SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2 � One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was �blabbing away� into her phone.

�She was using the word �like� all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,� said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer�s cellphone transmission � and any others in a 30-foot radius.

�She kept talking into her phone for about 30 seconds before she realized there was no one listening on the other end,� he said. His reaction when he first discovered he could wield such power? �Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.�

As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.

The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States � prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.

The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.

�If anything characterizes the 21st century, it�s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,� said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. �The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.�

The jamming technology works by sending out a radio signal so powerful that phones are overwhelmed and cannot communicate with cell towers. The range varies from several feet to several yards, and the devices cost from $50 to several hundred dollars. Larger models can be left on to create a no-call zone.

Using the jammers is illegal in the United States. The radio frequencies used by cellphone carriers are protected, just like those used by television and radio broadcasters.

The Federal Communication Commission says people who use cellphone jammers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforcement bureau has prosecuted a handful of American companies for distributing the gadgets � and it also pursues their users.

Investigators from the F.C.C. and Verizon Wireless visited an upscale restaurant in Maryland over the last year, the restaurant owner said. The owner, who declined to be named, said he bought a powerful jammer for $1,000 because he was tired of his employees focusing on their phones rather than customers.

�I told them: put away your phones, put away your phones, put away your phones,� he said. They ignored him.

The owner said the F.C.C. investigator hung around for a week, using special equipment designed to detect jammers. But the owner had turned his off.

The Verizon investigator was similarly unsuccessful. �He went to everyone in town and gave them his number and said if they were having trouble, they should call him right away,� the owner said. He said he has since stopped using the jammer.

Of course, it would be harder to detect the use of smaller battery-operated jammers like those used by disgruntled commuters.

An F.C.C. spokesman, Clyde Ensslin, declined to comment on the issue or the case in Maryland.

Cellphone carriers pay tens of billions of dollars to lease frequencies from the government with an understanding that others will not interfere with their signals. And there are other costs on top of that. Verizon Wireless, for example, spends $6.5 billion a year to build and maintain its network.

�It�s counterintuitive that when the demand is clear and strong from wireless consumers for improved cell coverage, that these kinds of devices are finding a market,� said Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon spokesman. The carriers also raise a public safety issue: jammers could be used by criminals to stop people from communicating in an emergency.

Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation, died early yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84.

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Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, his literary executor said. Above, Mr. Mailer at his home in Provincetown, Mass., in January. More Photos �

The cause was acute renal failure, his family said.

Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with �The Naked and the Dead,� a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for six decades he was rarely far from center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for �The Armies of the Night� (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and �The Executioner�s Song� (1979).

He also wrote, directed and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair � jet black at first and ultimately snow white � made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most authors were lured out into the limelight.

At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women�s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch.

Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once wrote: �Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.�

Mr. Mailer was a tireless worker who at his death was writing a sequel to his 2007 novel, �The Castle in the Forest.� If some of his books, written quickly and under financial pressure, were not as good as he had hoped, none of them were forgettable or without his distinctive stamp. And if he never quite succeeded in bringing off what he called �the big one� � the Great American Novel � it was not for want of trying.

Along the way, he transformed American journalism by introducing to nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing at the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life character who was none other than Norman Mailer himself.

A Pampered Son

Norman Kingsley � or, in Hebrew, Nachem Malek � Mailer was born in Long Branch, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, known as Barney, was a South African �migr�, a snappy dresser � he sometimes wore spats and carried a walking stick � and a largely ineffectual businessman.

The dominant figure in the family was Mr. Mailer�s mother, the former Fanny Schneider, who came from a vibrant clan in Long Branch, where her father ran a grocery and was the town�s unofficial rabbi. Though another child, Barbara, was born in 1927, Norman remained his mother�s favorite.

When Norman was 9, the family moved to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. Pampered and doted on, he excelled at both Public School 161 and Boys High School, from which he graduated in 1939.

That fall he enrolled as a 16-year-old freshman at Harvard, where he showed up wearing a newly purchased outfit of gold-brown jacket, green-and-blue striped pants and white saddle shoes. Classmates remembered him as brash and jug-eared and full of big talk about his sexual experience. (In fact he had had very little, a lack he quickly set about rectifying.)

