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Last October we introduced a new feature in which, each Monday morning this school year, we posted a New York Times photograph without a caption, then invited students to answer three deceptively simple questions about it: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? As student answers poured in to the blog each week — this shows someone learning a back-flip; I think he’s in the military because of his camouflage shirt; The background makes it look like a movie set — our collaborators for the feature, Visual Thinking Strategies, acted as live moderators, linking thoughts and posting further questions intended to help them go deeper and see more. Most weeks that created a lively debate in our comments section, as students of all ages, backgrounds and places pushed each other to find detail and defend interpretations.

Female impersonators, midgets, hermaphrodites, tattooed (all over) men, an albino sword swallower, a human pincushion, a Jewish giant: “Characters in a Fairy Tale for Grown Ups” is the way Diane Arbus once described her subjects—“people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do,” she also said, “invented by belief.”

A video artist who uses YouTube clips, a print-maker and an artist who pairs spoken word with photography are among this year's Turner Prize nominees.

When I tracked down a Nazi soldier’s snapshot of an execution, it reminded me how warily you must tread when you try to enlist the past, however good your intentions

When the artist Peggy Weil first learned about the National Ice Core Laboratory, a few years ago, she was captivated. She contacted Geoffrey Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, and soon found herself inside a giant freezer, bundled in an Arctic-ready parka. (The temperature was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.) With the help of lab assistants, she loaded up a cart with cannisters made of thick cardboard, each containing a small segment of a two-mile-long core from the Greenland ice sheet. Weil trundled her specimens to a cylindrical scanner and photographed them in high resolution. Eventually, she strung together eighty-eight scans, top to bottom. Then she animated them and added an accompanying score, creating a four-and-a-half-hour video, designed to be projected onto a wall.