As he talked to us, one of his kites took a dive and disappeared behind some trees. One of my buddies piped up to tell him the kite was gone, for Frank had taken his eyes off the sky to show us how to build a good kite, a kite that would actually fly. “The kite is gone? That’s what I get for teaching you.” But there was no malice in his voice. Frank had done this, surely, thousands of times. And what’s the point of flying kites in the park if you’re not going to show some kids–even when the kids are young men? Frank showed us, taught us, inspired us to try again, with better kites next time. If I get the guys to make another set with me, we’ll use materials like the ones Frank uses. And in fifty years–or maybe just next time, if we’re lucky and good–we’ll get them to actually fly.

New memories, shared here.

And this video, “L’Eau Life,” by Jeff Scher for The New York Times‘ website (therefore unfortunately unembeddable), is the most fun and beautiful summer-inspired art I can remember seeing. I wish I could live in that world. For the last month I almost have. Soon this will be over for a long time.

Pictures here. Example below.

Two and a half years later I had grown up enough that, when my city was in the news for even more historical events, I was a regular newspaper reader. No longer did individual days’ headlines grab me and get lodged in my memory the same way, but the events unfolding before me affected me even more as I grew up. My adolescence was framed–even defined, in some ways–by a series of events that could only have been covered on A1. After wars, murders, and terrorism in 1999 and 2001 came a war in 2003 and elections in 2004, 2006, and 2008. Each event was important in world history and equally so in my coming of age.

Given how powerfully these events have affected me, I’m fascinated by other historical events that happened in my lifetime. I’ll never really be able to believe the Cold War ended after I was born, or that apartheid in South Africa fell apart when I was in elementary school. Without memories of those events–of seeing them written about the next day, or over weeks, on the front page of the Times–they feel like history to me, rather than the current events they were not too many years ago.

Another such event was made current again today, on its twentieth anniversary. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, I’ve also never understood the Tiananmen Square protest, I suspect because I didn’t experience the event as it happened. The narrative as I’ve learned it after the fact–students and intellectuals in China protested for more freedom in 1989, the protest was quashed with a massacre, little more freedom arrived, and twenty years later no one protested–doesn’t make sense. Then again, I can’t expect China to make a lot of sense to me. In every way, it’s as foreign, as far from what I know, as anything on Earth.

I’ve loved learning just a little about China over the last year from a few sources. James Fallows, the Atlantic writer and editor who has lived in China for the last few years, maintains a blog that I’ve read religiously since last summer. He writes about technology, aviation, the craft of journalism and the life of a journalists, and China. All of his writing is interesting; his observations and understanding of China are enlightening. And since January a friend of mine, Dylan Suher, has been studying abroad in China. He too has kept a blog, where he has given a mostly personal account of his time there, but through which he has shared impressive insight into a country he is just getting to know. I’m glad he has blogged so regularly while abroad, disappointed his dispatches will cease when he returns to the U.S. this weekend, and most happy his wisdom will last in his writing. Trusting him to have something interesting to say in response, I recently sent him this Atlantic article by Mark Hertsgaard about China’s balance between economic development and environmental protection. The article is especially interesting because it was written in 1997, and yet it reads as if it could come out tomorrow: all the issues it covers seem as relevant, if not more so, today as they were a dozen years ago. Being the good friend and smart guy he is, Dylan replied to the article with a surprisingly long and thoughtful response, which I’ll assume his permission to reproduce here:

I was only too happy to read this article instead of reading [sic: missing word], although I was sad I couldn’t watch the YouTube video (damn you, China, don’t you know seeing the “Leprachaun” video is an inalienable human right?). I think it’s really right on. I think people who are not here can sometimes get the impression that the Chinese government and the Chinese people just don’t give a shit about the environment. But actually, compared to the Americans, the Chinese lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly (air drying, no heat below the Yangtze by government order, great public transportation, lots of biking). What we’re really worried about is that more and more Chinese will start to live like us, which would undoubtedly lead to a world environmental crisis. Also, the sense I’ve gotten is that in recent years (since this article has been written), the government has taken serious steps to improve the environmental situation. This of course varies from province to province and city to city (Yunnan has a particularly good party boss, according to people I’ve talked to), and some cities are still absolutely awful (I had a hard time breathing in Tai’an in Shandong province and in China’s coal centers in the Northeast, and the smog in Xi’an is really sad). But the government is limited in what it can do, both by corruption and by the economic/demographic situation.

