NY Times Photo Blog

I have a certain regard for the NY Times – and after all it paid my bills for a few years recently when I worked for one of the companies it owned. It’s certainly one of the papers I look to as a paper of record and have often linked to, example when I wanted to know more out about Boris’s Turkish great-grandad. They obviously have an excellent photo-editor, and some of the features they’ve commissioned about photography and photographers have  certainly been of interest.

So it’s not surprising that their photojournalism blog, LENS, introduced on May 15, has some decent work on show. Just a shame that the unusual design makes it so difficult to find it.  Blogs – and browsers – are just not made to scroll sideways.

Of course you can – as many do for this blog – rely on a RSS feed to let you know what is there, but LENS is a fairly active place, and the feed only displays the last ten posts – three or four days.

LENS isn’t perhaps a very good choice of name either. Too generic, this site doesn’t at the moment get on the top page of ten when I google it.  >Re:PHOTO or Re-Photo brings this site up as No 1 as it should be!

And perhaps too many of us will be wondering who Len was anyway or if it’s a site for wearers of small glass discs on the eye or that town in France or…  But I am pleased to see that Lens Culture still came above it in my Google search.

One post worth a look (there are others) is  by Ozier Muhammad, “58, a staff photographer for The Times, has been photographing Harlem since he moved to New York in 1980.”  Its perhaps unfortunate that this work is only present as a slide show, making it difficult to pick out individual images and meaning that those who haven’t got 3 minutes 40 second may miss some of the better work. It’s a nice slide show, but I’d like also to be able to the thumbnails and jump to the work I want to see, or at least to click through the pictures at my own pace.

Incidentally should anyone be wondering why this site is called >Re:PHOTO you can read a little more about it and me on the About >Re:PHOTO page

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