.

How was this different from previous experiences you've had in other countries, and how was it similar?

It reminds me of when I covered the Balkans in the 1990s, with the snipers and urban-style conflict.

How did it compare to Libya?

It was definitely different to Libya. In Libya, when shells and mortars were fired they would hit the sand but in Syria they hit t he tarmac, concrete and buildings. This made it a lot more dangerous, as the shrapnel flew around a lot more.

Is there a particular moment, or a few moments, that stand out in your memory?

There are a few moments that stand out, like seeing the dead child's body under the rubble after the bombing of his house (Slide 9). Another was when a rebel was hit by shrapnel. We were just talking on the street when we heard shooting and started running into the building. Two rebels entered the building after me. We heard a large explosion, and that is when the rebel was hit by shrapnel. This photo (Slide 7) is the moment just after the rebel had been hit and entered the house, so there isn't much blood. But in the next series of pictures, you can see blood all over the room. It was such a small room with not much light. It was really difficult technically to take these pictures.

What was your day like when you were in Aleppo? How did you decide what to shoot? And when not to shoot?

I would just wander around, and see who I knew and who I didn't know. I'd see who would provide me with an opportunity to go to the front line.

How did you gauge the danger at any given moment?

Thankfully, there weren't any moments where I had to stop covering something. I was constantly assessing the dangers, but I knew that the rebels also didn't want to be killed. Every time I went somewhere, I always made a back-up plan of how I can run back to safety. I marked the buildings and knew exactly how I came in. I also watched the government positions and understood that things can go wrong. I always made a plan in my head of what I'm going to do.

Pictures of the Day: Lebanon and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Lebanon, Pakistan, Nepal and Ecuador.

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Photographing Violence Against Women, Even in Norway

By JAMES ESTRIN

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There is a reason that we rarely see photo essays of serious social problems from Norway.

There are relatively few social problems.

Norway has a well-deserved reputation as one of the wealthiest, safest, best-educated and most democratic countries in the world.

But this is precisely why Walter Astrada chose Norway as the place to complete his magnum opus on violence against women.

ShowcaseWalter Astrada

Walter Astrada's photographs of violence against women in Guatemala, Congo and India.

He start ed the project in 2006 in Guatemala, where more than 600 women were murdered that year. He then documented sexual violence in Congo, where hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been brutally raped. In 2010, he focused on female infanticide and the low status of women in India.

But to fully demonstrate that violence against women crosses all economic, cultural, or geographic barriers, Mr. Astrada needed to go to a country with few other social ills.

“Everyone thinks that Norway is a paradise, and of course it is in many ways - if you compare it with India or Guatemala,” he said. “But you cannot say that a country has no human rights problems if women suffer from violence and you are not protecting them.”

In Norway, the violence against women does not often happen in public as it often does in Guatemala and Congo. It is hidden, and therefore more difficult for Mr. Astrada to document. Though the Norwegian government is often responsive to surv ivors, he found that women rarely talk about their stories.

Mr. Astrada's most recent images are quite different from his earlier ones. They are quieter and less dramatic. At the core of his Norway chapter are portraits of women who you probably could not tell were victims of violence. Except, possibly, from their gaze. The portraits are accompanied by moody images of the sites of violence.

He says this violence is not just a woman's issue, but an issue that affects all of society, particularly children. “If 50 percent of a country can be beaten, raped, killed or tortured, then it's not a free country no matter how developed it is.”

Mr. Astrada was raised in Buenos Aires by a single mother who gave birth to him when she was 18. She had to quit school and go to work.

“Women who get pregnant when they are young and unmarried get blamed, but not the guy who did it,” he said. “She gets the fault when society fails to protect her.”

In 199 6, Mr. Astrada started his career as a staff photographer for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación. He has been a staff photographer for The Associated Press and a stringer for Agence France-Presse. He is now a freelancer based in Spain.

In 2008, and again in 2009, Mr. Astrada won first place for spot news stories in the World Press Photo contest. In 2006, he won first place in contemporary issues. Mr. Astrada was also named Photojournalist of the Year in the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photo Journalism contest in 2009.

Most recently he won an Alfred I. Dupont award for a multimedia piece, on sex selective abortions in India, that was produced by Media Storm for the Alexia Foundation.

The Norway trip was was financed by a $20,000 Getty Images Grant that Mr. Astrada received last year at the Visa pour L'Image photo festival in Perpignan, France.

Now that he has finished his six-year project, he is ready to present the work in as many forms and as many forums as possible. He intends to publish a book including the photographs from Guatemala, Congo, India and Norway.

Rarely has a photographer tackled a social problem as eloquently, and as comprehensively, as Mr. Astrada. He hopes the photos produce concern, and action, from the audience.

At the very least, the images should cause shame.

Follow Lens on Facebook. On Twitter, follow @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto.

Pictures of the Day: India and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from India, Pakistan, South Africa and Paraguay.

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Shaping Foreign Policy

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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We encourage viewers to use the “full screen” button - above, at right.

Smoke-Filled RoomsStephen Crowley

Previous installments of Stephen Crowley's series:

While pundits agree that this presidential election will likely turn on economic issues, the candidates have been busy demonstrating that they are capable in foreign policy.

In the fifth installment of the “Smoke-Filled Rooms” series, Stephen Crowley, a staff photographer at The New York Times, continue s to look beyond the restrictions, spin and control of the contemporary American political process. With an unorthodox presentation of photographs and text, Mr. Crowley examines the forces that influence the presidential campaign.

Previous installments can be viewed here: Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

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Photographing, and Listening to, the Lakota

By JAMES ESTRIN

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After Aaron Huey's powerful photographs of poverty, dysfunction and gang violence on the Pine Ridge reservation were published on Lens three years ago, the reaction was strong and swift.

There were more than 100 comments, many from American Indians. Most applauded Mr. Huey's work. But there were also many who thought it was a one-sided view of the Lakota people.

One commenter, Mark St. Pierre wrote, “There are many Pine Ridges. As someone who lives here in the center of the reservation, I can tell you that the photographs are only part of the story here. Hope is alive here, resistance is alive here.”

Mr. Huey also heard from many of the people he had met and photographed at Pine Ridge. No one suggested that the imag es failed to portray important problems that exist on the reservation - but some thought it was an incomplete view.

“I appeared to many on the rez to be a poverty tourist, making money off the tears of the people, like many journalists before who had come through photographing dirty houses and drunk people,” said Mr. Huey, 36. “They were tired of that image.”

Mr. Huey was certainly not the first photographer whose subjects complained that an outsider had created an incomplete view of them. Sometimes, it's a matter of subjects' not liking the way that other people see them. Other times, it's a matter of photographers not really having seen them at all.

But Mr. Huey's reaction was different than most photographers facing the disapproval of their subjects.

He returned to the Pine Ridge reservation.

And listened.

A lot.