Mr. Mailer intended to major in aeronautical engineering, but by the time he was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with literature. He spent the summer reading and rereading James T. Farrell�s �Studs Lonigan,� John Steinbeck�s �Grapes of Wrath� and John Dos Passos�s �U.S.A.,� and he began, or so he claimed, to set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words of his own, on the theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system. By 1941 he was sufficiently purged to win the Story magazine prize for best short story written by an undergraduate.

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Mr. Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943, determined on a literary career. He started on a thousand-page novel about a mental hospital (never published) while waiting to be drafted. He was called up by the Army in the spring of 1944, after marrying Bea Silverman in January, and was sent to the Philippines.

Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for �The Naked and the Dead,� the book that put him on the map.

Mr. Mailer wrote the novel, which is about a 13-man platoon fighting the Japanese on a Pacific atoll, in 15 months or so, and when it was published it was almost universally praised � the last time this would happen to him. Some critics ranked it among the best war novels ever written.

�The Naked and the Dead� sold 200,000 copies in just three months � a huge number in those days � and remains Mr. Mailer�s greatest literary and commercial success, even though it is in part an apprentice work, owing a large and transparent debt to Dos Passos, Tolstoy and Farrell.

Mr. Mailer later said of it: �Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since �War and Peace.� On the other hand I also thought, �I don�t know anything about writing. I�m virtually an impostor.� �

�Daring the Unknown�

His second book, �Barbary Shore� (1951), a political novel about, among other things, the struggle between capitalism and socialism, earned what Mr. Mailer called �possibly the worst reviews of any serious novel in recent years.� A third, �The Deer Park� (1955), in part a fictionalized account of Elia Kazan�s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, fared only a little better, and for the rest of the decade he wrote no fiction at all.

For much of the �50s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both, and affected odd accents: British, Irish, gangster, Texan. In 1955, together with two friends, Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, he founded The Village Voice, and while writing a column for that paper he began to evolve what became his trademark style � bold, poetic, metaphysical, even shamanistic at times � and his personal philosophy of hipsterism.

It was a homespun, Greenwich Village version of existentialism, which argued that the truly with-it, blacks and jazz musicians especially, led more authentic lives and enjoyed better orgasms.

The most famous, or infamous, version of this philosophy was Mr. Mailer�s controversial 1957 essay �The White Negro,� which seemed to endorse violence as an existential act and declared the murder of a white candy-store owner by two 18-year-old blacks an example of �daring the unknown.�

In November 1960, Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, seriously wounding her. It happened at the end of an all-night party announcing Mr. Mailer�s intention to run in the 1961 mayoral campaign, and he, like many of his guests, had been drinking heavily. Mr. Mailer was arrested, but his wife declined to press charges, and he was eventually released after being sent to Bellevue Hospital for observation. The marriage broke up two years later.

All told, Mr. Mailer was married six times, counting a quickie with Carol Stevens, whom he wed and divorced within a couple of days in 1980 to grant legitimacy to their daughter, Maggie. His other wives, in addition to Ms. Silverman and Ms. Morales, were Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook; Beverly Rentz Bentley; and Norris Church, with whom he was living at his death. Lady Jeanne died in June.

In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with feminists and proponents of women�s liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an �enemy of birth control.�

He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had eight children, all of whom survive him: Susan, by Ms. Silverman; Danielle and Elizabeth Anne, by Ms. Morales; Kate, by Lady Jeanne; Michael Burks and Stephen McLeod, by Ms. Bentley; Maggie Alexandra, by Ms. Stevens; and John Buffalo, by Ms. Church. Also surviving are an adopted son, Matthew, by an earlier marriage of Ms. Church�s, and 10 grandchildren.

For all his hipsterism, Mr. Mailer was an old-fashioned, attentive father. Starting in the 1960s, the financial burden of feeding and clothing his offspring, as well as keeping up with his numerous alimony payments, caused him to churn out a couple of novels, including �An American Dream� (1965), for the sake of a quick payday and also to take on freelance magazine assignments.

