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      Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Champion of Latino Photography, Dies at 93

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      A New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, he helped start a collective that brought recognition to Hispanic photographers and illuminated life in the city’s barrios.To Charles Biasiny-Rivera, who worked as a street photographer in the barrios of New York City in the early 1970s, his craft was a matter of trust as much as eye.“You really do have to understand that when you enter a neighborhood, the neighborhood sees you as a stranger, because they know everybody, so you don’t want to become noticed,” he said in a 2022 video interview. “So you hang out a little bit,” he added, “smoke some cigarettes, say good morning, good afternoon to people.“If you created a rapport with them,” he said, “they wouldn’t be peering at you all the time. For those peeking from windows, “the shades would go up, the shades would go down.”A photograph by Mr. Biasiny-Rivera taken in 1974 at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. (The school closed in 1982.) The image was shown in the 2021 exhibition “En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973-1974,” at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan.Charles Biasiny-Rivera/Collection El Museo del Barrio, New York CityAs an aspiring photographer of Puerto Rican descent, Mr. Biasiny-Rivera saw street photography as one of the few paths open to him at a time when the handful of Latino photographers he knew were struggling to make a mark in the field. He spent the rest of his career working to change that.Mr. Biasiny-Rivera died at 93 on Aug. 10 at his home in Olivebridge, N.Y., a hamlet in the Catskill Mountains. His wife, Betty Wilde-Biasiny, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lloyd Ziff, Visionary Photographer and Art Director, Dies at 81

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      He designed some of the most visually exciting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. But his real love, and eventually his focus, was photography.Lloyd Ziff was not yet a celebrated art director in 1968, when he photographed an art school classmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his girlfriend, Patti Smith, in their tiny Brooklyn apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Mr. Ziff said years later.The black-and-white portraits he took are tender and moving, almost heartbreakingly so; as James Danziger, the gallerist who showed them in 2013, said recently: “Youth is moving. They capture a moment in time just before Patti and Robert were going to explode. They both carried an aura, and Lloyd was drawn to that. They wanted to be photographed just as much as he wanted to photograph them.”Mr. Ziff photographed Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at their apartment in 1968. “I found them very beautiful,” he said.Lloyd ZiffMr. Ziff went on to serve as art director for some of the most influential and visually arresting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s, including Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Mapplethorpe and Ms. Smith, of course, would find their own fame, and tragedy, when Mr. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989. When Ms. Smith wrote of their coming-of-age in her 2010 memoir, “Just Kids,” she included a few of Mr. Ziff’s portraits.“Although we weren’t particularly close,” Mr. Ziff said, “I believe we recognized in each other something we probably couldn’t put into words at the time.”Mr. Ziff died on Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 81.His husband, Stephen Kelemen, confirmed the death. He said that Mr. Ziff had been in declining health.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Footage of J.F.K. Shooting’s Aftermath Goes to Auction

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      The footage from 1963, taken by a Texas businessman and seen only by a few, shows the president’s limousine speeding to a Dallas hospital. It is being auctioned this month.Nearly 61 years ago, Dale Carpenter Sr. showed up on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas, hoping to film John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed. But the president’s car had already gone by, and he recorded only some of the procession, including the back of a car carrying Lyndon Johnson and the side of the White House press bus.So Mr. Carpenter, a businessman from Texas, rushed to Stemmons Freeway, several miles farther along the motorcade route, to try again.There, just moments after Kennedy had been shot, he captured an urgent and chaotic scene. The president’s speeding convertible. A Secret Service agent in a dark suit sprawled on the back. Jacqueline Kennedy, in her pink Chanel outfit, little more than a blur.Kennedy himself could not be glimpsed. He had collapsed and was close to death.A film Dale Carpenter Sr. took of the Kennedy motorcade on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas before the president was shot. Because Mr. Carpenter did not get footage of the president there, he traveled to another part of the route, where he filmed the speeding car bringing the mortally wounded Kennedy to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Footage via RR AuctionFor decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson, James Gates.Later this month, the Kennedy footage is to be put up for sale in Boston by RR Auction, the latest in a line of assassination-related images to surface publicly after decades in comparative obscurity. The auction house says it is the only known film of the president’s car on the freeway as it sped from Dealey Plaza, the site of the shooting, to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. More

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      Book Review: ‘Orange Blossom Trail,’ by Joshua Lutz and George Saunders

