If you want people to see something, it's probably best to put it somewhere visible. For a long time, that might have meant the pages of Life magazine. Today, perhaps that means a place where passers-by can stop for a minute, or tweet a photo, or even listen to an audio guide just by dialing a phone number. Say, for example, in New York City.

That's exactly what you'll find if you happen to be ambling around 6th Avenue, in the windows of the International Center of Photography.

The unorthodox digital display — three mounted monitors running a looped slideshow — is a tribute to Gordon Parks, the first African-American staff photographer for Life magazine, who would have been 100 this year.

And although the installation is undeniably modern in contrast to the photos themselves, Parks might have approved of the idea.

"It's so Gordon Parks, in a way," says curator Maurice Berger. "He wanted to reach as many people as possible."

How do you sum up the life and work of someone like Parks — who escaped poverty in order to document it, who endured racism while photographing it, a writer-photographer-filmmaker whose work spans a huge swath of the 20th century?

It's next to impossible in this square-inch of cyberspace — and the ICP's window installation probably isn't meant to do it, either. It may be as simple as raising awareness.

"We want all the younger generations to know who this guy is," Berger says.

And who was he?

"He was a jack of all trades and, in a funny way, a master of all," says Berger. Case in point: On the Gordon Parks foundation website, you'll find photos of the civil rights movement and of poverty around the world — right next to glamorous fashion shoots.

He was a documentarian, "both of how far we've come and how far we need to go."

You can learn more about Parks in this 1997 interview, or on the Gordon Parks Foundation website.

You may have heard of Dear Photograph, a website that invites readers to submit photos of photos — images from the past, set in the present. Over the past year, the website received thousands of submissions. In fact, enough for a book, also called Dear Photograph, which was released earlier this month.

Taylor Jones, 22, is the man behind the project. He came up with the idea last year while sitting at his parents' kitchen table. While flipping though a family photo album, he stumbled across a picture of his younger brother, Landon.

"It was his third birthday," Jones says. "He had a Winnie the Pooh cake, and I was sitting in the same spot my mom was when she took the original photo." Landon was also sitting in his same birthday seat.

So, Jones held up the old picture — taking care to line up kitchen cupboards just so — and snapped a photo. He posted it on his blog, and the rest, he says, is history.

"I'm a new-age nostalgic guy, I guess you could say," he says.

You can submit your photograph on Jones' blog.

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This is the final installment of our weeklong look at five of those photographers.

Susan Worsham describes her work better than I could, so in her words:

I photograph the landscape of my childhood, but through the lens of my adult self.

One of my muses, Margaret Daniel, is my oldest neighbor on Bostwick Lane, and one of the last threads remaining from my childhood, since all of my family has passed. ...

I can remember one particular time when I visited Margaret. I looked out of her large picture window and saw what looked like a nest or hammock of small red berries draped between the winter trees. I asked Margaret what it was. She answered, "Why, that's bittersweet. Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane."

Maybe that is what it means to me to be a Southern artist. Putting sugar in my tea to make it go down easier. Maybe not hiding the real taste, but being able to taste both the bitter and the sweet.

In the South it seems like there is a name, a history and a story for everything, just like in Margaret's house. She calls the flowers in her yard "Frannies" and "Mrs. Macs." ...

"Look at Esther growing in your old backyard."

My mother's name was Esther. She is referring to a camellia bush that my dad, who died when I was in the third grade, planted for my mom long ago.

In Margaret's kitchen, her homemade bread or ... chocolate chip cookies can be found baking, set to the same timer that she used to use ... in her old biology lab. The ticking sound is a reminder to me to appreciate every moment I have with them.

When I ask Margaret what it means to be Southern, she says: "It is just liking to keep what was."

(See Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV)

Of all the memorable photographs that came out of the Vietnam War, Horst Faas was probably responsible for more of them than any other photographer.

