By Mike Segar

As New York braced for the arrival of Hurricane Sandy three weeks ago, I was in California for a long-planned personal event. But I wasn’t about to miss what was shaping up to be a major story. I was determined to get back. I found a united flight to Detroit, Michigan, that was still listed as “on-time.” How far a drive would that be to New York? 10 hours? Through a hurricane?… I’ll take it, I thought. Seven hours later I was on the ground in Michigan driving through the night towards New York as winds howled and Sandy was coming ashore. I made it back to a region knocked to its knees by this storm.

The next seven days were a blur of finding and photographing those worst hit by the storm and hunting for gas for vehicles to keep going (not to mention returning home to a house without power, heat or hot water and without my wife and children who had evacuated to Massachusetts). Together Reuters photographers Lucas Jackson, Shannon Stapleton, Brendan McDermid, Keith Bedford, Adrees Latif, Andrew Kelly, Tom Mihalek, Carlo Alegri, Steve Nesius, Chip East, Adam Hunger and myself covered the immediate aftermath of Sandy in countless locations. We documented places and people affected by this massive natural disaster, one of the most destructive ever to hit the Northeast U.S. Our team made amazing pictures throughout and our collective photographic documentation of this disaster speaks for itself.

GALLERY: A STORM NAMED SANDY

I found myself mostly covering the particularly hard hit borough of Staten Island where at least 23 people died. Many Staten Islanders say they live in New York City’s “forgotten borough.” On Staten Island’s south shore there are several long low-lying communities of mostly working class New Yorkers, many with civil service jobs. With a mixture of ethnic backgrounds of long-time residents and recent immigrants, this area consists of mostly beach bungalow style homes. The homes are mostly single story and packed closely together near the shore that stretches for about six miles and faces the Atlantic Ocean.

As I met more people and was invited to photograph what was left of their homes, I became interested in just who these neighbors were. Could I find a way to photograph them in a similar style and tell some of their stories? I began to try to put a face on this tragedy with compelling portraits as I moved through the area documenting the results of the storm surge.

GALLERY: SURVIVING SANDY

I decided to ask all the subjects (I photographed more than 30 for this project) to look into the camera, and I photographed them all in a similar technical style. I felt that a completed set of pictures along with a short written piece about each person could stand out by itself and perhaps put more of a human face on the disaster for our readers.

From the interviews I conducted with the subjects I learned that when Sandy came ashore people here in Midland Beach, New Dorp Beach, Oakwood Beach, Great Kills and Bay Terrace who did not evacuate found themselves in what one resident described to me as a giant washing machine of homes, debris and wind-driven ocean. Within minutes, water reaching 10-18 feet high demolished hundreds and hundreds of homes. After the storm as I wandered through these neighborhoods photographing the aftermath, I kept finding myself stopping to talk to people. Cleaning out their ruined homes and searching for personal belongings, they were trying to cope with suddenly having nothing.

I worked to tell some of the amazing stories people told me of survival and loss on Staten Island. Stories like the one of survival by neighbors Lisa and Eddie Perez (no relation) of Oakwood. Both were swept away from their homes as they desperately tried to escape rushing storm surge waters at the height of the storm. Rising so fast they could not move against it, the two eventually helped each other up above the waters over their heads into a tree that saved their lives.

Dominic and Sheila Traina of New Dorp beach told me the story of their house they had lived in for 43 years, where they raised their 4 children, being demolished to a pile of rubble.

Or the story of Patrick Zoda of Midland Beach – one of the very first New York City firefighters to enter the north tower of the World Trade Center, escaping just moments before its collapse on 9/11, who found himself trapped inside his own home as Sandy struck. He spoke of floodwaters forcing him to escape through an open front window as water poured into his home. The waters reached the ceiling and he was forced to wade and swim blocks inland before finding dry ground and safety.

I hope that with this set of portraits and their accompanying stories, readers will get a different perspective on who it was that was devastated in Staten Island. My hope is that this stands as a record of just one of the thousands of communities throughout the region that will feel the effects of hurricane Sandy for years to come.

Firstly, let me say I am most definitely NOT a New York Yankees fan. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have been a devoted Boston Red Sox fan my entire life. The Yankees are our sworn enemies as Red Sox fans and that never changes.

However, in my job as a photographer for Reuters I have covered the Yankees in the MLB playoffs since 1996, when I covered my first New York Yankees World Series championship.

