Roman Caribe and Robert Cea discuss their book Confidential Source 96, the story of a former drug kingpin turned informant for the FBI, ICE and DEA. Nnamdi Asomugha talks about his film “Crown Heights," the story of Colin Warner, a young man from Trinidad who spent 20 years in prison for a 1980 murder in Brooklyn he didn't commit. Jerry Shine talks about his book A Year Underwater, his record of one year diving up and down the East Coast of North America, through winter storms and summer heat waves. Philip Caputo revisits his landmark Vietnam War memoir A Rumor of War nearly 40 years after it's first publication.

In 2015, Kiana Hayeri was living in Kabul and noticed something strange. She was helping her roommate, an Australian TV producer, with a script translation. The main character, a mother of three who divorces her abusive husband, was always described in a way that referred to a male relative.

There was no word in Dari, a language spoken in Afghanistan, to describe a single mother. "They are fighting against a culture that doesn't even recognize them," says Hayeri, a Tehran-based photographer.

She went back to Afghanistan a year later to document single women in Kabul, the capital, and Herat, a city in the west. In July, the work earned her a grand prize in documentary photography from the International Academic Forum, an interdisciplinary think tank, conference organizer and publisher based in Japan.

Decades of war have left more than 2 million Afghan women widows, according to data from U.N. Women. Others have lost their husbands in suicide attacks or in the line of police duty. And because women typically have no say in who their fathers arrange for them to marry, a small percentage flee abusive husbands and obtain divorces— a decision that requires immense courage.

Women who flee violent relationships don't necessarily want to marry again. Neither do widows who are often pressured to wed a brother of their husband so that their children have a male guardian.

"The women I met either chose not to do it, or fought against it and refused to do it," says Hayeri, who photographed the women in August and September 2016. "They are fighters."

That decision makes them among Afghan society's most vulnerable. Many are disowned by their families. They may be harassed or abused. And with 60 percent of the country unemployed, every woman must find a way to support her children. It is not uncommon to have five kids, and Hayeri says she's photographed mothers with as many as eight.

"I am constantly trying to find a positive point, something that I can hold onto while I'm doing this work," she says, thinking about the women. "It's not easy at all."

Hayeri, 29, says that being a woman gives her access that no foreign or local man could ever get. The Iranian photographer recently spoke to NPR from Kabul, where she is currently on assignment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

How are single mothers treated by Afghan society?

If you are a widow, you are considered to be a "black widow." It is a bad omen. If you divorce, you have gone through the trouble of leaving your spouse and getting a divorce. You are not a good woman for doing that. They have an expression here in Afghanistan: You go to your husband's house with a white dress and you leave it with a white dress, referring to the white sheet they wrap around a dead body before they bury them. It's something that is said pretty often.

What kinds of emotional traits did you note in the women you met?

Afghan women are always asked[by society] to suppress all of these feelings and emotions, even their thoughts. They are not allowed to express themselves. One thing that I noticed among all of the women who I photographed is that they constantly complain about racing hearts, anger, fear, headaches — these things that I associate with PTSD and mental illnesses like depression. But they are not aware of it.

Whether widowed or divorced, does her family or her husband's ever provide support?

Sometimes they do. One of the women I photographed, her husband's family is an elite family. They gave her complete freedom [after her husband died of cancer]. They help the family financially. They were educated and they came from a different class. They were a very famous family of musicians who are trying to preserve their Afghan music. We do see that. I don't think it's very often.

Do widows receive any help from the government?

Only if your husband is part of the army. I'm not sure about the police but I assume also the police, if they were killed while they were working. But nothing about people who get killed in suicide attacks or illnesses.

Are there any centers or places of support where single mothers can go?

There are shelters for women that [have been pushed to] the street or forfleeing abusive husbands. But the funding is limited. None of them are pleasant places where you want to live yourself or let alone bring your kids.

You photographed a fascinating community in Kabul built by and for women.

Tapaye Zanabad is a hill [where] women came together and started building their own houses. They don't own the land. The government tried to destroy the little township they made but it couldn't. Apparently the woman who started it lied down in front of the bulldozer and said, "You have to pass over my dead body before you destroy this township." There is no running water so the kids usually come down the hill every morning to get water from the trucks. There is no help for them there.

Did you see women helping other women in the weeks you were there?

Yes, very much. If one has to work and the other is home, they basically babysit the other's kids. I've seen them lending each other food. I photographed two very old single moms, whose children are in their 40s and 50s. Their husbands died around the same time [and] helped one another. One of them ties threads to make these long, beautiful belts. She had that skill and passed that onto the other single mom so she could start making money.

Tell me about someone who really stood out to you.

Reihana was 14 when her father sold her to a man who was basically twice her age. The husband took her away, and he basically abused her in every possible way — emotionally, verbally, physically, even sexually. She had five children when she ran away from the house and came back to Kabul and divorced her husband, amazingly.

When she was married, she never went to school. So on her own she started studying and started teaching other girls in her village how to read and write.

There was a competition on TV, a contest about general information on the capital [Kabul], so she studied hard. She attended the contest. Won it. She got a big chunk of money and put that into university where she enrolled herself, and got a job at a ministry.

Right now she is studying part time, working full time, and also on top of raising her five kids, she is also raising the daughter of her brother who is now in prison.

How does the Taliban, which is regaining control of parts of Afghanistan, factor into what single mothers face?

The country is becoming more unstable. These women don't feel safe anymore. Who knows what's going to happen five years from now. What if Taliban or another insurgent group comes to power and they don't allow women to work? How are these women going to survive?

Sasha Ingber is a multimedia journalist who has covered science, culture and foreign affairs for such publications as National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazineand Smithsonian. You can contact her @SashaIngber.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

President Trump has announced his decision to remain in Afghanistan and increase U.S. troop levels there, continuing the 16-year-long conflict.

And what helped shape his decision, according to The Washington Post and several other sources, was a black and white photograph from Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970s.

I'm working on a @WNYC story on the 1970s Kabul pic that swayed Trump to stay in Afghanistan (1st image). Here's my grandma in 70s Tehran! pic.twitter.com/YxHavZAGNO

— Shumita Basu (@shubasu) August 23, 2017

NYU Associate Professor Arang Keshavarzian provides context for that image. He also talks about why the argument for "women's liberation" is so appealing to people of different political and social stripes, but also why it's a problematic means of justifying military intervention that we've seen used in U.S. history many, many times.

After Marine Sgt. Thomas ("TJ") Brennan was hit by the blast from a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2010, he suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him unable to recall much of his immediate past — including, at times, the name of his own daughter.

"When I got blown up, it erased a lot of my memories," Brennan says.

Brennan began therapies to address his TBI. He used the 200 letters he had exchanged with his wife to put together a broad narrative of his time at war. When it came to the grenade blast itself, Brennan pieced together the sequence of events surrounding his injury with the help of Finbarr O'Reilly, a photographer who had embedded with Brennan's unit in Afghanistan.