Faas, who died in Munich on Thursday at age 79, spent eight years in Vietnam for The Associated Press. He was willing to go anywhere no matter what the risks, and he was relentless in his pursuit of images that captured the war.

He won a Pulitzer Prize. He was badly injured. And he was a stern taskmaster who helped mentor countless photographers, both Vietnamese and Westerners.

He assembled some of the best photography from Vietnam in Requiem, a 1997 book about photographers killed on both sides of the conflict.

Having survived all those years as a combat photographer, Faas returned to Vietnam in 2005 for a reunion of the press corps 30 years after the war's end. He fell ill there, the result of a spinal hemorrhage that left him paralyzed from the waist down for the final years of his life.

Just dwell on this image for a minute or two, and you get a sense of the power of Faas' photos:

There's much, much more where this came from, in the full obituary.

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we're looking at five of the photographers on that list.

We all have our ways of escaping the daily grind. We watch TV, or go for a run — or a drive. When Texas photographer Brandon Thibodeaux wants a break from the "constrained world of deadlines," he gets in his car and heads down Highway 61 to the areas around Mound Bayou — a black-majority area of Mississippi with a history as rich as the Delta soil.

PBS has the story of Mound Bayou, which, in short, goes like this:

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Southern Confederacy, had a brother, Joseph. And Joseph had a plantation. And on that plantation, a man named Benjamin Montgomery was born into slavery.

Montgomery managed the plantation until the end of the Civil War, when he bought it from Davis and built an autonomous community of freemen. Hard economic times ensued, and Montgomery sold it back — but his son, Isaiah, executed his father's dream: He bought more than 800 acres in the wilderness of northwest Mississippi and founded an independent black community called Mount Bayou.

"There is this elegance," Thibodeaux says of his wanderings through the area. "You might see the parking lot party, trailer, white-washed chapels — but when you venture off the road and into the communities, you realize there is a sense of pride. You see it in the family unit, in their ties at church."

The story of Mound Bayou gets complicated when you fast-forward to today. Most recent estimates put the population at around 1,900. And historic and cultural riches don't always translate in hard numbers: According to the U.S. census, about 35 percent of the population in Bolivar County lives below the poverty line.

So, while Thibodeaux may come here to escape his deadlines, plenty of Mound Bayou residents leave the city limits to find better work. The economic hardship is real, but that's not his focus. He's off duty and exploring, making friends and finding an appreciation for one enclave of people after another.

"There's so much fertile ground to explore," he says. "There's so much in your own backyard."

(See Part I, Part II and Part III)

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we're looking at five of the photographers on that list.

How much does geography frame an artist's vision? It's hard to say; just ask Tammy Mercure.

"I don't think of myself as any particular kind of photographer, like a Southern photographer or a woman photographer," Mercure writes in our correspondence. "The South has very much shaped my photography, though."

Born in Iowa and currently teaching at King College in Bristol, Tenn., Mercure has a few ongoing documentary projects, including this one about tourist towns near the Great Smoky Mountains, a ridge that runs between Tennessee and North Carolina.

Mercure seems to shoot with a twinkle in her eye, which she keeps out for wryly humorous scenes — like people sitting at a park with their backs to the beautiful view. She also seems sincerely affectionate for what she captures in places like Pigeon Forge, Tenn., home to Dolly Parton's amusement park, and Cherokee, N.C.

"The pure spectacle of the towns brimming with shopping, all-you-can-eat buffets and pure entertainment stop some visitors from even seeing the nature up close and unmediated," her website reads.

She also explains that there are several things she appreciates: "The biggest is that the majority of the people I meet are really passionate about their 'thing,' whether it is NASCAR or a beauty pageant. I feel that they appreciate me for being into photography — and take the time to really show [me] something."

"I plan on living somewhere in the South for the rest of my life. The tea is sweet, and the weather is good for shooting every day of the year. And one can always find a live wrestling match every Saturday or just show up to Junior Johnson's house and get a hearty breakfast."