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      In “Orange Blossom Trail,” the photographer Joshua Lutz and the author George Saunders pay tribute to the hard living across one stretch of American highway.With an austere frankness, the 62 photos by Joshua Lutz in ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL (Image Text Ithaca Press, $40) document the hard living, low-wage jobs and big-box landscapes along a single stretch of highway that runs 400 miles from Georgia to Miami, cutting right through Orlando, Fla.High shutter speeds hide road workers’ faces in shadow. Corporate storefronts and commercial vans appear without ceremony, as if snapped from a camera phone. Commuters wait for a bus, reduced and sad, while a sign for “Mighty Wings” floats mockingly above them.Though not without dignity — see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges — his photos lack any social agenda. They find an unlikely manifesto in the three previously published texts by George Saunders, our Chekhov of suburban realism, threaded through the book.Joshua LutzJoshua LutzSaunders’s 2022 allegory of death and hope, “My House,” casts a certain entropy over Lutz’s close-ups of oranges — the region’s alleged cash crop — overtaken by rot and snails. In “Exhortation” (2013), a story told in the voice of an embarrassing middle manager trying to psych up his employees, Saunders expertly confuses the objects of our allegiances. In a sincerely Buddhist essay from 2007, he asks us to view misfortune “with clarity, rather than judging.” It’s almost a caption for Lutz’s images, as attuned to ironically pleasing harmonies of shades of orange — across workers’ safety vests, loan shark signs, a child’s slightly tragic coloring book — as they are to any drama of the working class. Mindfulness, often prescribed for happiness, can be brutal.Joshua LutzNot quite an illustrated Saunders, nor an annotated Lutz, this bizarre almost-collaboration confronts the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves. More

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      Images of History, From Film to Digital

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      The reporter and photographer David Gonzalez once had to ship his film rolls to The Times’s Manhattan office. But in 1999, he went digital.In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum of The Times.Two notable events in David Gonzalez’s nearly 34-year career at The New York Times occurred in 1999. He was appointed the Central America-Caribbean bureau chief, principally covering Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama.And he bought his first digital camera.Widely known as a Times reporter and columnist, Mr. Gonzalez is also an accomplished photographer. He served for eight years as co-editor of The Times’s Lens photojournalism blog and is a founding member of the Seis del Sur collective of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican photographers in the Bronx. “The Dancers,” which he took in 1979, depicts an elegant couple swept away by salsa music, rapturously indifferent to the fact that they’re in the middle of a street in the South Bronx.Mr. Gonzalez photographed his first assignments in Central America and the Caribbean on film. He had to ship undeveloped film rolls to The Times’s office in New York for processing, a cumbersome method that gave him no chance to review his work.So he bought a digital Olympus C-2020 in 1999, later upgrading to an Olympus C-4040, which was 4-by-3-by-2 inches and weighed 15 ounces. “I couldn’t afford one of the early Nikon digitals,” Mr. Gonzalez recalled in a recent email. (A Nikon Coolpix 950 cost $999.) “I knew Olympus, and the price was right, about $800. Since correspondents were paid $100 per photo, it paid for itself quickly.”With a digital camera, Mr. Gonzalez was immediately able to see what he’d photographed. He could also transmit his photos to New York with a modem that converted digital files into signals that traveled over telephone lines. Though much slower than a modern internet fiber-optic connection, this method was immensely faster than physical shipping.Mr. Gonzalez used the C-4040 digital camera to photograph the visit of former President Jimmy Carter to Cuba in May 2002.David Gonzalez/The New York TimesMr. Gonzalez used the C-4040 to photograph the visit of former President Jimmy Carter to Cuba in May 2002, a vigil Mass for the martyred Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador in March 2003, and a Three Kings Day celebration in Manhattan.The battery compartment of his C-4040 is now broken and corroded. Otherwise, Mr. Gonzalez might have found an eager buyer among Gen Z influencers who prize digital cameras older than they are.On retiring from The Times last month, Mr. Gonzalez gave the C-4040 to the Museum at The Times. He also offered this reassurance: “I still have lots to say and show.” More

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      Scenes From the California Park Fire