"I have the whole sequence documented of him," O'Reilly says. "One of the things I ... [photographed] was this Afghan national policeman who fired the rocket that ultimately went astray and blew up very close to TJ, knocking him unconscious ... and the explosion afterwards, and the guys who went to recover TJ."

Back in the U.S., both men struggled with the aftereffects of war. Brennan suffered from PTSD and debilitating depression, while O'Reilly grappled with the psychological toll of years spent documenting human brutality in conflict zones across the world. Together, they collaborated on a memoir, called Shooting Ghosts, about what Brennan refers to as the "invisible injuries" of war.

Interview Highlights

On why O'Reilly pursued photojournalism and how much of it is about the thrill of adventure

Finbarr O'Reilly: I think, on some level, if we're entirely honest with ourselves as photographers, yes, we do want adventure. We do seek out that thrill. The fact that that impulse matches with something that is considered a noble calling — truth-telling, or photojournalism as a profession — these are all worthy things to do, but it does draw people, such as myself, who did go in search of things that would give us a sense of purpose and meaning that was matched by our desire for adventure or for thrills. Initially at least.

When I started out I did want to have an interesting life. I did want to be in places where things were happening. I had traveled, after university, through east and Central Africa down to South Africa. And this is in 1994 — as the Rwandan genocide was beginning to happen — and then I was in South Africa when Mandela was elected. These were very intense experiences for me as a young individual, and I wanted to keep experiencing those kinds of things, and journalism seemed like the best way to do that.

On photographing the explosion that left TJ with a traumatic brain injury

O'Reilly: My job in these situations is first of all not to get in the way of what's happening, while also trying to remain safe myself. So I was very focused on my role while these guys were focused on theirs. So I would just photograph things unfolding.

On what it is like to live with a traumatic brain injury

TJBrennan: I was trying to take off my boots to take my first shower in a few months, when I first arrived at Camp Bastion [now Shorabak]. And there's something really scary about being inside your own head and telling your hands to untie your laces — and they won't listen.

You know what you're supposed to be doing. You're telling yourself what you're supposed to be doing. And your fingers are working, but something's not connecting. And the emotion and the fear that I felt in that moment and knowing that I had a difficult time recalling my own daughter's name just an hour ago at the hospital — like, that was really scary. There are times now where I have [what] I call ... "bad brain days," and that first day in the hospital was one of my first bad brain days that I had.

On returning to his squad and suffering from residual symptoms of his TBI

Brennan: The majority of traumatic brain injuries, they leave residuals. But not everyone experiences residual symptoms of their traumatic brain injury, so I thought that I was going to be OK when I went back out to my guys. And then, when it came time to me doing [what] I call ... the basics of being a Marine infantryman — having my squad's identification numbers memorized, having their blood types memorized ... when I went back and I started doing my precombat checks and precombat inspections, I was having a hard time remembering those.

That's a real, "Oh, crap" moment, when you're responsible for 15 lives. But I didn't want to be labeled as a malingerer for saying I was having issues. Because, for me — my TBI — the symptoms manifest in a very physical way for me. But they're very invisible to a lot of people, so it's easy for people to discount invisible injuries.

On not seeking help for his trauma initially

Brennan: I ignored getting help for far too long. One of the main reasons why I wanted to write the book was because I understand how it feels to feel alone, like you're the only veteran or service member going through an issue. It feels like you're surrounded by extremely strong people who are wearing the same uniform that you are, and you don't want to let them down. And that's a lot of why I couldn't bring myself to get help.

On deciding to be open about his own PTSD after a leader in the battalion gathered the unit to criticize a fellow Marine for having PTSD

Brennan: There was somebody in the battalion who was bitching [about] ... pulling the PTSD "punk card." And that was a symbolic moment to me, because it was [about] the stigma toward mental health treatment in action — whether it was 100 percent directed at me or not.

I immediately [felt like I] had been labeled a piece of broken gear. ... That's probably the best thing that could have happened to me in hindsight, because I knew it was either I walk back inside and say, "I'm not getting help, and I'm going to deploy back to Afghanistan with these guys in seven months" or "I need to steel my resolve and go down the road of getting help, because I just need to accept that my career is over."

I want to make one thing clear: The opinion that that "leader" showed that day, that's not representative of every Marine. That's not representative of every service member.

On helping another retired Marine through his writing

Brennan: What means the most to me was, after I wrote about my suicide attempt for The New York Times— I think it was 2013 — I had a Marine veteran reach out to me.

He called me on my office line while I was working at The Daily News in North Carolina. He really didn't tell me too much other than the fact that he was an Iraqi immigrant that later joined up and served as a linguist during the wars. When he came home, his family disowned him. And it had probably been about seven or 10 days after the story had published, but he told me that he Googled "painless, quick suicide" or some sort of Google search about how to kill himself painlessly and not leave a big mess for his family. And the SEO — the search engine optimization — for The New York Times story made that the first thing that popped up [in his online search]. And he called me to tell me that my story renewed his commitment to stay alive.

Lauren Krenzel and Mooj Zadie produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web.

Copyright 2017 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.

Remembering our nation's history through photographs is the focus of the newest and first special exhibition at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

"More Than A Picture" features more than 150 images from 80 well-known and lesser-known photographers who documented the lives of African-Americans. Their works showcase subjects who, in ordinary and extraordinary moments, shaped history.

One of the oldest photos — of an enslaved family — is estimated to have been taken between 1861 and 1862 on a plantation in Virginia. There is a photograph of the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, a well-known image of Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver clutching a rifle and a candid shot of author-activist James Baldwin being admired by a group of sailors in Turkey.

And, alongside the now-familiar photos of civil rights marches in the 1960s, the exhibit includes digital prints from recent protests in 2015.

Curator Aaron Bryant says it was important to integrate the older, iconic civil rights photos with those taken in the past few years, in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore.

"We wanted to help people to understand that history isn't just in these objects that you would buy in an antique store, or at an auction like Sotheby's or Christie's," Bryant says. "History is about everyday people and everyday lives. And you can find important significant cultural as well as historical objects right there in your home."

Bryant says some of these photos could be hiding in a family album, stashed away in a drawer or nearly forgotten in an attic or basement. Historical photographs, he says, could even be on your cellphone.

"We wanted folks to understand that history is happening right before our eyes every single day," he says.

Photographer Jermaine Gibbs captured a bit of history when he headed out with his camera to document what was happening on the streets of Baltimore during the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died while in police custody.

One of his photographs now hangs in the museum's exhibit.

It is of a young boy seen from the back, standing before two towering police officers in full riot gear. The tension of the moment is evident. The image shows the boy looking up into the face of the officer standing in front of him and, with one hand outstretched, offering a bottle of water.

"It was probably about 10 o'clock in the morning and the police were actually just setting up, but it was extremely hot," Gibbs says. "And some adults had come out with cases of water, so the young man went over and asked could he have one of the waters, and they thought he was just going to take it and keep it for himself. But what he did was he actually walked over to the officer and handed the officer the water."

Gibbs says he took the photograph in order to show people who might one day see his images that life in Baltimore, especially during that tense time, was not just "chaos."

