Pictures of the Day: New Jersey and Elsewhere

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

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Sounding the Warning on Preparedness for Hurricane Sandy

The Times had a strong story on the front page Wednesday under a headline that says a great deal: “For Years, Warnings That It Could Happen Here.”

“It,” of course, refers to a disaster like the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

That article, by Mireya Navarro and David Chen, may have reminded some readers about another front-page effort about seven weeks ago by Ms. Navarro.

Consider these paragraphs from her prescient Sept. 11 article:

But even as city officials earn high marks for environmental awareness, critics say New York is moving too slowly to address the potential for flooding that could paralyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financial district and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Only a year ago, they point out, the city shut down the subway system and ordered the evacuation of 370,000 people as Hurricane Irene barreled up the Atlantic coast. Ultim ately, the hurricane weakened to a tropical storm and spared the city, but it exposed how New York is years away from - and billions of dollars short of - armoring itself.

“They lack a sense of urgency about this,” said Douglas Hill, an engineer with the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, on Long Island.

I spoke with Ms. Navarro on Wednesday. The Metropolitan section reporter who covers the environment said that she is glad that she wrote that article last month and that The Times gave it front-page display.

But now, she added, the situation â€" in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Sandy - has moved from the theoretical to the all-too-real.

It's not in the job descriptions of reporters to make policy, but often they are in an unusually good position to make cogent observations about what they cover. Ms. Navarro did just that when we spoke.

“Rather than constant studies, we need some action steps now,† she said. “The subway alone is a major thing. If the subway goes, the city goes.”

It's notable that her September article drew nearly 250 comments from deeply interested readers, from Manhattan to the Netherlands. Infrastructure may not be a sexy topic on its face, but it matters deeply to people's lives and creates passionate responses.

The Times has given this subject significant attention, not only in the metropolitan region, but also nationally.

In its national reporter John Schwartz, The Times has a full-time infrastructure reporter, a major commitment of resources. His reporting has frequently sounded alarms about infrastructure deficiencies in the United States. In the paper's long-term, sustained coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans, The Times showed that it knew just how important infrastructure is.

And talk about prescience. As early as 2008, Mr. Schwartz was writing about New York's vulnerability to storms wit h an article titled “Waiting for the Big One.”

But readers â€" from governors to city residents to federal officials â€" often have short attention spans and limited ability to focus on important, hugely expensive and seemingly unexciting topics.

Now the subject has come home in an undeniable way.

Ms. Navarro noted that those action steps are extremely expensive and take sustained effort over time.

“The plan is to stick with the coverage,” she said. “We know that this is not going to go away.”

Mr. Schwartz put it another way: “People do the right thing after we've been shamed into it. We don't learn our lessons until we have to.”

That moment, apparently, has arrived. But a newspaper can only do so much. So far, The Times has done its job admirably. Now it's time for public officials to do theirs.

At a Crossroad of Faith and Folklore

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In remote northeastern Poland there lives a group of elderly Orthodox devotees who are said to possess special powers. They can heal the sick, cast out demons - even still a foe's heart. Living at a mystical crossroad of Christian faith and folkloric superstition, they consider themselves members of the church, though the church does not.

They are called “Whisperers.”

Kuba Kaminski, a photographer from Warsaw, had heard of them a few years ago in tales that sounded more like forest myths. But their lives seemed like a natural project to pursue. “I like to photograph the invisible,” said Mr. Kaminski, 28. “I wanted to be there, I wanted to touch the things that people can't understand.”

Mr. Kaminski, unfamiliar with the language and the Podlasie region - which abuts Belarus, Lithuania and the Kaliningrad Oblast - enlisted a young anthropologist he befriended to serve as his liaison during two weeklong trips to the Whisperers, who were highly suspicious of strangers. Carrying around a camera made them doubly anxious of him, requiring helpful words from his anthropologist friend, who is also an editor at the magazine Czasopis. The editor/anthropologist, Tomas Sulima, spoke their dialect, a hard-to-understand mix of Belorussian and Polish.

The Whisperers - or Szeptun, in Polish - do not refer to themselves by that name. Nor do they necessarily identify as Polish citizens - nationality is not their concern. Mr. Kaminski said that if you ask them, “Where are you from?,” they answer, “We are from here.”

Kuba Kaminski Women came to pay their respects to the Virgin Mary in the village of Knorydy, Poland.

Yet they do claim the Orthodox faith, saying God obliges them to conduct the supernatural rituals that, in turn, prevent them from being fully embraced by their church. To practice their faith as they understand it, they sidestep the church's established boundaries. Many of their prayers are conjured up on the spot to suit their rituals. They stray from ecclesiastical doctrine in other ways, too.

S ome of their spells are intended to inflict harm, or death.

The Whisperers' willingness to do “the bad stuff” intrigued Mr. Kaminski. He said he witnessed a friend of one Whisperer asking if she - they are usually women - could make her neighbor die. Mr. Kaminski said that the Whisperer replied, “Yes, I can do that,” but with a caveat. “She said, ‘If your neighbor is a good person, you will die.' And she prayed that,” Mr. Kaminski said.

Duly warned, the woman agreed. And a month later, Mr. Kaminski learned she had died instead. It was harvest season, and she fell under a tractor.

Though a self-described skeptic, Mr. Kaminski vowed to himself, “I will believe everything I see,” when he embarked on the project.

Kuba Kaminski Anna performed a curing ritual beside a source of holy water in the village of Dobrywoda.

On one occasion, in the home of one of the Whisperers, Mr. Kaminski was taking her portrait. It was a productive day - he had more than a hundred images, when she said sharply, “Now you go.” He left, taking a few more pictures of her house on the way out, and returned to his hotel to review his work. The pictures of her house and from earlier in the day remained, but the portrait files were corrupted. Mr. Kaminski - the young, urban skeptic - wasn't sure what to make of it: “In this situation, you just think, ‘Wow, there could be something there,' ” he said.

But the Whisperers insist that their powers are about healing, and not all of them are elderly women. Mr. Kaminski encountered one Whisperer, a priest by day, who straddled the gap between the Orthodox Church and these unorthodox practices. He accepted “patients,” as Mr. Kaminski ca lled them, in the church after hours to avoid attention from the hierarchy. Some came from afar, gathering in the hallway to seek his healing prayers. The air was heavy and the mood solemn.