(See Part I and Part II)

The current issue of Oxford American magazine, known as "the Southern magazine of good writing," is nicknamed the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we'll take a look at five of the photographers on that list.

Frank Hamrick controls the means of production: He shoots film. He develops it. He makes his own paper and prints. He works in series, and literally sews it all together in limited edition books. All by hand. There's an intense thoughtfulness, deliberateness and slowness to his work that you just don't see too often these days.

I mean, in response to a few casual questions, he sent me a four-page meditation. And I read every word of it.

"Chicken is chicken," he says, "but we all realize its taste will be affected by whether we fry it, broil it, bake it, grill it or microwave it."

Like most photographers, Hamrick has digital cameras — even an iPhone. But the chicken analogy is one way to explain why he mostly uses a large, clunky camera. Perhaps the equivalent of a long marinade and slow roast. (Not necessarily better than a quick fry, but certainly more complex.)

Hamrick was born and raised in Georgia, and is now an assistant professor at Louisiana Tech University. He has spent most of his life in the south, with brief interludes in New Mexico, where he received his M.F.A., and in Italy, where he taught a course. His photos are often about his immediate surroundings: family, friends, home, his garden.

"Leaving the South for a while to live in different places helped me better understand who I am as a person and what it means to be from the South," he says.

"Although," he continues, "I am not sure what being labeled a 'Southern artist' tells anyone, other than the fact that I am from and live in the South. [It] can generate more questions than answers."

But he's clearly OK with ambiguity. I mean, look at the photos. What do you get out of them?

"My photographs are not necessarily created to illustrate or provide answers," Hamrick says.

"If anything, I would like for my images to generate more questions. I do not see them as endpoints, but rather starting places where I give viewers ideas to ponder and allow room for their imagination to create the rest of the story."

Hamrick was nominated for the the magazine's list by Jim Sherraden of the famous Nashville letterpress studio Hatch Show Print — where Hamrick spent a few weeks in 2007. That's another thing Hamrick does: his own letterpress printing. That's the gravy on the chicken.

See more on his website.

(See Part I: Unseen Scenes Of Guantanamo)

The current issue of Oxford American magazine (known as "the Southern magazine of good writing") is titled the "Visual South Issue." In its 100 under 100 list, the magazine identifies "the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South." This week, we'll take a look at five of the photographers on that list.

Christopher Sims used to be a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He would spend hours and hours each day looking at photos of war, he explains over the phone from his home in North Carolina, where he's an instructor at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.

Although the museum's photo collection is one of the largest of its kind, Sims explains, "there were a lot of things that were missing, and that's because they were never photographed in the first place — or because they didn't survive the war."

Sims had that in mind during and after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I knew I didn't want to go to Afghanistan or Iraq myself because there were a lot of people already doing that," he says. "I was interested in finding, just like at the Holocaust museum, the places that there weren't photographs of. I was thinking of an archive for the future, and searching for images in the collection that other people weren't concentrating on."

That idea took him through much rigmarole and red tape to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — home to the American Naval base and its controversial prison, created during the Bush administration. Sims went once in 2006, and again in 2010.

"[Guantanamo Bay] holds a certain meaning to us," he says, "but we don't really know what the place looks like."

Because access to the prison is very limited for photographers, Sims focused on the scenes that are a backdrop to what happens on the base, rather than the people: the landscape, the architecture, the mundane details of daily life.

"You think Guantanamo, and you think its going to be a very high-tech, formidable prison system in a base that's sophisticated and up-to-date," he says. "The base as a whole kind of feels like a leftover from the Cold War. ... It's this very unique place — a U.S. military base in a communist country on a tropical island."

This peripheral approach to war shows up in Sims' other work, too. The photos in his series "Theater of War" were not taken in the Middle East, though it may initially appear that way. The images actually show "the fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases, places largely unknown to most Americans," his website explains.