"I noticed that everything that you saw on TV and everything you saw in the newspaper was giving a more negative image of what was going on, but I actually saw so much positivity at the riots and that's what I wanted to capture," he says. "So when I saw this I said, this is something that, 20 years from now, I can look back and say, 'Yes, this is a powerful image.' "

Bryant says the photos from Ferguson and Baltimore were included in the exhibit to not only show the evolution of civil rights protest but also to explore a concept that is at the heart of the exhibit — the idea of historical perspective.

In selecting Gibbs' photo, Bryant says the aim was to offer another frame of reference in the moment of unrest.

"We get a very different sense about what people who are fighting for justice, or communities who are fighting for justice — what that protest looks like," he says. "This gesture of giving a bottle of water to the police officer is just a part of this boy's everyday life. ... That was very important to show that it really wasn't this community against the police. That there are different perspectives of what actually happened during that protest, particularly from people who were documenting it with their cameras."

Dustin DeSoto and Janaya Williams produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Emma Bowman adapted it for the Web.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis, courtesy of Muskegon Museum of Art

In 1907, a Michigan librarian named Lulu Miller had a wild proposal. She wanted her library in Muskegon, then a bustling industrial port on the shores of Lake Michigan, to subscribe to a set of photos documenting North American Indian tribes living west of the Missouri River. She managed to convince the library board to pay $3,000 — roughly $80,000 today — to purchase 20 volumes from photographer Edward S. Curtis, who was largely unknown at the time. The small town library joined a handful of other subscribers, mostly wealthy and famous, including the King of England, President Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell.

In the years that followed, Edward S. Curtis became one of the most well-known photographers of his time, especially of North American Indians.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis, courtesy of Muskegon Museum of Art

Now more than 100 years after librarian Lulu Miller’s gamble, these photogravures — the resulting images from a printing process that uses a metal plate and etching — have come out of their dusty volumes and are seeing the light of day. All 723 are displayed at the Muskegon Museum of Art, in what’s believed to be the largest ever exhibition of Edward S. Curtis’ work.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis, courtesy of Muskegon Museum of Art

“Quite honestly, I never was entirely sure the exhibit could work,” said curator Ben Mitchell, citing the sheer size of the undertaking for a small museum. He’d wanted to mount an exhibition of 300 of the photos but museum director Judith Hayner was insistent: all or nothing. So Mitchell and a team cleared out four-fifths of the museum’s wall and floor space to accommodate the photos. But as the installation process got underway and the photos went up on the wall over the course of two weeks, Mitchell said, “I began to be very gratified. It worked. It really worked.”

Many of the images are iconic, some are controversial. There are portraits of tribal chiefs, sweeping landscapes and depictions of the daily lives of 80 North American tribes — the Nez Percé, the Navaho, the Piegan. What was intended to be a seven-year project took Edward Curtis 30 years to complete.

Mitchell said, “I think he began the project thinking they would all be gone, just be wiped out either physically through genocide but at the very least, forever changed, no longer have their rituals, their history, their language. Luckily, he was wrong.” For many of those 30 years, Curtis lived with the tribes he was photographing and controversially in some instances, paid his subjects to pose for him. He also made audio recordings of his work and took copious notes.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis, courtesy of Muskegon Museum of Art

The exhibition tells both the story of the North American Indians he documented and also of the photographer himself. Curtis had pulled himself out of poverty in the late Victorian era.

“The people who were in charge were white men,” Mitchell said. “They firmly believed the world, the social and the human world, was a hierarchy, and white maleness was at the top, and in descending order were people of color from other places. We can’t condemn Curtis for [also having] that view.”

Larry Romanelli, the leader of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians in Michigan, said Curtis captured a culture that would have otherwise gone unseen. “The thought was that Native Americans were going to be eliminated, and while that didn’t completely happen, we were diminished greatly,” Romanelli said. Native Americans now make up just 2 percent of the total U.S. population.

Early on in the planning stages, Mitchell involved elders from the Little River Indian tribe, the nearest Native American tribe in the Muskegon area. Even though their tribe was never photographed by Curtis, Mitchell wanted to assure the tribal leadership that critiques of the photographer’s representation of North American Indians would be included in the exhibition. He also asked them to perform a formal blessing at the public opening. Attendance is up 390 percent at the museum since the exhibition opened.

“In the end,” Mitchell said, “what could be more poignant for us to sense in this turbulent, troubled, fraught time than how important it is to learn from people who are not us.”

“Edward Curtis: The North American Indian” is on view through September 10th.

The post Small Michigan museum holds massive collection of Edward Curtis’ Native American photography appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

We take black mega-celebrity endorsers as a given today: Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce, the husk that was once Tiger Woods. They wield a kind of agency that seems to continually reset the upper limits of black aspiration, while remaining more or less incidental to the median black condition.

It wasn't always so. There was a moment in the 1960s, for example, when the Supremes were one of the biggest acts in show business, with a string of Top 10 hits. But the trio weren't making a lot of money endorsing products made by big companies — or, at least, not endorsing those products to "mainstream" (read: white) audiences.

According to Tom Burrell, the pioneering ad executive and the subject of the latest Code Switch podcast, Coca-Cola would only placed ads featuring the Supremes on black radio, so worried was the soft drink giant that the trio might scandalize white consumers

That line of reasoning held sway for a long time, until people like Tom Burrell helped dislodge it. Burrell one of the very first black men in advertising, and his hire for a job in an agency's mailroom was considered so risky that the company's CEO had to be called in from vacation to sign off on it. And because Burrell was a black man climbing the corporate ladder in the 1960s, he saw his work as part of a larger project. Burrell understood, too, that he wasn't just selling burgers for McDonald's, but politics: His ad campaigns were always informed by his belief that they should portray black folks in the most affirming light.

Today we call this "respectability politics," the practice of using "positive" portrayals to counter unflattering stereotypes as a way to further racial equality. There are lots of valid critiques of this line of thought — is discrimination against black people who are less "respectable" somehow more justified? — but it was in step with the mores held by many folks of that era. It's the reason so many images of the civil rights movement show protesters in dresses and crisp shirts and ties --their appearances beyond reproach. It was a media play, by activists, for the hearts and minds of the broader public.

Sonari Glinton, a business correspondent at NPR, brought us Burrell's story. He says Burrell changed how advertisers thought about who they could sell to, and who their audiences might buy from. Burrell's agency found that white audiences responded more positively to ads with black actors and celebrities targeted to black people than they did to ads aimed at white consumers. (Make of the implications there what you will.)

As Sonari and I talked, we couldn't help but note the odd coincidence that the first shining exemplars of the crossover black pitchman — O.J. Simpson and Bill Cosby— are today seen by an awful lot of folks as supervillains. "O.J. was the first to demonstrate that white folks would buy stuff based on a black endorsement — as long as it was not pressed as a black endorsement," said Harry Edwards, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Oscar-winning documentary, O.J.: Made In America.