That season a young rookie shortstop named Derek Jeter made his postseason debut as the Yankees went on to win the first of five World Series titles through 2009 (losing two more World Series in 2001 and 2003 along the way). I have seen a lot of playoff baseball games and experienced countless exciting and memorable moments as the Yankees and Jeter proved their greatness time and again.

Jeter is the Yankees’ all-time career leader in hits (3,304), games played (2,585), stolen bases (348), and at bats (10,551). He has been elected to 13 All-Star teams, won five Gold Glove Awards, four Silver Slugger Awards. two Hank Aaron Awards, and a Roberto Clemente Award. Jeter is the all-time MLB leader in hits by a shortstop, and the 28th player to reach 3,000 hits. The 37-year-old Jeter’s 216 hits lead all Major league hitters in 2012.

You could go on forever with statistics about why Jeter is a sure Hall of Famer and clearly one of the very best to ever play the game of baseball. But there is something else about him. I, like most people, have the nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the Yankees captain and for how he conducts himself, how he competes and represents the sport of baseball and the Yankees. It’s truly been a privilege to have photographed him in so many great moments.

Saturday night during Game 1 of the 2012 American League Championship Series at Yankee Stadium, shooting Jeter was something else altogether. The Yankees had staged a stunning rally against the Detroit Tigers scoring four runs to tie the game in the ninth inning sending the game into extra innings. In the top of the 12th inning, fielding a ball by Tigers’ Jhonny Peralta, Jeter ranged to his left. From my position in the first base photographers pit I had a clear view with my 400 mm lens as I followed him while he scooped up the ball. I waited to shoot what appeared to be a routine play, for him to turn and throw as I have seen him do countless times. But he started to fall and scream out and I started shooting. As he went down screaming and tossing the ball on the ground for second baseman Robinson Cano he screamed out again. I just kept shooting.

Every sports photographer knows when someone like Jeter goes down, you just keep shooting.

The stadium was instantly silent. As manager Joe Girardi and a trainer ran to carry him off the field I shot everything I could see until he was out of sight. I ran into the room behind the photographer’s pit at first where we have a small transmitting area and ingested my card into our Paneikon remote editing system and wrote a quick instant message to editor Peter Jones who was filing the pictures of the game to our clients from Toronto. “You cannot move enough pictures of Jeter’s injury” I said. “Oh I know,” is all Peter said back. Peter has edited baseball for me for many years and I knew he know how big an injury picture this was and how it would dominate the story of this game.

Overall Peter moved 21 pictures from myself and the other photographers – Ray Stubblebine, shooting in an overhead position, Bill Kostroun, shooting from Center Field, and Adam Hunger who was shooting from third base.

The Yankees went on to lose the game in the bottom of the 12th as stunned fans and frankly stunned photographers and reporters left the building. In the scheme of things, the pictures of Jeter injuring himself were pretty standard baseball pictures; nothing visually outstanding. But in New York where Jeter is something of a “god” and seemed immortal it took on a larger significance.

I was lucky to be in a position where my pictures were strong and not blocked by players or umpires and the images landed on the front pages of the NY Post and NY Daily News and were widely published. I could not help but wonder if that was the last time I would see Derek Jeter in a playoff baseball game. While I never root for the Yankees, I always will for Derek Jeter.

For any photojournalist, when you cover events of any kind, be it sports or news or daily life, you really never want to be part of the story. Your assignment; to be present to make the best possible images of the events unfolding in front of you is a privilege, and ideally your only mark on the event itself is to come away with as compelling a visual record of what happened as you can under the byline REUTERS/Mike Segar…

However, sometimes… you just can’t get out of the way.

Photo courtesy of Richard Mackson for USA TODAY Sports

My assignment at the London 2012 Olympics along with my colleague Sergio Perez from Madrid, is basketball; 15 days of basketball games, 6 games a day, as nations compete for the Olympic Gold medal. Even for basketball lovers, that’s a lot of basketball.

This is my first time covering an Olympic basketball tournament. I have been fortunate enough in my career at Reuters to have covered many NBA Championships and NCAA championships. I love basketball as a sport that I play, love to watch and love to photograph. Action at the feet of the world’s best players is exciting and fun. My close friend and colleague at Reuters Shannon Stapleton and I spend many hours talking about the game. I always look forward to being on the court, close to the action of the NBA, NCAA and in this case the Olympics where many NBA stars are competing.