As to whether or not he considers himself a "Southern photographer," Sims is somewhat on the fence. But the sound of his 1-year-old chattering in the background reveals a little something. "He's obsessed with horses," Sims says. His wife is from Louisville, Ky., and, accordingly, they just celebrated the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.

I can't remember exactly when I received the first flower email, but I do remember it was sometime in 2005.

At the time, I had no idea why my old friend Darryl Pitt had sent it, but I didn't think too much about it. A flower. OK. That's nice. But then the flowers continued to arrive day after day after day — and soon a modest digital bouquet turned into a meadow, and that meadow into a hillside of, as always, flowers.

There was no explanation attached to these emails — only that he was shooting exclusively in a garden he passed each day in Riverside Park at 91st street in New York City. No special effects. Just one man, one camera, one garden.

I was surprised, really, that he'd developed this passion for the botanical, because Darryl's photographic career was spent in the music world shooting for magazines like Rolling Stone, and album covers for artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Ray Vaughan. People, yes. Flowers, no.

Still, each day, I and a handful of Darryl's close friends opened our inboxes to discover another of his discoveries. A tight tangle of petals at dawn. A single blossom melting into darkness.

It recently occurred to me that it was no accident that these flowers started showing up when they did. As I mentioned, it was 2005. That was a significant year for Darryl, because it was when he learned this his good friend and client, renowned saxophonist Michael Brecker, was seriously ill. It turned out that Michael had myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS.

MDS is actually a group of diseases that attack the bone marrow and blood, and for folks like Michael who contract the disease, the best shot at survival is to get a blood stem cell transplant from a matching donor. That is no easy task, and it's one that takes time — something Michael didn't have much of. So Darryl, along with Michael's wife, Susan, went to work at jazz festivals and concerts asking people to be tested and join the donor roll — if not to help Michael, than for someone else, somewhere else, suffering from the disease.

So why the flowers? It happened that early on in Michael's illness, Darryl took a trip to Death Valley, where there had been an extraordinary six inches of rain — three times more than the normal spring rainfall — and the result was an explosion of wildflowers. Suddenly the desert was alive with reds and yellows, purples and oranges. Darryl called Michael and, standing in that field hundreds of miles away, told his friend about the startling, tenuous beauty before him. Michael asked for pictures, but the photographer in Darryl refused. Flowers weren't his strength, and each time he tried to capture them, the image just didn't turn out right.

Back in New York, when Darryl was helping Michael prepare for his first hospitalization, Michael once again asked for photos of flowers from Death Valley and, once again, Darryl refused. It sounds kind of harsh, but really he just couldn't stand the fact that he'd give anybody, much less a really dear friend, a crummy photograph. What Darryl didn't know at the time was that Michael had planted a seed.

And one day, as Darryl was biking home, he noticed something he'd never paid any attention to before: a garden, with flowers. The next morning, he returned with his camera.

During Michael's hospitalization, a wall in his room filled up with Darryl's flowers, all taken from that same garden at 91st in Riverside Park.

Michael died in January of 2007. During that month, and in fact during much of that year, not many flowers showed up. But in the years since, they've returned. And now, once again, they are a daily occurrence. Sometimes a word or two accompanies them, but mostly not. Just a quiet meditation from the dawn or the dusk — an homage to the power of friendship and the beauty it inspires.

Koalas: They're downright adorable, and that's obvious. (Don't even try to suppress the high-pitched coo.)

"They're pretty much exactly what you think," admits National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, who was on assignment in Australia last October for a story in the magazine's current issue.

Except — his job was to photograph a scene that isn't so cute. In fact, a bit of an editor's note: Some of these photos are kind of grisly to look at. "The goal," he says, "was to tell the story of the plight of the koala in the northern half of Australia."

So what's causing this "plight," exactly? Well, somewhat obviously, it's us.

"You think we're developing stuff here [in the States]," Sartore says over the phone, "you should go to Australia. Koalas can't take it. They're not fast; they can't defend themselves against dogs and against traffic."