I’ll give you the example of Kunming, since I know a bit about it. Kunming has about six million people, and is growing at an insanely rapid rate. The government expects it to reach ten million people by 2012 or so. Kunming’s main source of water is the filthy Dian Chi lake. Now, in America, most water pollution is agricultural or industrial. However, this is not the case with Dian Chi. Years ago, fertilizer and tanning plants did a number on Dian Chi, but most of those have been shut down; now, the main source of pollution is literally household sewage. But what can you do? It has to go somewhere. It doesn’t help that the marshes that used to clean Dian Chi were drained during the Great Leap Forward, but it’s now not an option to restore the wetland: it would mean the relocation of thousands of people who now live in the reclaimed land. So what can the government do? It can’t stop the migration. All it can do is really what it’s doing now, which is throwing millions at sewage processing plants and punishing people who violate plumbing regulations.

Which brings it back to the point that this guy made that I think is the most insightful and right on. China’s problem is a world problem. We have a billion very poor people, and the real question is, can we fulfill the promises that modern, liberal, capitalist society has made to allow every human being on the planet live a life of unprecedented comfort without destroying the planet. It’s something to lose sleep over.

With friends like these, who needs professionals to tell you about the world? Nevertheless I appreciate what professional journalists do (of course). In addition to Fallows’ writing and the Hertsgaard article, I recommend today’s column by Nick Kristof, in which he recounts his experience in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, when he was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times. Here is a fascinating recent blog post by John Pomfret outlining China’s relationship with North Korea, explaining why it may be that China watches happily as North Korea antagonizes the United States and the West. (H/T to Fallows for recommending it.) And here the Times runs down the stories behind the iconic photos of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square during the protest. (Here too is a follow-up post with a never-before-published picture of the event.) All interesting reads to learn just a little more about the Middle Kingdom in the modern era.

At work today, with the TVs on the cable networks, an MSNBC afternoon anchor said the following as the channel cut to a commercial break: “A dark chapter in China’s history: Tiananmen Square, twenty years later. What do you remember about the event?” This was followed by a call for viewers to send in their recollections of the protest and the massacre. The line was completely in character for cable news, and had I been barely less attentive I would have missed it. But I heard it, and it struck me. This simplification was just one example out of hundreds I must have heard on TV today. Yet it perfectly encapsulated a source of sadness in me: Here was “coverage” of a truly fascinating historical event that–by the choice of the “journalist”–removed all the elements that could have educated, enlightened viewers. Instead, we were given a vague allusion (“dark chapter”) and encouraged to be egocentric, to share our memories of the event, as if they were, are somehow relevant, as if they mean anything at all. Nothing before or after that teaser gave viewers any better understanding of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, or what has come since. For that, one would have had to look elsewhere, far away. Cable news is pitiful, but the 2009 media landscape includes more media offering the same antisubstance. I’m saddened that so little attention is given to the most interesting parts of the news, which also happen to be the most valuable to know. And I’m fearful of a media that is ever receding into a universe of headlines.

Update 6/14/09: How many of my friends will go to China? With one high school friend recently back, another is leaving for Beijing in two days. And a friend from college will be there all of next year, taking a year away from Yale to study Chinese more in China. He’s a tremendously talented guy, as can be seen in this video of him speaking Chinese, playing cello, and beatboxing:

Update 6/1/09: An earlier version of this post said Manhattanhenge happens once in spring and once in fall. In reality, as I just learned here, it happens twice in spring. New Yorkers will see the same sight again in under two weeks, on June 11 and 12.

The album is here.

As always, there were characters.

Check out more photos here.

The blog is two things at once. It is an ongoing lesson in photography that is written, it seems, for people exactly like me: amateurs who are looking to get better, and looking to learn about visual news as much as photography. And it is an ever-evolving story of a life that is as fascinating as I can imagine. The blog’s contributors are people who love to see and convey the world, and who are not interested in or moved by the pretty nearly as much as they are by the profound.

The most recent post, “Death all around,” by Finbarr O’Reilly, is as powerful as any I’ve seen on the blog since I started reading it at the end of the summer. The photos and story come from a Congolese refugee camp. It doesn’t deserve a description, only a recommendation: read it for yourself. But one sentence struck me hard, and is worth pulling out:

There’s no joy getting a good picture from a baby’s funeral.

How much is built into those eleven words? How perfectly does such a short sentence convey the passion of a man’s occupation and the humanity that in this moment overwhelms it? How universal is the sentiment he expresses, even to those who have never worked to get a good picture, or to the millions of us who have so thankfully never had to attend a baby’s funeral.

I hope to one day be able to take pictures like the ones on this blog. I hope to be able to write about my experiences as the photographers do. I read the blog for the artistic lessons it teaches. But, more importantly, I read for its lessons about the life of a photographer: these can be your experiences — if you want them, if you can handle them, if you can capture them.