On day four of competition one of the world’s best teams, Spain, faced Australia in a second round match-up. The Olympics set up for photographers is somewhat different than for an NBA game. There are cardboard “A-boards,” a short angled wall bearing the Olympic rings and London 2012 logo, between us and the floor along the baseline. In an NBA arena photographers are slightly closer to the court and sit in one row with nothing between us and the court as we sit at the feet of the fans in the front row. At the Olympics, there are padded seats on the floor for us and then a bench behind us for a second row of photographers.

My editor for this tournament is Jeff Haynes, a veteran sports photographer and editor based in Chicago who was editing my pictures from Chicago through Reuters’ Paneikon remote picture editing system. In addition to my cameras and lenses, a laptop connected to our network was also placed behind my seat to ingest images from my cameras.

Photo courtesy of Eric Gay for the Associated Press

Now, anyone who has watched a number of NBA basketball games has surely seen a player occasionally tumble into the fans seated court-side or often over the photographers at the baselines of the court. In nearly 20 years of covering NBA basketball, I have had players land on me and fly over me many times.

Photographers generally try to absorb the impact when a player falls and try to protect their equipment and the player as best they can. It’s not easy! When a 6’-8” or 7’, 250 plus pound athlete moving quickly, dives to save a ball out of bounds or gets slammed off the court by an opponent into us, there is simply nowhere for us to go. Sitting cross-legged in floor seats cramped together with cameras, large lenses, laptop computers, and often floor remote triggered cameras, photographers are vulnerable. Yet my experience has mostly been that the players are really good at relaxing their bodies somehow as they land. We roll over in a heap and they are rarely injured and rarely injure us. Our photo equipment on the courts has taken a beating more than once. Yesterday was a bit different.

In the first half, Spain’s Rudy Fernandez, who plays for the Denver Nuggets in the NBA, suddenly sprinted at full speed from the far end of the court for a loose ball. “Uh-oh” I thought, “here he comes.” Colleagues were on either side of me and Fernandez was not slowing down. He just kept coming, diving for the ball and crashing directly into me at full speed. BANG! Eyes closed, hands up, it was a blur of arms and legs and a loud thump as we slammed backwards. All I could think of was that I was going to slam into the hard metal and wood bench behind me as I braced for impact.

Photo courtesy of Christian Petersen for Getty Images

As the smoke cleared and I looked up, Fernandez was basically lying in my lap head down eyes closed. He rolled forward slightly, moved his hands to his head, moaned loudly and stopped moving. He was in my lap, clearly injured on his head. I could see blood on his fingers on top of his head and apparently he was now unconscious for a few seconds, or nearly so. At this point I was not a photographer. I suppose I just kind of instinctively rubbed his arm and shoulder, kept my hands on his back and held him a bit and said “stay still, stay still man… You’re all right.” I didn’t actually know if he WAS all right at all, but all I could do was to try to comfort him for the 20 or 30 seconds it took the Spain trainers, players and staff to rush to his aid. Anyone would do the same for anyone else injured in their lap, right?

I looked up and realized that fellow photographers and TV crews were shooting the incident from all possible angles. I was in the center of this wreckage but I was not really hurt. A camera with a wide angle lens was somewhere in the strewn mess of my equipment at my side and for a moment I thought to try to find it and take pictures, but with Fernandez lying bleeding on my feet and me the only one trying to help a bit, that wasn’t going to happen.

Photo courtesy of Richard Mackson for USA TODAY Sports

As Fernandez was helped away, he gave me a quick hand slap and looked at me with a weak smile holding a towel to his bleeding head. A small pool of his blood was on the floor. Cameras were checked, blood washed away, computers reattached to networks, equipment sorted out and despite the referee constantly blowing his whistle and yelling at photographers to sit down so he could start the game despite the pool of blood not yet being cleaned up (he wisely ended up waiting) we went back to work. Fernandez received stitches in the locker room and even played a few short minutes in the second half but spent most of it on the bench with a large ice bag on his head. We were never sure what he hit his head on – A lens? A camera? The bench?

After the half ended I knew the other wire photographers were likely to move pictures of the scene to their editors. At first I was slightly annoyed at being identified in their captions and becoming the subject of a news picture. But later, when my friends and colleagues at AFP, Getty Images, AP, USpresswire and others all showed me their pictures of me holding the player as he was down, it was clear that my role as a journalist had, for that moment, ended innocently and out of my control and I was at least shown in a compassionate moment – that I can live with. Now, back to the marathon of games.