Some research shows that we humans almost can't help but find koalas cute; and that, to a degree, might work in their favor toward survival.

But they're just not the brightest crayons in the box. They need about 20 hours of sleep in order to live off their nutrient-deprived diet of eucalyptus. They also, obviously, need trees. So when eucalyptus is wiped away in huge swaths for development, koalas aren't smart or fast enough to relocate.

Though it's tempting to fantasize about having these cuddly creatures in your front yard, the reality (and it has become a reality) seems a lot less enchanting. You can read more about it, and what rescue groups are doing for koalas, in the article.

But there's a silver lining. This past Monday, certain koalas in Australia's northern regions, were officially recognized by the government as "threatened species."

"Koala populations are under serious threat from habitat loss and urban expansion," the official news release reads, "as well as vehicle strikes, dog attacks and disease."

According to Sartore, that's a step in the right direction.

You may have read about the demise of the book. You know, the thing that has been around for more than a millennium — dead trees, covered in ink. A repository for the exchange of ideas, and stories — a place of sanctuary, solace and sometimes entertainment. Doomed.

I'm here to tell you: Not so fast. We don't know where the e-book revolution will take us, but we do know it is going to take awhile to completely eliminate books. We still love books. We love the way they look and feel and what the physical object tells us about our history and society. I love perusing a person's bookshelf. It reveals so much: biography, experience and interests.

Many people still prize books, possess them and want to show them off. Nothing illustrates this as well as the incredible effort that goes into designing the space to store your books.

Alex Johnson is part of the online team at Britain's Independent newspaper, and a few years ago he started a blog, Bookshelf, devoted entirely to how we store our books.

"This was an early moment when e-books and e-readers were becoming popular, and I felt like, in a very small way indeed, the blog helped to show that there was still considerable — indeed growing — interest in reading 'proper' books," Johnson says.

In his just-published book Bookshelf, he celebrates the creative responses to the challenge of book display. Bookshelf is a riot of ingenuity and creativity, featuring works by designers from around the world, who have interpreted and reinterpreted the humble bookshelf.

There are variations on the basic horizontal planks between vertical stabilizers; ingenious pieces of sculpture that house books; practical pieces of furniture; chairs or tables that double as book storage units. Something to suit every taste.

Gravity-defying designs include "Conceal," which gives stacks of books the look of floating unmoored on a wall; the ingenious "Z Shelf," where books are magically moored slightly a-kilter; and the rather astonishing "Cantilever Bookshelf," a supple arm made of steel, protruding from a concrete base, that bends to the weight of the books on top.

Johnson's personal favorites are the designs that integrate storage into furniture. He cites the "Bibliochaise" and "Lost in Sofa" as two examples. "They feel like mini book dens," he says, "which is a lovely sensation. It comes back to the idea of books providing a den or sanctuary. I don't think e-readers provide much of a sanctuary."

The bookshelves that Johnson has found add another dimension to the whole archaeology of books and their place in the home. The fact that so much creativity and thought has gone into thinking about a "home" for books shows that our love affair with books is far from over. "Books are part of who we are," says Johnson.

So how does Johnson himself store books?

"Ha, ha! Just as the cobbler's children have the shoddiest shoes, my bookshelves and bookcases are spectacularly dull and straightforward," he says. "Most of them are standard, horizontal wooden shelves painted white in the basement of the house where I work."

In addition to a few glass-fronted bookcases in the sitting room for the "smarter volumes," Johnson confesses to something that every book lover can identify with: "I'm afraid we also just have piles of them lying around the house. Like many families who read a lot, we don't really have enough space for them all."

Alex, there's a great book called Bookshelf. You should check it out; it might give you some creative storage ideas for all those books!

---

Madhulika Sikka is executive producer of NPR's Morning Edition.

What does daily life look like in Afghanistan? It's something we rarely see despite more than a decade of U.S. military involvement.