“A woman named Ramona White Plume, a woman I now consider like a sister, stopped me and told me she was disap pointed in me,” he said. “She had seen my photos on the Times Web site and wanted to know ‘what the point of all this' was. I had to stop and ask myself the same thing.”

He realized that he needed to expand his story, but that was not going to be easy to do. He would have to go into much more traditional communities and photograph people who were not, at this point, likely to be open to him.

But he kept going back.

“I just knew that the work was incomplete,” he said. “It wasn't that I thought the aesthetic product was incomplete. That was pretty tight, but something was not finished. It was really about the stories that they were trying to tell that had not been heard.”

A few months after the Lens piece was published, Mr. Huey received over 40 letters from students at the Jesuit-run Red Cloud High School. Many of the letters asked why he couldn't show families like theirs: sober, employed, “normal.” The students wanted him to balan ce the story and to include them. The letters stuck with Mr. Huey.

“I had been dissatisfied for years with the limitations of traditional journalism,” he said.

“A flaw of all journalism is that someone else is telling your story,” he said. “It was always through my lens, and they felt like that lens was distorted.”

During a yearlong John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, Mr. Huey was able to distill his experiences and work on possible solutions to his problem of journalistic representation. Working closely with Jonathan Harris, founder of Cowbird, a participatory journalism and storytelling Web site, Mr. Huey developed a plan to help the Oglala Lakota tell their own stories, in their own words, and with their own photos.

The result was the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project unveiled last month and embedded on the National Geographic Web site. It is a fascinating repository of personal tales, oral histories, fa mily stories and tribal legends.

National Geographic also gave Mr. Huey a 75-day assignment to take new photographs of Pine Ridge for the magazine. (It is the cover story of the August issue.)

This time, he wanted to show the side of the reservation that many Oglala Lakota people had asked him to. To do that, he felt he had to show the resurgence of the sun dance and other ceremonies. “These communities that do the sun dance are sober and happy and speaking the language,” he said.

The sun dance has rarely been photographed. Two sun dance circles allowed him to photograph at a few prescribed moments before and after (Slide 3) the main part of the ceremony. He was allowed to observe much of the rest of the ceremony.

He describes it:

The sun dance is where the men pray for the alleviation of the suffering of the people. They don't pray for themselves. They generally pray for their family members, or people that are sick or suffering . They get pierced in their chest or their back, and they tear their flesh off. It's an intense spiritual exercise that people prepare for, over long periods of time, with fasting sobriety, a vision quest, and intense suffering. What was happening in the middle of that circle was like being on another plane of existence.

Mr. Huey says that he has come to realize that journalists, and publications, are sometimes ill-suited to tell well-rounded stories about complete communities. Even on the web, publications don't have the “time, space or attention” to tell the story of a whole community.

Which is not to say that journalists shouldn't be telling these stories.

“I don't propose to replace journalism with a bunch of unedited posts from a community,” he said. “But I think supplementing really great journalism with stories from the community, can only improve that journalism. This platform allows for the story to be a living story, that's infinitely expanding.”

With his new images, Mr. Huey believes that he shows a more complete view of the Pine Ridge reservation than he had earlier.

He will be returning to the reservation to continue photographing. If he meets anyone who object to his photos in National Geographic, he has a new response.

He can now say, proudly, that he can't tell everything about the Lakota.

“But now you can.”

Mr. Huey participated in a public art project on the Pine Ridge Reservation along with Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena. In September 2010, he gave a TED talk.

Follow @aaronhuey, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, South Africa, Yemen and Russia.

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Update: Whither Eleanor\'s Album?

August 16, 2012, 12:00 pm

By MATT MCCANN

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A few weeks ago, we published a piece about a modest yet fascinating photo album that had found its way to the displays of the University of New Mexico Art Museum. “Random Shots Compiled for the Edification of Eleanor T. Wragg” read its first page - it was a Christmas gift from 1915, made up of 25 photos. Its pictures varied from quiet silhouettes and commonplace scenes to divers, airplanes and Gov. Jim Ferguson at the Cotton Palace Parade in Waco, Tex.

Now Miss Wragg's album is out of its glass case at t he museum and back in a drawer. And what of its compiler?

Out of the DrawerEleanor T. Wragg's Album

Lens presented a minute mystery a few weeks ago: who compiled those random shots for the edification of Eleanor T. Wragg? A look at the album's pictures and peculiarities.

Since the original post, with the help of readers and researchers, I've assembled a guess: Albert E. Wells, a piano teacher at Baylor University beginning in 1906 - a colleague of Miss Wragg's, who taught art at Baylor. In 1915, the Wells household was situated next door to young Georgia Irwin, who is identified in Miss Wragg's album as a “chum” of Dorothy, Albert's daughter. Albert's wife was named Blanche.

Before then, the Wells fam ily lived at the same address as Miss Wragg on Dutton Street, suggesting that Miss Wragg and her older sister, with whom she lived, may have offered room and board, or some other temporary lodging arrangement, to a young teacher and his family who were new in town. (Albert and Blanche had come from Montreal.)

So, then, is Albert Wells the man posing with “William,” the skeleton at the Baylor Museum? It seemed likely to Roy Flukinger, a senior research curator of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It would appear that the album was the effort of an enthused hobbyist with a sense of play, and that photography's wide availability to amateurs at the time opened up a lot of possibilities to many people, he said.

Unfortunately, Albert did not live to pursue those possibilities much longer. As World War I raged overseas, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, trained at Niagara and succumbed to pneumonia in England in 1918. It seemed his games with “William” eerily foretold a swiftly approaching eternity with like company.

Blanche and Dorothy moved to St. Cloud, Fla., according to the 1920 census, and thereafter, their traces are scarce. If Albert is our photographer, questions remain, but some of their answers are less likely to turn up in public records. Did Dorothy marry - or Blanche remarry - taking on new names? Did they move from St. Cloud? Did they keep in contact with Miss Wragg, or vice versa? What did Miss Wragg do with that album after - if? - she learned Mr. Wells had died? Did she put it aside and stow it, or was it left out by a chair, for occasional melancholy edification?

“It's a fascinating puzzle as many early albums continue to be,” Mr. Flukinger said, adding: “It certainly deserves a little life beyond a drawer and a shelf.”

Follow @MattMcNYT and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

Artists Caught on a Camera\'s Canvas

By JOHN LELAND and DARCY EVELEIGH

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History in ImagesThe Lively Morgue

The newsroom archive, or morgue, has millions of photos. Lens is dipping in.

Sometimes art imitates life, sometimes life imitates art. But something special happens when art imitates art imitating life. In the 1920s, with some spillover before and after, The New York Times made a convention of photographing artists with both their works of art and the people (or pets) depicted in those works.

For the subjects, it meant getting their pictures in the paper twice in the same day, captured - once in the flesh and once on canvas or in clay. For the subjects' mothers, presumably, it meant clipping twice as many likenesses to send to far-flung relatives. Imagine the postage and long-distance calls.