Thanks to Getty Images, Agence France-Presse, USA TODAY Sports and Associated Press for their courteous use of their photographs for this blog.

The photos in this project, conceived ahead of this week’s International AIDS Conference, are not the dramatic, heartbreaking, moving sort that we have been used to seeing of AIDS patients from the ‘80s and ‘90s. What I came to quickly realize is that this story, or I should say this portion of it, is about hope – hope and recovery. Living and learning to live as best one can with a disease the world has come to know all too well as an indiscriminate killer.

Take for example the hope that I saw in the eyes of 40-year-old AIDS patient Bobby Billingsly, a man who was close to death when he arrived at Broadway House in Newark, New Jersey, with a CD4 count near zero in 2009, an indication of what is known as Full blown AIDS.

GALLERY: AIDS IN BLACK AMERICA

With the care of nursing, physical therapy and support staff, the latest in AIDS fighting medication, exercise, healthy diet and therapy, Billingsly is becoming the picture of hope – at least to me. He has slowly been able to raise his CD4 count to nearly 200, improving his overall health and hoping to live as long as possible with AIDS. Twenty years ago he would surely have faced a speedy death. Perhaps most hopeful is the attitude he shows of resolve and determination to move forward — something he said he had little of when he arrived. When I asked him how he looks at having AIDS now as opposed to then he says, ”With the medication, workouts, and all we do here, there is reason to believe that you can beat this thing, maybe not beat it, but not let it beat you.” That stuck with me.

Ahead of the AIDS conference, being held in the U.S. for the first time since 1990, I was asked to take a look at something related to HIV/AIDS in America. Not much direction or specifics were given, but rather more of an open palette. My first reaction was: kind of a big subject. But I decided that I would be willing to take a swing at finding out something about people living with the HIV virus in America, who some of them actually are, and try to at least put a human face on this devastating disease to see what I could learn.

After months of mostly meeting with rejection in my efforts to gain access to any AIDS care facility, or clinic, or hospital, I was becoming somewhat frustrated. When a photographer for an international wire service writes and calls trying to get the chance to photograph people infected with HIV and those suffering from AIDS in an attempt to get a glimpse of their life for our readers, it is not surprising that people would be cautious and want to protect their privacy.

After several months I got a reply from Broadway House for Continuing Care in Newark. The staff had identified willing patients who wanted to talk to me about living with HIV/AIDS. The facility stands in the North Ward of Newark, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River and New York Harbor from New York City, in a building featuring soaring two-story marble lobbies that once were home to a public high school in a grander, more prosperous day that this low-income, urban area left behind many years ago. It is New Jersey’s only specialized long-term and residential acute care facility for people living with HIV/AIDS. Opened in 1995 when a consortium of five hospitals in the City of Newark implemented a new concept in community-based AIDS care, Broadway House offers comprehensive in-house medical services to those suffering from HIV/AIDS, in a community where HIV infection is still endemic, in a state that ranks fifth overall in the United States for total AIDS cases.

James R Gonzalez, Broadway House President and CEO, says the change in perception and reality for patients at Broadway House since 1995 has been remarkable. “To see a patient like former NBA player Nate Granger for example, who came here after suffering a stroke, unable to walk or talk, emaciated and dying of AIDS, to see him improve enough to move out of acute care and into Genesis (a nearby affordable housing development)… and to see him move into an experience of an independent, healthy lifestyle living with HIV is such a giant leap from 20 or 25 years ago or even when we opened our doors in 1995.”

“The stories of AIDS patients here have not all been happy, but we see so much hope today where there was far less when we started. That’s a good sign,” Gonzalez said.

LEARNING TO LIVE A BETTER LIFE

Once upon a time not long ago in America, a diagnosis of infection with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was a complicated death sentence. Today, as has been well documented, HIV/AIDS in America is largely becoming a chronic disease rather than a sure death sentence. The ultimate goal for residents at Broadway House, whose average age is 42, is preparation for life back in the community with hopes of living a longer life with the HIV virus.

