W Eugene Smith

Shinobu Sakamoto struggles every morning to button her blouse. She manages fitfully to reach her mouth with most of her breakfast rice. Then she sets forth to work, walking in tortuous, jerky movements and contemplating, she said in badly slurred speech, "what it must be like to run, to feel free."

When photographer Steve Schapiro first arrived on the Lower East Side set of "The Godfather" in 1971, there were rumors floating around that Marlon Brando was not well. Moving closer to the action, he noticed an old man in an overcoat and hat talking to an assistant director with this gravelly, sick voice. The rumors must be true, he thought. "Suddenly," Schapiro recalled, "Brando turns to the crowd with this enormous electricity shooting out of his eyes and in his best 'On the Waterfront' accent said, 'I think there's someone with a camera out there.'" That stunning transformation was just one of many Oscar-worthy moments Schapiro has witnessed in his 50-year career working on the sets of such groundbreaking films as "Taxi Driver," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Chinatown.

If you want to view outstanding photography outside Orange County, head south to the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego's Balboa Park. The museum, which opened in 1983, has exhibited photography's elite, such as Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, W. Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson. It also supports lesser-known photographers by sponsoring workshops, lectures and tours.

The battleground experiences of Dmitri Baltermants were not so unlike those of other Soviets during World War II. He had gone to the battle front as a young photojournalist, much as Western photographers W. Eugene Smith and Robert Capa, seeking to capture on film the heroic and tragic, horrific and awe-inspiring moments of war.

Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the adventurous musical improvisations of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, has died. She was 69. Coltrane died Friday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in West Hills, according to an announcement from the family's publicist. She had been in frail health for some time and died of respiratory failure.

Even someone who works in the heart of the city has to stroll the territory every few weeks just to keep abreast of the fast and almost phantasmagorical changes that keep taking place on and around Bunker Hill. Just now, Arata Isozaki's stunning red sandstone Museum of Contemporary Art has been completed on Upper Grand Avenue (Grand Avenue being double-decked in this stretch, to the occasional confusion of walkers and drivers alike).

In the 1930s, many New York photographers felt it was their duty to document the life of the city's less fortunate inhabitants surviving on the streets and in dilapidated, congested tenements. Like the federal government's Farm Security Administration photographers, who focused their lenses on the plight of rural Americans caught in the Depression's grip, the city photographers hoped to stimulate interest in improving the lot of working-class people.

While museums throughout the United States and Europe have marked photography's sesquicentennial in 1989 with enormous survey exhibitions documented by hefty catalogues, the J. Paul Getty Museum has staged a relatively quiet 150th birthday party. The celebration has taken shape in a yearlong series of five small exhibitions on "Experimental Photography," all drawn from the museum's extensive collection.