And for the artists, it was a chance to step inside their own creations, to appear in a visual story not just about the muse but about the creative process itself.

The photographs here date from the years 1918 to 1942, when culture watchers were debating the place of photography among the older, more handmade arts like painting and sculpture. Walter Benjamin, in his famous 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” argued that photography and film changed the nature of all art, because they shifted attention from the artifact, which was unique and authentic, to the portable image, which could be reproduced again and again with no loss of power or value - and from the painter's or sculptor's hand to the photographer's eye.

The photographs here offered a window into the tense relationship between the mediums: we see how the camera viewed Helen Keller (Slide 11) or Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance (Slide 5), then again how artists rendered them.

Of course, the game was rigged in favor of photography: the best a painting could do in this setup was approximate the photograph. We can see with our own eyes what the follies dancer Claire Luce “really” looked like, at least if we accept the widespread idea of photography as a neutral medium, like glass. In that reading, whatever deviations appeared between the photograph and the painting reflected poorly on the painting. Also, the painting's uniqueness, which Benjamin called its aura, disappears in the photograph, which is the same in my newspaper as in yours. And in the newspaper, its colors flatten to black and white, its textures to cheap newsprint.< /p>

But still, what fun for the artists, to stand on equal footing with both their subjects and their works, with each of the three of them telling us things about the others. Was Baron Robert Doblhoff, an Austrian émigré who painted Nicholas Longworth, an insightful or empathetic observer of human nature? Was Dorothy Knapp (Slide 2), who stood on tiptoes for the sculptor Howard Chandler Christy (the photo was never published), as poised and superhuman as her rendering? The pictures tell the story.

The missing player in these images is the one who created them, the photographer, who remains as invisible as the artists usually are to the people who look at their work. These photos deny the hand of the photographer altogether: we feel like we're comparing the work and the flesh to each other, not to the photographs they appear in.

The next step, of course, is to get the photographer into the picture. What would be revealed in a David Hockney painting of a New Y ork Times photographer, posed beside the photographer's self-portrait, the aesthetic values of both canvas and print held up to the criteria of painting, not photography?

Imagine the postage and cellphone minutes.

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For information about buying a print of the photographs featured in
the Lively Morgue series, please visit nytstore.com/lens.

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, Pakistan, India and South Africa.

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Finding Mars in Familiar Places

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

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The rover Curiosity survived its famed “seven minutes of terror” and has touched down on the surface of Mars, and the world cheered.

Getting people to the Red Planet hasn't been a success story, however. “Landing humans on Mars has been 20 or 30 years away for the last 40 years or so,” the rover driver Scott Maxwell at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine this month. He acknowledged that there has not been the “political will” to take on such an expensive and risky project. But, he added, “All I know for sure is, if they'd put me on a rocket, I'd go.”

The entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose NASA-supported private company launched a craft in May that successfully docked with the I nternational Space Station, has said that his real goal is to send people to Mars in 15 or 20 years.

Until any of that happens, we poor humans have to sit here and wait for our chance. A group of would-be explorers at the Mars Society has decided not to wait for rockets to get them to the Red Planet. The society, founded by Robert Zubrin, an advocate of planetary exploration, has created field research stations in difficult Earth environments that the group says create conditions like those found on Mars. One is in the Utah desert, another in the Arctic reaches of northern Canada.

The teams travel to the sites - known within the society as “habs,” for habitations - for weeks or months at a time, to serve as “an effective testbed for field operations studies in preparation for human missions to Mars.” They see themselves as testing the design features of the habitat, use of tools and technologies in hostile environments, and even work out the human factors that might affect people over a long mission with no way to get away from one another.

Nadav Neuhaus, an Israeli-born photographer who lives in Jersey City, has spent time with teams at both of those sites. When he first heard about the Mars Society and its attempt to simulate living on Mars, “I said, ‘Wow, this is strange,' ” he recalled. As he got to know people who embarked upon the arduous, isolated missions - some for months on end - he found them “super, super serious” about paving the way for future explorers, as one man in his 80s put it. “He told me ‘I will never step on Mars, but I did this first, small step.'”

In Israel, Mr. Neuhaus, worked for the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, and later for Sygma, then for Agence France-Presse covering Gaza. He moved to the United States in 2005 and has since covered the earthquake in Haiti, last year's uprising in Egypt and the illegal immigration along the United States-Mexico border. Mr. Neuhau s, 40, also produced a multimedia piece on rape in the camps in Haiti that was named a PDN Photo Annual selection for 2012.

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, France, Afghanistan and Israel.

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Criminalizing Photography

By JAMES ESTRIN

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Mickey H. Osterreicher is the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association and edits the organization's Advocacy Committee blog. He spoke with James Estrin. Their conversation has been edited.

It seems like photographing in public is becoming a crime.

Literally every day, someone is being arrested for doing nothing more than taking a photograph in a public place. It makes no sense to me. Photography is an expression of free speech.

Since 9/11, there's been an incredible number of incidents where photographers are being interfered with and arrested for doing nothing other than taking pictures or recording video in public places.

It's not just news photographers who should be concerned with th is. I think every citizen should be concerned. Tourists taking pictures are being told by police, security guards and sometimes other citizens, “Sorry, you can't take a picture here.” When asked why, they say, “Well, don't you remember 9/11?”

I remember it quite well, but what does that have do to with taking a picture in public? It seems like the war on terrorism has somehow morphed into an assault on photography.

What's caused this?

It's been a perfect storm. There's 9/11, and now photojournalists who traditionally worked for newspapers are losing their jobs and becoming freelancers who may not have the backing of their news organizations. You have Occupy Wall Street, where police didn't want some of their actions to be photographed. And now everybody with a cellphone is capable of recording very high-quality images. And everyone has the ability to upload and share them almost instantly. There is no news cycle - it's 24/7 with unlimited bandwidth.

When did you start doing this work?

Well, I was originally a still newspaper photographer for 10 years at the Buffalo Courier-Express, and they went out of business in 1982. I made the transition to television and worked for the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y., for 22 years. While I was there, in the '90s, the reporter I worked with got in the car one day and said, “I think I'm going to law school,” and I said, “You know, I always thought about law school.” And so we went together. We worked from 2:30 to 11, and we went to law school during the day and raced to get to work. In 1998, I graduated from law school, and in '99, I got admitted to the bar.

I'd been in the N.P.P.A. ever since 1973. I was asked in 2005 to work as an attorney for the N.P.P.A., which I was thrilled to do. Photography was a profession that I loved. This was my way of paying back.

In 1946, N.P.P.A. was formed to give a voice to photographers, and I think now more than eve r we need that - not just press photographers but anybody who takes a picture anywhere.

What does a professional photographer need to know about their right to photograph?