I'm filing from Kabul, where I will be for a few more days before heading south to Kandahar province. In the capital, there seems to be a resilience gained from decades of conflict.

Here you'll find a culture that is alive and thriving. The city nurtures a micro-economy of independent businessmen and women, buying, selling and trading wares.

Thousands of shop owners open their doors for business every morning. The money-changers and cart-pushers take to the gritty streets. It is a vibrant confluence of merchants and customers doing business in both traditional and newer ways.

Kabul is better off than anyplace else in Afghanistan, yet hardship is visible on the streets. Elderly men in tattered clothes and women in dusty blue burqas beg for money as they float between the passing cars.

The city's population is swelling with an influx of people from the war-stricken, impoverished countryside. Traffic here is mind-bending. Security is everywhere, all the time: a reminder of the never-ending threat of an attack.

Yet life goes on — even in the face of an uncertain future.

Zoe Strauss is not really a photographer. She sees herself primarily as an installation artist. About 12 years ago, someone gave her a camera for her birthday, and she used it for a project called Under I-95.

She would take photos in her South Philadelphia neighborhood and display them there, too — on concrete columns supporting an interstate overpass. She wanted her images to be outside, in an urban setting, at home.

That idea grew into her one-woman Philadelphia Public Art Project, which puts the pictures back into the community, under freeways and, most recently, on massive billboards around the city. And now it's not just her neighborhood that will see the photos.

Strauss' work has earned her a Pew fellowship, a spot in the Whitney Biennial, and most recently, the billboard photos — 54 of them — were part of a mid-career exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But they were not advertisements for the exhibit, she's sure to emphasize.

"Just photos," she says. "No text or logos. I want people to take a lot of questions away from the billboards and make their own narrative about them."

 

One billboard shows the close-up of the face of a heavyset woman with short, curly hair, on a field of sky blue.

"So, I live at 13th and Dickinson," Strauss explains. "This woman lives across from me, Antoinette Conti. It's just neighbors on the billboard."

This South Philly neighborhood is changing. Conti, a second-generation Italian-American, is the old guard: She has lived here almost a half-century. Italians like Conti are being replaced by Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans.

Six weeks later, Strauss replaced the billboard photo of Conti with a photo of one of her newer neighbors, Fernando Trevino. In effect, the billboard was edited, like a movie — like consecutive frames on a strip of celluloid — one image replaced by another, and a third meaning emerges.

Strauss points to the top of the billboard, where you can see clustered spires of a cellphone tower behind it. "When you step back a bit," she says, it "looks like a crown that's on top of the billboard. This is 'La Corona' ... 'crown' in both Italian and Spanish."

"It breaks out of the museum," says photographer and writer Allan Sekula, who was involved in a billboard art project last year in Los Angeles. "She brings the whole city into it with the billboards. It's a giant theatrical operation using photos as the tokens."

Sekula says the strength of Strauss' pictures is not how each stands on its own, but how they fit into the larger system of interrelated meanings.

"It's partly a cumulative effect, and more than one image," he says.

These images come from tough neighborhoods populated by damaged people: bad teeth, gunshot wounds, an arm scarred by a hundred tiny cuts; ear lobes split open where earrings used to be. Boys flipping over abandoned mattresses on the sidewalk. Some of this might seem exploitative. Strauss says she's just trying to connect with people — it's coming out of an interaction.

"I'm not looking for one thing," she explains. "Just a moment in which there's going to be an interesting exchange."

Since she started to take photos, Strauss' career has taken off. But the pictures she takes are just people she meets, and things she finds, on the street.

"I'm drawn to people with a strong sense of self. That's the strongest thread through the portraiture," she says.

After 10 weeks, her images are gone and the billboards have reverted back to what they were. That enormous picture of Antoinette, which became Fernando, is now an ad for a local auto body shop, and its meaning has shifted yet again.

Buddha reached enlightenment under a tree. Cinnamon comes from trees — as do apples and latex and frankincense, not to mention the oxygen we breathe. As Shel Silverstein reminds us, they're just about the most selfless things.