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      Last Wednesday, a man pushed a burning car into a gully near Chico, a college town north of Sacramento, according to the authorities. Within days, the flames have consumed more than 370,000 acres and the Park fire has become the largest active blaze in the country.Thousands of people are under evacuation orders and at least 111 structures have been destroyed, according to Cal Fire.Residents of this part of California have dealt with one fire after another in recent years. In 2018, the Camp fire destroyed the town of Paradise and became the deadliest fire in state history. In 2021, the Dixie fire burned nearly a million acres. That history loomed large for Paul Mozzino, who was working an afternoon shift at a grocery store in Chico last week when he heard the alerts about a nearby fire. He thought, “Oh God, not again.”Here are photos from the last few days as the Park fire — already one of the largest in the state’s history — burned through this swath of Northern California.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesThe Park fire burned into the night in Butte County, northeast of Chico, on Sunday.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesA California Conservation Corps firefighter took part in a backfire operation on Monday.Noah Berger/Associated PressSmoke rose above the road as the Park fire jumped Highway 36 in Tehama County on Friday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesThe hills near Chico on Thursday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesA helicopter dropped water on the Park fire along Highway 32 in Butte County on Saturday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesThe plum of smoke from the Park fire on Friday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesA home destroyed by the Park fire in the Forest Ranch area in Butte County on Friday.John G Mabanglo/EPA, via ShutterstockThe burned remains of cars destroyed by the fire on Friday.Noah Berger/Associated PressThe Park fire burned below Highway 32 near Lomo on Friday.By Daniel Dreifuss For The New York TimesFirefighters set controlled burns along Highway 32 near Chico on Saturday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesA Cal Fire firefighter sprayed down hot spots along Highway 32 as the Park fire continued to grow on Saturday.Nic Coury/Associated PressA firefighter monitored a burn operation on Highway 32 near Forest Ranch on Sunday.Noah Berger/Associated PressHorses were evacuated as the Park fire tore though the Cohasset community in Butte County on Thursday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesA firefighter kept a close eye on a controlled burn along Highway 32 on Saturday.Daniel Dreifuss for The New York TimesFire trucks lined Highway 32 on Friday.Almendra Lawrence More

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      Doug Mills Describes the Trump Shooting Scene

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      Doug Mills, a veteran photographer for The New York Times who has been taking photographs of presidents since 1983, was only feet away from former President Donald J. Trump at the rally in Butler, Pa., when shooting started.He spoke with Victor Mather about the experience.What did you see and hear today?It was a very standard, typical rally. The former president was maybe an hour late. The crowd had been hot all day. Donald J. Trump arrived, waving to the crowd, just like any other rally he does.There’s a pool of photographers, maybe four of us, who were in what is called the buffer area just a couple feet from the former president. We were all jostling around in there trying to get our normal pictures.With his Secret Service detail between him and the crowd, Donald Trump walked to the stage in Butler, Pa., on Saturday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAll of a sudden, there was what I thought were three or four loud pops. At first I thought it was a car. The last thing I thought was it was a gun.I kept taking pictures. He went down behind the lectern, and I thought, “Oh my God, something’s happened.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rencontres d’Arles Points the Camera Below the Surface

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      There’s always more to a photo than what we see, as shown by standout exhibitions at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles in southern France.Deep beneath the town hall in Arles, France, past some unassuming service counters and down several flights of narrow steps, the artist Sophie Calle has buried some things that she can’t bear to part with.Her show, called “Neither Give Nor Throw Away,” is a standout exhibition at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 that presents group and solo shows of new and old photographic works in museums, churches, repurposed storefronts and parks across this Provençal city of 52,000 residents.This year’s edition of the Rencontres, which runs through Sept. 29, is titled “Beneath the Surface,” and Calle’s contribution takes place in a labyrinthine series of underground caverns bisected by long arched balustrades. The shadowy walkways and damp, moldy atmosphere are ideal for her project, in which she displays works from her storeroom that were damaged in a storm. Advised by restorers to destroy them, she decided instead to give them a subterranean afterlife. And so, the works are now “buried” in Arles, where they continue to decompose, but have not, at least, been forsaken.Sophie Calle’s exhibition “Neither Give Nor Throw Away” is in a series of underground caverns beneath Arles’s town hall.Teresa Suarez/EPA, via ShutterstockCalle — a photographer, writer and conceptual artist — is one of France’s most lauded and prolific contemporary art makers. Family, absence, death, romance and archives are themes that recur in her work, which often pairs images and text. In Arles, water-damaged photographs show a charred and discarded bed, formerly Calle’s own, in which a man who was renting a room from Calle’s mother burned to death, and a series of modest grave plots with stark markers: Mother, Sister, Child.Others come from a series titled “The Blind,” which matches modest black-and-white portraits that Calle took of blind people with her photographic interpretations of their responses, also present as framed texts, when she asked them what they imagine to be beautiful. (Answers include the sea, the color blue and Alan Delon.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More