If you're out in public, you can take pictures. And you can report to your heart's content. The problem is whether they know their rights or don't know their rights and are willing to assert their rights.

Now, when I say that, that doesn't mean that you can get up within two inches of a working police officer and stick your camera in their face. One of the things I prided myself on when I was a photojournalist was not affecting the situation. You want to be invisible. You get in, you get out, nobody gets hurt. You do your job, and that's what your main responsibility is. It's not to become the news story. Be respectful, be polite, act professional.

But even in certain cases when photographers have carried around the law and shown it to police officers and law enforcement, it hasn't mattered.

Unfortunately, a lot of officers will say “because I said so.” It works for your mother, but it doesn't really work for police. They have to be enforcing a certain law, and they can't just make it up.

If you're stopped on the street, stay calm. Be reasonable, be cooperative - as cooperative as you can. By cooperative, I don't mean you have to show them your pictures when they ask. If you're not getting anywhere ask to speak to a supervisor.

When all else fails, unless you're willing to be arrested, you have to consider trying a different approach. Walk away, and see if you can get another angle. As news photographers, you're there to break a new story, the last thing you want to do is stand around arguing with somebody while the images you want to take disappear.

For the general public, just be aware that this may happen to you. Tell them, “I'm on a public street, this is America, I can take pictures.”

We look at the images tha t come out of Syria and Libya where people risk their lives in order to get images out. Most of those images that we've seen are coming from citizens with their cellphones. They risk their lives, and we consider those efforts heroic. And yet in this country, somebody doing the very same thing is considered suspect. I have a real problem with that.

So the law is supposed to be, anywhere the public can go, the press can go, at least?

The press may not have any greater right than the public, but they certainly have no less right than the public. And unfortunately we're finding that that is not the case anymore. When you're identified as being a member of the press, you are often restricted from doing your job.

What we're seeing is photographers being charged with disorderly conduct, trespass and obstruction of governmental administration for doing their job. I call it the catch and release program. Almost always the D.A. will drop the charges immediately. But in the meantime, the police have managed to stop the person from photographing.

Most people don't know that it's legal to take a photo on the street without asking people. People often say to me while I'm shooting “you have to ask my permission.” What exactly is the law on that?

If you're in public, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. That's the difference between what is public and what is private. It's the reason that all those security cameras that are on every city street are allowed to photograph us, because when we're out in public we have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

“…It led to an exchange where the sheriff said, ‘We'll get to determine the aesthetic value of the photographs.' Police determining what is and what isn't a picture? I don't think so - I don't think that's their job.”

There's a big difference of taking a picture an d the use of a picture. If I take a picture of someone on the street they don't really have a right to tell me that I can't take their picture. They can ask nicely, “Hey, would you mind not taking my picture?” But they can't enforce it, because there isn't a law.

Now, if I use your picture in an advertisement or use your picture with story about obese people or smoking in America? That's different. But that's a whole other issue then the taking of the picture.

A lot of nonprofessionals have walked by federal buildings and been stepped for taking a snapshot.

Absolutely. If it's in public view and you're on public property, then you're allowed to take a picture of it.

There are permutations. I tell photographers, if you're standing on a public sidewalk and you're taking a picture with a 50-millimeter lens, and it's a wide shot of the city street, that's fine. If you now put on an 800-millimeter lens and take a picture through somebody's window, you' ve now invaded their privacy and that could be a civil tort.

After photographers were stopped from photographing the police clearing Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zuccotti Park, you and representatives of a media coalition including The Times, met with the police commissioner Ray Kelly. What happened at that meeting?

It was on Nov. 23. I asked the commissioner if he would reissue the “finest message” from 1999 that dealt with the police cooperating with the press. He did that. It was read at 10 consecutive roll calls in every single station house and precinct.

What did the message say?

It said that the police shall cooperate with the press to the greatest extent possible.

So that's good.

It was a wonderful thing - but that was last November, and now it's August.

Unfortunately, the very next day on Thanksgiving day, we had two more incidents. One was a Daily News photographer, covering a fatal fire in Brooklyn, who was interf ered with by police and had his press credentials pulled, and another one with another Daily News photographer who was told - by a deputy inspector no less - that the only place he could shoot pictures of the Thanksgiving Day parade was from a press pen. While tens of thousands of other people with cameras were taking pictures from wherever they wanted.

So we've been trying to work with the New York City Police Department in implementing it. Issuing that “finest message” was a good start, but as we all know a piece of paper is just a piece of paper unless there's proper training and - where appropriate - discipline. I was very disappointed to see what happened with Robert Stolarik the other day when, again, he was interfered with and arrested for doing nothing more than taking pictures on a city street which is his right.

[Mr. Osterreicher reported on the N.P.P.A. Advocacy Committee blog that Mr. Stolarik's camera equipment were returned to him by the police on Monday.]

One of the other things that came out of the meeting was that they said, anytime there's a problem, you send us an e-mail or give us a call and let us know what's going on. And I've been doing that. And some of them I have had responses to, and other times I have had no responses.

And so you sent a letter to the deputy commissioner for public information after the Stolarik incident?

Yes, I sent the letter specifically to Paul Brown of D.C.P.I., which was a lengthy letter, but I also wrote a letter to the editor to The New York Times that was printed on Friday. I said that this incident with Stolarik is a step back in police press relations and that we urged them to work with us.

How many other incidents have you been involved in since since the “finest message” was read at the police precincts?

I think there's been probably a half a dozen, but you know we are not just talking about New York. I deal with similar incidents around t he country.

“Unfortunately, nowadays wearing a press credential is almost like wearing a scarlet ‘A.' “

We have the same problem in Los Angeles. A photographer in Los Angeles was taking pictures at an oil refinery and got stopped. Fortunately, this officer just let him go after questioning him for awhile, but it led to an exchange where the sheriff said, “We'll get to determine the aesthetic value of the photographs.” Police determining what is and what isn't a picture? I don't think so - I don't think that's their job.

You've been doing training?

Yes. I've been a reserve deputy in Erie county sheriff's department since 1976, so I understand this issue from both sides.

For the Republican and Democratic conventions I recently did training sessions in Tampa and Charlotte with the local police departments on how to interact with photographers and what th e laws are. I'll be at the conventions with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and available to help photographers with any issues. We certainly don't want a repeat of Denver and St. Paul.

I was in Chicago during the NATO summit, and was watching the interactions between the police and the press and pretty much anyone with a camera. I think, they showed an incredible amount of restraint in allowing everyone to take pictures, both still and video, whether you were credentialed or not.

There are a couple photographers who might disagree.

Yes there were a few unfortunate incidents where Scott Olson with Getty was hit over the head with a riot baton and I spoke to him, and Joshua Lott, a Getty photographer, was also arrested. But at least the system we had set up with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the hotline worked well, because we got a call right after he was arrested, and I contacted the Chicago police along with one of the lawyers working with the Reporters Committee.

Even though Joshua Lott was initially charged with mob action, which is a fairly serious charge, when the police took a closer look at it - which they did - they reduced it down to reckless conduct, which was a misdemeanor.

Why is this happening everywhere?

In New York, it's not because they don't have good guidelines. Clearly if the officers followed the finest message, we wouldn't be having any problems. Other cities don't have those guidelines, but certainly in New York, it appears that officers need more training than their getting. They also need to have some teeth, so when officers violate those guidelines, disciplinary action is taken. It is very rare to have that happen.

It did, happen in a previous incident with your photographer Robert Stolarik who was covering Occupy Wall Street, and somebody else fortunately was videotaping this. An officer stood in front of him and continued to get in his way. Everywhere Stolarik went, the officer would block him. It's our understanding that the officer eventually got some form of discipline for that.

I believe that the problem is it's ingrained in the police culture. The idea of serve and protect has somehow changed, for some officers, to include protecting the public from being photographed.

Many times officers are pushing and shoving, and our photographers are told, “If that was your mother, would you want to see her picture in the paper?”

That's not the officer's job. The officer's job is to protect and serve, to make sure the public is safe, secure the scene, collect evidence. It's not to decide what pictures should and shouldn't be taken on the street.

There are officers who think it's their job to protect other officers from being photographed. They're absolutely wrong. That not what their function is.

Just as a news photographer's job isn't to direct traffic, or collect evidence at a scene, or do any of the things that law enforcement does.

Can you explain to me how this is changed from 20 years ago?

I think it was very different 20 years ago. I think press photographers had more access, I think credentials were respected. Unfortunately, nowadays wearing a press credential is almost like wearing a scarlet “A.”

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Photos from Syria, Spain, India and Florida.

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Picturing the Remnants of Anti-Chinese Violence

By DAVID W. CHEN

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Many people try to pay homage to historic sites by preserving or taking stock of whatever remains. Tim Greyhavens, a photojournalist from Seattle, wants to highlight a slice of history by challenging his audience to fill in the blanks.

For a new online project, Mr. Greyhavens pinpointed, based on records and interviews, the locations of dozens of anti-Chinese incidents in the American West that occurred more than 100 years ago. After traveling to those locations, he then photographed whatever exists there now.

The exhibit offers an entry point into a little-known and ignominious chapter of ethnic cleansing in American history that, viewed more than a century later, seems stunning for the sheer breadth and brazennes s of racially motivated violence.

From the mid-1800s until the early part of the 20th century, towns up and down the Western Seaboard, stretching into Wyoming and Colorado, lashed out against Chinese immigrants by rounding them up, often at gunpoint, and kicking them out. Dozens were killed and injured, and houses were set on fire.

Sometimes, the aggressors - who included mayors, judges and businessmen - acted out of economic fears. Sometimes, they acted out of cultural fears. But the Chinese also fought back, filing lawsuits and organizing boycotts, among other means. Yet much of that history is now largely unknown, even in the places where the violence transpired.

But instead of depicting that violence, Mr. Greyhavens opts for a minimalist approach. There are no people in his photos. No historical markers noting that thousands of Chinese immigrants were expelled or killed. Just frame after frame of seemingly mundane rail yards, downtown intersections, ind ustrial zones and more, in the hauntingly titled exhibit, “No Place for Your Kind.”

“I wanted these photos to represent that all these people had been removed,” Mr. Greyhavens said in an interview. “Here's something where time has passed, and what was there before was just gone. How do you represent something that's not there? And what is there that can possibly be visually interesting, especially in these dull urban landscapes?”

Mr. Greyhavens began his project in 2008, when he stumbled upon a reference to a place called “Chinese Massacre Cove” in Hells Canyon along the Oregon-Idaho border. After reading up on the events, he began to “notice parallels between what happened then. and what is taking place in our country right now,” he explains in the exhibit. “Both periods are marked by a widespread lack of understanding of other cultures.”

The project's name comes from a newspaper article from the time, describing one of the incident s. A map of the Western United States serves as an index, allowing viewers to click specific locations and read short historical summaries.

The clearest juxtaposition between past and present is his entry for Eureka, Calif., which offers images from 2011 and 1885 of Eureka's former Chinatown. Mr. Greyhavens's favorite photo, perhaps, depicts the only surviving home from a former Chinatown in Rock Springs, Wyo. Tensions between white and Chinese mine workers at the Union Pacific coal mine led to the destruction of 79 homes owned or occupied by Chinese.

“There is nothing about that picture that says, ‘Oh, I want to live there, even now,' ” said Bob Nelson, museum coordinator of the Rock Springs Historical Museum, who assisted Mr. Greyhavens. “It just needs to be recognized, so it never happens again. People knew about it here, and they're embarrassed, and I think they're trying to atone.”

Mr. Greyhavens based much of his research on “Driven Out: T he Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans,” a 2007 book by Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of English, women's studies and East Asian studies at the University of Delaware. And when asked to review Mr. Greyhavens's exhibit, Ms. Pfaelzer applauded his efforts as earnest and dogged. But she noted that Mr. Greyhavens largely neglected what she felt was a crucial part of the Chinese-American experience at that time: their resistance to, and in some cases, striking legal victories as a result of, the violence.

“On the one hand, it is very powerful to bring place from the past into the present,” she said. “But the present can only hold history if it is somehow revealed. That, to me, remains his challenge.”

John Kuo Wei Tchen, an historian at New York University who is a founder of the Museum of Chinese in America, said that Mr. Greyhavens's endeavor represents the latest effort in recent years to capture a slice of history that has largely been erased, or forgott en. Indeed, he is now the chief historian for an exhibit on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that is scheduled to open at the New-York Historical Society in April 2014.

“I think it's really terrific that this guy did this, and that he is mapping all these spaces that seem totally mundane,” he said. “The tricky part is that most people don't know about the violence, and they don't know the actual stories.”

Mr. Greyhavens is amenable to updating the project, based on additional research and suggestions. “It's something that can definitely be never-ending,” he said.

But he is already thinking about what's next: looking at the social and economic effects of the Grand Coulee Dam on local American Indian tribes, with a focus on the inundation of burial sites and ancestral fishing grounds.

Editor's Note: The following texts were written by Tim Greyhavens and accompany some of the photographs of his project, “No Place for Your Kind.” Th ey have been edited.

Hells Canyon, Ore.

Chinese Massacre Cove
One of the worst crimes in Oregon history took place here in May 1887. There are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened, but the following is known to be true: a group of at least 31 Chinese miners were camped on the river when a small group of white men surrounded them and opened fire. All of the miners were killed.

The site of the massacre is isolated, and the killers might have gotten away had they not thrown the bodies of the Chinese into the river. About two weeks later, several of the bodies washed up on the shores near Lewiston, Idaho, 65 miles downstream.

An investigation by the Chinese Consulate determined that the killers were a band of local horse thieves. Three of the killers left the area before they could be arrested, but another three stood trial several months later. All three men were acquitted.

Denver

The Corner of 19th and Arapahoe Streets

< p>On Oct. 23, 1880, the Rocky Mountain News noted that “the pest of the Pacific Coast … is invading the state, forcing men into starvation and women into prostitution.” It went on: “California is already in ruin through Chinese labor … and now Colorado is threatened with the same disaster.”

These diatribes set the background for violence, and a week later, on Halloween, a major riot erupted. There are several accounts of how it started, but most historians agree that it began when a group of three or four drunken white men attacked two Chinese who were playing pool at a saloon on Wazee Street. One Chinese man was hit with a board, but apparently, both men were able to escape.

Soon, an estimated crowd of two or three thousand began throwing bricks and breaking into Chinese stores and homes. The police were vastly outnumbered and were unable to stop the growing violence.

By late afternoon, the Chinese businesses and homes in the area had been gutt ed.

Rioters broke into a laundry and put ropes around the necks of the owner, Ah Sing, and his worker, Sing Lee. They dragged the men into the streets, where Ah Sing escaped after one or more white citizens persuaded the crowd to stop momentarily.

After Ah Sing got away, the mob, enraged, attacked Sing Lee. He was beaten and kicked, then dragged down the street to the corner of 19th and Arapahoe Streets where a rope was thrown over a lamppost. Sing Lee was hung by his neck, but the rope either broke or came untied. He died about two hours later.

After the violence ended, more than a dozen rioters were arrested, but almost all were dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence. The following year, several men were tried for the murder of Sing Lee, but a jury found none of them guilty.

Tonopah, Nev.

Site of the Former Chinese Community

On the evening of Sept. 15, 1903, a group of at least 30 men from the Tonopah Labor Union, a chapter of the American Labor Union, marched into Tonopah's Chinese community and ordered the residents to leave. A few hours later, a smaller group began breaking into every Chinese-occupied house. They pistol-whipped anyone who resisted and ransacked the homes, searching for money and valuables. Many Chinese reported losses of cash, gold and other prized possessions.

Some of the more prominent Chinese merchants were marched out of town and beaten, then left to find their way back. In the morning, it was discovered that one of the merchants did not return. His corpse was found the next day with a deep hatchet wound in his forehead and other wounds on his body. The man, Zhang Bingliang, had lived in the United States for more than 30 years.

Many of the Chinese and several white residents of the town came forth to identify those who took part in the riot, and 17 men were initially arrested. After a preliminary hearing, only six men were charged with assault and murder. Th ey were tried, yet the eyewitness accounts of several Chinese and white men did not convince the jury of guilt.

Rock Springs, Wash.

The Only Surviving Chinese Home

In the summer of 1885, tensions between the white and Chinese workers at the Union Pacific coal mine in Rock Springs began to escalate. Over the previous five years, at least 300 Chinese had moved into the town, and their presence was resented.

When the white workers went on strike for better wages and working conditions, the Chinese refused to join them. Things worsened when mine owners hired about 150 Chinese workers to replace the striking white miners. The already-simmering racism in the town soon erupted into one of the worst massacres in American history.

On Sept. 2, a fight broke out at a mine, and two Chinese workers were beaten. The mine foreman shut down work, and the white miners went to nearby saloons. By 3 p.m., the owners closed the saloons as well, in an attempt to qu ell the angry workers - so the drunken crowd spilled into the streets. A mob mentality soon took over.

Since the mines were closed and most of the Chinese miners had gone to their homes. Groups of white men quickly formed and headed to that area. One group of men blocked a plank bridge across Bitter Creek, the quickest means of escape from the rioters. Other groups then moved in from both the east and the west, effectively trapping many Chinese in their homes.

More than two dozen Chinese miners were known to have been murdered, and many were branded, mutilated, dismembered or decapitated. The number of actual dead is thought to be much higher.

The dead bodies of some were carried to the burning buildings and thrown into the flames. Some of the Chinese who had hid themselves in the houses were killed and their bodies burned; some, too sick or lame to run, were burned alive in their houses.

In all, 79 Chinese-owned or occupied homes, valued for official purposes at $147,000, were destroyed.

Issaquah, Wash.

Probable Site of the Chinese Camp

In September 1885, a group of 37 Chinese workers were hired to pick hops on a farm about 15 miles east of Seattle. As soon as they arrived, a group of white and Native American hop-pickers threatened them and ordered them to leave the area. The Chinese refused, and they camped on a small peninsula along what is now Issaquah Creek.

On Sept. 7, at least five white men and two Native American men climbed the fence around the farm and sneaked into Chinese camp. The group fired their guns into the tents of the sleeping Chinese laborers. Three men were killed, and three others were seriously wounded. The shooters escaped, and the remaining Chinese tended their wounded and left the farm the next day.

Several weeks later, three men were arrested for the murders. One confessed and testified at trial against his co-conspirators. Nevertheless, the jury took less than 30 minutes to return a not-guilty verdict for all of the defendants.

Los Angeles

Site of Lynchings, 1871

On Oct. 24, 1871, a mob went rampaging in Los Angeles' Chinatown. The incident began when a policeman tried to stop a gunfight between two groups of Chinese men. When the policeman was wounded, a businessman named Robert Thompson came to his aid. Thompson fired back at the Chinese, and in the ensuing gun battle, he was mortally wounded.

When Thompson died, a crowd attacked Chinese people regardless of their involvement in the earlier gunfight.

Several Chinese barricaded themselves in a building, and some of the attackers climbed onto its roof. They chopped holes in it with pickaxes and fired shots into the building. The Chinese inside tried to escape, but they were captured by the waiting crowd, which now numbered in the hundreds.

At least a half-dozen Chinese were taken to a horse-drawn wagon shop known as Tomlinson's Corral, at the intersection of Temple and New High Streets. The beams of the shop served as a makeshift gallows, and all of the Chinese in the hands of the mob were hanged, some after they were tortured.

When the beams at Tomlinson's Corral could not hold any more ropes, the crowd moved to the intersection of Los Angeles and Commercial Streets. At least another dozen Chinese were hanged or murdered there.

The coroner's report officially listed 19 dead. The next day, the Los Angeles Star newspaper described the Chinese victims as “uncivilized barbarians” who “valued life so lightly.” The massacre was described as a “glorious victory for the virtuous people of Los Angeles.”

Los Angeles

Site of the Calle de Los Negroes

Months after the event, a grand jury indicted just nine men, all for the murder of a single man, a Dr. Tong. No other charges were brought forth.

After a short trial, two men were acquitted, and seven others were convicted on r educed charges of manslaughter. One year later, the California Supreme Court reversed the verdicts for all of the men. The court ruled that in some of the cases, a Chinese man was allowed to testify in court, which violated an 1863 state law that said no Chinese person could testify against a white man. In the other cases, the court said the indictments failed to explicitly state that the victims had been murdered as required by law, saying that terms such as “shot” and “hanged” were not specific enough.

Unlike incidents in other cities, the massacre and its aftereffects failed to force the Chinese to leave. The investigation and indictments, as weak as they were, had a dampening effect on the racism in the town, and before long, many Chinese businesses and homes in the Calle de Los Negroes were re-established.

Oro Grande, Idaho.

On Feb. 12, 1879, five Chinese miners were murdered at the Oro Grande mining camp in central Idaho. Local officials cla imed that Native Americans, members of the Western Shoshone tribe - known as the Sheepeaters, who had lived in the region for many years - were to blame.

The Sheepeaters denied responsibility for the killings, and no evidence ever connected them to the deaths. Years later, some white miners claimed that other whites had killed the Chinese for the small amount of gold they had in their camp.

Still, at the time, the military took advantage of accusations and initiated what became known as the Sheepeater Indian War. The army pursued the Sheepeater people through central Idaho for many months, and in October 1879, the remaining members of the tribe surrendered. They spent the rest of their lives on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeast Idaho.

No one was ever charged with the murders of the Chinese miners.

Butte, Mont.

Buildings From the Original Chinatown

In the 1880s, Butte had a large and active Chinatown. During the nationwide economic d ownturn of 1884, labor unions in Butte ordered all Chinese residents to leave town - blaming the Chinese for the unemployment problems. Though the Chinese community chose to resist the order, no harm came to them. During subsequent economic downturns, in 1891-92 and again in 1896, the unions promoted a boycott of all Chinese-owned and operated businesses. The latter boycott became increasingly vitriolic.

Fearing for their lives, some in the Chinese community left Butte in 1896-97. However, a significant number of Chinese merchants retaliated, seeking in federal court an injunction to stop the boycott. The case, known as Hum Lay, et. al. v. Baldwin, was heard in the Ninth Circuit Court in Montana in 1898.

Unlike most court cases brought by Chinese immigrants during this time, this court ruled in favor of the Chinese plaintiffs. The unions were ordered to stop the boycott, and the Chinese were awarded $1,750 from the defendants for fees and expenses. Business retur ned to usual in Chinatown, and there were no further organized actions against Chinese immigrants.

This was a significant legal victory for Chinese immigrants in the United States during the 19th century. It went counter to the prevailing prejudice and bigotry of the times, which in many other cities in the West resulted in violence against local Chinese. After winning their case, the Chinese community in Butte remained an integral force in the town for many years.

Portland, Ore.

Site of the Albina Chinese Community

On March 1, 1886, a group of 30 or more white men entered a camp of Chinese woodcutters just north of the town of Albina, now part of Portland. The white men, who were armed, ordered the Chinese to leave the area immediately.

After escorting the Chinese to the ferry on the Willamette River, the mob went back to Albina and made the same demand the Chinese residents of the town. About 180 men and women were removed from the Albina an d East Portland areas and forced to move into the city of Portland, on the west side of the river.

The Portland Oregonian reported at the time that police had questioned the white men involved, who said they “had a hell of a fine time.” No arrests were made.

Newcastle, Wash.

General Area of the Chinese Quarters

On Sept. 11, 1885, at least 15 white miners at the Coal Creek Mine near Newcastle, Wash., attacked a group of about 50 Chinese miners. They fired guns into the air and forced their way into the company building where the Chinese lived. They ordered the Chinese outside at gunpoint, then set fire to the building. It was completely destroyed.

The miners lost all of their clothing and personal belongings, but no one was known to be seriously injured. Most of the Chinese miners fled into the woods nearby and did not return. Prior to this, almost all of them had worked at the mine without incident for three years.

Seattle

Si te of the Anti-Chinese Riot

In February 1886, an armed mob rounded up most of Seattle's Chinese residents and attempted to force them onto the docked steamer, Queen of the Pacific. The captain of the Queen refused to let anyone on board without a proper fare, so the mob began collecting money.

Meanwhile, Washington's Gov. Watson Squire ordered the ship to stay at the dock while he looked for some resolution. He failed to act, however, and the Chinese were held in a dock warehouse overnight.

By the next morning, the mob's leaders had collected enough money to pay the fares for nearly 200 of the Chinese captives. Having heard abut the recent massacre in Rock Springs, they reluctantly boarded the ship to leave Seattle.

Guarded by the militia, the others walked toward their homes in what is now the Pioneer Square area. The procession was immediately threatened by a large mob, and when deputies tried to arrest the most violent of the agitators, fighting br oke out.

During the melee, several shots were fired, and five men from the mob fell to the ground. Upon hearing the gunshots, reinforcements appeared and strengthened the militia's numbers. The casualties were taken to a hospital, where one of them died. Order was eventually restored, and the Chinese were allowed to return to their homes. The governor declared martial law throughout the city.

On Feb. 14, another 110 Chinese left the city on the next steamer. It was understood that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger.

Six men were later indicted on charges of unlawful conspiracy for their roles in the forced exclusion of the Chinese. After a four-week trial, the jury returned not guilty verdicts for all six men.

Chico, Calif.

General Area of the Lemm Ranch Chinese Cabin

On March 14, 1877, a group of white men shot six Chinese men at point-blank range in a cabin at Lemm Ranch, just outside of Chico. Three died immediately .

Although wounded, a man named Wo Ah Lin feigned death and survived. After the white men left, he tended to the two other wounded survivors and made his way into town for help.

One of the survivors died the next morning, but Wo Ah Lin and another - Ah Shung - eventually recovered. After the murders, several fires were set in Chico's Chinatown, but the residents extinguished those fires.

Weeks later, 29 men were arrested for the murders and the arson. A grand jury dismissed the charges against eight of the men, but four pleaded guilty. A determined prosecutor managed to make arson charges hold against six more, and they were found guilty. This was a rare instance of conviction in a crime against Chinese immigrants.

In 1881, locals demanded pardons for all of the convicted men. California Gov. George Perkins, who previously had declared a legal holiday for the purposes of attending anti-Chinese demonstrations, shortened the sentences of all of the men to the time they had served and they were released.

In 1886, multiple fires broke out simultaneously in Chinatown, and the entire area burned to the ground.

Truckee, Calif.

General Area of the First Chinatown

When the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, about 1,400 now out-of-work Chinese laborers traveled to Truckee, seeking new jobs building railroads through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Within a few months, one-third of Truckee's population was Chinese. The Chinatown there was second in size only to San Francisco.

Within a short time, anti-Chinese resentment swelled in the ranks of the white workers of Truckee. For years, there were sporadic incidents of whites beating and stealing from Chinese merchants, but on May 29, 1875, a fire of unknown origin broke out in Chinatown. Soon, the entire area was in flames, and spread to several white-owned businesses, though a volunteer fire brigade prevented it from spreading further.