“The Whisperer is more important than the doctor healing their cancer,” Mr. Kaminski said. “That's who the Whisperers are for those people.”

The Whisperer-priest isn't alone at this intersection of faiths. Mr. Kaminski said that crossroads are powerful images for both the Orthodox Church and the Whisperers. It is “a holy symbol for making the bad and good decision - going right, going left,” he said, adding, “There are many crosses on the crossroads.” Those seeking to be healed are sometimes instructed by the Whisperers to place an object there, as an offering or a portent.

These objects are common enough that when he was driving to the first village of the project, he and Mr. Sulima struck one. Mr. Sulima, the editor and anthropologist with whom Mr. Kam inski plans to continue the project in Belarus, was unfazed, explaining that every time he went to visit the Whisperers, he hit something. Mr. Kaminski, however, was uneasy, recalling a story from a few years ago in which a priest died in a car accident after swerving to avoid an object. Mr. Kaminski heard the object had been placed there by someone - per the instruction of a Whisperer - who had a quarrel with the priest.

“I've observed that always for the people who come to the Whisperers, it's very serious,” Mr. Kaminski said. “It's this type of situation when if you believe in something, maybe it's true or maybe it's the power of suggestion. Maybe it's real spirits, and you don't know that, and you cannot know that because, how can you?”

Kuba Kaminski The road that leads to the village of Knorydy, where, it is said, the Virgin Mary appeared more than a hundred years ago.

 

Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, New Jersey, Gaza City and Myanmar.

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With Digital Readership Up and Pay Wall Down, The Times Covers the Storm Robustly

The New York Times had many more readers than usual on Monday and early Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy devastated the metropolitan area and beyond.

And that was for many good reasons. The Times's offerings on the storm have been robust, authoritative and remarkably varied. They were also accurate, which is more than you could say for some of what was available elsewhere, where hyped reports and faked photos added to what was already a chaotic situation.

Those offerings included everything from a webcam on the building's roof, with images updated minute-by-minute, to the overall reported story under the byline of James Barron â€" surely one of the best rewrite men in the business - with contributions from dozens of reporters in the field, and a great deal more. An interactive storm tracker was one of many graphics intended to help readers understand what was going on. A frequently updated gallery of startling photographs helped tell the tale, as did video.

I nternet traffic to the Times site went through the roof, said Ian Fisher, the associate managing editor in charge of the dayside home page and Web site.

“Digital traffic was about double what would be our highest normal day,” he said.

His aim? “Trying to do a bit of everything â€" cover all the basic news, the announcements from public officials, but also to catch the sheer scale of the devastation and the human drama and emotion.”

In addition to the quality of the report, the removal of the paper's pay wall â€" which blocks readers from digital access after a number of visits â€" was surely a part of the increased traffic.

The free access to The Times's digital sites will continue at least until tomorrow morning, said John Geddes, managing editor of The Times.

Why did The Times remove its pay wall?

“It's a quaint term but it's public service,” Mr. Geddes said. “This is a situation in which dissemination of information may h elp people make life and death decisions.” He said the free access would continue at least until 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Print readers in the New York metropolitan area were less fortunate. Bridge and tunnel closures meant that getting papers from the printing plant in Queens to Manhattan and most other parts of the metropolitan area was impossible; the paper was printed and distributed nationally. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Times, said that undelivered Tuesday papers would be included in Wednesday's delivery wherever possible.

The fast-moving story, though, was far more suited to digital news anyway. “There's a lot of misinformation out there and we hope that people come to The Times to find out what's true,” said Fiona Spruill, who is in charge of emerging platforms, which these days tends to mean mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.

All of this doesn't happen by magic. When I got to The Times's newsroom on Tuesday morning, many of the reporters and editors who were still at their posts had barely left them since Sunday.

Carolyn Ryan, the metropolitan editor, had not slept in more than two days when I spoke to her on Tuesday afternoon. As the editor at the center of the paper's coverage, she had 42 reporters and nine editors on the story.

“We most want to be useful, we want to be truthful, we want to be encompassing and contextual,” Ms. Ryan told me.

An article that is very likely to be on Wednesday's front page is one that provides that context: A report on the city's flood zones that will detail, she said, “that the water table has changed and the infrastructure hasn't.”

It suggests, Ms. Ryan said, that “we can't live like this.”

For the breaking story, Ms. Ryan relied heavily on Mr. Barron, the rewrite man who has been working at The Times for more than 35 years â€" since a week after his graduation from Princeton University in 1977.

His challenge in writ ing the main news story, he said, is to “take a big story and turn it into something that makes sense, is accurate and reads well.” Weaving together reports from many reporters in the field is part of the challenge.

“When they are all clamoring for the copy and everything is still happening,” it's difficult, he said. “Getting it right is the first and foremost thing.”

Mining Coal and Melting Ice

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David Breashears couldn't be reached a number of days ago when we'd hoped to speak over the phone. He was in Kathmandu, dealing with something of a mountaineering crisis.

This wasn't unusual for Mr. Breashears, who has been scaling mountains since the early 1980s. When I last spoke to him, we had discussed “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya,” a series of large-scale photographs exhibited at Asia Society in Manhattan. The exhibition contrasted archival photos from early 20th-century explorers with images of the same scenes by Mr. Breashears and his GlacierWorks team.

This spring, he returned to the Main Rongbuk Glacier, at Mount Everest's base, to install a photo “gallery” more than 17,000 feet above sea level. An online video shows him tromping gingerly across the ice with a large print in hand.

The prints he and his team hammered into the ice do not show mountains or glaciers. They are photos about coal, shot by other photographers. They comprise half of “Coal + Ice,” a major exhibition produced by Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations that opened last year at Beijing's Three Shadows Photography Art Center. It was a huge show that tried to show the fossil fuel industry's complicated path: from the glaciers of the Greater Himalaya to scenes deep within mine s.

It also includes photos about coal from the United States, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany and elsewhere. It incorporates some of the classics of mine photography - including work by Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson (Slides 1 and 4) and Lewis Hine (Slide 7), whose photos are perhaps the best example of early documentary imagery used for social change.

