Pumping Up the Visual Volume

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

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

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

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

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

A similar impulse drives his high contrast work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It hit home.

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

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Pictures of the Day: Bahrain and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Gaza Strip.

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Life on the Track and In the Stretch

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

He feels. He count s. He listens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Microcosm of the New South Africa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Detail on Why The Times Called the Presidential Election Later

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

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, China, Chile and Greece.

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An Inside View on Documentary Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that it was easy.

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

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

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

Kismet El Sayed From “A State Virus.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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