Day in Photos: Trump Meets Putin, World War II Anniversary, and Wildfire in Spain
A glimpse at the world through the lens of photography.
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By Epoch Times Staff
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August 15, 2025Updated:August 15, 2025
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Day in Photos: National Guard Patrols Washington, Air Balloon Accident, Clashes In South Africa
Day in Photos: Floods In India, Wildfire in Greece, and Sailing Ship Festival
Day in Photos: 105-Year-Old Royal Marines Veteran, Heatwave in Europe, and Grouse Hunting Season
Day in Photos: Wildfire in Portugal, Attack on Refugee Camp, and Traditional Sailing Boats
America in Photos: Flood in Wisconsin, Fire in California, and Astronauts Landing
Day in Photos: NASA Astronauts Return to Earth, Protests in Ivory Coast, and Oldest Oak Tree in France
Day in Photos: Texas Capitol Deserted, Waterspout in Cuba, and JD Vance Goes Fishing
Day in Photos: Kenya Plane Crash, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Protest, and British Chess Championships
Day in Photos: Massive Fires in France, Ice Production, and Lightsaber Up for Auction
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Lloyd Wolf has photographed Mexican dancers at a Bangladeshi festival and taken portraits of a Baptist preacher and an Ethiopian Coptic priest. He's shared chicory coffee with a former Freedom Rider and hours of conversation with a dishwasher turned immigrant activist. On this sticky summer morning, Wolf, the son of a refugee from Nazi Germany, has come to see the supermarket pizza guy. Mohamed Alassane ag Almoctar immigrated from Mali, and moments after he opened his red townhouse door, Wolf began chatting about Malian musicians to put his host at ease. Then he gently began asking questions to understand his journey from the Sahara to suburban Virginia. Wolf has photographed the people and neighborhoods along this same three-mile stretch of Arlington County for almost two decades. It's part of an ambitious effort to capture life in a community demographers once designated a 'world in a Zip code,' with people hailing from more than 125 countries. Working in one of the most diverse places in the country, Wolf and the rotating crew behind the Columbia Pike Documentary Project have been building the case, year after year, that their modest swath of storefronts and rising apartment buildings just outside Washington can be a model of American progress. They have witnessed the community drawing in new families, opening and shuttering businesses, hosting cultural celebrations, and, more recently, bracing as federal authorities under the Trump administration have pursued a mass-deportation campaign and barred most refugees from entering the country. As Wolf settled in, Ag Almoctar changed into the type of soft blue, flowing gown he sometimes wore to keep cool in Mali. He then served up sweet mint tea and stories from Timbuktu — and his new neighborhood. His father hauled salt across the desert in camel caravans, before drought wiped them out. Ag Almoctar's grocery store co-workers are from Morocco, Sudan, Gambia, Senegal, Malaysia and beyond. He had never touched pizza dough before he was enlisted to make $5 pepperoni specials, plus chicken and subs, at his branch of Harris Teeter, he told Wolf, and he learned everything he needed on the job. 'That is America,' he said. Wolf positioned him in front of a painting of camels lined up in the blazing sun, but wasn't sure whether that pose might be too cliché. He captured him lifting his hand toward his turban, expertly pouring tea from high above a small glass cup, then got him with and without an indigo veil covering his nose and mouth. As Ag Almoctar stepped toward a busy street in front of his brick home for a few photos, donning the brilliant blue garb of his nomadic North African Tuareg culture, his graciousness and willingness to play along was tinged with a wave of unease. If police see me like this, will they stop me? he asked Wolf. 'No, you'll be okay,' Wolf told him. The Columbia Pike Documentary Project was co-founded by Wolf and longtime Arlington resident Paula Endo, with help from her husband Todd. As children, the two of them had been forced, with 125,000 other Japanese Americans, into internment camps during World War II. 'What they learned as family and community is that you can't take liberties for granted,' said Erik Endo, one of their sons. The trauma of that experience shaped the way they wanted to live, he said. 'It was a larger picture of looking out for, and giving voice to, people in communities that didn't necessarily have that power.' For Todd, that meant fighting for a living wage and a lifetime of civic activism, including marching for civil rights in Selma, Alabama. Paula found power in 'giving voice to people through their art,' Erik Endo said. 'It's one thing to tell someone else's story, but it's another to help them learn how to tell their own story.' Paula started a photo project for neighborhood teens in the Columbia Pike area, giving them cameras and guidance, and inspiring them to explore their own community. They published a book of their photos and stories in 2003, which became a precursor to the broader documentary project. The two are now in a nursing home, in rooms near each other, struggling with the effects of dementia, their son said. Todd Endo is in hospice care. But their work continues. Dewey Tron was one of Paula Endo's students, and he is a key participant in the broader Columbia Pike documentary project. Tron has chronicled the humanity and churn of change in the neighborhoods along Columbia Pike. He has tried to find the delicate balance between a desire to capture compelling images and his sense of responsibility to the people in the pictures, he said. Tron said he was conflicted when the increasingly run-down Oriental Supermarket he had visited since he was a boy was due to close. The Cambodian immigrant owner had shared his struggles trying to keep it alive. 