Sixty-nine-year-old Woodrow “Woody” Barron, a resident of Broadway House for five years who contracted the HIV virus as an intravenous drug user sometime in the mid 1980’s, has seen the full gamut of the disease and the horror it has wreaked, especially on his African American community. I asked him what he thought of the fact that of the more than 1 million people living with HIV in the United States today almost half are African American, yet African Americans make up just 14 percent of the U.S. population (according to the CDC-2012). Barron, who is confined to a wheelchair, said he had a message for young African American men and women at risk of contracting the virus: “Learn a way to live a better life,” he said. “Young people should get tested, regardless of what other people think, stop having unprotected sex, think and open your eyes. It’s your life, not someone else’s.”

What I took away from these men and women at Broadway house was not just hope for HIV/AIDS patients today and their chances of survival, but more a personal sense of the reality that there are still so many at risk and work to be done with that sense of hope in mind. Having seen my own mother die in a nursing home from an incurable disease (Alzheimer’s) where there was no sense of hope, I felt these men and women had hope, with good reason despite the horror of this disease and the fact that it has wreaked such devastation among the African American population in particular.

A NEED FOR BEHAVIORAL CHANGE

Yet, just blocks away in the heart of downtown Newark, on the second floor of a two story walk-up across from Newark City Hall, I found Gary Paul Wright, the executive director of the African American Office of Gay Concern, who painted a somewhat darker picture. His is a community-based organization that deals primarily with outreach to African American gay men and transgender people in Newark in a broad-based initiative to stem HIV infection and educate youth at risk.

“Let’s remember AIDS is a medical issue, first, and it’s deep into our community. The stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS and how people become infected has been deeply detrimental to our community, deeply!” he said. “Because we are not in the schools talking about it, and teaching about it to these kids, even those with HIV in their lives don’t know the real deal… If we could catch people earlier on, at younger ages, and convince them of the message that this is a lifelong disease, you only need to get infected once and it’s with you forever and could kill you, I think we could do a better job. But I just think we all have failed them… and enough is not being done to change that.”

Much like Broadway House patient Woodrow Barron, Wright spoke about change: “The educational deficit about AIDS is one thing, but what we are not talking about largely is behavioral change, that’s really what’s putting people at risk. Kids, African American and Latino kids, here in Newark and elsewhere, need to change their behavior. If Michelle Obama made a condom commercial saying, “You all need to use this,” maybe we would see behavior change, but too much is being left to small CBO’s (Community Based Organizations) like mine to do in this fight. We are fighting for continually reduced dollars to fight this epidemic… I wish that some of these politicians would get out of their air-conditioned chairs and come see what we are dealing with here and in places like this, the inner city where the epidemic really is. We are not talking about getting limo service to a doctor’s office. We’re talking basic health care, basic needs; that’s what’s driving the epidemic in this city.”

SUPPORTING ONE ANOTHER

The CDC statistics about African Americans and HIV are staggering. As an ethnic/racial group, African Americans are the most affected by HIV/AIDS in America, accounting for nearly 70 percent of all new HIV infections in 2009. New HIV infections among young black MSMs (men having sex with men) increased by 48 percent from 2006–2009. At some point in their lifetimes, an estimated 1 in 16 black men and 1 in 32 black women will be diagnosed with HIV infection (CDC/2009).

Knowing this, I turned to the AIDS Service Center of New York City (ASC/NYC) which helps HIV-positive New Yorkers, and those at risk, get a second chance to reclaim their lives by offering a diverse range of individualized, professional services including access to healthcare, social services, peer education and safe-practice counseling.

Having lived in NYC in the last part of the 1980s and through the 1990s, I knew well that the AIDS crisis had hit the gay community here like nowhere else in America at that time. But what is today’s perspective in that community? Who were at risk and was the stigma of HIV infection there different than in a place like Newark?

Through Guy Williams, assistant director of prevention services at ASC/NYC, I was introduced to a group called SWAG (Sexy with a Goal). SWAG is ASC/NYC’s community empowerment initiative to try to end stigma and boost community awareness about HIV/AIDS. This group of young, mostly African American HIV positive males from ages 19-29 actively engage their community, hand out condoms, meet with and identify young gay men at risk and attempt to educate and empower them and try to make a difference — all in an effort to stem HIV infection among their peers. They also socialize together to support each other in their own personal lives.

Again I was drawn to what I had learned in research about how HIV/AIDS so alarmingly and disproportionately affects African Americans today in the U.S. Here was a group of men almost exclusively African American who classify themselves not necessarily as gay but rather MSM’s (men having sex with men). They allowed me to get to know them, hear their stories and photograph their group.

