AL DIAZ PHOTO

Photojournalist Patrick Farrell has joined the blog with his weekly feature, The Sunday Still. Farrell selects one image each week that showcases the best photojournalism by photojournalists from around the world. The feature runs weekly in The Sunday Long Read. The goal of the newsletter, edited by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jacob Feldman, is to put the week’s best journalism in your hands every Sunday morning. The Sunday Still from Patrick Farrell

Oil-Stained Lives While shooting striking news images for a story about fisher families struggling in the environmental fallout of Venezuela’s collapsing oil industry, AP photographer Rodrigo Abd spotted an opportunity for a different way to tell the story. He returned to the oil-covered shores of Lake Maracaibo in Cabimas with a vintage box camera and tripod. In haunting black-and-white portraits, Abd depicts the human toll of the tidal bay’s industrial decay in the straight-on stares, premature wrinkles and blackened clothing of his individual subjects. By slowing time and removing the distraction of color, his images suggest another time, demonstrating that 83 years after Dorothea Lange shot “Migrant Mother,” the most vulnerable lives continue to suffer the most from man-made environmental disasters. Patrick Farrell, the curator of The Sunday Still, is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Breaking News Photography for The Miami Herald, where he worked from 1987 to 2019. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Miami School of Communication.