The New York Times has introduced Lens, a photojournalism blog that intends to present some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting: in photographs, videos, audio slide shows and any other medium that fits.

Lens will be a showcase for the work of Times photographers, but it will also highlight the best images from other newspapers, magazines, news organizations and picture agencies, and from around the Web. It will point readers in the direction of important books, galleries and museum exhibitions. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

In time, we hope it will also become the center of a community of readers who are not just interested in photojournalism — in the broadest sense of visually chronicling the world around us — but actively involved in some way or other, whether professionally or informally. You can expect us to ask you for your photos on some topical subject or theme.

Longtime readers of The Times may be mildly amused by the idea of a Times photo blog, since it is still possible to recall days, as recently as the 1970s, when there was not a single photograph anywhere on Page 1. But the truth is that photojournalism has been in the Gray Lady’s blood for 95 years. Our Mid-Week Pictorial, a rotogravure magazine, was established in 1914 specially to provide ample photographic coverage of the war in Europe that would soon turn into World War I.