Gleb Kosorukov Ukraine, 2009.

But in “Coal + Ice,” much of the emphasis is on the work of Chinese photographers.

“The more I thought about trying to take on the project of photographing coal production and the impact of coal in China, the more I realized the hugeness of that,” said Susan Meiselas, one of the exhibition's curators.

Instead, she rea ched out to photographers like Song Chao, 34, who had worked at a coal mine himself in Shandong Province, in eastern China.

“I could not say it was a sweet and pleasing experience,” Mr. Song wrote via e-mail. “Though it was not as tough as some people would expect.”

Song Chao Shandong Province, China. 2002.

Mr. Song was not a professional photographer when he began making portraits of co-workers and friends (above). He started shooting for reasons more personal than political.

“I tend to focus more on the individual than the social aspect of the work,” said Mr. Song, who is now working on a series about migrant workers.

“You don't see in-depth documentary, in the same way,” Ms. Meiselas said of his portraits, “but this is someone who had a classic approach and did terrific work.”

Taken together, the works of the 30 photographers who make up the “coal” part of the exhibition present a wide view of the industry, now and in years past. Ms. Meiselas, a Magnum photographer, originally gathered them for “Mined in China,” an earlier exhibition she curated with Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations.

The project had its origins in a trip Mr. Schell and his family took to Shanxi Province in northern China - an area he called “coal country.” It was, he said, “one of the most arresting and tipping-point moments” of all of the years he has spent studying China.

“The landscape was so desecrated, and so bleak,” he said. “There were some villages; there were piles of huge mountains of fly ash; there were piles of coal. You didn't see the sun.”

And so he teamed up with Ms. Meiselas and started meeting wit h those who'd been chronicling the coal odyssey in China - “trying to put in a visual narrative form this incredible carbon arc that was affecting billions of people,” he said.

“Mined in China” opened in Houston in 2008 and later became part of “Coal + Ice,” which also includes photographs of the Asian rivers that flow down from the Tibetan Plateau. When it opened at Three Shadows, the organizers were planning to take the exhibition to New York, Berlin and elsewhere, including other parts of China.

Enter Yixian International Photo Festival, which begins Friday in Anhui Province, in the country's east. The festival will take place at the Yixian Museum of Art and throughout ancestral halls in a rural area known for its historic architecture.

“When it was in Beijing, they just used a very normal exhibition space,” Ou Ning, the festival's organizer, said of “Coal + Ice.” “But in our festival they have to use the rural architecture. So it's a huge challenge for them in design.”

This is the festival's seventh year, but the first that its organizers - the local government - invited a wider range of exhibitors. Mr. Ou, a curator, poet and artist who contributes to Asia Society's online ChinaFile magazine, was commissioned to organize the festival, which is combined with an independent art event he first organized last year.

Mr. Ou, who is in his early 40s, has been studying China's urban-rural divide and rural reconstruction, and used that theme in the program for Yixian. It has been advertised on Facebook and Sina Weibo â€" a popular Chinese microblogging service - and, less conventionally, on large billboards in the countryside.

“You always see the same people - it's the art community,” he said. “So I want to access more public.”

At Yixian, that means farmers. Peasants. People who might not typically spend their evenings at openings. And people whose lives are affected by glaci al melt.

“Its going to be really fascinating to see what ordinary people make of this idea,” Mr. Schell said, “that coal is linked to air, to temperature, to glaciers, to rivers, to hydrology.”

It is hard to say where “Coal + Ice” will go next, after Mr. Breashears's glacier-top open-air gallery and a relatively small, rural photo festival.

“We've been doing it now for five years and it's sort of like the book that never has the last chapter written,” Mr. Schell said. “It has continued to evolve.”

He continued: “Like it or not, we're all in this story together, and it's the climate change story. And the costs are immense for everybody, in terms of how the story ends.”

Yang Junpo Pingdingshan, Henan Province. 1996.

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Pictures of the Day: Connecticut and Elsewhere

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Photos from Connecticut, New York, Washington and Afghanistan.

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America for Beginners (or the Forgetful)

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Imagine if someone put a gun to Arthur Grace's head and asked him if he had photographed Evel Knievel jumping over trucks in Worcester, Mass.

He would be a dead man.

Mr. Grace doesn't even remember seeing Mr. Knievel in 1976 - or any other year. At least that's how he explains the shot on the back cover of his fourth book, “America 101.” Th is photographic amnesia extends to an image of a mixed-race couple at a swimming pool (Slide 10) and many other moments, as viewers time travel through America's recent past.

For nearly four decades of a nonstop career traveling the world, Mr. Grace carried a Leica rangefinder and took personal black-and-white photos. He thought they might have some potential one day - if he ever had the luxury to stop shooting and pore over his archives to recognize it.

The idea for the book had it roots in the photographer Elliot Erwitt's suggestion that going back over early work can be a photographer's smartest move.

Arthur Grace A delegate gets a shoe shine during the Re publican National Convention in New Orleans. 1988.

“You owe it to yourself to go back and look,” Mr. Grace recalled. “That's the way you do it to find the interesting photos. To find the ones you forgot. I took his advice.”

Mr. Grace started with United Press International in 1972, then worked as the New England photo correspondent for The New York Times, and began freelancing for People and Time magazines in 1974. He joined Newsweek's staff in 1986, then, during the early 1990s, he transitioned from photojournalism to film, advertising and corporate work.

His first book, “Choose Me” - a collection of images from the 1988 presidential campaign - was published in 1989, followed by “Comedians,” which sold 25,000 copies. Then, he said, he couldn't sell anything for the next 15 years until 2006, when he published “State Fair.”

By 2008, he finally had the time and started recalling all those images from the various archives of publications and agencies he had worked for in the past.

“It was my life coming back, reminding me where I've been, what I'd covered,” he said. “Certain things you'll always remember, obviously. But others? It was assignment after assignment after assignment … it gets lost in the shuffle of the Rolodex of your brain.”

When Mr. Grace began digging through his archives, he wondered where all his personal photos over the years fit in. He had published three books on aspects of American culture: presidential elections, comedians and state fairs. But he searched for the common thread in it all.