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A series of articles for Esquire on the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions became the basis for his book �Miami and the Siege of Chicago,� and articles for Harper�s and Commentary about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon were the basis for the prizewinning book �The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History.�

�Servant to a Wild Man�

The beginning of �Armies� is both a good summary of Mr. Mailer�s life to that point and an example of how he had begun to turn himself into a character in which literary style and selfhood were virtually indistinguishable:

�As Mailer had come to recognize over the years, the modest everyday fellow of his daily round was servant to a wild man in himself: The gent did not appear so very often, sometimes so rarely as once a month, sometimes not even twice a year, and he sometimes came when Mailer was frightened and furious at the fear, sometimes he came just to get a breath of fresh air. He was indispensable, however, and Mailer was even fond of him, for the wild man was witty in his own wild way and absolutely fearless. He would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast � no recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his reach.�

The critic Richard Gilman said of the book: �In �Armies of the Night,� the rough force of Mailer�s imagination, his brilliant wayward gifts of observation, his ravishing if often calculated honesty and his chutzpah all flourish on the steady ground of a newly coherent subject and theme.�

Alfred Kazin praised the book for its �admirable sensibilities, candid intelligence� and �most moving concern for America itself.�

Somehow in this busy decade Mr. Mailer also managed to write �Of a Fire on the Moon,� about the 1969 lunar landing, which began as a series for Life magazine; to make his most famous movie, �Maidstone,� during the filming of which he bit off part of an ear of the actor Rip Torn after Mr. Torn attacked him with a hammer; and to run finally for mayor of New York, this time as a secessionist candidate, campaigning to make New York City the 51st state. He also proposed to ban private automobiles from the city.

The writer Jimmy Breslin, who was also on the ticket, thought the race was a lark until, at a disastrous rally at the Village Gate nightclub, he discovered that Mr. Mailer was serious. Mr. Breslin later recalled, �I found out I was running with Ezra Pound.� (The Mailer team eventually lost in the Democratic primary to Mario Procaccino, who was beaten in the election by John V. Lindsay.)

In an interview in September 2006, Mr. Mailer said his favorite novel, if not his best, was �Tough Guys Don�t Dance,� a mystery thriller he wrote, under extreme financial pressure, in just two months in 1984. He was in tax trouble, he explained, and needed to crank something out quickly. �I was prepared to write a bad book if necessary,� he said, �but instead the style came out, and that saved it for me.�

His best book, he decided after thinking for a moment, was �Ancient Evenings� (1983), a long novel about ancient Egypt that received what had by then become familiar critical treatment: extravagantly praised in some quarters, disdained in others. About the book that many critics consider his masterpiece, �The Executioner�s Song,� he said he had mixed feelings because it wasn�t entirely his project.

�The Executioner�s Song,� which is about Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer who, after a stay on death row, asked to be executed by the State of Utah in 1976, was the idea of Lawrence Schiller, a writer and filmmaker who did much of the reporting for the book, taping Mr. Gilmore and his family.

But in �The Executioner�s Song,� Mr. Mailer recast this material in what was for him a new impersonal voice that rendered the thoughts of his characters in a style partly drawn from their own way of talking. He called it a �true-life novel.�

Joan Didion, reviewing the book for The New York Times Book Review, said: �It is ambitious to the point of vertigo. It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in �The Executioner�s Song,� is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature.�

Mr. Schiller also assisted Mr. Mailer with �Oswald�s Tale: An American Mystery,� his 1995 book about Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy�s assassin. In a review for The Sunday Times of London, Martin Amis called the book a �remarkable feat of imaginative sympathy.� But Mr. Amis also noted that it recalled Mr. Mailer�s championing of the convict Jack Henry Abbott, which displayed, he said, the author�s �old weakness for any killer who has puzzled his way through a few pages of Marx.�

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Mr. Abbott was serving a long sentence in a Utah prison for forgery and for killing a fellow inmate when, in 1977, he began writing to Mr. Mailer. Mr. Mailer saw literary talent in Mr. Abbott�s letters and helped him publish them in an acclaimed volume called �In the Belly of the Beast.� He also lobbied to get Mr. Abbott paroled. A few weeks after being released, in June 1981, Mr. Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed to death a waiter in a Lower East Side restaurant, and his champion became a target of national outrage.

