TIME is at heart a magazine of ideas expressed in words, but our editors pursue the right pictures with as much intensity as they use in their search for the best language. Simply stated, the purpose of the 70 or so black and white pictures that we usually run is to enhance the vitality and meaning of the stories.

To get these pictures, we maintain a Picture Research staff, whose dozen members mine the world each week in search of the singular picture which will best illuminate a story, whether the subject is king, clown or space capsule. The picture researchers--all of them women--have a hectic work week, since in most cases the question as to which picture will be most effective is not answerable until the story has taken shape. Thus the girls must mix the prophetic with the photographic, culling from many sources hundreds of pictures that may or may not satisfy fast-changing requirements of world events and the flow of new ideas out of editors' offices. No small part of the job is simply keeping in order the mass of pictures at hand.

Each researcher is assigned to special areas of the magazine. The girls take part in story-planning conferences, gauging pictorial possibilities in meetings with the editors and writers, then call, cable, assign or personally go after the photos from which the editors make final selection. The procedure we use for getting color pictures is somewhat different but no less intense. While some black and white pictures come from TIME'S own files, or those of sister publications, most are gathered specifically for the stories with which they appear. The researchers must know the best source for an existing picture and how to spot the right photographer in the right place for the right subject. They have a sharp eye for early-stage picture editing--a talent that, as anyone might guess, rose to a peak when they helped the editors select pictures of themselves for use on this page this week.

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