But still, Arbor Day never seems to get much love. (I mean, think about how nuts we go for other holidays.)

We can actually thank Nebraska for this day. According to Encyclopedia Britannica:

"It was first proposed in the 19th century by J. Sterling Morton ... the editor of a Nebraska newspaper, [who] often wrote acgricultural articles and shred his passion for trees with his readers. There were relatively few trees in the state at the time, and for several years Morton proposed such a holiday to encourage his fellow Nebraskans to plant trees."

The holiday has since been adopted by many states and is most commonly observed on the last Friday of April. (Though, technically, it's possible that today is not Arbor Day in your state, so double check!)

Now, without much further ado, a photo homage to awesome trees:

Now what did I leave out? What's your favorite tree? (Maybe go give it a hug.)

As I write this, it's about 1 a.m. in Nepal and, according to National Geographic magazine's iPad app, a group of climbers is camped on the side of Mount Everest, possibly sleeping (though we can't be totally sure), at nearly 21,000 feet. They expect to make a final summit push in early May.

Implications aside for a moment, this knowledge is pretty amazing. Two years ago, for better or worse, a 3G network was installed around the foot of Mount Everest. Which allows intrepid climbers like Conrad Anker, Cory Richards and Mark Jenkins to basically live blog their ascent for the magazine.

It's not the first time an Everest climb has been cataloged in almost real time (and really, you don't need 3G to do it); but Nat Geo says this is the first time that a publisher is giving real-time updates in a tablet app. Some of the dispatches can be found on Geographic's "Field Test" blog. But to see it all — including the map that tracks the climbers — you'll have to get your hands on an iPad.

The few images photographer Richards has filed are breathtaking. And when a Sherpa died on the mountain a few days ago, we knew almost right away. The whole thing is intense and riveting and addicting to follow.

But until recent history, the peak of the Earth's highest mountain was impossibly out of reach except to a very, very select few: those with extensive mountaineering experience, sturdy lungs, and a willingness to risk their lives unequivocally. The first attempt to reach the summit was less than 100 years ago; and the first successful climb was as recent as 1953.

Today, several hundred climbers make the attempt every spring. In Into Thin Air, the book chronicling his fateful 1996 climb, Jon Krakauer laments the spent oxygen tanks that litter the once-pristine mountain (although litter is now regulated) — and the irreversible commercialization of the climb, for those able to afford it (although Jenkins, on this expedition, contends that it "has been an economic miracle for the Sherpa").

On a similar note, an article in the current issue of Outside magazine explains the double-edged sword of increased helicopter rescue missions on Everest: "With 25 helicopters now operating in Nepal, the thwapping of rotors is becoming one of the landscape's most familiar characteristics," Nick Heil writes.

In other words: Though the climb remains a life-and-death risk, trekkers might still have, in the very back of their minds, the comforting thought that a rescue chopper is theoretically just a 3G phone call away. And if you can't even escape the incessant hum of humanity on Mount Everest, where can you?

This is not to diminish the feat, or overlook the skill of Anker, Richards and Jenkins, or trivialize the risk they are taking. Those three alone have a staggering laundry list of accomplishments under their collective belt. Not to mention the reputed climbers that join them, and the Sherpas that carry their weight.

It's just food for thought.

George Mallory was one of the climbers in the very first Everest expeditions. When asked why he wanted to do it, his reply, legend has it, was: "Because it's there." He died in a 1924 attempt.

Some people look at natural wonders and see a challenge. We climb mountains because they are there. We live blog it because we can.

Meanwhile, we also wire cables across virginal landscape just so we can show what we've done, or so we can make a call when we've gotten ourselves into trouble. It raises the age-old question: Who's stopping to think about what we should — or shouldn't — do?

It's something I'd love to talk with the climbers about directly; oddly enough, that possibility isn't too far-fetched.