Black-Tie Benefits

The episode was the last great controversy of Mr. Mailer�s career. Chastened perhaps, and stabilized by his marriage to Ms. Church, a former model whom he wed in November 1980, Mr. Mailer mellowed and even turned sedate. The former hostess-baiter and scourge of parties became a regular guest at black-tie benefits and dinners given by the likes of William S. Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt and Oscar de la Renta. His editor, Jason Epstein, said of this period, �There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has won.�

In 1984 Mr. Mailer was elected president of PEN American Center, the writers� organization, and was the main force in bringing together writers from all over the world for a much publicized literary conference called �The Writer�s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.� For a change, Mr. Mailer even found himself attacked from the left as many of the attendees protested about his inviting George P. Shultz, then secretary of state, to address the opening session. Mr. Mailer dismissed them as �puritanical leftists.�

In the �90s Mr. Mailer�s health began to fail. He had arthritis and angina and was fitted with two hearing aids. But his productivity was undiminished, especially after he embarked on what he called a �monastic regime� in 1995, swearing off drinking when he was working.

�Bellow and myself and a couple of others were very much smaller than Faulkner and Hemingway,� he conceded early in the decade, but he never backed off from the claim that among his contemporaries he was the heavyweight champion.

In 1991 he published �Harlot�s Ghost,� a 1,310-page novel about the Central Intelligence Agency, in which he conceived of it as a kind of cold-war church, the keeper of the nation�s secrets and the bearer of its values. A poorly received biography of Picasso came out in 1995, followed in 1997 by �The Gospel According to the Son,� a first-person novel about Jesus. It gave some critics the opportunity they had been waiting for. Norman Mailer thinks he�s God, they said.

Mr. Mailer�s next novel, �The Castle in the Forest,� was about Hitler, but the narrator was a devil, a persona the author admitted he found particularly congenial. �It�s as close as a writer gets to unrequited joy,� he said. �We are devils when all is said and done.�

Interviewed at his house in Provincetown, Mass., shortly before that book�s publication, Mr. Mailer, frail but cheerful, said he hoped his failing eyesight would hold out long enough for him to complete a sequel. His knees were shot, he added, holding up the two canes he walked with, and he had begun doing daily crossword puzzles to refresh his word hoard.

On the other hand, he said, writing was now easier for him in at least one respect.

�The waste is less,� he said. �The elements of mania and depression are diminished. Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always terribly affected by the fear that they�re not as good as they thought and why are they doing it, what are they up to?

�It�s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist,� he continued. �And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I�ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago � that one�s eventual reputation has very little to do with one�s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.�

Shaking his head, he added: �In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years. That�s not true for very many of us.� And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.

�I think the novel is on the way out,� he said. �I also believe, because it�s natural to take one�s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.�

Mike and I must have done a hundred psychiatric emergency admissions together � the hallucinating, the intoxicated, the violent ones, brought in by the police. Mike was known as a smart, confident, level-headed nurse, one of the few male nurses in the field, back in the 1980s. As a fledgling psychiatrist, I always respected his assessments in the E.R.; when he said, �This guy needs to be on a locked unit,� I listened. Even on our excellent nursing staff, Mike was known as the �top gun.�

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One morning, as I arrived on our inpatient unit, I nearly froze in my tracks. Our overnight admission stood in the hallway, looking disheveled and sporting a dense 5 o�clock shadow. He had the vacant look of someone whose spirit had been snuffed out like a cold candle. Our overnight admission was Mike.

It turned out that he had been struggling with a ferocious bout of depression for several weeks. Even those who had been with him recently in the E.R. were shocked at his appearance; he looked as if his blood had been drained and replaced with skim milk. I resolved immediately that I would be the one to bring him back from the Land of the Unliving.

Before you can put some folks back together, as one of my supervisors liked to say, they need to fall apart. Mike certainly qualified on that score. He spent most of his time curled up in a ball, sleeping on his cot. He had the usual symptoms of major depression: low self-esteem, loss of pleasure in most activities, thoughts of suicide and a tremendous sense of guilt. The precipitating causes were not clear, and Mike seemed humiliated at our efforts to delve into them. He, too, saw himself as a sort of �top gun,� and he had been ignominiously shot down.