A key to understanding the robust support those two men still enjoy in some places is remembering that their particular celebrity always carried a different gravity than that of their white contemporaries — regardless of whether they personally leaned into it. Simpson famously avoided speaking out on racial issues, and Ezra Edelman, the director of OJ: Made in America, told us last fall that those famous Hertz commercials featuring Simpson were cast so that he was the only black person in them. It was never just Pudding Pops, then, but politics: Simpson and Cosby became famous when being black and on America's TV sets was still a novel and subversive notion, even a dangerous one.

That doesn't, and shouldn't, make those men any more sympathetic. But it might shed light on the people who still vocally defend them; they were not only selling products but a seductive vision of a black America not weighted down by American racism. A black celebrity accused of the same crimes but who rose to prominence at a later time — a time with different politics around race and gender — might not enjoy the same tortured benefit of the doubt. (When Burrell, a generational contemporary of those two, was asked in 2014 what he made of the avalanche of sexual assault accusations against Cosby, he offered up a politician's non-statement: "It's sad if it's true, and it's sad if it's not.")

The squeamishness about black pitchmen as the face of "mainstream" ad campaigns lingered even after Burrell (and yes, Cosby and Simpson) terraformed the marketing landscape. Decades after the Supremes' heyday, in the Cola wars of the 1980s, Coca-Cola offered Michael Jackson— by then, on his way to becoming the biggest and most ubiquitous celebrity in the world — a $1-million dollar endorsement deal. But it envisioned a "targeted, ethnic campaign," recalled Jay Coleman, a businessman involved in the negotiations, told Billboard in 2009.

Jackson passed, and instead, inked a then-record endorsement deal with the competition: Pepsi. That deal spawned Pepsi's inescapable "New Generation" campaign that ran for nearly a decade on primetime network TV; Pepsi's sales and market share climbed. Meanwhile, Coke's position fell, all while being implicitly cast as the preferred soft drink of out-of-touch fogeys and not the "new generation."

The campaign also served as an inflection point, the moment in which it became clear that corporations might benefit more from their proximity to a black star than the other way around. And it also, perhaps, presaged the world on the horizon, where the influence of those stars would become at once more pronounced and less inherently charged. America has gotten pretty used to ubiquitous black celebrity, even as it's still trying to figure out what to make of black folks, broadly.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Ask Luis Garza how the La Raza exhibition came to be at The Autry Museum of the American West, and he raises his palms, eyes heavenward:

"Karma," he says. "Fate. Serendipity. The gods have chosen to align us at this moment in time."

Garza, who co-curated the exhibition with Amy Scott, is being a little dramatic, but he's not wrong. The country has finally started paying attention to Latino culture. Planning for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a huge, international group of shows focusing on Latin American culture in the Americas and in Los Angeles, was underway, spearheaded by the powerful Getty Museum. And at about the same time, Garza and others had begun to review thousands and thousands of photographs taken during the Chicano Rights movement. Photographers from La Raza (literally "the race"), an activist newspaper-turned-magazine published from 1967-1977, chronicled Chicanos in LA and Southern California; it would become nationally significant. After the magazine shut down, the archives were eventually gifted to UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. Years later, the Center wondered if the Autry might be interested in doing something with them.

The Autry was. Rick West, the museum's president and CEO, jumped at the idea. The museum's mission, West says, "is to look at the cultures that make up the American West in a very inclusive and pluralistic way." The La Raza exhibition had all the elements.

"You have what was a very, very important moment 50 years ago in Latino/a history—the Chicano rights movement," West ticks off. "You had the voice that articulated that—the photographers of La Raza. And that voice was a first-person voice": photographers as witnesses. About 200 of the 25,000 (yes, that's not a typo) photographs are up on the Autry's walls. And they are only the tip of the visual iceberg. "The vast body of this work has never been seen, has never been printed—until now," Garza says.

"From the mundane to the magnificent"

The photos—all black and white—range from shots of homey gatherings (neighborhood barbecues, parades, playground scenes) to protests, demonstrations and boycotts. On one wall, a line of Mexican Americans stretches to the distant horizon. They're walking down a long dusty road waving banners and placards. Participants in La Marcha de la Reconquista covered almost 1,000 miles in a month. They started from Calexico, in California's Southern-most boarder, and walked to Sacramento to lobby the state government for several things, including improved conditions for farm workers, and an end to police brutality.

In another shot, a little girl walks with a huge sign that warns onlookers a local auto dealership engages in discriminatory labor practices. There are photos of high-school students during a convulsive series of walk-outs, as students protested the shabby education the Los Angeles school board thought was good enough for them. And a fetching picture of a bridal couple, still in their finery, who left church immediately after their vows and marched with the crowd to protest the inordinate numbers of Chicanos that had been drafted, injured and killed in the Vietnam War.

Most of the photographers were self-taught. Before he joined La Raza as a staff photographer, Garza apprenticed with a professional, learning exposures, lighting, composition and developing. When he went to the paper, he took those skills and shared them with others who wanted to shoot. "We were mentoring each other," he says now.

The exhibition shows they were quick learners. They're not all memorable photos, Garza says; there's a little of everything here. "You go from the mundane to the magnificent."

One of the most memorable was taken by one of a handful of women photographers. Maria Varela's portrait of a little girl hawking La Raza at the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. is a standout for its energy and its size—it's one of the photos that have been blown up into a stele-sized image.

Varela had a long and storied career as a Chicana who went south in the early 60s to photograph the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, as volunteers worked to register black voters in Mississippi and Alabama. In 1968, she came to D.C. with a contingent of Chicanos who'd come to participate in several Poor People's Campaign marches. She doesn't remember the little paper girl's name, but she says, "This might have been the time that everyone emptied out to go up to Arlington Cemetery to honor Robert Kennedy, who had been assassinated two weeks before."

"This was our Facebook"

Although La Raza was the best-known of the Chicano newspapers, there were about 35 of them scattered across the US, from California to the Midwest, anywhere there were substantial Chicano populations. Sometimes travelers would carry an armload to Mexico or overseas, where they were snapped up. The pictures drew people in. The stories gave them ideas for organizing. And, Varela says, they served another, important purpose:

"This was our Facebook. This was our communication network. It was a little clunky, but it got the word out about what was going on in these individual communities."

The Autry Museum sits near several Latino communities, and the La Raza show may draw in people who've never crossed its threshold before. Some may be surprised to find faces they know in this exhibit—of long-lost friends, family, maybe even their own.

Luis Garza looks around the gallery and smiles. "That's the beauty of the power of photography," he says. "If one picture is worth a thousand words, how many are being said in this exhibition?"

Oh, and he might be right about that serendipity thing: La Raza opens to the public on September 16—Mexican Independence Day.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Romanian photographer Mihaela Noroc spent nearly four years shooting portraits of — and collecting stories about — women from around the world.

The product of her vision — and her travels to 50 countries — can be seen in her book The Atlas Of Beauty,hitting shelves Tuesday.

The project, she says, began as something "very genuine and sincere" that she financed, initially, with her own savings — and by being frugal in her backpacking adventure. She later crowd-funded, including a Facebook campaign in March.