What came through as I witnessed the camaraderie these men displayed with each other – men within their peer group in the face of a terrible illness – was once again a powerful sense of resolve and determination that HIV infection and the stigma that surrounds it was something they were actively addressing head-on. They were sending out a message and a loving or understanding hand to those at risk, while trying to make a difference in their own community, not allowing the disease to control their lives negatively at any cost and by any means. It was impressive, in a way I had not expected to experience.

As Williams tells it, a major problem facing black America and those infected or at risk of HIV is still stigma: “It’s up to the African American community to take the action that the white gay community has already taken in the fight against AIDS. In the 80s and 90s they embraced their status, had no problem saying they were HIV positive, had AIDS and wanted help, and have received the resources and attention needed to start to save them. Until the African American community can erase all the stigma that goes along with being HIV positive, there is still going to be a huge problem making progress against these infection rates.”

As photographers we find reward mostly in making lasting and hopefully meaningful and compelling images of our world now. Yet, what I found most rewarding about this small project in the end was not the pictures I made. For this story, it was the people I met. Glimpsing upon the world they live in, identifying the immense problems and obstacles faced by people infected with HIV that I met, learning their personal stories, happy and sad, put a human face, a name, a voice and a place for me on part of such a huge global pandemic. They are just people coping with this virus, right where I live.

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A note of thanks several people who were instrumental in helping me produce this piece:
Corinn Somers, MaryAnn Tracey and James R Gonzalez at Broadway House for Continuing Care in Newark for their help and support; Rebecca Oneill, Guy Williams, Brooke Bailey, and Franklin Burns at the AIDS Service Center of NYC (ASC/NYC); Gary Paul Wright, Executive Director of the African American Office of Gay Concerns in Newark, New Jersey

One of the many great things about being a Reuters wire service photographer is the wide spectrum of things that you get to witness and photograph from assignment to assignment. Of course, not every assignment brings you to a place or a situation that excites or moves you emotionally or visually, but over the past week I have had the fortunate experience of shooting two completely different types of assignments that brought me to two completely different experiences.

From the final game of the 2012 NBA finals in Miami last Thursday night where I was front and center to photograph LeBron James and the Miami Heat as they celebrated clinching the title victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder where the pure joy and excitement of sport was on full display, to a far different type of emotion at a New York City prison where inmates earned their high school diplomas.

SLIDESHOW: GRADUATING, FROM PRISON

At the NBA finals, hours of preparation, the setting and testing of remote cameras, days of shooting the action of each game in the series and trying to capture the peak of action culminated in the release of emotion the players displayed after reaching their ultimate goal. As a photographer, the nerves and the anticipation of trying to make the best possible pictures of that emotion for our clients around the world dominate your focus and attention. When it is all over and the pictures have been sent a real sense of relief of knowing you captured the best of what happened on the court in front of you comes.

From that to this….

When New York staff photographer and assignments editor Brendan McDermid and Editor in Charge Adrees Latif asked me on Monday after I returned from the NBA finals if I would be interested in going to Rikers Island Prison, New York’s notorious massive correction facility to photograph inmates as they earned their high school diplomas, I immediately knew I was interested in this assignment. After seeing the great work done by my Los Angeles based colleague Lucy Nicholson on two recent stories in jails there, I was eager to see if this assignment might produce a rarely seen look at life inside a jail facility here.

Two massive agencies, the New York City Corrections Department and the New York City Department of Education are responsible for providing high school education to the thousands of young men and women incarcerated in New York’s jails while they await either trial or sentencing through the “East River Academy” on Rikers; a school for inmates.

Reuters reporter Jonathan Allen and I arrived early at Rikers Island’s main entrance near LaGuardia Airport to meet our Corrections Department escorts and to clear the layers of security into the jail complex to access the graduation ceremony inside. At this point I had no idea what I would be allowed to photograph or what type of scene there would be. What I found out was that 4 of the 26 graduating inmates had agreed to be photographed and I was told that any other inmates I photographed would have to remain mostly unidentified or shot from behind.