I treated Mike with two robust antidepressant regimens over the course of about two months. I saw him twice weekly in individual psychotherapy and made sure he attended group therapy three days a week. Yet nothing seemed to budge his depression. His lethargy and somnolence seemed almost contagious, and our staff clearly felt uncomfortable working with Mike. He was a disconcerting reminder of our own vulnerability to depression, to what Winston Churchill used to call �The Black Dog.� I no longer wanted to meet Mike�s gaze in the hallway for fear he would catch the look of failure in my eyes.

In those days before managed care, we could keep patients on our unit for eight weeks or even more. But after a couple of months, Mike signed out of our unit, against medical advice. He was not suicidal, and there was no legal justification to keep him. I sulked around the unit for days afterward, wondering how I could have let him down so miserably.

A few weeks later, I ran into him outside the medical center. He looked as if he had just come back from a vacation in Tahiti. �Ron!� he yelled, �Great to see you! Hey, you won�t believe it! I saw this private psychiatrist and he figured out my problem. I had atypical depression. He put me on this fancy medication called an MAOI. I hate giving up wine and cheese, but I feel like a million bucks!�

As I tried to work up a smile, I wished nothing more than to sink into the sidewalk. Atypical depression � how could I have missed it? I had actually written a paper with one of my supervisors on this very diagnosis. Atypically depressed patients often show a different clinical picture from those with �classical� major depression. They often oversleep and overeat, for example. (Indeed, Mike had not lost weight before his admission.) And instead of feeling more depressed in the morning, as is common in major depression, atypically depressed patients tend to �crash� in the evening.

Furthermore, as Mike�s private psychiatrist clearly knew, patients with atypical depression often respond better to MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) than to standard antidepressants.

Why had I not prescribed an MAOI? Perhaps, on some level, I was afraid of exposing Mike to a medication I knew to be potentially lethal, if proper precautions weren�t taken. But the explanation doesn�t hold much water. After all, that very medication helped give Mike back his life.

I think something else may have been at work: a phenomenon that Dr. Jerome Groopman identifies in his new book, �How Doctors Think.�

Dr. Groopman observes that V.I.P. or celebrity patients sometimes short-circuit the physician�s normal diagnostic thinking. For example, these patients may be spared the doctor�s usual tests and procedures. As our �top gun,� Mike was just such a patient to me. Even as I entertained grandiose fantasies about curing him, my unconscious may have steered me away from doing everything I could to help him get better.

NOAH KALINA flew to Switzerland last month to attend the opening of �We�re All Photographers Now,� an exhibition at the Mus�e de l�Elys�e in Lausanne. The show is a survey of trends in digital photography, particularly portraiture, and Mr. Kalina produced its foremost example of how technology is changing the genre. His globally popular video �everyday� is composed of 2,356 daily self-portraits shot from Jan. 11, 2000, to July 31, 2006.

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Noah Kalina�s �everyday,� a video compilation of more than 2,000 self-portraits. It was inspired in part by a Ms. Lee's project.

Mr. Kalina, 26, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and earns his living photographing the interiors of Manhattan bars and restaurants. Ever since he posted �everyday� to YouTube in August, this six-minute film has generated a low-level conversation in photographic circles about its artistic merits.

But what makes �everyday� truly exceptional is how easy it was to make and how quickly it attracted a huge audience, said William A. Ewing, director of the Mus�e de l�Elys�e, who selected it for the exhibition.

�Noah�s video represents a phenomenal amplification not just in what he produced and how he did it, but how many people the piece touched in such a short period of time,� said Mr. Ewing, the author of �Face: The New Photographic Portrait� (Thames & Hudson). �There is nothing comparable in the history of photography.�

�Digital technology, computers, software and the Internet multiply the number of people with access to taking and viewing pictures,� he added. �Once you buy the camera, there are almost no other costs. That is increasing the variety and creativity in how people take pictures, and what they do with them.�

�We�re All Photographers Now� (www.allphotographersnow.ch) continues through May 30.