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navaro spoke with the 31-year-old via phone from Berlin about her photography. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

This book is called The Atlas Of Beauty. What is beautiful to you? What kind of beauty were you trying to evoke?

That's a very long story, actually. I'm going to try to make it short. You know nowadays the word usually has a little bit of a bad meaning in the end. And everything that's related to beauty is just related to marketing and sales. If you're going to put into Google, for example, 'beautiful woman,' you're just going to see women with parted lips and a little bit over-sexualized. And that's not what beauty means. In the end, I think beauty just means just being yourself. I don't think we have to change ourselves to be in a certain way; I think we just have to keep ourselves as we are and don't necessarily [need] to change.

Were you trying to reclaim the word 'beauty,' perhaps, from the male gaze and make it more about the way women see other women?

Maybe people that are going to look at my work are going to draw their own conclusions. I think I started the project in a very sincere way and the way it developed made us see some lessons from it.

Tell me how the project started.

The project started almost four years ago, and I just traveled around the world for one year. And, in the beginning, I was not expecting to do a worldwide project. It was just something very genuine; I just was photographing people that I met and after a year, when [my project] became very popular, I realized that I have to be more responsible and I have to work more.

The book features all these portraits of different women in different situations, of different ages, of different colors, of different sizes all over the world, and little snippets of their stories. How did you choose your subjects?

That's a very beautiful question because I think everything is very instinctual and, maybe, it's something that attracts you more than the appearance. Like a chemistry that happens for a moment between you and the person that you photograph. And you're just drawn to the people that you're going to photograph. It's something very natural, it's nothing planned. That's the beauty of it, and that's why the book is more honest and more sincere. Because if I would have planned everything, probably it would be very different.

Tell me the story of an encounter with one of the women. How you met her, how long you spent with her. Generally, do you just take the pictures immediately, or do you make an appointment to come back and see the women later when they've had a chance to fix their hair and put on some makeup?

Usually I prefer to photograph without makeup but not all the women are comfortable with that. It's very different from one situation to another. Sometimes I spend a few seconds, and sometimes I spend a few hours. If the women let me stay with them and photograph them and tell me their story, it is wonderful — but not everyone has the time for that. So whenever I have the opportunity to spend two hours, it is amazing.

The woman that I photographed for the cover of the book, it was a matter of seconds. I was in India, it was early morning — usually when you go to the river you are going to see a lot of Hindu pilgrims making their offerings. And so, she was one of them. I saw her in the river. I asked her for permission with my expression and she said yes. I made a few pictures, then I let her continue her offering. It was a magical moment that I saw — there are lots of magical moments like that in our lifetime. Maybe sometimes we are just not too careful to see them, and we are preoccupied with other problems. So maybe photography and this project also gives you the opportunity to just open your eyes and see the beauty that surrounds you.

Some of the women say they don't necessarily see themselves as beautiful. They do not see in themselves the thing that you saw in them. Did you find that to be common?

I did realize the women I photographed were not confident in the way they were. I posted their photos on social media and, after they saw the all the comments on social media, they saw [their beauty]. [We] are convinced we have to be a certain way and we are never secure in our own way. From an early age you can really understand that we can be confident and beautiful and however we want. We don't have to try to change. I think it's a very big confidence booster.

We are inundated by images of beauty on social media and in advertising in magazines. From your book, what can we learn about how other cultures view beauty?

The [other] cultures are also getting influenced by our Western way of seeing beauty. You see, in Asia and Africa, whitening products to lighten the skin. We have to start from early age with children to show them that people are very different but very beautiful in their own way.

How did this project change you as a woman?

I matured a lot, and I'm sure that my idea about the world changed a lot — in my idea about how a woman is supposed to be. I'm much more confident. I'm much more respectful of what the other women in the world have to go through every day because, I realize more that I am extremely privileged to be in this position. And this is why I'm beautiful.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In 19th-century Paris, there were few artists/entrepreneurs as popular as Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. Tournachon made a name for himself as the first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist and the first person to take an aerial photograph - among other achievements. He work was so captivating that he even became the basis for his friend Jules Verne’s hero in Around the World in 80 Days. Biographer Adam Begley details the innovations and adventures of Tournachon's life in his new book, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera. 

Adam Begley will appear on Sept. 26 at 7:00 p.m. at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater House of Speakeasy (425 Lafayette St.).

He will also appear at 7:00 p.m. on Oct. 3 at NYU’s La Maison Française (16 Washington Mews, between 5th Ave. and Washington Square E).

In “Faces Places,” the eminent French filmmaker Agnès Varda teams with the street artist JR (known for his recent mural on the Mexican border). They take a wondrous journey of making art and transforming lives in villages across France. This late career gem from the 89-year-old Varda has already won festival prizes in Cannes and Toronto.

— Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen

For more information, click here to visit the film web site.

Not long ago, two Americans caused a scene in a Mozambique village. Locals were mystified by the tourists spending several days photographing a single tree.

"Sometimes we have to explain to people what we're doing but often they just think, 'Okay these guys are nuts,'" says New York photographer Len Jenshel.

He and fellow photographer Diane Cook spent three years making Wise Trees, a book of tree portraits. The first photographs were taken at a place once known as Ground Zero. There they documented the blossoming "Survivor Tree," a Callery pear that had been pulled out of the ruins of the World Trade Center weeks after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Burned and broken, the tree was nursed back to health and re-planted a decade later at what is now the National September 11 Memorial.

Cook and Jenshel have worked together since 1991. A husband and wife team, they met years before "through cannoli, not cameras." For the book, she undertook the research while he sweet-talked their way into getting permission to photograph trees that were on private property.

And then came the challenge of making pictures. "Technically every tree poses a new challenge on how to photograph it," says Jenshel. They had to consider lighting, season, angle and how close or far away to shoot to capture each tree's most significant traits.

The idea was born on a night in 2012. The couple was photographing cherry blossoms after dusk in Japan. Cook got a call that her father in the United States was dying. They watched pale white petals from the trees float away in the wind. "We looked at this amazing ritual of life and renewal, which happens every spring," says Cook. "And somehow, when we came back from that trip, we started thinking about the wisdom that we get from trees."

The trees featured in their book offer shade and solace. Some give guidance, like a tree Native Americans once used as a reminder to leave one river and cross to a different waterway.Others are seen as a source of healing, like sacred trees in India. And a few have been silent witnesses to humanity's darkest times.

Both Jenshel and Cook say the hardest tree to photograph was what became known as the Killing Tree in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. During Pol Pot's brutal reign, prison guards held babies and children by their feet and smashed their skulls against the tree. Sometimes mothers were forced to watch before they were killed, too. "We kept it together while we were there in the field but it took us weeks to recover from photographing that tree," says Cook.

The book — published by Abrams in October — features images taken in 11 countries as well as the United States.

We've selected photographs that were made in the developing countries that Goats and Soda covers as well as New Zealand, where one kauri tree contains special meaning to the indigenous Maori people.