A surprisingly joyous ceremony took place in an auditorium where inmates under heavy guard were marched in to receive diplomas and awards, with caps and gowns covering their green and white prison jump suits. The ceremony was attended by many department officials, the Department of Education Chancellor, faculty from the academy and a smattering of parents, friends and relatives of the inmates. In an environment like Rikers, well known for its crowded, and often violent conditions, to witness the real joy and pride of these young inmate/students, most of who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, as they experienced a rare moment of achievement and accolade was surprisingly moving.

One inmate in particular, Arisleida Duarte, speaking for her classmates at the ceremony emotionally told the assembly of how the education she received in jail had changed her life. A young mother of two children under the age of 3, both of whom were born within the confines of jail, she particularly moved me. She was clearly proud of her accomplishment under such trying circumstances. She enthusiastically applauded her fellow graduates as they received their diplomas. Yet, when the assembly moved, under the watchful eyes of prison guards, into an adjoining gymnasium for a structured reception and celebration with family and faculty, she discovered that neither the father of her children, her two young sons, nor anyone from her family or friends had come to see her graduate or visit her. Only a lawyer was present. She was visibly so sad and disappointed as she sat with a plate of food talking quietly with her lawyer that I felt so sorry for her. As a father of two children under 10 I could only imagine the heartbreak of not seeing my kids and could not even fathom the disappointment she must have been feeling to learn none of her family was there for her.

From that deep sadness I then saw the pure joy of inmate Abdul Cornelius celebrating his diploma with his mother and sisters. Inmate Jasmine Castrillo who visited with her mother and stepfather was a hard contrast to witness.

While I was there for less than two hours with restrictions on what I was allowed to photograph, I felt truly fortunate to have witnessed an emotional and rare look inside the lives of these inmates. As I left the complex knowing they faced such amazing obstacles in their lives, I felt an even deeper appreciation for their accomplishment of earning a diploma. I also have a much larger appreciation for my own loving and supportive family and friends and the great opportunity I have as a Reuters photojournalist to see so much emotion in life around us.

At Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, about 100 activists
gathered where the group had promised a “pop-up encampment”
emblematic of the movement’s early days in lower Manhattan’s
Zuccotti Park near the Wall Street financial district.

The crowd soon dispersed to other locations to demonstrate,
including directly across the street from Bryant Park at the
Bank of America tower. About two dozen activists picketed in
front of the building’s main entrance. One person was arrested
in the middle of 6th Avenue in front of the building.

The group said it expected greater participation in events
planned for later in the day as it tries to breathe fresh life
into the movement that sparked a wave of nationwide protests
against economic injustice eight months ago.

Other actions included a march with organized labor starting
from New York City’s Union Square in the afternoon and a promise
to “occupy” San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. In Washington,
D.C., there were plans to march to the White House.

A text message alert broadcast late Monday from an Occupy
Wall Street address said: “All civilians stand by for GENERAL
STRIKE at 08:00. No Work, School, or Shopping. All out in the
streets!”

In California, Occupy Oakland has called for protesters to
“occupy” the Golden Gate Bridge in a show of solidarity with
bridge workers engaged in a contract dispute over wages and
benefits.

Police in New York declined to say if any unusual security
precautions were planned but the city’s financial community was
making preparations. At the Deutsche Bank building in lower
Manhattan, the atrium used for much of the winter as an Occupy
meeting spot was closed to the public on Tuesday.

Shortly after the New York Stock Exchange opened on Tuesday
there were no reports of problems.

TARGET: US FINANCIAL POLICIES

Inspired by the pro-democracy Arab Spring, the Wall Street
protesters last year targeted U.S. financial policies they
blamed for the yawning income gap between rich and poor –
between what they called the 1 percent and the 99 percent.

“We have to show the 1 percent what democracy looks like,”
said Joycelyn Gill-Campbell, an outreach coordinator with
Domestic Workers United. “The domestic workers take care of
their children, their homes, and they’re treated like less than
human beings.”

It was unclear whether the event would feed a resurgence of
Occupy after a winter hiatus.

In New York, the Occupy movement lost significant momentum
in November when a pre-dawn sweep broke up the encampment at
Zuccotti Park. Occupy protests in Oakland, California, in
January led to police firing tear gas into crowds of protesters
and more than 200 people were arrested.

Since last fall, when scores of demonstrators set up a vigil
in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and Occupy boasted it had
$500,000 in the bank, donations have slowed to a point where
Occupy was left in a cash crunch earlier this year.

In recent weeks, small groups of New York protesters have
taken to camping out in different locations, including across
the street from the New York Stock Exchange.