“I've been all these places. I've seen all these things. What defines it?” he wondered. “The cultural DNA of what makes up this country and what represents and defines us as Americans. With that in my head I started editing the pictures.”

Arthur Grace 4-H club winners pose with their prizewinning eggs. Sacramento, 2003.

Mr. Grace turned to people outside of photojournalism to help him edit the work, especially Brett Abbott, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and James Gilbert, the former gallery director of the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.

“Most photographers get very sensitive when somebody edits their work,” he said. “They fall in love with their pictures and that's fine but it depends what you're using it for. If you want to put out a project, maybe you need to hear some other voices, to have other eyeballs looking at them and the key thing is to listen to them.”

He did.

“Everything I thought they were wrong about when I got the copy in my hands, they were right about,” Mr. Grace said. “If I had done it my way, I wo uld have been missing some pictures I really like now, that really work well.”

The book's cover image of a Maine couple sitting on a rickety porch hitched to their trailer is one that Mr. Grace took while on assignment (with “the legendary” Times reporter, John Kifner). Although he hadn't saved it, it was plucked from the box of negatives that the Times lab manager William O'Donnell sent to him.

His favorite image in the book is of the Hatt family, potato farmers in Maine (Slide 9), which was the result of an all-too-familiar situation for many newspaper photographers. Mr. Grace had received a call from an editor at The Times saying that a writer had already reported a story on the plight of potato farmers in Maine and they needed a photo by the next afternoon. Mr. Grace got in his car, drove five hours, found a hotel at 11 p.m., had a candy bar for dinner, and got up early to make a critical, storytelling photo. He was on a tight deadline and without guida nce about where to go.

Hours later, feeling discouraged, he was speeding down a country road when he saw a white head of hair pop out of a ramshackle house. He hit the brakes, made a screeching U-turn, got out of the car with his heart pounding, apologized for startling a frail old woman and explained what he was doing. Her son came up behind her looking equally worn out.

Mt. Grace asked if he could take a portrait.

“She asked if her other son can be in the picture,” Mr. Grace said. “She calls to him and out comes the guy with one leg on crutches … my fingers were tingling; I couldn't believe I had everything I was looking for.”

It was because of that photo that he was flown to New York where he met Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor, and learned that the newspaper had submitted the image for the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Just as gratifying was a letter he received from a man who saw the images years later on a blog. The man wrote: “The Hatt family? I was their next-door neighbor. I went to school with the boys. I want you to know that that was an excellent photograph. That was a true picture of what it was like at that time. That picture will always stick with me.”

For Mr. Grace, the pictures that mean a lot to him date back to 1970s Boston, when the city was in upheaval over court-ordered busing and school desegregation.

“That was an ugly time in Boston,” he said. “Every picture in there has meaning to me.  We've gone over it so many times trying to get just the right picture.”

Granted, sometimes the right picture can be one you never remembered taking. Luckily, Mr. Grace recalled Mr. Erwitt's advice, which is a valuable lesson for any photographer.

And the title, “America 101″? That's a final lesson, too.

“It's like Econ 101, in college, Mr. Grace said. “That's your basic course. That's what the book is: a visual crash course on what A mericans are like. If you want to know, open the book.”

Arthur Grace A horseshoes match in Raleigh, N.C. 2003.

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Hitting the Reset Button on the Campaign

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

It's been a little more than a month since Mitt Romney's presidential campaign conspicuously declared a “reset,” when he was lagging in the polls and his prospects seemed grim. It's been a little more than three weeks since the first debate at the University of Denver, where Mr. Romney brimmed with confidence against a somnolent commander in chief and seemingly turned his election narrative around. In the second debate, Mr. Romney seemed to struggle to hold his own against a more forceful President Obama, who may have benefited from an assist from the moderator, Candy Crowley. The third debate, in which the topics were ostensibly restricted to foreign policy, took place last Monday at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.

Early voting has already started in many states. Eleven days remain until voters line up at their polling stations.

It's the first presidential contest since the Citizens United decision, and the campaigns and their parties are on track to raise $2 billion dollars. The candidates and the legions of “super PACs” have poured millions into increasingly acerbic ads, while trading tit-for-tats, which are pounced on and repackaged with commentary by a ravenous punditry seeking to fill a 24-hour news cycle.

In the eigh th installment of the “Smoke-Filled Rooms” series, Stephen Crowley, a staff photographer at The New York Times, trains his camera on one of the more combative phases of the campaign, striving to see beyond the restrictions, spin and control of the contemporary American political process. This unorthodox presentation of photographs and text examines the forces that influence the presidential campaign as it nears its denouement.

Previous installments can be viewed here: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
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Pictures of the Day: Lebanon and Elsewhere

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Photos from Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus and Senegal.

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\'Great Journalism\' That Has Unwanted Business Impact in China

Here's one memorable part of the coverage of the Chinese government's censorship Friday of The New York Times's Chinese-language Web site: the word “harmonized.”

The word crops up in a Washington Post story about the Chinese government's decision to block The Times's Chinese-language site. It has to do with reaction to the David Barboza article on the vast wealth of the Chinese prime minister â€" reaction that also was deemed inappropriate for viewing.

A respected professor at a Chinese university posted a comment about the article, The Post reported, but that comment lasted only one minute.

“It's already been harmonized,” an observer noted. Read: deleted.

There surely was less harmony for advertisers on The Times's Chinese site, whose ads also were blocked from millions of viewers.

Nor could there have been much harmony for those at The Times who deal with advertising revenue, a difficult-enough propositio n as a discouraging third-quarter earnings report made clear on Thursday.

The episode is an extreme example of an enduring newspaper-world fact: journalism and business interests don't always go hand in hand.

The Times did exactly what one would hope and expect: It published a great story without undue regard for the short-term business consequences.

And, given The Times's financial challenges and its major effort to become a true global news organization, that took guts.

On Friday, I interviewed the publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. about the story, the censorship and what it means for The Times's global push.

“I'm very proud of this work,” he said of the story. “Our business is to publish great journalism. Does this have a business impact? Of course.”

Mr. Sulzberger said the publication of the article was preceded by “conversations with the Chinese government to discuss it.”

“They wanted to air their concerns â€" which I listened to, as I should,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “And eventually, we made a decision to publish.”

The timing is awkward, in that The Times began the Chinese-language site only this past summer, and this month began a similar effort in Brazil.

But that timing “was not in my control,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “That has to do with when the story is ready to go.”

Those who advertise on the Chinese-language site did not receive advance warning of the story and its likely consequences, he said.

“We didn't tell them, any more than we would tell any advertiser about a story that was coming.”

But now, he said, The Times's advertising department is talking with advertisers, “and we'll work with them” to remedy their lost advertising.

Joseph Kahn, the foreign editor, told me that he knew when the reporting on this story began â€" about a year ago â€" that it would be a “threshold issue” for the Chinese government.

“I ex pected it to test the limits of what they would tolerate from the foreign media,” he said. (In speaking with me, he emphasized that Mr. Barboza's direct editor on the story was Dean Murphy, a deputy business editor.)

“For us, this is just classic New York Times investigative journalism,” Mr. Kahn said. “It's what reporters do. For them, this is not what reporters do. This is what reporters are banned from doing.” He said he believed that, by various means, the story is still getting out in China and that “it has done nothing to diminish the reputation of our journalism.”

Mr. Kahn said that as recently as Wednesday, Mr. Sulzberger and the executive editor, Jill Abramson, met with Chinese government representatives at The Times. But the focus of that conversation was not about the journalism â€" it was about a political and cultural differences.

In short, Chinese officials were making the case that The Times not publish the article.

“I'm gratified â€" there's no other word to describe it,” Mr. Kahn said about The Times's decision to publish it. “People cite the Pentagon Papers, but that involved defying a legal order.”

This decision, and others like it that may follow, Mr. Kahn said, have the potential to be more costly, given The Times's global strategy.

“This may be a taste of the Pentagon Papers of the future,” he said.

In Restive Greece, Afghans Greeted by Xenophobia

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On a recent assignment in Greece, Zalmaï Ahad discovered that more than 50,000 Afghan refugees who had fled the most recent war were living illegally in Greece - in the middle of the streets, in parks and under bridges and olive trees.

“What I saw was very difficult for me to see,” he said. “I have been working so many years with refugees, in refugee camps, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But it was difficult for me to accept this in Greece - a European country.”

It was particularly upsetting, he said, because he had also been a war refugee, fleeing Afghanistan in 1980 at the age of 15 to avoid conscription by the Soviets into the Afghan army. He went to Switzerland, where he was educated and still lives.

When the Taliban were forced out of power a decade ago, he was able to return and has photographed his homeland for the last decade. Known professionally as Zalmaï, his Afghan photographs were featured on Lens in 2009 and 2011.

Because Greece shares a border with Turkey, it is the major land transit route into Europe for immigrants. But it is almost impossible for Afghan refugees to get official status. Racist graffiti and posters are commonly found in Athens, and there is an epidemic of anti-immigrant violence that is particularly directed at Afghans and sub-Saharan Africans. Zalma ï says that there has been an increase of attacks over the last two years, while he has been covering the story.

“They happen every day, every day, every day,” he said. “Before, it was at night that a group of people were attacking. But now they do this during daylight.”

Zalmaï Thousands of migrants, some asylum-seekers, some refugees, have sought shelter in a makeshift camp near the port of Patras. The camp was closed by the police in July 2009, pushing the migrants out of the city, where they now live on olive tree farms.

The attacks are associated with the rise of a neo-Nazi movement in increasingly restive Greece. Earlier this year, the far-right Golden Dawn Party won 18 seats (out of the total 300) in the Greek Parliament.

In the beginning, Zalmaï financed the project himself, although he later received an Emergency Fund grant from the Magnum Foundation. He also got some from Human Rights Watch.

He spoke with and photographed many victims (Slides 1, 2, 4 and 10). One violent incident involved a 27-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker (Slide 2) and two of his friends who were attacked in September 2011 by a mob. The man was hit on the head by a beer bottle and stabbed five times.

The asylum-seeker said that when he went to the hospital, “I was very afraid.”

“I realized that I could have died so easily,” he said. “We come from so far away and it is so easy to get killed here.”

Zalmaï says he will continue to photograph Afghan refugees in Greece. Although his people have suffered through three decades of war, Zalmaï says that at least the world knows what is happening in Afghanistan. He wishes that there was some awareness about the plight of his fellow Afghan refugees.

“I ask all the international community just to take responsibility,” he said. “I don't want people crying for Afghan people, but at least understand their problems and help them to just to be like normal people. “

Zalmaï An Afghan asylum-seeker slept on the sidewalk in the center of Athens.

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Pictures of the Day: Florida and Elsewhere

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Photos from Florida, Ohio, Saudi Arabia and China.

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Pursuing the BBC Story \'With Objectivity and Rigor\'

A few further notes on the matter of the incoming New York Times president and chief executive, Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC, which I wrote about on Tuesday:

1. The byline Matthew Purdy, atop a story in Thursday's Times, speaks volumes. Mr. Purdy is the highly respected head of The Times's investigative reporting team. That Times top editors sent him to London - to report on the unfolding scandal at the BBC, which is under fire for killing an investigative report on sexual abuse by its celebrity TV host Jimmy Savile â€" says that they are indeed taking this seriously. (I want to make it clear that, as public editor, I had nothing whatsoever to do with that decision and that it was already made by the time I wrote my blog post, urging aggressive coverage.)

It is somewhat unusual to see Mr. Purdy's byline â€" this time it is combined with that of Christine Haughney, a media reporter in New York. It indic ates that he is taking a “player-coach” role. The article includes this sentence: “The director general at the BBC is both chief executive and editor in chief.” That casts some light on my earlier comparison of the director general to a newspaper's publisher, making it clear that they are different roles.

The article appeared on Page A8 of The Times on Thursday with a brief front-page summary directing readers to its presence.

2. In a communication to Times employees on Thursday, The Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., offered strong support for Mr. Thompson, praising his ethical standards and calling him “the ideal person to lead our company.” Mr. Sulzberger also acknowledged the situation in Britain and the questions it has raised about Mr. Thompson's role at The Times, but said he is satisfied with the answers he has received.

He also said he and Mr. Thompson fully support The Times covering the BBC story “with objectivity and ri gor.”

