Where beauty meets horror

Lens is the 'photography and visual journalism blog' of the New York Times. It's a place to find journalism - yes, it is journalism - that is at once beautiful and engaging and absorbing ... and horrifying.

Take this - its latest addition: 'They Survived the Rwandan Genocide.' It's a minimally simple concept - a slideshow of high-quality still images matched with brief, heart-rending quotations from those who survived. There is no audio. None is necessary.

As with the best slideshows, there is no imposed narrative arc; each reader/viewer brings their own personal reactions to the images and the stark immensity of the sentences. Only in this format could 'nothing' be so powerful.

"I have nothing to say. I have too much pain, and there would be too much to say anyway."

For most 'story-focused' journalists, that's a response to a question or interview that simply wouldn't be reported. It's not part of any story. It leads nowhere. It is nothing.

An eloquent nothing.

Myriam Abdelaziz who took the photographs in this show also collected the voices of those she pictured. Out of necessity, to begin with:

"Some scars are intimate and some of them find them ugly; they're uncomfortable. To make them feel comfortable about having their picture taken, I really felt that I needed to listen to everything they had to say."

The first person she spoke to - Innocente - told how she arrived home one day in 1994 and saw a group of Hutu militiamen preparing to kill her family. They ordered her to join the others in her family to die. She told the men she was a Hutu, a neighbour - the people the men were about to kill were nothing to do with her.

"I disowned my family to get a chance to survive,"

she told Myriam Abdelaziz.

She was 12 years old at the time.