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Credit Librado Romero/The New York Times

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Credit Librado Romero/The New York Times

Timeless: Warm Cats, Cold City

Carl T. Gossett Jr.’s name appeared in agate-type letters as credit lines beneath his photographs in The New York Times for nearly 40 years. He covered the Nuremberg war-crime trials in the late 1940s and the 1956 uprising in Hungary. In 1964, he took an exhilarating picture of ecstatic teens reacting to the arrival of the Beatles in New York City.

I first saw his work in a 1963 photography yearbook: a triumphant John H. Glenn Jr. waving upward in a flurry of cascading ticker tape as he paraded down the Canyon of Heroes to celebrate his orbits of Earth in Friendship 7. Carl’s work was inspirational to me when I finally had the opportunity to cover similar events.

On Jan. 9, 1970, a bitterly cold morning, Carl emerged from a building on Water Street in Lower Manhattan after shooting a routine assignment. He spotted these huddled creatures trying to keep warm.

They were not strays, necessarily, as the Fulton Fish Market was in the same neighborhood. I’m sure this group was just taking a break from the routine of keeping the rodent population in check. Meanwhile, though The Times was not accustomed to publishing pictures like this one, an editor must have found the image irresistibly illustrative of the bone-chilling weather, and ran it two columns wide with the continuation of a front-page story about the cold.

Letters poured in, which led Carl to remark, “If you want to improve circulation, run cat pictures.”


Librado Romero, a staff photographer at The Times, is examining some of the images he cherishes most — ones big and small in scope, but all enormous influences on his work. In some cases, he will revisit the scene of a photo; in others, he’ll discuss the story behind the image and why it proved so affecting to him.

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