Mr. Kalina, like other photographers in the show, many of them amateurs, used a combination of digital tools and technical know-how that has become routine for his generation. By adroitly joining digital still photography, computer software and the Internet, he turned a student art project characterized principally by self-absorption into a global phenomenon.

�Everyday� succeeds in large part because it adheres to all three of the new principles of digital media, said Jonathan Lipkin, a professor of digital media at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of �Photography Reborn� (Abrams).

�The hallmarks of the new age of digital imagery are distribution, combination and manipulation,� Mr. Lipkin said. �The use of digital technology is especially revealing in portraiture. The digital camera has changed the genre. Before now it was just about impossible to do what Noah Kalina has done.�

Just one facet of the film project took real devotion: Mr. Kalina�s daily routine of snapping his own picture for nearly six years. The other part � transforming portraits that individually had attracted no attention into a film that is riveting � was almost too easy.

One afternoon in late August, prompted by a similar film of time-lapse portraiture made that month by the California graphic designer Ahree Lee, Mr. Kalina collected the digital self- portraits he had taken since he was a 19-year-old student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He downloaded them into the Windows Movie Maker software program on his desktop computer, spaced the portraits at an interval of six images per second, set the film to a shadowy and insistent piano soundtrack (composed and performed by Carly Comando, his girlfriend at the time) and wrote the credits and title.

Making the film took four hours. That�s all. Then Mr. Kalina, like millions of others of his generation for whom stylized digital self-portraits are an important personal message and a form of self-actualization, posted it on Aug. 28 to YouTube. (It can also be found on noahkalina.com.) The response, he said, was instantaneous and unnerving. Thousands of young people, who regard the Internet as a vast digital campfire, found �everyday,� shared links with their friends and built an audience that has reached 5.3 million and is growing by 10,000 per day.

�Until that moment it was always a still-photography project,� Mr. Kalina said. �A friend suggested that it could be a movie. I was never convinced it would really work until I saw Ahree Lee�s movie. Now there�s a whole group of people making these kind of films and posting them on the Internet.�

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new age of digital portraiture is the ease with which photographers, professional or amateur, can so easily produce images, videos, sequences and other projects that are dramatic, fresh and interesting. �Digital technology has changed what portraits look like,� Mr. Lipkin said. �If you pay attention to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the other social Internet sites, you see right away how stylized the portraits are. How they are taken from odd angles and with interesting lighting. It�s the angle of the hand-held digital camera.�

Jonathan Keller, a 31-year-old multimedia graphic artist studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, turned eight years of daily self-portraits into a video titled �Living My Life Faster� and posted it to his Web site (c71123.com/daily_photo). But his more significant contribution to the new form is his online archive of what he calls �passage of time� and �obsessive� photo projects.

Among the 40 projects on the site is Ms. Lee�s �me,� composed of more than 1,000 self-portraits taken from November 2001 to November 2004 and regarded as the first digital video portrait. Ms. Lee said she used a Nikon digital camera that had a flip screen so she could see herself while snapping the image. She used Photoshop software to align her eyes and After Effects software to create the animation. It took her 200 to 300 hours, she said, and on Aug. 8 �me� was posted on AtomFilms (me.atomfilms.com), an Internet site for independent filmmakers. She also posted it on YouTube, where it has attracted more than three million viewers.

�It would be possible to do this without digital technology, but it would be so much more difficult and expensive,� said Ms. Lee, 35, who lives in San Francisco (ahreelee.com). �If you use a film camera, you would have to buy rolls of film and get them processed, and do whatever you would need to do � and I don�t know what that is � to turn it into a film.�

Whether �me� or �everyday� or any of the other projects archived on Mr. Keller�s site qualify as art is in dispute in some quarters of the photography world. Richard Benson, a photographer, printer and professor of photography at Yale University since 1979, called them �a complete waste of time.�

�They are people who don�t know what they are doing and who celebrate themselves,� Mr. Benson said. �I find it completely boring.�

But Mr. Ewing and Mr. Lipkin say such views may reflect generational insecurity, prompted by the old-guard notion that good work that isn�t laborious isn�t worth much. Mr. Kalina�s �everyday� is a dramatic challenge to those conventions, Mr. Ewing said, because it breaks barriers, has helped to establish a new form of portraiture and sets a new standard of audience interest.