< p>No effort was made to save the Chinese buildings, which were completely destroyed.

Soon after the fire, a group of white men started a vigilante committee called the Caucasian League. They began to plan ways to rid the town of its Chinese residents. Some League members wanted swifter action than others, and in June, a few attacked several Chinese woodcutters outside of town. They set fire to their cabins, and when the Chinese ran out, the attackers shot and wounded several of them. One of the Chinese men died the next day.

Seven men were arrested and stood trial, but in spite of direct testimony by two of the defendants against the other five, all were acquitted after the jury's nine-minute deliberation.

Not long after moving across the river, fire once again raged through Chinatown, destroying half of the newly built homes and stores.

Frustrated by the resilience and perseverance of the Chinese, the white leaders of Truckee began planning new ways to rid their town of Chinese. In 1885, Charles McGlashan formed the Truckee Anti-Chinese Boycotting Committee, launching a boycott by merchants of any Chinese who comes to them either for employment or for goods, hoping to starve the Chinese out of Truckee. McGlashan's newspaper proclaimed, “Peacefully, orderly, lawfully, let us disperse with every collie slave in the Truckee basin.”

As food and other supplies dwindled in their community, many Chinese left town. Records indicate that though the boycott leaders claimed to have rid the town of Chinese, a few remained. In 1886, four months after the boycott was declared a success, another fire burned most of the buildings in Chinatown. Three people were killed.

Pierce, Idaho

The Site of the Chinese Hanging Tree

On Sept. 10, 1885, residents of Pierce, Idaho, were shocked to find storekeeper D.M. Fraser murdered. They immediately suspected Lee Kee Nam, a Chinese merchant who had opened up a store in competition with Fraser. Vigilantes arrested five Chinese men, including Kee Nam and his business partner, and forced the two to incriminate each other.

A week later, the sheriff and a small posse rode out of town with the five Chinese prisoners, intending them to a courthouse 18 miles away. A little outside of Pierce, they were stopped by a band of armed, masked men, who ordered the posse to leave the prisoners and return to town.

A makeshift gallows was created by lashing a pole between two trees, and they hanged all five of the Chinese men on the spot. The newspaper reported that when the sheriff's posses returned to the site, they found that the pole between the trees had broken but had been lashed to a center post, suggesting to them that the Chinese must have been hanged twice before they finally died.

A perfunctory investigation of the original murder took place the following year at the request of the governor, and it concluded that the Chinese were the guilty parties. No one was ever charged with their murders.

San Francisco

Site of the Sandlot

In 1877, an estimated crowd of 5,000 gathered near City Hall to hear speakers campaign for an eight-hour work day and for the nationalization of the railroads. Soon, however, labor organizer Denis Kearney and others began to lash out against the Chinese in the city, blaming them for a lack of jobs and difficult economic times.

As the speeches became more charged with racist language, tempers flared and shots rang out, and there was a riot.

A mob from the sandlot marched toward Chinatown, but the police successfully halted the attack, and within an hour, the marchers began to disperse.

The next day, police battled with a mob trying to block the docking of a steamer carrying more Chinese to the city. Someone started a fire, and when a rioter rushed in to try to cut a fire hose, he was shot dead by the police.

The police then charged the mob of about 1,500 people. When shots were fired at the officers in the lead, the officers returned the fire, killing 4 and wounding 18. The crowd dispersed.

Another mob took battering rams and broke into Chinese businesses in the area south of Market Street. They ransacked the interiors, stole valuables and destroyed everything else. The few rioters who were caught from this mob ranged from 12 to 16 years old.

San Jose, Calif.

Site of the First Chinatown

After the rapid growth of the early 1880s, San Jose made plans to modernize its downtown area. At that time, the Chinese community, which was once on the city's edge, had become surrounded by white-owned businesses. Civic leaders called for the removal of Chinatown and demanded that local businesses only hire white labor or face a boycott.

After the Chinese made it clear that they did not want to move, local anti-Chinese forces reacted. On May 4, 1887, a fast-moving fire destroyed most of Sa n Jose's Chinatown, which, like many urban areas of that time, was built almost entirely out of wood.

There are no reports of deaths or serious injuries from the fire. But arson was widely suspected as the cause, since multiple blazes broke out in a short while.

The San Jose Daily Herald newspaper announced the next day that “Chinatown is dead. It is dead forever.” Soon, however, local Chinese merchants started working with white businessman John Heinlen, and together, they made plans to construct a new Chinatown nearby. That area thrived until the 1920s, when the long-term effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act reduced the numbers of residents to a few dozen.

Olympia, Wash.

General Area Where the Expulsion Was Stopped

On Feb. 9, 1886, one day after an anti-Chinese protester in Seattle was killed by militia who were protecting Chinese citizens, agitators in Olympia tried to force the Chinese out of their city. Newspapers reported that a crow d of 20 had entered the Chinese homes and businesses and were notifying the residents that they must leave. When Olympia Sheriff William Billings realized what was happening, he challenged the organizers of the expulsion attempt at the corner of Fourth and Main Streets. When the crowd continued on its business, the sheriff deputized several citizens of the town, and together, they succeeded in stopping the crowd from removing any of the Chinese.

After the sheriff's intervention, the crowd backed down and dispersed. Later, the riot's leaders were arrested, tried and convicted of conspiracy. Though shaken by this event, the Chinese in Olympia kept their homes and businesses, and for many years, a small Chinatown flourished in their city.

In 1997, Washington Gov. Gary Locke, the first Chinese-American governor in the United States, referred to this incident in his inaugural address, recalling that his grandfather lived in Olympia at the time of the riot. He said tha t the fact that important citizens stood up for the Chinese in Olympia helped his family establish a deep faith in American values.

Tacoma, Wash.

Approximate Site of “Little Canton”

On Nov. 3, 1885, a mob forcibly rounded up most of Tacoma's Chinese residents. Leading the mob were the mayor, the sheriff, a judge and other officials. The mob went to each home in what the white citizens called Little Canton.

When the rioters found someone in a house, they dragged them out. If they did not find someone, they ransacked the place.

The day after the Chinese were forced to leave the city, a fire started in the now-empty homes. All of the homes burned were destroyed.

“The houses were of no value,” reported the Tacoma Ledger newspaper, “except to the Chinese.”

At least 200 Chinese were forced from their homes at gunpoint. A few wagons were brought to carry any baggage the Chinese could bring with them and provided rides for elde rly women and children. The men had to walk the eight miles outside of town to the Lakeview Railway Station.

There are no official records of deaths or serious injuries during the expulsion, though Chinese accounts say two people died from exposure while being held at the train station.

The mayor of Tacoma and other leaders of the expulsion were indicted for conspiring to deny the Chinese their civil rights, but the charges were dropped.

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