Sasha Ingber is a multimedia journalist who has covered science, culture and foreign affairs for such publications as National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazine and Smithsonian. You can contact her @SashaIngber.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Photo courtesy of William Wegman

For more than 40 years, artist William Wegman has been making portraits and videos of his beloved Weimaraner dogs, who have appeared in numerous publications and on television shows like Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live.

And this month, he released a new career retrospective book, “William Wegman: Being Human.” The book features 300 images of his dogs from his countless collection of prints.

NewsHour Weekend recently visited Wegman in his New York City home and studio, where he introduced us to his current canine models, Flo and Topper.

William Wegman arranges clothing that will be worn by his dogs, Flo and Topper, with the help of a long-time assistant inside his New York City studio. Photo By Michael D. Regan/NewsHour Weekend

Wegman lives and works in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan with his dogs. He keeps many of the props utilized for photo shoots in his downstairs basement, which are filled with decades’ worth of costumes and trinkets he uses to make elaborate scenes.

He said Weimaraners are good at standing still because they were originally bred to hunt, and are capable of freezing and pointing at prey.

Wegman stores hundreds of prints inside his home and studio, some shown here. Michael D. Regan/NewsHour Weekend

Most of Wegman’s photos were captured on a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera, which he said is the size of a “big refrigerator” kept inside a a wood base that’s “quite beautiful actually but very rickety and fragile.” When working outside, Wegman would haul it around in a truck.

Wegman has taken about 15,000 photos with that Polaroid, but he has since moved on to digital cameras.

Wegman said he’s worked with 14 Weimaraners in total, the first of which was named Man Ray, named after the artist. Yet, he didn’t initially plan on taking artistic portraits of them.

“I took his picture, which you would do with your newborn, or whatever,” he said. “It was kind of magical how he became. He was kind of transformed by the act of photographing him.”

Flo and Topper are a part of the family, Wegman said. The photos of his dogs can sell for thousands of dollars. Michael D. Regan/NewsHour Weekend

Wegman was born in 1943 in Massachusetts and in the 1960s went on to receive fine arts degrees in Boston and Illinois, where he studied painting. He taught in Wisconsin and California, and by the 1970s his artwork was being exhibited in galleries around the world, about the same time he began taking photos of his first Weimaraner.

Wegman’s photographs now sell for thousands of dollars and he has published 40 books, including 20 children’s books.

At age 74, Wegman said he plans on continuing his work, including an extensive portfolio of paintings.

Wegman also works with oil paintings, including this one shown here, which also incorporates post cards he’s collected. Michael D. Regan/NewsHour Weekend

Wegman’s work is now being shown through Oct. 28 at the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York. An exhibit of his images will take place from Jan. 17 through July at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with plans for an international showing next summer at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

“William Wegman: Being Human,” released this month in collaboration with William A. Ewing, includes more than 300 photos, many of which have never been shown to the public. Here are some of those images:

Courtesy of William Wegman

Courtesy of William Wegman

Courtesy of William Wegman

Courtesy of William Wegman

Courtesy of William Wegman

The post Photos: Four decades of William Wegman’s Weimaraners appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Credit: Kay Chernush

Where does human trafficking take place? In Russia, China, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and… all over the United States. Labor trafficking occurs in elder care, nail salons, babysitting. Sex trafficking is happening to runaway teens, an issue highlighted earlier this year after the Washington D.C. Police Department began posting images of D.C.’s missing girls online.

According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, some 57,700 citizens and immigrants in America are victims of human trafficking. Around the world, some 45.8 million people are affected.

Now, Kay Chernush, a photojournalist who captured victims of human trafficking for the U.S. State Department, is trying to change that, by blanketing Washington D.C. with photographs, drawings, essays, theater, film screenings, panel discussions and more on the realities of human trafficking today. Her nonprofit, ArtWorks for Freedom, which seeks to fight human trafficking through art, has previously shown work in the Netherlands, Singapore, Florida, Georgia and Wisconsin.

“NGOs already know about this problem. So we’re interested in taking it to the girl on her bike, the mother taking her child to the park, the guy with his dog,” Chernush said. “We’re trying to catch people and give them an entry point to this very dark subject, so that they’re bowled over by the art in a visceral way — so that people can taken their own creative actions to fight it.”

A woman stops to look at an image in the ArtWorks for Freedom exhibit “Bought and Sold” in Dupont Circle in Washington D.C., in October 2017. Courtesy of Kay Chernush / ArtWorks for Freedom

On a recent Friday in D.C.’s Dupont Circle, where ArtWorks for Freedom had set up “Bought and Sold,” an outdoor exhibit of more than a dozen images depicting victims of and participants in human trafficking, passersby stopped and somberly took in the work.

One image showed an American woman who was trafficked at age 13 from Washington D.C. to New York; in an accompanying caption, she described being held by “mental chains that were just as thick and heavy as any metal chain would have been.” Another depicted a Brazilian woman trafficked to Surinam and then a club in the Netherlands, where she said she was “forced to go with a certain number of men everyday — keep them happy, keep them drinking.” And a third image quoted a sex tourist in Thailand, who, after being photographed by Chernush, asked: “Why do you care if older men are with younger women?… How do I know she’s being forced?”

Jennifer Barton, a Maryland resident who passed by the exhibit on her way to the bank, and stopped to read all of them, said seeing the images and accompanying stories was humbling. “You know these things happen, you watch Law & Order on TV,” she said. “But just to the read the stories about how it happens is very different. To read how people from different countries were deceived.”

Credit: Kay Chernush

The exhibit also gives voice to victims of labor trafficking, which make up the majority of human trafficking cases. One image depicts a Central American migrant trafficked to the U.S., who said he was forced to work 11 or 12 hour days, live in a shack, and paid poorly for the work.

“People want their food cheap. Without people willing to pay a fair price for their food, will there ever be fair working conditions?” he said.

The images in “Bought and Sold” are photo collages, instead of traditional portraits, which Chernush said she hoped would reveal more about what human trafficking was actually like. She made the images in collaboration with human trafficking survivors.

“People may be bruised or battered but that doesn’t say much about what trafficking is,” she said. “That people are underage and exploited and sold on the streets…. That it’s all around us, not hidden, but we don’t know what to look for… That if a man buys sex he doesn’t know if that person is there of their own volition. And that it’s happening in the U.S. as well.”

Credit: Kay Chernush

“Bought and Sold” is on display in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle until October 20, and the ArtWorks for Freedom events continue until November 10. The exhibits will then travel elsewhere in the United States.

WATCH MORE: After viral story on DC girls, understanding the real perils for missing children of color

The post ‘How do I know she’s being forced?’: New exhibit reveals the dark underbelly of human trafficking appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

In the art world, William Eggleston is a revered photographer. In the music world, he's virtually unknown. But now the 78-year-old Memphis native, celebrated for legitimizing color photography in the 1970s, has just released his very first album, simply titled Musik.

The German spelling is an homage to J.S. Bach, one of Eggleston's heros. And while the new album sounds very little like Bach, Eggleston often makes his 1990s-era Korg synthesizer sound like one of the master's mighty church organs.