Mr. Kalina�s instinct for narrative makes the film work. The background is the room in which he�s living at the time. It changes episodically, producing visual interest and adding information. Ms. Comando�s soundtrack, which she now sells on the Internet, is appropriately portentous. Mr. Kalina doesn�t age, though at times he looks worn, and his haircut evolves through phases of short, long and unkempt. His gaze also doesn�t waver.

�He hypnotizes you with those eyes,� Mr. Ewing said. �The changing background and the changing hairstyle enhances a frenetic pace, the feeling of hurtling through space. But there is also a sense of a kind of dispassionate distance, the feeling of being the observer. Unlike a single digital image, the kind that appears on Flickr, in this film there is a sense of rapidity and infinite possibility.

�It�s a remarkable piece,� Mr. Ewing continued. �That�s why we ask in our show: Is this a revolution or just an evolution? The answer is it�s a revolution.�

ATLANTA, Sept. 19 � The attack in a hotel parking lot here last month was remarkable not only because the victim, Juanita Bynum, is the most prominent black female television evangelist in the country, who is pals with Oprah, admired by Aretha, and who recently signed on to campaign for Obama.

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Chris Rank for the New York Times

Mr. Weeks held a news briefing to respond to assault charges.

It was shocking, especially to legions of women who had latched onto her message that only chastity and self-respect would bring true love, because the attacker who choked, stomped and kicked her, Ms. Bynum said, was her husband.

The episode has led to debate about domestic violence and how churches, particularly black churches, respond to it.

But it has also raised questions about the trajectory of Ms. Bynum�s career as a woman who called herself a prophetess, and while condemning promiscuity spoke openly about her lust and longing, in what has been called one of the most significant contemporary American sermons. Her struggle struck a chord in many black communities, where marriage rates are notoriously low, and it seemed to culminate in the form of an earthly reward: a televised, million-dollar 2003 wedding to a fellow Pentecostal preacher, Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, followed by what seemed to be a model marriage.

Since the attack, Ms. Bynum, 48, has tried to reinvent herself once more, announcing that she is �the new face of domestic violence.� But Tom Joyner, the syndicated radio talk show host, did not let her off the hook so easily: �If you�re a prophet,� Mr. Joyner asked, �didn�t you see this coming?�

In a telephone interview, Ms. Bynum said the public had overly romanticized the union. �What happened to me was reality,� she said. �I made a right decision that went bad. If you choose a Cadillac, if two years later someone runs into you and tears it up, it wasn�t a bad decision to buy the car.�

Mr. Weeks, who according to the police report was pulled off his wife by a hotel bellhop, pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated assault and making terroristic threats. Ms. Bynum has filed for divorce.

Conservative critics among the evangelical clergy have accused her of exploiting the attack for publicity, calling her �loud,� �angry,� �aggressive� and �out of control,� while a group of black and Hispanic churches has demanded Mr. Weeks�s resignation. Fans responded with shock.

�It just hit me like a wake-up call, that even the strongest can be victims,� said Elizabeth Alexander, a student at Spelman College, a historically black women�s school here, which held a forum to discuss the issue.

Ms. Bynum, a former flight attendant and hair stylist, rose to fame in the late 1990s with the help of the powerful Bishop T. D. Jakes of Dallas, who supplied an audience of thousands for her frank sermon about sex and the single woman called �No More Sheets.� The sermon is said to have sold more than a million copies on video and profoundly affected many black women.

Ms. Bynum�s sermon admonished women looking for love to stop sleeping around and prepare for a lifetime commitment, but also dwelt on the difficulty of being Christian and single.

�I find it very difficult to listen to anybody preach to me about being single when they�ve got a pair of thighs in their bed every night,� she said that night. �You�re telling me, �Hold on, honey, sanctify yourself,� and you�re going home to biceps and triceps, and big old muscles and thighs.�

She went on, her voice husky and anguished: �I want to hear �Hold on� from somebody who is really holding on. I want to hear �Hold on� from somebody who knows my struggle.� She used bed sheets borrowed from a hotel maid to signify her past promiscuity.

Ms. Bynum�s confessional approach, including of an abusive first marriage, made her a sought-after speaker and a popular host on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, although she did not lead a church of her own. She wrote books that ranked among Publishers Weekly�s top 10 religion best sellers, and her gospel album �A Piece of My Passion� went gold. Women across the country held �No More Sheets� parties to watch and discuss the sermon.

�She�s a powerful trailblazer,� said Shayne Lee, a sociologist of religion at Tulane University who closely follows what has become known as the neo-Pentecostal movement, which emphasizes self-improvement and prosperity over social issues like poverty and crime. �She resonated with so many people because sex is out there in a way that I don�t think any other preacher, or any other black preacher, has tapped into on a grand scale.�

The assault, Dr. Lee said, is a challenge to Ms. Bynum�s credibility: �Maybe she�s been living a lie all these years.�

In a private ceremony in July 2002, Ms. Bynum married the relatively unknown Mr. Weeks, a Washington pastor from a family of clergy members. The couple announced the union in October, then followed up with a lavish New York ceremony in 2003 � with a 7.76-carat diamond, an orchestra and 1,000 guests � shown on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

�This was my once-in-a-lifetime wedding,� she told Ebony magazine. �I did it this way because I plan to stay married.�

Mr. Weeks, 40, whose previous marriage ended in divorce, proved a foil to Ms. Bynum. Bespectacled, bow-tied and far less visceral, he is fond of maxims like �Failure is a tool that God uses to teach us systematic information to give us consistent success.�

The pair quickly capitalized on their marriage, publishing a book called �Teach Me How to Love You: The Beginnings,� and conducting relationship seminars where Mr. Weeks presided over a sometimes graphic version of �The Newlywed Game� and Ms. Bynum heard couples� grievances as Judge Juanita on �The Love Court.�

In 2006, Mr. Weeks started the Global Destiny Church in Duluth, a suburb of Atlanta, with Ms. Bynum as his �first lady.� (In Pentecostal and charismatic circles, the title bishop usually goes to a pastor who oversees more than one church. Global Destiny says it has locations in Washington, Los Angeles and London.)

The couple separated in June, a fact not made public until the assault case arose. Mr. Weeks was subsequently evicted from his house and threatened with eviction from the space rented by his church.

Mr. Weeks has not granted interviews but has made several statements, saying there is more to the story and apologizing that Christians have had to endure this ordeal.

But during the marriage, Ms. Bynum publicly focused on the duties of a Christian wife, counseling women to give their husbands plenty of sex and to ask them, �Do I please you?�

About this time, Ms. Bynum glamorized her own look, trading a bun for a hair weave, picture-perfect makeup and plastic surgery that she discussed on the BET network. Her wardrobe went from ankle-length skirts to casual chic and glittering jewelry.

In the seminars, she sermonized, �I don�t care what kind of husband you got, that�s your covenant vow, and you have a responsibility to make him feel like he�s a wonder when you know he ain�t.�

The Rev. Dr. Sharon Ellis Davis, a pastor in Chicago who teaches seminary classes on domestic violence, said some mega-churches support female leaders but still perpetuate a conservative message that can lead to abuse. �I don�t personally view her as a liberation preacher; I don�t view her as an empowerment preacher,� Dr. Davis said of Ms. Bynum.

Her audience is �interested in self growth, how good they can be and how God loves them, but not in how to do the kinds of things that stop abuse, that fight oppression, that fight hunger and incarceration and ask the reason why,� Dr. Davis said.

When the news of the confrontation broke, Ms. Bynum appeared on the �Praise the Lord� television program to say that she forgave her husband and would not speak ill of him. She later said there had been previous instances of �pushing and shoving� and that she wanted to �take some classes� to find out why she attracted abusive men.

The experience, she said, caused her to wake up to the prevalence of domestic violence. �The counselor came and the D.A.�s office came and said, �This is an epidemic.� I was like, �What are you talking about, an epidemic?� � She added, �It kind of brought my head out of the sand of the church in that sense and I said, �Wait a minute, nothing will change if we don�t bring about social change.� �

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