His “On the Record” statement, posted with the company's third-quarter earnings report on its intranet system, says in part:

I want to address a topic that has been on many people's minds. You no doubt have read the recent reports of a controversy regarding the BBC's decision in late 2011 to cancel a news story investigating allegations of sexual abuse and molestation by an on-air BBC talent, Jimmy Savile, who died last year. Mark has provided a detailed account of that matter, and I am satisfied that he played no role in the cancellation of the segment.

In the months leading to our decision to bring Mark to the Times Company, Michael Golden, our vice chairman, and I, along with the rest of our Board of Directors, got to know Mark very well. Our opinion was then and remains now that he possesses high ethical standards and is the ideal person to lead our Company as we focus on growing our businesses through digital and global expansio n. Some of you have already had the opportunity to meet Mark and many more of you will in the coming weeks and months. We are all looking forward to that day when he takes the helm.

As you all instinctively know, but it is worth stating again, we will cover the Savile story with objectivity and rigor. Mark endorses that completely as do I. Both of us believe passionately in strong, objective journalism that operates without fear or favor, no matter what it is covering. We have dedicated a significant amount of resources to this story and this is evident by the coverage we have provided our readers.

I'm looking forward to reading further reporting from Mr. Purdy and other Times reporters on this subject, not only because of the potential importance to The Times and its readers, but also because it concerns the BBC's inappropriately killing of an important story. That is an issue that goes to the heart of honest journalism.

Wandering in Japan\'s \'Suicide Forest\'

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It was an odd and hauntingly beautiful forest to be lost in. The trees were growing on pure dark lava, their roots often stretching above the ground and wrapping around caverns, making it difficult to walk. The tree cover was so dense that G.P.S. devices sometimes didn't function, and there were hundreds of long ropes tied to tree trunks.< /p>

Pieter ten Hoopen grabbed onto a rope and made his way down an incline with a sense of foreboding. He was uncertain what he would find at the end of the 300-meter blue rope. He knew there might be clothing, empty pill containers and a diary, a scene suggesting that a suicide had taken place. Reaching the end of the rope, he was relieved there wasn't a body or human remains.

After all, there is reason the Aokigahara Forest, at the base of Mount Fuji, is called the “suicide forest.”

Japan has more than 30,00 suicides a year - one of the highest rates among industrialized nations. On average, someone in Japan dies by his own hand every 15 minutes. Usually a man. The Aokigahara Forest is the most common place to commit suicide in Japan, and it is widely thought to be the second most likely site in the world, after the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

The reasons are complex.

In 1960, Seicho Matsumoto wrote a popular novel called “Tower of Wave,” in which a couple commits suicide in Aokigahara Forest. These woods are described as the “perfect place to die” by the author Wataru Tsurumi in the book, “The Complete Manual of Suicide.” His best seller has been found next to many bodies in the woods, which is also known as the Yukai Forest, or Sea of Trees.

Pieter ten Hoopen/Agence Vu The Yukai Forest, whose trees grow from volcanic soil.

In addition, Mount Fuji is revered as a sacred site in Japan. Folk tales tell of ghosts and demons haunting the forest.

There is also a long, romantic history of honorable suicide in Japan, from the Samurai avoiding disgrace to the kamikaze pilots of World War II. And suicide is less stigmatized in Japan than in many W estern societies.

Mr. ten Hoopen, 38, had entered the Aokigahara Forest wondering why so many Japanese travel there to commit suicide. Although he has a degree in forestry from Velp College in his native Belgium and was with a knowledgeable guide, the vegetation was so dense that it took a few hours to find a way out.

During the week he spent photographing and wandering the forest, Mr. ten Hoopen tried to come to terms with the gravity of his undertaking. “I'm making the same trip - following the same rope, walking in their footsteps, seeing the last trees that person saw,” he said. “I try to visualize this last trip.”

The ropes, put up by people on this last trip, are tied to trees so that others might recover the bodies. Many change their minds, however, and use the rope to navigate back out of the woods.

Pieter ten Hoopen/Agence Vu Mount Fuji.

Mr. ten Hoopen, a member of Agence Vu, is attracted to topics that are difficult to tell through photographs. Before he arrived in May, he had made a decision not to show skulls or bodies - rather, to explore the subject through subtler images. That turned out to be a fortuitous choice, because he found that the forest had just undergone an annual clearing of bodies by officials and volunteers.

For Mr. ten Hoopen, suicide is a serious and difficult topic. He says he has been depressed at times. Although he was born and raised in Belgium, he has lived the last decade in Sweden, another country with a very high suicide rate. This, he said, led him to be interested in the suicide forest story.

“In many ways, the Swedes and the Japanese are similar when it comes to their ways of not really expressing their emotions,” he said. “But Sweden is particularly good for the availability of psychological help. In Japan, seeking this kind of help is less common.”

While mental illness plays a dominant role in suicides, in Japan, there have been upticks during times of particular stress, for instance the financial crisis of 2008 or the tsunami of last year.

It is important to Mr. ten Hoopen that depression and suicide be discussed openly, in all societies. He worries that many - if not most - of the people who enter the Aokigahara Forest to commit suicide “have never spoken to anyone in their lives about their feelings.”

Mr. ten Hoopen was profoundly moved by his guide, the geologist Azusa Hayano, 66, who has spent most of his life in and around the forest and has encountered hundreds of people there, contemplating an end by their own hand. He has persuaded many of them not to kill themselves and rescued scores of others who had already tried and were dying. “He sits down besides them, puts his hand on their shoulders, and just is there as a human being,” Mr. ten Hoopen said.

Pieter ten Hoopen/Agence Vu The park ranger and geologist Azusa Hayano, an impromptu counselor on patrols he conducts in the forest. He has saved hundreds of people.

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Pictures of the Day: Gaza and Elsewhere

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Photos from Gaza, Libya, West Bank and South Africa.

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In Postwar Iraq, Neither War Nor Peace

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A young Iraqi boy leads his camels through the desert. A Christian girl roller skates on a dirt path while snow falls. In Najaf, a group of Muslim women mourn the loss of a relative killed in a car bombing while another shops for jewelry at a local market.

This is not war, and it is not peace.

It is the Iraq that American soldiers left behind 10 months ago during a quiet, unceremonious end to one of the United States' longest wars. Earlier this year, the Australian photographer Adam Ferguson traveled through Iraq - from the capital, Baghdad, to the oil-rich deserts of Basra, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet and trickle toward the Gulf.

From an embedding in Afghanistan, where he is photographing another American war winding toward an uncertain end, Mr. Ferguson, who is represented by VII Photo Agency, spoke about what he saw while traveling through Iraq on assignment for the New York Times. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q.

War photography is incredibly challenging. But what you're doing here could be called postwar photography. It is very different, but perhaps no less challenging, to capture the essence of a place after the immediate conflict has faded. How did this work compare with work you've done in active war zones?

A.

This is postwar photography in the context of an American presence, but Iraq is still at war with itself. In these photos, I attempted to explore the aftermath of American occupation and the current challenges facing Iraq.

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times The wife of Araf Khulaif baked bread at their home on land that covers the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, in Mosul, Nineveh Province, Iraq. Thousands of Iraqi families live illegally on historical sites, and some are disrupted by archaeological activities.

These photographs differ from other work I have done because my other work explored conflict at its height. I was embedded with U.S. troops. The work also differs because it was a journey; there wer e no boundaries. There was much that I had to negotiate access for, but especially outside of the cities, I just meandered and let my camera form my impressions. It was a much more organic process than covering war through an embed.

Q.

There are opposing themes in these photos. We see violence, frustration, protest and poverty, but also images of resilience, exuberance and everyday pleasures. On some level, it seems like you're taking pictures of uncertainty. How do you strike that balance and accurately portray a place that's not at war anymore, but not at peace either?

A.

It takes time to find a moment that translates the intensity of a story. Uncertainty is complex. Within it there is joy, ambition, protest. These pictures are just glimpses. I hope they pose questions and stimulate a more complex understanding of America's legacy in Iraq.

Q.

One of the most striking things about y our photographs is the absence of Americans. Were you expecting to see more traces of this long war?

A.

I expected to see more garish traces of the American presence, but they were subtle. They were inherent in the lives that were affected by violence, and in the security forces that patrolled the streets. There were checkpoints everywhere, a constant military presence on the streets. Iraq feels like a tense police state.

Q.

Tell me about the basic logistics of taking photos in Iraq. Lots of photojournalists â€" both Western and Iraqi â€" have run into real problems, with government troops and policemen, who forbid photography and even take people's cameras. What kinds of roadblocks did you encounter?

A.

Everywhere I went I needed permission to shoot, even for an informal visit to a Baghdad neighborhood. Even with letters from government ministries, the police in some areas denied me access. I spent most of my time in Iraq trying to photograph, rather than actually photographing.

Q.

Why do you think there's such a resistance to photojournalism in Iraq?

A.

I think there is resistance from Iraqi security forces because they see photography as a threat. Security forces carry out their duties with extreme vigilance, given the threat of violent bombings. Journalism and a free press aren't very high on their list of priorities.

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times Abbas Abdul Nali, at home with his wife and children in Baghdad. Abbas was registering to join the Iraqi police when the recruitment center was targeted by a suicide attack. He lost his left arm in the explo sion and his mother was allegedly shot by insurgents after the incident.

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Pictures of the Day: Florida and Elsewhere

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Photos from Florida, Israel, Russia and Syria.

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Times Must Aggressively Cover Mark Thompson\'s Role in BBC\'s Troubles

One of the most difficult challenges for news organizations is reporting on what goes on inside their own corporate walls. Two global media companies, the BBC and The New York Times, are dealing with that challenge right now, as a complicated sexual abuse scandal â€" with a media scandal component - unfolds in Britain.

On Tuesday, the director general of the BBC, George Entwistle, was grilled by Parliament about his role in the events at the well-respected British media company.

A tough investigative committee is raking him over the coals about whether he knew what was going on when the BBC killed an investigative segment on its “Newsnight” program about a celebrity TV personality, Jimmy Savile, accused of sexually abusing hundreds of young girls. Mr. Savile died last year.

Killing the story has impugned the BBC's integrity.

Mr. Entwistle, though, was not the director general of the BBC when all of this was going on last year.

That was Mark Thompson, who is now the incoming president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company. Mr. Thompson was said to be in the Times building on Monday for preliminary meetings, but he hasn't started yet. In fact, Times reporters and editors were reminded on Monday in a style note not to refer to him in articles as the current president and chief executive:

Mr. Thompson will be the president and C.E.O. of The New York Times Company starting Nov. 12, per Robert Christie, senior vice president of corporate communications. Until then, he is still “incoming.”

The style note even resulted in a correction on the Web site of The Times.

To its credit, The Times is reporting this story regularly though its London bureau, and has displayed it several times on the Web site's home page. The London article was summarized in a brief on the front page on Tuesday.

Mr. Thompson has been quoted repe atedly saying he knew nothing about the investigation being conducted by the “Newsnight” program, or at least that he was never formally notified about it. Here's The Guardian's report on that.

How likely is it that he knew nothing? A director general of a giant media company is something like a newspaper's publisher. Would a publisher be very likely to know if an investigation of one of its own people on sexual abuse charges had been killed? The answer to that is not as easy as it sounds. Because of the intentional separation between editorial and business-side operations, publishers usually don't know about editorial decisions - unless they are very big ones, fraught with legal implications. A Reuters story explores this subject.

And for that matter, how likely is it that the Times Company will continue with its plan to bring Mr. Thompson on as chief executive? (It's worth noting that as public editor, I have no inside knowledge on such corporate matters.) His integrity and decision-making are bound to affect The Times and its journalism - profoundly. It's worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job, given this turn of events.

All these questions ought to be asked. I hope The Times rises to the challenge and thoroughly reports what it finds. The Times might start by publishing an in-depth interview with Mr. Thompson exploring what exactly he knew, and when, about what happened at the BBC. What are the implications of these problems for him as incoming Times chief executive? What are the implications for the Times Company to have its new C.E.O. â€" who needs to deal with many tough business challenges here â€" arriving with so much unwanted baggage?

As the BBC has found out in the most painful way, for The Times to pull its punches will not be a wise way to go.

A Photographic Road Trip Through a Familiar Superpower

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Recall the electric 2008 presidential election - it seems so long ago - when the prevailing message that carried Barack Obama into the White House was of hope and change. The celebratory inauguration was a blink of optimism in the face of a terrifying and complex global financial meltdown. That crisis, plus two wars and a host of other problems, makes one wonder why some folks want the job so badly.

The London-based photographer Robert Leslie saw a live projection of the inauguration in Miami. The fervor of the audience and its diverse crowd was a sight to behold, he said. He had photographed the modern versions of some of the world's ancient empires - China and India among them - and was struck by the thought that he hadn't seriously addressed the world's current superpower, the United States.

He had a sister in Los Angeles and some time to kill. American gas prices, to him, were a steal. He rented a car.

The ensuing road trip took him across the Sun Belt, west from Florida till he reached the Pacific Ocean. Taking off with an open mind, Mr. Leslie was eager to see how the narrative would unfurl before him. As he drove through the wasteland of foreclosures of Florida, however, or as he pushed along the impoverished Gulf of Mexico, razed by Hurricane Katrina, it became clear that the trip was a sort of tour of America's woes.

“I didn't go out to make this ironic look of America,” said Mr. Leslie, 50. “But it was pretty disheartening to find these things.”

Robert Leslie Florida, Highway 98.

Mr. Leslie eventually completed two trips, the one that began on inauguration day and another last year - after the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be added to the list of calamities - that together provided the material for his project, “Stormbelt.” Its book form, available from Blurb, includes essays by the photographer Edward Burtynsky and the TED speaker Cameron Sinclair. (Mr. Leslie himself has been a TED.com collaborator and photographer since 2005.) It is also available on Blurb and on iTunes, as an enhanced multimedia e -book produced with editorial direction from Chris Boot of the Aperture Foundation. Mr. Leslie, originally a musician and sound engineer, incorporates audio from the people he encountered, and one of the videos features a stand-off with a cow. (A different preview, without the cow, is viewable on Vimeo.)

Mr. Leslie was partly spurred by nostalgia - though he was born English and currently living in England, he spent much of his childhood in Ottawa and had vacationed in the United States as a boy. For this project, however, his outsider's perspective informed his vision. Like many non-Americans, Mr. Leslie was intensely fascinated by many aspects of the United States' conduct - politically, economically, environmentally, internationally - during the first decade of the new millennium. How was it that this chest-puffing world power could now barely support the people of its vulnerable underbelly? Ironies frequently presented themselves to him, and Mr. Leslie, who has an eye for the wry, rarely missed them.

In Texas, for instance, he found a shop that sold mostly George W. Bush memorabilia. “They had a banner that said, ‘Evil prevails when good men do nothing,' ” Mr. Leslie recalled. “It was this phrase that was proudly put up with all these symbols of Texas on the crossroads of Crawford. And when I went back last November or December, the banner was still there, but it was only being held up by one nail. It was blowing in the wind.”

In Arizona, a snowstorm ambushed an extravagant plan Mr. Leslie had to drive to the Grand Canyon. The detour to the interstate, which Mr. Leslie knew would be plowed, put him along a river that he learned the Navajo had signed over decades ago to developers. Mined coal was sailed upriver to be transformed into electricity to power Las Vegas and Los Angeles. “At the end of it, the water's just dumped out, it's disposed of,” Mr. Leslie said. “The total irony of this is that they only go t electricity on their reservation in 2005.”

Drainage from the mine had turned the river red. It was a ripe moment for a photograph - there was fresh snow, and although it was mostly overcast, some sky poked through. Red, white and blue.

Robert Leslie Miami.

Contradictions and Confusion on an Agreement With Iran

The lead news article in Sunday's Times raised questions for a number of readers, who were either puzzled or angered by its apparent contradictions.

In the “bulldog” edition, published Saturday afternoon, The Times reported that Iran and the United States had agreed to one-on-one negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. The news â€" certainly a major development on a hugely important subjectâ€" was attributed to unnamed Obama administration officials.

In subsequent online editions and in the late print edition, which now appears on NYTimes.com, new information was added to the article, and here's where the confusion began. The White House now denied that an agreement had been reached. So the words “in principle” had been added to the first paragraph to describe the agreement, and a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, was quoted denying there was an agreement.

(If you want to see the different iterations of the story t hroughout Saturday, visit NewsDiffs.org.)

By Monday's paper, both sides â€" the White House and Iran's foreign minister - were officially denying an agreement.

Readers wanted to know a few things: Is this story for real? Is there indeed an agreement? Whom are we to believe?

I posed the questions to the executive editor Jill Abramson, who called the Sunday story “solid and true.” She said that the White House was “hair-splitting” when it denied that there was an agreement, and that information was added to the original article to reflect the denial while still standing by its original reporting.

“Good journalism practice sometimes involves changes between editions. We did not see these changes as significant,” Ms. Abramson said.

Complicating the issue is that the reporting is based on unidentified sources, described only as “Obama administration officials” or “U.S. officials.”

One reader, Bill O'Fallon of Brentwood, Tenn ., expressed his reaction this way:

Who are these “U.S. officials?” How strong are the sources? Strong enough to contradict Mr. Vietor? Who shall we believe in this obvious contradiction?

The prominent display of the article, and Ms. Abramson's answer, says that there is indeed an agreement and that the denials are relatively unimportant.

A former foreign editor of The Times, Bernard Gwertzman, was another who wrote, calling himself an “unhappy reader.”

I would like The Times to be more specific. Is there an agreement or not? If there is, the White House is lying. If there is not, The Times is guilty of overplaying a phony story.

When newspapers use unidentified sources â€" as sometimes they are justified in doing â€" they say to the reader: “Trust us. We know what we're talking about.” And that trust is earned over time.

The more information about the sources that can be includ ed, the more the reader has to go on. It makes for a more transparent and far better process.

It's unfortunate that there wasn't much information offered about the unidentified sources in this case. While that may not have been feasible, the result of the vagueness is that it puts the reader in the position of not knowing quite what to believe.

Pictures of the Day: Lebanon and Elsewhere

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Photos from Lebanon, Kosovo, Gaza Strip and Kuwait.

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