'I took a picture of him. It just felt sad for me, because I am never going to see it again and this was the only evidence of it,' Tron said. 'It's just like mourning, constantly, these places that are disappearing. And it seems like that's the only time it catches our attention is if it's about to disappear.' Tron also photographed the bustling Megamart Express that took over the space and caters to the large local Latino population. The place of his memories was gone, but there was also rebirth. 'They really have made that business boom,' he said. Tron's parents, who immigrated from Vietnam, spelled his name Duy Tran. He decided to use the name Dewey Tron professionally, because he considers it more distinctive and less likely to be mispronounced. Sushmita Mazumdar, an artist who grew up in Mumbai, has interviewed immigrants from Afghanistan, South Africa, Bolivia, Bangladesh and Ethiopia as part of the project. She joined Wolf, Tron and other participants seven years ago. Wrestling with change is a constant in the work. At Mazumdar's Studio PAUSE on Columbia Pike, which she describes as a community space for art and stories, there's an exhibition of photographs from the documentary project hanging on a wall that used to be behind an old international money-transfer counter. One series shows another old grocery store, a Food Star; a frustrated college student in a jeans jacket, standing before a crane and apartment complex, lamenting the community 'losing its culture'; and a vast hole in the ground where the store once stood, illuminated by stars of light, giving the scene a stark beauty. Mazumdar likes using photographs as a jumping-off point, and is also involved in related video and oral history work. 'When we get to know each other's stories, it becomes a community,' she said. The photos have been published in a blog and three books. More than 10,000 of them have been archived in the Library of Virginia, where they will be preserved in perpetuity and eventually made available to the public. 'A neighborhood that isn't changing, there's no real reason to continue to document it. But this one just had so much going on,' said Dale Neighbors, the library's visual studies collection coordinator, who acquired the collection. He points to the energy and color of Wolf's photo capturing a Bolivian dance parade more than a decade ago. 'Every time you look at it, the eye lands sort on something slightly different,' Neighbors said. There's the bigger picture too, he said: 'Individually, they're beautiful. But the value of that collection really is sort of seeing more than one, to really get a sense of the community and the diversity.' For Wolf, the work has left a deep imprint. Photographing the Prio Bangla, the long-running cultural festival, time after time, and the Bolivian celebrations, with so many people 'dancing, singing, proudly expressing themselves in my own community was a revelation. A revelation of joy,' he said. Finding people, asking them about their lives, listening to them and taking their photographs, that entire process is, in many ways, a process of building a community, not just documenting one. Wolf often stays in touch with the people he photographs, seeing where they go, what they do and how their lives change, and thinks about how those connections echo with his own past. He met and interviewed a Guatemalan volunteer at Arlington Public Schools, where students speak 90 languages, among them indigenous languages such as Quechua and Aymara. Claudia Cuellar told him how she cleaned bathrooms here, despite being a secretary back home. There was no embarrassment, she said, 'because my father and my mom always taught me that if the job is decent, you have to do it. … We have to do everything with the power of our hands to help our kids advance.' He said the moment reminded him of one of his mother's uncles, a poor Jewish immigrant who cleaned toilets on the New York State Thruway after arriving in the U.S. from what is now Poland. 'My grandfather and especially my mother often told us that this man was a mensch … a solid, upstanding, righteous and honest man, irrespective of social station,' he said. That work, he said, lifted the family from poverty. 'I kind of cried a bit at the time, a complex silent cry, for her, for all of us who have been able to take the opportunities provided to contribute to America, despite real hardship, real struggle,' Wolf said. In the project's 2015 book, 'Living Diversity,' Takis Karantonis, then leading a Columbia Pike revitalization group, wrote as part of the introduction that the photographs, like all great art and images, raise challenging questions. 'Is 'The Pike' beautiful or ugly? Does it have a character or is it a soulless suburban thoroughfare? Is there a past worth preserving? Is there a future worth pursuing? And who gets to decide? Who owns this place anyway?' he wrote. A decade later, Karantonis said the answer to that last question is clear: 'We do.' The tens of thousands of people who live in the area, even with earnest and impassioned debates over gentrification and housing affordability, live richer lives for being part of such a diverse community, he said. Karantonis, an economist who immigrated from Greece, now serves as Arlington's county board chair. He keeps the documentary project's three books, and the earlier one from Paula Endo and her teenage students, on his desk as a reminder of how special that place is. The long-running and largely upbeat photo project has, in recent months, been unfolding as the Trump administration has assailed diversity initiatives and pursued a nationwide immigration crackdown, including operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Columbia Pike area. Mazumdar has taken to carrying a photo of her U.S. passport in her phone, so she can produce it easily if challenged by federal authorities. 'I'm a citizen, but I have an accent,' Mazumdar said. She also wanted to provide comfort to her Midwestern in-laws who are worried about her. Tron said capturing candid street scenes along the Pike, which he liked doing for years, now seems like an unwelcome intrusion at times, so he's pulled back a bit. 'People live in fear today,' said Karantonis, who has followed community reports of federal immigration authorities detaining people in Arlington. National polling has shown a sharp partisan divide over Trump's efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. A Wall Street Journal poll in July, for example, found 91 percent of Democrats polled think those efforts have gone too far. Republicans were evenly split, at 44 percent, on whether Trump's efforts were 'about right' or had gone 'not far enough.' In deep Blue Arlington, there has been loud criticism of the administration, with local Democrats and an immigrant advocacy organization assailing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem for appearing in the county to underscore the administration's aggressive posture. There has also been quieter community support for some undocumented parents and others, including an asylum-seeker called in unexpectedly by immigration authorities in July. The woman was released with an ankle monitor and is terrified of being taken away from her young children, said a woman who was photographed for the project. She spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss her own efforts to provide assistance. The U.S. has been through perilous times before, Wolf said, from the Civil War and Jim Crow to the McCarthy era. But he believes its deep-seated values, its trust in the motto e pluribus unum, will eventually prevail, he said. 'I hope the ship rights itself,' Wolf said. From the beginning, the idea of exploring The Pike so deeply, and for so long, was to show what it's really like to live in such a community. 'The community was very, very diverse and it seemed to be working — and that was something we thought was worth examining,' Wolf said. Last month, he and Tron each visited Paula Endo, who shared that vision, at her bedside in the nursing home. Wolf considers her a big sister, and remains in awe of her work. Endo documented her own mother's process of dying in haunting and beautiful photographs, which are marked by a kind of glowing, spiritual light. Wolf has a self-portrait Paula took as part of that series on display in his home. Tron told her how much it meant that she helped set him on a path to being an artist. When Ag Almoctar moved with his wife, a U.S. citizen, to a brick townhouse a few blocks from Columbia Pike two years ago, he began building a life he believes might be possible only in America. He attends the Bangladeshi mosque, sometimes grabs food from an Afghan restaurant up the street, and communes with a colleague from Mongolia. They are both former desert people, and 'we have the same culture,' he said. Ag Almoctar used to run a guesthouse and guide service in Timbuktu, but attacks by extremists shut foreign tourism down, ending his livelihood — which had allowed him to build two schools, a clinic and 15 community wells — and forced him to leave. When he first told people he was moving to the U.S., they warned him he would be shot. Now, at work, his colleagues ask whether he's on drugs because he looks so cheery. 'I didn't take any pill. I'm just happy,' he told Wolf as they shared tea in his dining room. 'I think this is the one thing that makes America famous in the world. Because if you come here, you're white, you are green, you're blue, you're whatever, you're American,' he said.
Epoch Times
2 days ago
- Epoch Times
Day in Photos: Trump Meets Putin, World War II Anniversary, and Wildfire in Spain
Open sidebar A glimpse at the world through the lens of photography. Listen Save By Epoch Times Staff | August 15, 2025Updated:August 15, 2025 Share this article Leave a comment More Photo Pages see more Day in Photos: National Guard Patrols Washington, Air Balloon Accident, Clashes In South Africa Day in Photos: Floods In India, Wildfire in Greece, and Sailing Ship Festival Day in Photos: 105-Year-Old Royal Marines Veteran, Heatwave in Europe, and Grouse Hunting Season Day in Photos: Wildfire in Portugal, Attack on Refugee Camp, and Traditional Sailing Boats America in Photos: Flood in Wisconsin, Fire in California, and Astronauts Landing Day in Photos: NASA Astronauts Return to Earth, Protests in Ivory Coast, and Oldest Oak Tree in France Day in Photos: Texas Capitol Deserted, Waterspout in Cuba, and JD Vance Goes Fishing Day in Photos: Kenya Plane Crash, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Protest, and British Chess Championships Day in Photos: Massive Fires in France, Ice Production, and Lightsaber Up for Auction To ensure we reach the high standards of reliability and neutrality that you expect from us, we are engaging with Ad Fontes Media to analyze our content. If you find an article you think falls short of the standard, please submit the link through this form. Copyright © 2000 - 2025 The Epoch Times Association Inc. All Rights Reserved.