You can get a taste for the album in the short and sweet film by Rick Alverson, which follows Eggleston around his Memphis apartment while his music plays. The artist pads from bedroom to dining room where, hunched over a table laden with oscilloscopes and tube amplifiers, he noodles with his keyboard, creating a retro sound somewhere between Tomita and Tangerine Dream.

He appears to be the very essence of a southern gentleman as he sits on his sofa, lighting a cigarette. But Eggleston's music reveals a more mischievous side. Like his photography, he locates the beauty in the quotidian. The chords and harmonies may sound mundane, but listen close and hear how some are stretched out of shape into unfamiliar territory.

The film closes with Eggleston at his piano. Like the untitled synthesizer improvisations on Musik, his style is off-the-cuff, with a homespun feel, somehow suggesting the rough-hewn music of Charles Ives.

In a languid voiceover, Eggleston tries to describe what he's up to. "I wouldn't pretend to understand what really makes music," he states plainly. "It's so fluid and formless, physically, that we just can't grab part of it. When one starts to try to do that, one's trying to speak about something that is not finite."

He's right. And for now, Eggleston's new album will let the "Musik" do the talking.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Annie Leibovitz is a legendary photographer who began her career in the 1970s, shooting photos for Rolling Stone. She joins us to discuss her recent work in portraiture and her new book Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016. Her subjects in this new collection of over 150 portraits include Stephen Hawking, Barack Obama, Gloria Steinem and Kim Kardashian. 

At first glance, you see a young girl goofing around with her friends.

But there's one crucial detail: This girl — 16-year-old Nirma — has a traditional stripe of vermilion powder smudged into her forehead. In her region in India, that's a sign that means Nirma is married.

Nirma is one of several young women that New Delhi-based photographer Saumya Khandelwal features in a series depicting the daily lives of child brides in Shravasti, India. "In this part of India, there are villages where almost every girl over the age of 12 is married," Khandelwal says. "And these girls are deprived of their dreams, of their innocence."

This week, her photographs won her one of the top spots in Getty Images third annual Instagram Grant.

Khandelwal, along with American photographers Nina Robinson and Isadora Kosofsky, won $10,000 each for using Instagram as a platform to highlight stories of underrepresented people around the world.

Robinson's photos document the everyday life of her family in rural Arkansas, and Los Angeles-based Kosofsky focuses on aging, poverty, mental health and the lives of imprisoned minors and their families in the U.S. and Romania.

We asked each photographer to tell us about their winning images.

Saumya Khandelwal

When Khandelwal first began photographing young brides in north India, she says, "I became conscious of the privileged life I had," she says. Khandelwal grew up in Delhi — and "as a kid I had no clue about child marriage. I always thought that your destiny is in your own hands."

A newspaper article about child marriage in north India piqued her curiosity. Child marriage is illegal in India, but it's still common in parts of the country.

So she visited one of those parts — the town of Shravasti — and she was devastated.

"When you I asked some of the girls what are their hopes for life — What surprised me is that they had nothing to say," she says. No one had ever asked them that question — "they would get married, and in a few years, have children. And that's it."

Nina Robinson

Robinson's "Arkansas Family Album" was born out of loss. "In 2014, I wanted to go take a trip to the South to visit my mom's side of the family," she says. "I knew my grandmother was sick, but I didn't know the severity of her sickness."

Her grandmother died a week after Robinson arrived in Arkansas. "I was only going to stay a week or two," she says. "Instead, I ended up staying in Arkansas for three and a half months. I needed to be there and heal."

She began taking photos for herself, as a way to cope with her grief . "And in the process I also found myself reconnecting with my roots" she says, "getting close with my aunts and uncles."

Isadora Kosofsky

Kosofsky has been following Vinny and his family for nearly six years now. She first became interested in the criminal justice system when she was in high school.

"I had a boyfriend at the beginning of high school who was arrested, around the time I was first discovering documentary photography," Kosofsky says. She began researching the juvenile justice system, and decided she wanted to photograph some of the young men and women who had ended up in that system. "So I submitted applications for access to facilities all over the U.S. — but I was denied, because I was underaged. I was just 14 at the time"

"I realized I wanted to show what's going on in my own backyard," she says.

Maanvi Singh is a freelance writer based in London. Contact her @maanvisings

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In the early 1970s, when many professional photographers were shooting in black and white, Raghubir Singh pioneered the use of color film to capture scenes from his homeland India. Back then, color photography wasn't always taken seriously. But Singh insisted that it was impossible to capture India's essence in black and white.

"The fundamental condition of the West is one of guilt, linked to death — from which black is inseparable." he wrote in his 1998 book River of Color. "The fundamental condition of India, however, is the cycle of rebirth, in which color is not just an essential element but also a deep inner source."

A wedding party dressed in shades of red, a roadside vendor selling oranges out of fuchsia baskets, terra cotta landscapes and green monsoon skies: Singh's work captures the vibrancy of everyday life in India.

Singh, who came from a wealthy family in Rajasthan, India, never studied photography formally. But soon after his older brother gifted 14-year-old Singh his first camera, he became enamored with the work of French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Singh's parents owned a copy of Cartier-Bresson's book Beautiful Jaipur— which became a sort of textbook for him.

After dropping out of college, he began working as a photojournalist for American publications, including National Geographic and The New York Times. And there was a big perk: free access to color film (which wasn't available in India until 1991).

His work exposed Westerners to the real India, says Shivji Joshi, a photographer and retired professor of philosophy at the University of Jodhpur. "Photos taken by Raghubir Singh showed to foreigners — or rather everyone — that India is more than a land of snake-charmers," Joshi says. Although Singh lived in Hong Kong, Paris, London and New York, most of his work featured his native India.

Joshi — who like Singh is from Rajasthan — says Singh's work captures a "love and sense of respect for his homeland."

"Modernism on the Ganges," a retrospective of Singh's work, is on display at the Met Breuer in New York through Jan. 2, after which it will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

We spoke to Joshi about why Singh is still relevant today. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Singh died in 1999 of a heart attack when he was just 56. Why is it important to remember him now?

His work is celebrated by art lovers and critics alike due to its authenticity, simplicity and candidness. He shows the complexities of India — its rich culture, its humanitarian and spiritual values. He showed a land of magnificent monuments and also a land of simple, warmhearted people.

And what's remarkable about all his images is that they are incredibly rich in color.

Singh opted to use color for his photography at the time when black and white photography was very popular and more respected. And I do understand his choice because color plays a key role in Indian life — we have colorful religious festivals or celebrations, we have colorful costumes, colorfully decorated and painted walls of houses — even colorful rangolis [colorful patterns] at the doorways of houses. So only color photography would be suitable for recording Indian life.

Take the photo of the fruit seller. His use of color is totally justified with this picture — it's divided into two frames to show that the delicious oranges and apples are out of reach for the boy — who probably cannot afford them. Black and white photography could not have rendered the precise differences in shades of yellow and red.

You can almost taste those apples! Which of his images do you like the best?

The photo of the man diving is my favorite image and one of Raghubir's best. This is an example of him cleverly catching the decisive moment — the diver suspended horizontally in the air, parallel to the surface of the river. It is as if he is bowing to the sacred river. For Raghubir the Ganges was not just a river: She carried the rich culture of India with her streams.

He seems to often capture people mid-action — there's the diver but also the girls on a swing.

In that image he really caught the right moment — the swing at its full height — to capture the enthusiasm and the festive mood. This picture was taken during Teej -- a festival during which girls and women in Rajasthan rejoice the coming of the monsoon.

What can young photographers learn from Singh?

Everyone should develop his or her own unique approach toward art whether it is photography or any other art form. Never follow others.

Maanvi Singh is a freelance writer based in London. Contact her @maanvisings

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

As the chief official White House photographer for President Barack Obama, Pete Souza had top security clearance and sat in on most meetings and major events with the president.

"I was there all the time," he says. "I wasn't talking to [Obama] all the time, but I was always in every meeting and pretty much every situation that he had as president."

Souza sought to minimize his presence at the White House by working with what he calls a "small footprint" — not using a noisy camera, not using flash and moving around gingerly. "I'm not sure if 'invisible' is the right word," he says. "But I was certainly trying to be a piece of the woodwork."

Over the course of Obama's eight years in office, Souza estimates that he took approximately 1.9 million photos — sometimes more than 2,000 each day. His new book, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, is a collection of his favorites.

Interview Highlights

On being in the room for sensitive White House meetings

I had top security clearance, which enabled me to go into all these meetings, but I have to say that most of the top secret material is on paper. I was not privy to paperwork. I didn't get memos and things like that.

When you're a photographer in the room in these kinds of situations, you do hear conversations, but you've got so many things to worry about technically with the camera, and then hoping to capture the moment at just the right time, composition. You can get the sense of the conversation and the mood and the emotion, but, like, I couldn't repeat verbatim conversations that took place, because, quite frankly, I wasn't necessarily listening to all of the words — just trying to get the essence of what was taking place.

On photographing the Situation Room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden

They were monitoring, in real time, the mission as it was unfolding. We were in that little conference room within the Situation Room for about 40 minutes, I think it was. And so during that entire time the mission was taking place in Pakistan and they were just monitoring it in real time.

The thing that strikes me about that photograph now is you have the most powerful people in the federal government — you've got the president, the vice president, the chairman of the joint chiefs, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and on and on and on — and they were essentially helpless. They had made their decision in the days and weeks before to launch this raid, but now it was up to those guys on the ground and there's nothing they could do to affect the outcome, which I think helps depict why their faces are so anxious and tense — to just essentially watch as this happens right before their eyes.

On capturing the moment President Obama learned of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

It's very emotional, but I'm also worried about my composition and framing, so all these things are going through my head as this very difficult conversation is taking place.

I always tell people that in this moment he's not reacting as the president of the United States. You see the body language. ... He's reacting as a fellow parent, just trying to imagine that you send your 6-year-old off to school — we consider those safety zones — and you've just learned that you're never going to see that 6-year-old again because some crazy guy shot them to death.

On his photo of Obama rewriting his remarks for the Sandy Hook memorial service

This is two days after the shootings and they had planned this public memorial service. But before that, they had all the families gathered in different rooms and he went and spent I think it was three hours with all of these families. And then he came back into this classroom ... and not only is he going over his notes, he is rewriting parts of his talk that he was going to give at this memorial service to incorporate what he had just experienced during those three hours visiting with these families.

I was struck by that classroom and the messiness of it, and that's why I backed off to try to give people a wider sense of him alone in this room.

On his photo of a young African-America boy touching Obama's hair

Jacob [the son of a White House staffer] in his shy voice said, "My friends tell me that my hair is just like yours." And at that moment President Obama bent over and Jacob touched his head. The president said, "Go ahead and touch it." And I snapped that one picture. I have one picture of this brief moment, and it kind of took on somewhat of an iconic status in years to follow. ...

I guess what I see in that picture is two things: One is, here's this African-American kid who is touching the head of the president of the United States, who looks like him. And I think a lot of young African-American kids probably could identify with that moment. But it also says something about President Obama that at the behest of this innocent question from this kid, that he was fine bending over to let this kid touch his head.

On his photo of Obama leaving the Oval Office for the last time

It's one of the few times where I thought about the image beforehand. I knew he was going to walk out of that door, obviously. And I asked one of the [general services] workers if he had a ladder nearby that I could borrow so that I could get up high, high angle, and with a very wide angle lens try to show as much of the Oval Office as possible as he's walking out the door.

On his Instagram account, where he often posts photos of Obama in response to news about President Trump (which some people interpret as trolling Trump)

I think for the most part what I've tried to do with my current Instagram feed is display public domain photos and be somewhat subtle and respectful in the words that I write. I think people can interpret them [however they want to]. ... When somebody first wrote a story about "throwing shade" I actually had to look that up because I really didn't know what it meant. ... I kind of laughed, I guess.

I'll say this: I do think that compared to what some people write on Twitter, I'm being very respectful in the way that I present my Instagram feed.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Nicole Cohen adapted it for the Web.

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Coming up on today's show:

• Just five days ago, Devin Kelley walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and murdered 26 people with a AR-15 style military rifle. As officials try to figure out why, the Air Force has admitted that a lapse in oversight made it easier for Kelley to buy his weapons. Geoffrey Corn, who served in the U.S. Army for 21 years as an officer and is now a professor at the South Texas College of Law, examines this oversight failure. 

• Ohio voters killed a resolution aimed at lowering drug costs in the state. But many voters said they were confused by the complicated ballot measure. Andy Chow, a reporter for Ohio Public Radio’s Statehouse News Bureau, he joins The Takeaway to explain what the measure was all about, and why it was defeated.

• On Tuesday, voters in Maine backed Medicaid expansion in the state, which will make at least 80,000 residents eligible for Medicaid. The vote is a direct rebuke to conservative Governor Paul LePage, who says he will not enforce the voters' mandate.Sara Gideon, the Speaker of the Maine House Representatives, discusses the fight over Medicaid in The Pine Tree State. 

• Several programs in Oklahoma give defendants the ability to choose addiction recovery treatment instead of jail time. But according to an ACLU lawsuit filed on behalf of former participants, some of these facilities are actually being used as work camps for private poultry companies. Amy Julia Harris is a reporter for the investigative public radio program and podcast Reveal, and she joins The Takeaway to explain how programs like these operate. 

• ProPublica conducted a review of 83 Supreme Court cases between 2011 and 2015. Reporters found seven errors that, in some cases, helped determine the outcome of a ruling. Ryan Gabrielson, a reporter for ProPublica covering the U.S. justice system, explains. 

• Former White House Photographer Pete Souza discusses his new book, "Obama: An Intimate Portrait." It's a compilation of some of the nearly two million photographs he took of President Obama throughout his years in office. Souza was also the chief official White House photographer for U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan.

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich.