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Cave bear. A beautifully preserved ancient cave bear ( Ursus spelaeus) has been uncovered by the melting permafrost on Siberia's Lyakhovsky Islands. The remains were found by reindeer herders and include soft tissues and internal organs. An initial analysis suggests the bear is at least 22,000 years old. "This find of great importance to the whole world," said Lena Grigorieva, a palaeontologist at North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia, in a statement. Until now, only the skulls and bones of cave bears have been found, and scientists are eager to study the specimen. The bodies of several ancient animals, including cave lions ( Panthera spelaea), woolly mammoths ( Mammuthus primigenius) and woolly rhinos ( Coelodonta antiquitatis) have been discovered in the past decade as Siberia's permafrost thaws.

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COVID sniffer dogs, cave bear and corals - September's best science images

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Cave bear. A beautifully preserved ancient cave bear ( Ursus spelaeus) has been uncovered by the melting permafrost on Siberia's Lyakhovsky Islands. The remains were found by reindeer herders and include soft tissues and internal organs. An initial analysis suggests the bear is at least 22,000 years old.

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Written by Oscar Holland, CNN

The story of photography in 19th-century India is the tale of a new technological age.

As cameras arrived in port cities from Europe in the late 1840s, photo studios began spreading throughout the country. Members of the British Raj also extensively cataloged the people, cultures, landscapes, buildings and wildlife they encountered on the subcontinent.

There is, however, a darker side to the medium's history. Photography may be one of the great inventions of the era, but it was also widely used as a propaganda tool by colonial elites, according to Nathaniel Gaskell, co-founder and associate director of the Museum of Art and Photography in Bangalore.

This troubling history forms part of Gaskell's wide-ranging new book "Photography in India," which was co-authored with University College London PhD scholar, Diva Gujral. From ethnographic photos that reinforced racist stereotypes, to portraits depicting colonial officers as Western saviors, images in the pair's book reflect many of the ideologies underpinning the British colonial mission.

"You have to realize that everything, even photos of buildings, were taken with an agenda," Gaskell said in a phone interview. "They were making India look (like) a place that was in need of intervention.

"It was not meant to be shown as a grand former empire, but as these crumbling ruins. And that slightly dictates the way pictures were taken, and, therefore, their academic value isn't purely objective."

Implicit agenda

The case for intervention was also made through depictions of living conditions in India, according to the book's co-author, Gujral. By way of example, she points to photos of the Madras famine in the 1870s, which were produced specifically for newspapers back in Britain.

Images of famine were intended to help justify expansion into India, but they sometimes took on new and unintended meanings.

"These photos fall into this idea of the 'chaotic East' -- images that (promoted a Western idea that) the East 'needed' it," she said on the phone. "But when they were released to the London press, what they actually generated was a series of public groups very concerned by the fact that famine still existed. (People) were saying, 'This is exactly what you went out there to fix, so how have you not fixed it already? And if you're not intending to, what are you doing?'

"So there are moments when the images absolutely backfired."

When it comes to landscapes, however, the photographic aesthetic was often one of order, not chaos. Rather than depicting far-off lands as untamed or untouched, India's dramatic mountains and tropical flora were frequently made to resemble bucolic scenes from the English countryside.

This, too, reflected Britain's goal of spreading outwards, said Gaskell, who described the practice as "a kind of taming of the landscape."

"I see this as a further extension of ownership and legitimizing (colonial) presence, because it's showing (India) as this great garden of England," he continued. "It's mad to think that they were photographing the Himalayas as if they were Gloucestershire."

But while the book's images often reflect explicit propaganda efforts (Gaskell also cites grand processions published in British newspapers to show the "pomp and ceremony" of the Raj), many simply document dominant attitudes of the day.

"I think some of it was conscious, but photographs also reflect the time they were taken in, and the prevailing mindset," he added. "I don't think photographers were sitting down with spin doctors saying, 'We need to make it look like this.' But I think, inevitably, that's what happened."

A distinct aesthetic

Despite the political undertones, colonial India's early cameras were also used for relatively mundane purposes: art, postcards or keepsakes. Photography sometimes served very practical roles, too. Some of the first images to be captured in the country were taken by the British army and civil service to speed up record-keeping.

"They were replacing drawings as a way of describing monuments, for instance," said Gaskell. "And that's why you get these big catalogs of, literally, a whole building, with every stone or detail recorded. It made things much faster than having a whole team of draftsmen."

The spread of portrait studios is another important development in photography on the subcontinent -- one that wasn't driven solely by the imperial elite. In the latter half of the 19th century, Indian royals, the merchant classes and other wealthy individuals would also have family pictures taken, "much in the same way as the British did," said Gaskell.

Local photographers were also active from the medium's earliest days. They helped give Indian photography a distinct aesthetic, inspired by the country's own artistic traditions. This is particularly evident in the use of hand coloration, Gaskell said, which transformed monochrome images into vibrant artworks.

"Hand-coloring of photographs is something that also happened in Japan and China," he said. "But in India it was a much thicker application of paint that almost completely concealed the image. You'd get gold leaf painted directly on, so there'd be almost none of the original photograph visible.

"Sometimes, people would go to the studio to have their photos taken, then the family's (faces) would be pasted into a completely made-up landscape. So it was really pushing what photography was."

Yet, the local tradition can not be entirely removed from its colonial context. Take the Indian photographer Narayan Dajee, one of the few non-white members of the Bombay Photographic Society, who was also involved in taking ethnographic pictures that may have helped propagate racial theories.

His work was, according to Gujral, often indistinguishable from that of his European contemporaries.

"One of the myths we try and debunk, when we're dealing with ethnography and colonial science in the book, is the idea that all the photos were taken by colonizers," she said. "This style and mode of photographing becomes something that Indian practitioners are doing too.

"Understanding the images is not always to do with who's sponsoring them or where they're going to wind up, it's an aesthetic that is diffused. So we try to counter the idea that it's the British who are taking these very stark, scientific images and the Indians who are heartily painting over everything. It's somewhere in the middle."
"Photography in India," published by Prestel, is available now.

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what these rare images of 19th-century india tell us about colonial rule - cnn

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What these rare images of 19th-century India tell us about colonial rule

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Written by Oscar Holland, CNN The story of photography in 19th-century India is the tale of a new technological age. As cameras arrived in port cities from Europe in the late 1840s, photo studios began spreading throughout the country. Members of the British Raj also extensively cataloged the people, cultures, landscapes, buildings and wildlife they encountered on the subcontinent.

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Being a monk who has photographed monastic communities from many years now, many people have asked me if I have something to share from my experience. Well, there isn't much.

First of all, one must know that he doesn't know anything. Only in this way can one stay on the constant path of progress and not harm anyone. People who are overly confident often harm others, many times even without noticing.

We must have a correct relationship with our subjects, with ourselves and with the outside world.

The first rule of thumb especially when we talk about our subjects is: do not harm. Always be ready to lose a shot (or more) just to leave others to breathe, to be natural. We must have the awareness that a photographer, depending on the environment, applies pressure upon others and thus he must be attentive in order to keep this pressure in bearable limits. We must be constantly attentive not only to see the occasions in which we must shoot but also to see the occasions in which we must skip shooting. Perhaps this will give us fewer shots, but albeit better ones showing a delicacy otherwise impossible to get:

"Be there and get close," is something that's often said. Well, this is true, but in order to "be there," we must know very well the customs and habits of the place, to have our homework done in order to become invisible for others, to just be there. And then your truly immersive experience will be transmitted to the ones for which you're photographing:

Try, rather, to not act instead of making a wrong move. Be obedient. Because we are humans we are bound to make mistakes. That's why we must build trust with others, to show them love, to help them, to be one of them - we should cancel the distance between 'us' and 'others'. We just need to be one body and then this unity will show up in our photos:

If we are constant and have the flexibility of humbleness, then this bond with others is strengthened until the point at which even the deepest feelings of the subjects are freely flying outside, sometimes in unbelievable candid shots.

We must have a peaceful lucidity in order to see where an interesting story develops and try to cover it:

The correct relationship with ourselves is based on humbleness and correct attention. The ultimate attention, that is where the mind is, should be in the right place at the right time.

That's why we must avoid the centers of pleasure or pain which can divert our mind. So, we need to avoid unnecessary chimping or praising ourselves for a good shot that we think we got. Also, we must try to avoid conflicts at any costs and we shouldn't take in our heart the praises of others. Then we will be able to be in control of ourselves and of the event, knowing if it is appropriate (or not) to get a very intimate shot:

The only praise you can take into account is when someone says, "I praise you because you didn't bother me - you were there but I didn't see you at all".

Here our gear plays a special role. Our attention shouldn't be diverted by our gear. We must be focused on what we have to do, not on how to do it. Our gear, especially our camera, should be a natural extension of our body in order to not lose the shot when the moment comes:

The last thing about the correct relationship with ourselves is to not seek comfort for ourselves. Bitter conditions make sweet photos:

The correct relationship with the outside world can be summed up in some small things. Here's one: don't lie. In my humble opinion, post-processing in order to crop, enhance colors, and increase sharpness is okay, but don't lie. Do not clone in or out something in order to alter reality. It won't end well. Always think: "If others will learn what I did, what will they say?". Ask yourself this thing because they will.

Manipulations such as long exposures...

...or obviously staging photos...

...are okay because these don't try to deceive so it isn't unjust towards others.

Sometimes trying to be just and to not stage photos is rewarded by candid shots that look like they are staged but they aren't - the happiness of getting the candid shot below is much bigger than if I had staged it:

A strong bond with your subjects and your clients will greatly offset the lack of staging. In fact, in my humble opinion, this is a professional: not the one which does something for the money or fame but the one which sacrifices himself for others. Money, fame, and gear should be secondary effects of the amount of love that someone gives to others.

That's why on my site I don't showcase my 'best' photos, but rather I try to help others by posting each day an image (or more) while covering the expenses from donations.

In fact, I do it just in order to be happy and to make others happy too, because only in this way I reach my peace of mind - a thing which is very rare today.
About the author: Monk Theologos of Vatopaidi is a monk and photojournalist based in The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopedi, an Eastern Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos, Greece. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Monk Theologos shares his work through his website, The Ascetic Experience.

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Photojournalism Through the Eyes of a Monk

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Being a monk who has photographed monastic communities from many years now, many people have asked me if I have something to share from my experience. Well, there isn't much. First of all, one must know that he doesn't know anything. Only in this way can one stay on the constant path of progress and not harm anyone.

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The Shanghai Exhibition Center is located in a vast complex that was inaugurated in 1955 as the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building, and last week, the artworks assembled there for the latest edition of Photofairs Shanghai likewise told a rich, multilayered, and sprawling story about palimpsestic nature of China's recent cultural history. With dealers attending from across the region and the rest of the world-including Western powerhouses like Thaddaeus Ropac, Sean Kelly, and New York's groundbreaking Bitforms Gallery-it also told a tale of the contiguous narratives of a broad spectrum of people that are becoming increasingly interwoven in our globalizing world. There was much to learn, and much to admire. Here are some of the more eye-opening works on display.

China's breathtaking political and cultural changes over the past century are captured intimately in Cai Dongdong's A Hundred Years, an installation featuring three doors that are each strung with 780 portraits of Chinese people, first from the years 1910 to 1950, then 1950 to 1980, then 1980 to 2010. Each door tells an epic story. Approaching the work, one sees a mix of men and women alternately wearing mandarin collars and cheongsam, respectively, or European-style formalwear-a stylistic variance that captures the complex era, which spans the establishment of the Western-leaning Republic of China in 1912 to the birth of the communist party to civil war to the Second Sino-Japanese war and, ultimately, to Mao's rise to power as the head of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

The second door, replete with military uniforms, charts the devastating, internecine years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, culminating with Mao's death in 1976. The third door, where the clothes more or less conform to the Western fashions of the period, covers the heady opening up of the country (which saw the birth of China's contemporary art scene), the traumatic crackdown of Tiananmen Square, and, in 1979, the return of Hong Kong from England to China. Incredibly, across all the photos, apart from the clothing and hairstyle changes, people more or less project the same range of demeanor: happy, awkward, diffident, quirky-offering little more than a hint of the seismic transformations happening around them.

In 2013, Cheng Xinhao earned a PhD in chemistry from Peking University, but he hasn't really done much with it. Instead, he has largely remained focused on his ongoing 15-year photographic research project into the Hmong people of Western China, an indigenous population that can trace its roots back to before the country's ancient birth. Mercilessly persecuted during the Qing Dynasty, where they were targeted for genocide, they do not occupy their own branch in China's 56 acknowledged ethnic groups but are instead categorized under the one known as the Miao (or "savage").

Today, around 700 live in the country-the rest, around 4,000, live in Vietnam. They subsist mainly off of hunting and gathering in the forested mountains, and in a strange twist, they are among the only people in China allowed to own guns, an antique kind of self-made flintlock rifle that they once used against French colonists in Indochina but which they now use for hunting. As part of his research project, Cheng Xinhao spends days following members of the Hmong as they go on long hunts and other activities, including the subject of this photo, who he also once documented as he went to work for a stint in a Shenzhen factory.

Born in the Hebei province circling Beijing, the photographer Wang Ling today splits his time between the Songzhuang artist village in China's capital city-which is the country's artistic as well as political nucleus-and the far-western Xinjiang province, where he attended art school. In this performative photographic series, where he uses red powder to demarcate a one-kilometer-long line in the snow, the artist is signifying a spiritual dividing line between the two places, one of them signifying government rule and the other, Xinjiang, signifying a vibrant mixture of religious life picked up across its frontier borders, from Tibetan Buddhism from the south to the Islam practiced by the Uyghur people. (The region is also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.)

Brought to the fair by Gaotai Gallery, a brand-new contemporary-art incubator that is the first gallery of its kind to be based in Xinjiang, Wang Ling has also made significant work chronicling the fraught situation of the Uyghurs, who in recent years have been the target of a comprehensive Mandarin re-education campaign by the Chinese government, which has banned the Uyghur language and is cracking down on the culture generally, in part due out of fear that it could give birth to the kind of militant Islamic groups that are roiling the Middle East.

Leila Alaoui
"Portraiture series" (2010-14)
Galleria Continua - Beijing, San Gimignano, Les Moulins, Havana
Price: $50,000 apiece

Between the years of 2010 and 2014, the French-Moroccan photographer Leila Alaoui set up a simple studio-basically a backdrop of black cloth-in the center of a souk in her hometown of Marrakech and persuaded passersby to sit down, relax, chat, and then have their portrait taken. Inspired by Robert Frank's "Americans" series, which documented postwar society in the US, Alaoui set out to record the thrilling diversity of Morocco, bringing to light its many narratives of cultural identity-and historical displacement-through the dress and appearance of her remarkably charismatic sitters.

Tragically, Alaoui's work was cut short in 2016, when, at the age of 33, she was killed when a terrorist opened fire on a cafe in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as she was inside. That year, the 6th Marrakech Biennale was dedicated in her honor, and today, her family operates the Leila Alaoui Foundation to promote her values and her artistic work, which is in the collection of the Qatar Museum.

Long Chin-san
A Lakeside View in the Fall (1939); Deer in Forest (1956)
M Art Center - Shanghai
Price: Not for sale, but roughly $30,000 to $50,000 apiece

Sometimes known as the "father of Asian photography," Long Chin-san (also written Lang Jingshan) was a pioneering figure who brilliantly combined the novel Western tool of the camera with traditional Chinese visual idioms. Born in 1892, he became one of the country's first photojournalists, working for the Eastern Times, and went on to break new ground in art, taking what is considered the earliest surviving Chinese nude photograph in 1928, a portrait of a woman recumbent on a divan titled Meditation.

More significantly, Long Chin-san is known for his modernist approach to fusing Eastern and Western aesthetic styles. Through darkroom practices, he overlaps multiple photographs in one print to create images reminiscent of classical Chinese painting that he often embellishes further by drawing additional scenery in ink. At the fair, one image featuring a Disney-esque landscape populated by spotted Bambis was the product of 18 separate darkroom alterations.

A photographer who met and was influenced by Picasso, Long Chin-san is widely acknowledged as a major figure in 20th century Chinese art history, but he remains undervalued in the art market-primarily because he fled to Taiwan in 1949 during the Sino-Japanese war, thus becoming overlooked by Chinese collectors. Today, his record for a single lot at auction is $105,000, hammered at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2017 for a collaborative photographic work with the legendary painter Zhang Daqian.

A classic image by the photojournalist and writer Jin Yongquan, this photograph shows prominent villagers from Shiyou, in the Jiangxi province, who were chosen to enact male and female Nuo gods in an ancient dance ceremony believed to promote heath, happiness, and good fortune. Taken nearly a quarter century ago by one of China's leading photographers of the time, it documents a facet of traditional Chinese culture that has since vanished, a casualty of the country's headlong rush into modernity.

The 30-year-old German photographer Xiomara Bender is well-known in North Korea-her father, the head of a travel agency specializing in exotic locales, had spent 30 years visiting the hermetic dictatorship neighboring China, and she has been there herself 10 times. In 2018, she went on a photographic expedition to the country with her dealer, OstLicht Gallery founder Peter Coeln, in tow. They hoped to pay a visit to one of the so-called "mass gymnastics" performances in Pyongyang's May Day Stadium. The largest stadium in the world, it has capacity for 114,000 people, of whom an astonishing 90,000 are made up of the performers-who stage precisely choreographed pageantry-while the rest are North Korea's elite.

One day, Kim Jong-un proved unable to attend the spectacle, so authorities auctioned off his two tickets for €800 apiece, and Bender and Coeln snapped them up. (However, they were prevented from taking photos, so this picture was captured on a different visit.) According to Coeln, the event was immensely impressive-until he paid a visit to the training camps where kindergarteners are drilled in the dance moves with military rigor, at which point it became immensely depressing.

Also in the fair, this photograph by Bender calls back, once again, to Robert Frank-and the emotional story it tells cuts to the heart.

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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What Can Contemporary Photography Tell Us About China Today? Here Are 7 of the Most Arresting Images at Photofairs Shanghai 2019

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The Shanghai Exhibition Center is located in a vast complex that was inaugurated in 1955 as the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building, and last week, the artworks assembled there for the latest edition of Photofairs Shanghai likewise told a rich, multilayered, and sprawling story about palimpsestic nature of China's recent cultural history.

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In September 1999, an underground photography exhibition titled "Wushirenfei" was shut down by Shanghai police on its opening afternoon. To this day, it is unclear what precisely had irked the city's authorities.

Perhaps it was the image of four women ogling a man's crotch or the photograph of books balanced on brightly-colored plastic phalluses. Or perhaps it was the prospect of 15 of Shanghai's most exciting young artists exhibiting their work beyond the gaze of government-controlled institutions.

Such closures were relatively common in China during the 1990s, with the state evidently wary of contemporary art. But things have changed dramatically, and, this week, the shuttered exhibition is being re-staged at Photofairs Shanghai, a sprawling annual art fair which last year attracted more than 30,000 visitors.

The move is emblematic of the shift in official attitudes that has taken place in the last two decades, according to the new show's curator, Victor Wang.

"We've come a very long way since then," he said in a phone interview. "Some of China's first (art) institutions were only built within the last decade."

"(The 1990s) was a very specific time when artists were doing everything: being curators, administrators, marketing, branding, facilitators, you name it. Whereas now, in 2018 Shanghai, there are contemporary art museums, fairs, galleries. It's a very different art landscape."

It is fitting, then, that exhibition's name, "Wushirenfei," is an idiom roughly translating as "things stay the same, but people have changed."

What's more indicative of the times, however, is not necessarily the fate of the show, but the career trajectories of the participating artists. Yang Fudong, Hu Jieming, Xu Zhen and the late Geng Jianyi -- then young upstarts in Shanghai's fledgling scene -- all went on to become internationally recognized names in the art world.

Rather than replicating the 1999 show, Wang is presenting more recent images by some of the original participants -- a reflection on the evolution of contemporary art in China. The work will be shown alongside that of emerging artists, including Shanghai's Miao Ying, who contributed a bold installation inspired by Windows desktop backgrounds.

The strength of the city's photography scene is also evident elsewhere in the Photofairs program. This year's exhibitors will showcase, among many others, the art duo Birdhead, whose snapshots revel in the minutiae of Shanghai life, and Chen Ronghui, whose stark photojournalism examines the landscapes of a rapidly changing China, from amusement parks to petrochemical plants.

Hub for a growing market

China's hunger for fine art has grown considerably in the last 10 years. It's now the world's second largest art market, accounting for 21% of global sales (up from 9% in 2008), according to UBS and Art Basel's annual market report.

But the country's collectors have been traditionally reluctant to invest in photographs. A 2015 study by the research group Artprice found that China represented just 1.2% of the global photography market.

This disinterest is often attributed to collectors' dislike of editioned works or prints -- as opposed to one-offs -- and the lack of superstar photographers, relative to other fine arts. But there appears to be a growing market for the medium, according to Photofairs' group fair director, Georgia Griffiths.

"In comparison to where we were five years ago (when the first Photofairs Shanghai was held), it's incredible how China has embraced the medium," she said in a phone interview, pointing to the importance of affordability to middle-class Chinese collectors.

"They can buy a masterpiece for $200,000 or even $20,000 -- not a million, which is what you'd be starting for a painting," she said. "That really appeals to people, this idea that they can have a piece of history in their collection without hemorrhaging money."

Shanghai now stages dozens of photography exhibitions a year. There are also a number of gallery spaces dedicated to the medium, like the Shanghai Center of Photography, which opened its doors in 2015 and exhibits a mixture of photojournalism and more conceptual work.

The gallery's founder, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Liu Heung Shing, believes that the social climate in Shanghai puts it ahead of other Chinese cities.

"Documentary and contemporary Chinese photography lend themselves very well to the Shanghai landscape," he said in a phone interview. "Shanghai is very cosmopolitan and international city ... which makes it much more open to ideas.

"A decade ago, Beijing was predominant and preeminent because it housed all the major art academies, it's the capital and all the bureaucrats who manage culture are (there). But as more private museums have been founded in China, and collectors have become a force of their own, this has really precipitated and facilitated Shanghai as a leading city in (arts and photography)."

Favorable environment

The comparison with Beijing is a pertinent one. Although the capital is home to a number of designated art zones -- such as 798 Art District and Caochangdi, where Ai Weiwei was once based -- a handful of notable galleries have been forced to close by local authorities in recent years.

By contrast, Shanghai, appears to have become increasingly favorable to not only photography, but the arts in general. The number of galleries in the city has skyrocketed, and will soon include an outpost of Paris' famed Centre Pompidou.

The local government's approach to the arts is virtually unrecognizable from the time when "Wushirenfei" was shuttered. An ambitious new plan, dubbed "Shanghai 2035," aims to transform the city into an international cultural hub in less than two decades through a slew of state funding and initiatives aimed at developing the design, film, performing arts, gaming and publishing industries.

At the heart of the project is the West Bund, a stretch of land along the banks of Huangpu River earmarked for cultural institutions -- including Liu's photography gallery.

"Shanghai seems to be a bit better managed, and the decision-making process is done by a more competent bureaucracy," Liu said. "In the case of West Bund, they designated almost 10 kilometers of space as an art and cultural area -- a destination like the Museum Mile in New York, or the South Bank in London.

"They pour resources into this area, and it's done with significantly more planning (than in Beijing). In Beijing you just don't see that -- for good or bad."

Nonetheless, 19 years after his exhibition's forerunner fell victim state intervention, Wang maintains a level of skepticism about the impact public art initiatives are having on the city.

"I'd be cautious to say it's a top-down approach, because the majority of the (art) infrastructure in Shanghai is privately initiated and funded," he said.

"There wouldn't be so much contemporary art infrastructure if it wasn't for the passionate individuals in Shanghai who are putting their own finance behind it."

Photofairs Shanghai is at the Shanghai Exhibition Center from Sept. 21 to 23, 2018.

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shanghai takes center stage in china's burgeoning photography scene - cnn

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Shanghai takes center stage in China's burgeoning photography scene

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In September 1999, an underground photography exhibition titled "Wushirenfei" was shut down by Shanghai police on its opening afternoon. To this day, it is unclear what precisely had irked the city's authorities. Perhaps it was the image of four women ogling a man's crotch or the photograph of books balanced on brightly-colored plastic phalluses.

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SHANGHAI - The building is only 12 stories high, but there are more than 3,000 students living inside the dormitory block at Beijing's Renmin University of China. Most who have studied in China have experienced life in such accommodation, with six undergraduates squeezed into each room.

Zhang Jiayu was one of those 3,000 people. As she approached graduation, she picked up her camera and recorded life in her dormitory building, taking photos of more than 60 beds and their occupants.

Curled up on the neatly arranged bunk beds, Zhang said her subjects looked like rows of bean sprouts in a laboratory experiment. She decided to name the series "Petri Dish."

Born in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang in 1995, Zhang spent most of her childhood in communal spaces: She lived in a dormitory during kindergarten, before moving to a strict, military-style boarding school. But she found the pressures of collective life most stifling in college, where her classmates were all busily preparing for high-flying futures.

When she realized she could not escape her reality, Zhang decided to turn it into art by attempting to capture the essence of communal living.
This is Zhang Jiayu's story, as told to Sixth Tone and edited for brevity and clarity.
When I was a child, I was educated in a collective manner, learning how to adapt to the rules and strive for excellence. Before college, the dormitory I stayed in was a space for education. The teacher set rules for everything, from when to get up to when to go to bed. I would be graded on how well I obeyed these rules. In this day-to-day regime, I formed a routine. I also formed a timid and meticulous personality.

At college, although there were many rules for our collective lives, there was also wiggle room. For example, there was no longer the requirement to live according to a single timetable. I could discover new things, and this made me want to throw off my repressed personality.

But whenever I tried to explore who I was, I still felt alienated. Life in the dorm was complex. On the one hand, we passively chose to share our living space with a group of people; on the other hand, we were often eager to seek out private spaces, to find corners on campus where we could talk freely and cry if we needed. And at the same time, we would pour out our emotions and thoughts in virtual spaces. In an effort to make sense of this contradictory existence, I began to examine my relationship with my living environment.

I turned my eyes to the girls' dormitory block where I lived. The building had 48 rooms on each floor, with six people in every room. The area allotted to each person was about 2 square meters. The layout of every floor was the same: two public toilets, a hot water dispenser, a big trash can. The corridors were narrow and airless, with army-green doors lining the walls, three crude red numbers spray-painted on each one. Downstairs was the public bathroom, managed by the dormitory ayi (the Chinese word often used for middle-aged or elderly women, particularly those working service jobs) and a janitor.

A photo collage shows 64 beds in a dormitory, photographed by Zhang Jiayu. Courtesy of Zhang Jiayu

You needed to swipe a card to enter the dormitory: Boys weren't allowed in. Each room had just six iron-framed bunk beds with tables underneath. A wide aisle ran through the middle, and there was a balcony at the end to hang clothes. In the building, everyone was allocated equal space, but people also felt estranged.

It wasn't until I saw the students clearing out their dormitories one graduation season that I realized how diverse and complex the individuals inside the building were. Items that were originally privately owned were thrown into the public domain as piles of garbage filling the corridors. The codes of the residents' lives were hidden in the chaos.

I decided to use my camera to record this social ecosystem. When I first started shooting, I wanted to find some interesting subjects and try to strip the unique characteristics from each of them. But gradually I was forced to adjust my plans.

With the rise of food delivery and online shopping platforms, courier boxes and small items piled up in each person's narrow compartment. The beds embodied a sense of self-abandonment. There seemed to be no need to interpret it visually, and I became frustrated, wondering if it was worth taking pictures.

But on second thought, this chaotic and crowded space represented how the occupants lived their lives, even if it was aesthetically unpleasant. There was a sense of emotional suppression that was similar to what I felt at the time. The dormitory seemed lively, but people often felt lonely and had nowhere to escape.

The feeling was amplified at night. When the lights went out, a person's face would be illuminated by the light from their cellphone, the world behind hidden in darkness. Insomniacs would often stare at their screens until dawn. Phones became the way individuals vented their emotions. It seemed that only in the virtual world could we have comfortable personal relationships.

Many girls surrounded their beds with curtains, creating a physical barrier to divide private from public space. Anyone who disliked changing clothes in front of other people would climb into bed with their clothes on and pull across the curtains. The sheltered spaces gave them the freedom to disappear.

Many girls thanked me for recording their actual living environment. If they hadn't seen the pictures, most of them never would have realized how they really lived.
Translator: Matt Turner; editor: Dominic Morgan. (Header image: A student covers her eyes with her bra on a bed. From photo series "Petri Dish." Courtesy of Zhang Jiayu)

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Capturing Life in China's Crowded College Dorms

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SHANGHAI - The building is only 12 stories high, but there are more than 3,000 students living inside the dormitory block at Beijing's Renmin University of China. Most who have studied in China have experienced life in such accommodation, with six undergraduates squeezed into each room. Zhang Jiayu was one of those 3,000 people.

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"I never realized that so many Chinese people have tattoos," says photographer Xu Song, who spent the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016 photographing people at outdoor swimming pools in Beijing with his phone. "When the clothes come off, the secrets come out." For Xu, pools provide "a summer outlet for the emotions" of the swimmers. Like the water that spills through them, Xu's photographs both clarify and obscure his subjects, playing with surface and depth, forcing us to see the strangeness in familiar scenes and gestures, and daring us to wonder what might remain submerged.

- The Editors

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"I never realized that so many Chinese people have tattoos," says photographer Xu Song, who spent the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016 photographing people at outdoor swimming pools in Beijing with his phone. "When the clothes come off, the secrets come out." For Xu, pools provide "a summer outlet for the emotions" of the swimmers.

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In this issue of Depth of Field: the dying art of tomb burials; bike graveyards; and a son's 20,000 photos of his mother.

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Are photographs inherently dishonest?

Photographer Martin Schoeller thinks so. "I do think all photographs lie," he said told CNN in an 2017 interview. "I don't think there is one picture that is really honest. You can't describe a person in a split second, but maybe in the grand scheme of photography, I think there are some pictures that are more honest than others, you know? So I'm trying to steer to the little bit more honest side of the spectrum," he said.

Schoeller's way of doing that has made him one of the best known photographers in the world. His portraits of the rich and famous and the down and out are immediately identifiable as the work of a single vision, and a rigorous one at that.

"It's been 20 years that I've been taking these close-up portraits and everybody (has) the same lighting, the same setting, the same angle, the same camera. Nobody is retouched - what you see is what you get," he told CNN.

Schoeller's tightly framed portraits create a typology of faces, in the way that Bernd and Hilla Becher created typologies of industrial sites. Indeed, Schoeller says his work was inspired by the Becher's photographs of water towers. In his images, the expressions are consistently neutral, neither animated nor relaxed, in an attempt to tease out his subjects' differences and capture moments that, he says, feel "intimate, unposed."

Schoeller is now publishing his sixth book, called (Steidl), which features 120 images made between 2005 and 2018 - portraits of presidents, actors, artists, architects, and athletes, as well as religious leaders and homeless people in Los Angeles.

What is missing from a Martin Schoeller portrait is a narrative - the narratives of self that his subjects create with their choice of clothes, or the narrative spun in an environmental portrait by the photographer's choice of background. With those distractions eliminated, we are not only allowed but forced to concentrate on the face before us. Here is Schoeller describing his work for National Geographic:

Schoeller, who grew up in Germany, attended a photography school in Berlin, and after assisting a still-life photographer in Frankfurt and another in Hamburg he moved to the U.S., where he worked for Annie Liebovitz for three years.

"You learn so much working with Annie because she gives away so much responsibility," Schoeller told photographer Ken Weingart in 2015. I was in charge of lighting for her. She's very peculiar about her lighting, but she's not very technical. She doesn't always know how to achieve what she wants, but she knows what she wants - which is the most important part. The issue was that sometimes I wasn't able to make her happy with it, and she would say, "No I don't like this lighting." I tried very hard to please her, but wasn't always successful."

It was in 2015 that Schoeller, known for his images of celebrities, began photographing and interviewing homeless people in Los Angeles, working from a makeshift studio set up at the corner of Sycamore and Romaine streets in West Hollywood, where they were served dinners by an aid organization, the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. He began the work, he told PPD, after being told about the homeless situation in the city by Audrey Landreth, a former photo editor at Rolling Stone who gave him some of his first magazine assignments.

Later he began posting his photographs and transcriptions of his interviews at Instagram. "I'm a little old-school - I'd never done anything on Instagram," he told PPD. "But I thought, 'Hmm, maybe this is a great project for Instagram.' Within six weeks, the Instagram feed had more than 60,000 followers. Schoeller's portraits of the homeless were also highlighted by People magazine and National Geographic, and featured by Los Angeles magazine. He followed up by launching a fundraising project for the Food Coalition.

Schoeller said capturing moments on honesty was easier when he worked with the homeless. Unlike actors, he noted, "They don't stand in front of mirrors and practice their facial expressions. They don't pose as much."

"Actors in general are difficult to shoot because they are always acting," he told CNN. "You feel like 'Oh, this was an honest, great portrait' while you're photographing them... and then (I'm) looking at the contact sheets and I feel like, 'Oh my god, they were playing the whole time and I didn't even notice it.'"

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AI-AP | Pro Photo Daily " Books: Martin Schoeller Gets "Close"

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Are photographs inherently dishonest? Photographer Martin Schoeller thinks so. "I do think all photographs lie," he said told CNN in an 2017 interview. "I don't think there is one picture that is really honest. You can't describe a person in a split second, but maybe in the grand scheme of photography, I think there are some pictures that are more honest than others, you know?

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Martin Schoeller Studio is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation

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Diana Markosian is known for her intimate approach to storytelling, using photography and video. Her projects have taken her to some of the most remote corners of the world, where she has created work that is both conceptual and documentary.

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The World's Smallest Football League | The New York Times

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In the past two decades, most people went from not carrying a camera to always having a smartphone camera with them at all times. With millions upon millions of photos shot (and shared) every single day, how is this explosion in photography affecting us? Here's a 10-minute video that explores that question.

To find out how photos are affecting our eyes, brains, and bodies, WIRED Senior Editor Peter Rubin looks into how selfies distort our self-perception, shoots with a professional photographer, and examines how photos impact moods and memory.

A study published in 2018 found that selfies captured at a distance of 1 foot away make your nose look 30% bigger than an ordinary portrait captured from a farther distance. This can change how we see ourselves and even our behavior: a study also found that people who shoot selfies felt worse than those who don't, and the desire to look better in selfies is also growing as a motivation for certain plastic surgery procedures.

There's also the question of whether incessant photo-taking enhances or detracts from our enjoyment of experiences. While obsessing over shooting photos for social media can negatively impact experiences, shooting for oneself (and worrying about sharing later) can positively affect enjoyment.

Finally, using eye-tracking systems, Rubin compared how he looks at the world and photos with how professional photographer Chris Burkard does. What he found is that Burkard is more deliberate in seeing the details of things while Rubin's untrained eye appears to be much less focused.

"None of [this] may make you a better picture-taker, but it might just help you understand what a camera can do to your mind and your emotions," Rubin writes. "No selfie stick required."

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In the past two decades, most people went from not carrying a camera to always having a smartphone camera with them at all times. With millions upon millions of photos shot (and shared) every single day, how is this explosion in photography affecting us? Here's a 10-minute video that explores that question.

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Colombian graffit artist Sepc recently created an mural showing a woman snapping a Polaroid picture. But it's unusual in that it's a negative: you can see the normal "positive" version by snapping a photo of the mural and then inverting it.

Here's what the mural above looks like when you invert the photo:

The idea came about as a technical challenge, Sepc tells PetaPixel. He combined the creative idea with the technique for making it happen.

"I think that in the world of urban art, it's not enough to be good," says Sepc, who's based in the city of Manizales. "I am constantly reinventing myself and the curiosity to explore and discover new ideas is something that I focus my work on."

This isn't the first time he has created negative murals. Here are a couple of other examples of previous works using the same technique:

Sepc creates the mural by making a sketch and using vinyl paint to create the initial background layer of volume and colors. He then adds in his detail using spray paint.

"Each color has an adjacent or complementary color that is the inverse color of the other," Sepc says. "I want the viewer to capture a photo and to 'reveal' the image - this creates another kind of experience with urban art."

You can find more of Sepc's work on his Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram.
Image credits: Photographs by Sepc and used with permission

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This Negative Mural Can Be Developed by Inverting Your Photo

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Colombian graffit artist Sepc recently created an mural showing a woman snapping a Polaroid picture. But it's unusual in that it's a negative: you can see the normal "positive" version by snapping a photo of the mural and then inverting it.

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Unequal Scenes portrays scenes of inequality around the world from a drone.

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From the perspective of today's young music fan, the most unfathomable aspect of the past might be that we were once starved for images. You could listen to a cassette or a CD over and over, but staring at one of the few photographs you could find of Public Enemy or Geto Boys, on an album sleeve or in a magazine clipping, only elicited feelings of deeper curiosity. You heard the music, but you wanted to see the world that had inspired it, just beyond the frame.

Vikki Tobak's new book, " Contact High," is a wondrous tribute to the way hip-hop overturned not just the sound of culture but also ways of seeing. Tobak worked in the music industry and as a journalist throughout the nineties, experiences that gave her an insider perspective on the culture's rise. Throughout "Contact High," Tobak and some of hip-hop's greatest photographers return to their old contact sheets, scrutinizing all the other, considerably less famous pictures they took on their way to images that became iconic. There's something thrilling about seeing Michael Lavine's outtake versions of OutKast's "Stankonia" cover, where André 3000 has his hands up rather than pointed toward the viewer in a hex, or alternate versions of Danny Clinch's famed portrait of a shirtless Tupac and his "Thug Life" tattoo, where he's looking down at the ground with a measure of peace, rather than toward the sky or directly at the viewer in defiance. These images are like portals into alternate time lines. There's a lone photo of the Notorious B.I.G., wearing a crown and grinning, surrounded by a dozen versions of him flashing a tragic scowl. The crown was the photographer Barron Claiborne's idea, meant to evoke Biggie as the king of New York. Biggie's close friend and producer, Sean "Puffy" Combs, feared that it made him look like the Burger King.

"Contact High" tells the history of how hip-hop learned to pose in front of the camera. And it gives credit to the photographers for being the ones, more often than not, who were telling the stars how and where to stand. The photographer Joe Conzo, Jr., was "a chubby kid with an Angela Davis afro" whose high-school buddies, the Cold Crush Brothers, were starting to gig outside of their South Bronx neighborhood. His late-seventies images capture the music at its freest, full of young faces in the crowd squealing in delight at seeing people just like them onstage. Martha Cooper, a New York photojournalist, obsessively took photos of dancers and graffiti writers in the early eighties, fearful that this subculture "might disappear" before anyone knew it. An image of the b-boy Frosty Freeze in the middle of his routine feels impossibly still, a blur of twisting, whirling limbs captured in a single, fleeting shot.

Cooper was wrong, thankfully, and the spirit that she tried to capture did not disappear. As hip-hop established itself as a cultural force, in the late eighties and the nineties, the desire to myth-make in visual terms grew stronger, more conceptual. The photographer Glen E. Friedman tells a great story about Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" album cover. The group preferred an image of Chuck D and Flavor Flav behind bars, whereas Friedman insisted on his original concept, shot from the perspective of a surveillance camera. He was so adamant about his preference that he threatened to destroy the negatives. (He eventually lost.) The photographer Brian Cross recalls how shy and demure the rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard became when he was asked to put his hands over the breasts of a model-a play on Janet Jackson's famous Rolling Stone cover.

Photography has become thoroughly woven into our everyday lives as a sort of running archive of our experiences. Images haven't lost their power, especially in the age of social media, when a meme-conscious artist like Drake can shift fads by taking a dimly lit selfie. "Contact High" provides a fascinating prehistory of our present, a glimpse into a time when nobody quite knew where hip-hop could go. Tobak's photographers often speak of bearing witness, hoping to capture a moment in time. DJ Premier, of Gang Starr, talks about how he and his crew took a picture together at the end of their album shoot-a perk of having a professional photographer around for a few hours. "Some of us made it through and others didn't," he says, looking at Matt Gunther's contact sheet from Gang Starr's "Daily Operation" session. Premier notices some guys being a little too casual with their guns, and others, like his partner, Guru, who are no longer around. "We were just young and living."

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How Hip-Hop Learned to Pose for the Camera

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From the perspective of today's young music fan, the most unfathomable aspect of the past might be that we were once starved for images. You could listen to a cassette or a CD over and over, but staring at one of the few photographs you could find of Public Enemy or Geto Boys, on an album sleeve or in a magazine clipping, only elicited feelings of deeper curiosity.

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Books - Contact High (hip hop photography)

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Books - Contact High (hip hop photography)

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Iconic spots in Kansas City, Missouri, are banning photographers from their property due to photo shoots getting out of control. Professional photographers argue the trouble is being caused by "a few bad apples" that aren't representative of the whole industry.

In a new article and the 3-minute segment above, FOX 4 Kansas City reports that popular historic areas such as the West Bottoms are seeing more and more "No Photographer" signs posted on old, beautiful buildings in response to growing issues.

"[F]amilies open the front doors and set up like it's their home photos, so they have like props and everything at the door," salon owner Brett Judson tells FOX 4. "Besides setting up their fake house in our lobby, in our front door, they will block all the traffic under the 12th Street bridge to get that like beautiful family photo or a wedding photo."

Photographers have also reportedly left paint splatters on the side of a building and regularly leave trash and litter in nature areas.

While private property owners have the right to keep photographers off their land and out of their buildings, the city affirms that it's lawful to photograph private property and buildings from public property.

"The city doesn't have any specific laws that would ban taking photos while the photographer is on public property, such as sidewalks, streets, etc.," spokesman Chris Hernandez tells FOX 4. "If private owners have signs posted banning people from entering their property to photograph their property (or enter for any other reason), that's more of a trespass issue."

In order to preserve their ability to photograph in well-known historic and nature locations, some photographers are working to improve relations with the community by going out and cleaning up after the messes left by others.

(via FOX 4 Kansas City via Fstoppers)

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Iconic Kansas City Spots Are Banning Photogs Due to 'Bad Apples'

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Iconic spots in Kansas City, Missouri, are banning photographers from their property due to photo shoots getting out of control. Professional photographers argue the trouble is being caused by "a few bad apples" that aren't representative of the whole industry.

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Photographs as Protest - Gordon Parks

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When Lens kicked off 10 years ago this month, Instagram did not exist and smartphone cameras were relatively new and rarely used by serious photographers. Today, most readers view Lens on their phones. That's but one of the tectonic shifts in photography as Lens followed monumental events like wars and the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump as well as the intimate stories of daily life told by people in their own communities.

If Lens had a credo, it was this: Photography does not happen by itself; it happens because of photographers.

Image

That realization came at a time when advances in digital technology and platforms spurred both anxiety and layoffs among photojournalists as well as a drop in freelance editorial assignments. James Estrin envisioned an online destination that would highlight excellent photography and serious discussion of visual journalism, a mission that over the years expanded to include debates on important issues of accuracy, ethics and representation.

After some research, James suggested to Michele McNally, then The Times's director of photography, the idea of a photo blog. There were few such blogs at the time, and none with The Times's reputation or reach. She agreed, though she also realized it could be too much for one person to take on. That's when David W. Dunlap, then a Metro reporter with a keen interest in photography, came on board as the incipient blog's co-editor. Josh Haner, who besides being a fine photographer - he would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 - was conversant in the language of coders and designers, also joined the team as co-editor, setting up a simple WordPress blog for a one-week trial run.

Michele wasn't kidding about the amount of work involved. Lens took a year to get up and running - there were so many people involved in the planning that it took about four months to agree upon on a name. We settled on Lens, a name that had been previously used for a weekly photographic column from 2005 to 2008. Originated by Anne Cronin, then a metro editor, it featured projects by staff as well as freelance photographers. Lens finally went live five days a week with a sleek design featuring a dark background, slide shows and white type. The first post declared that Lens would showcase the work of Times photographers and also highlight the best images by photographers from other publications, wire services and agencies from around the web:

"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."

Lens has since grown to include photography that could be considered more broadly documentary or art and has also featured video. Over the course of the past decade, it has addressed ethical issues in conflict photography and revisited overlooked - or underappreciated - masters. Readers have also been invited to participate in Lens's mission; several callouts were made to crowd source images in projects like " A Moment in Time."

When David left Lens, he was succeeded by David Gonzalez, a longtime Times reporter who had been a columnist and foreign correspondent, as well as a founding member of Seis del Sur, a Puerto Rican photo collective. A native Spanish speaker, he proved to be the point person for photographers from Latin America, a region that - along with Africa and Asia - had seen robust growth thanks to the accessibility of digital technology and platforms.

More important, Lens became one of the industry leaders in the discussion over accurate representation, featuring the work of people telling the stories of their own communities. Narratives that for too long had been defined by outsiders began to be reclaimed by those whose lived experiences informed their photography.

Lens's commitment to these issues led it to become a co-founder of the New York Portfolio Review, which convenes a diverse group photographers, editors, curators and publishers for a weekend of critiques and panel discussions. The goal was for each participant to get not just advice, but also a chance to be published or exhibited. Above all, unlike other established reviews that charged to participate, the New York Portfolio Review was free, a decision born of the belief that money should not be an obstacle to finding new opportunities. This was largely made possible thanks to the time and talent of its co-founders at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and United Photo Industries.

None of this could have been accomplished without a series of intrepid producers: Kerri MacDonald, Matthew McCann, Whitney Richardson, Anjelica Bartkowiak and Matthew Sedacca Levine.

To mark Lens's 10th anniversary, we are featuring some of our favorite posts today and tomorrow.With more than 4,000 posts to choose from, the choices are admittedly personal. Consider this a mixtape by David Gonzalez and James Estrin.We'd love to hear which ones have been your favorites over the years.

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When Lens kicked off 10 years ago this month, Instagram did not exist and smartphone cameras were relatively new and rarely used by serious photographers. Today, most readers view Lens on their phones. That's but one of the tectonic shifts in photography as Lens followed monumental events like wars and the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald J.

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Country Doctor • W. Eugene Smith • Magnum Photos Magnum Photos

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The life of a country doctor in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a landmark photoessay by W. Eugene Smith

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Leica has announced the new D-Lux 7, a powerful yet compact camera the company is calling the "Swiss Army knife of Leica compact cameras."

Inside the D-Lux 7 is a large 17-megapixel four-thirds CMOS sensor that significantly larger than what's found in traditional compact cameras. The camera can shoot photos at 11fps with an ISO range of 100-25600 as well as 4K30p video (100 Mbit in MP4 and AVCHD-format).

On the front of the camera is a 24-75mm (35mm equiv.) f/1.7-2.8 all-purpose zoom lens that, when paired with the sensor, provides "maximum image quality in the smallest possible package," Leica says.

In addition to the 3-inch 1.24-million-dot touchscreen LCD, photographers can also frame shots with the built-in 2.8-megapixel high-res electronic viewfinder that provides "crystal-clear viewing even in direct sunlight."

Other features and specs of the camera include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, USB-C charging, Post-Focus, 4K Photo, an included flash unit, one-touch aspect ratio switching, manual settings, and Leica FOTOS app compatibility.

The Leica D-Lux 7 is available now for $1,195. If you'd like the same features and specs and don't care about the Leica red dot, you can consider purchasing the Panasonic Lumix DC-LX100 II (which the D-Lux 7 is a rebranded version of) for $998.

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Leica Unveils the D-Lux 7, Its 'Swiss Army Knife' of Compact Cameras

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Leica has announced the new D-Lux 7, a powerful yet compact camera the company is calling the "Swiss Army knife of Leica compact cameras." Inside the D-Lux 7 is a large 17-megapixel four-thirds CMOS sensor that significantly larger than what's found in traditional compact cameras.

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They prepare for classes and make their beds together, gently setting a teddy bear and a stuffed crocodile on pillows. They look intently at themselves as they fix oversize white bows, meant to symbolize purity, in their hair.

And they wear gas masks for training drills.

They are "the Little Spies of Putin" - or at least that's what a French publication called them in a piece that inspired the photographer Sergey Kozmin to document them for his series "Girl Soldiers."

They can "strip down an AK-47 Kalashnikov in the time it takes most kids to send an S.M.S.," Mr. Kozmin said.

The young students attend the Moscow Female Cadet Boarding School No. 9 - which Mr. Kozmin calls "one of the elite military academies in Russia." It is a state school, free to all who attend, though the competition to be admitted is intense.

Sergey Kozmin

In addition to standard subjects, the students study the basics of military service including marching, military strategy and marksmanship. The school's curriculum also includes sewing, ballet and compulsory choir practice.

The school is strict. "No miniskirts or swear words, no smoking or drinking, and no hanging about unattended," Mr. Kozmin said. "Mobile phone are also banned except for a few minutes a day to talk with parents."

But Mr. Kozmin once indulged them, breaking a school rule against gum. "The girls saw that I was pulling chewing gum out of my pocket, and they were so excited, ran up to me and encircled me and asked to give them the whole package," he said. "It's one of the things they miss so much."

Many of the girls come from military families and dream of careers serving Russia, whether in the army, the police force or the Federal Security Service. A museum inside the school celebrates famous Russian women, beginning with the era of the czars. The students want to be like them, Mr. Kozmin said, as well as other prominent Russian women like Alina Kabaeva, the Olympic medal-winning rhythmic gymnast and member of the Russian parliament.

"They want to improve the role of women in Russia," said Mr. Kozmin, 32, of the students he has been photographing since October 2011.

His dedication to the project allows him to go seemingly unnoticed by his subjects. "It's a part of my job," he said. "But usually I like to spend more time with the people I photograph. Sometimes, I spend a whole day and the photos, I take in a few seconds. But it's worth the waiting."

Sergey Kozmin

Mr. Kozmin's presence is unusually easy to forget when looking at these images, whether in a photo of a young woman gazing intently just past his camera, tying a braid in her hair, or in one that shows another student closing her eyes, dancing cheek-to-cheek with a young man at a winter ball. Or even leaping joyously in ballet class, presumably just over Mr. Kozmin's head.

If any are aware of the photographer in their midst, they usually don't show it.

Mr. Kozmin began as a cinematographer, studying at the Russian State Cinema School in Moscow. But he quit his studies to become a photojournalist. "I wanted to be independent," he said. "It was more fun."

Mr. Kozmin has realized that this story isn't finished, and plans to add video and sound. He'd like to give the students themselves an opportunity to say "who they are, what they want and what they dream of."
Follow @nytimesphoto and @kristenjoy on Twitter.

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They prepare for classes and make their beds together, gently setting a teddy bear and a stuffed crocodile on pillows. They look intently at themselves as they fix oversize white bows, meant to symbolize purity, in their hair. And they wear gas masks for training drills.

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A Fisherman's Friend | a photo story by Laurent Weyl | Panos Pictures

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Zhakslik Kinzhimbaev is the son and grandson of fishermen. He was born on the shores of the Aral Sea but never worked in industrial fishing. The sea had already retreated too far from his village when he was old enough to work and feed his own family.

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The Last of the Aleuts | a photo story by Vlad Sokhin | Panos Pictures

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After over 70 years of separation, the two communities were once again permitted to visit each other in the early 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union. Due to the remoteness of the islands, however, bureaucratic obstacles continued to hobble contact between the two parts of the archipelago.

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Adam Dean Photography | Represented by Panos Pictures

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Russian b.1964~~Sergey Maximishin spent his childhood in Kerch, Crimea. He moved to Leningrad in 1982 and served in the Soviet Army as a photographer for the Soviet Military Force Group in Cuba from 1985 to 1987.~~After graduating from Leningrad Politechnical Institute in 1991 with a BA in physics, Maximishin worked in the laboratory of scientific and technical expertise in the Hermitage Museum.~~He then graduated from St.

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An ode to a schizophrenic sibling: Louis Quail's moving portraits of his brother

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A new book of photographs ​challenges the stigma around mental health and captures the light and shade in the lives of Quail's brother Justin ​a​nd his girlfriend, Jackie

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Structure with photos

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The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years. Many lost their jobs during the country's transition from Communism and initially became traditional herders. But two devastating winters, known as dzuds, wiped out a third of Mongolia's livestock in 2001 and 2002, and thousands of families joined the gold rush, scouring sites rejected by large mining companies for quartz or crumbs of gold. Ninjas earn between 5$ and 10$ a day, often more than teachers, doctors and government officials.El agreste paisaje de Zaamar, situado a unos 350 kilómetros al oeste de Ulaanbataar, está sembrado de tantos agujeros que podría hundirse en cualquier momento. Allí, a la sombra de grandes compañías mineras trabajan miles de ninjas, llamados así por la batea de plástico verde que llevan en la espalda y que recuerda a las Tortugas Ninja. En los últimos cinco años alrededor de 100.000 mongoles han decidido aventurarse en las profundidades de la tierra para extraer cuarzo y, especialmente oro. Muchos de ellos perdieron sus empleos durante la transición que siguió a la caída del comunismo e inicialmente se hicieron pastores nómadas. Sin embargo dos inviernos especialmente duros-los temidos dzuds- fulminaron la tercera parte de la ganadería mongola entre 2001 y 2002 y miles de familias emprendieron la carrera del oro, explotando yacimientos desechados por las grandes compañías. Los ninja ganan entre 5 y 10 dólares por día, un salario a menudo superior al de profesores médicos e incluso funcionarios del gobierno.

Mongolia is in the midst of an epic gold rush spawning the modern equivalent of the forty-niners who rushed to California in 1849.

The county is rich in natural resources-stunning scenery, yes, but also vast deposits of coal, copper, gold, and other metals. Over the years, industrial mining has punched gaping holes into the landscape, then moved on after taking all it could. Then the locals scour the open pits, taking what the corporations left behind and creating an informal but dangerous industry.

As many as 100,000 Mongolians- nearly 20 percent of the country's rural workforce-work as independent and unlicensed miners, sifting the dirt for the smallest flecks of gold. Spanish photographer Alvaro Laiz is fascinated by this trend and chronicles this dangerous endeavor in Ninjas: Gold Rush In Mongolia.

"I've been always interested in how human beings interact with our environment and how the search for natural resources affects us," he says.

The term "ninja" refers to the large green pans (used to carry ore and sift gold) the miners carry on their backs, which makes them look like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It is a difficult way of life; these miners descend into shafts with little structural support and endure bitter cold or searing heat deep underground. There is little in the way of safety equipment or oversight as they chip away at the earth using rudimentary tools.

"When I ventured down a shaft, the heat, the dust and the noise was so intense I couldn't see my hands," says Laiz. "I was there for 40 minutes. It felt like a century. Afterward, I saw with different eyes, the men who spend 10 hours each day down those same holes.

"Watching them work was like traveling back to the times of the Gold Rush."

Though ninjas are drawn by the promise of riches, most merely get by. The mining is tough on them, and on the landscape. According to rough estimates by officials and non-governmental organizations, the ninjas pulled as much as 5 tons of gold from the ground in 2013 alone, earning as little as $8 a day for their efforts.

All things told, the Mongolian economy is booming and The Economist says mining industries will drive the country's economic growth at a faster rate than any other nation on earth in the next decade. The government recently acknowledged the ninjas' contributions to society and their needs as a migratory and nebulous workforce, but the amateur miners remain at the bottom of the heap because of their crude methods and associated risks. Until there's employment alternatives, it's likely the ninjas will continue to speculate.

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Inside the Dangerous World of Amateur 'Ninja' Gold Miners

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The rugged landscape in Zaamarr, 350 kilometers west of Ulaanbataar is sown with so many holes that it may subside at any moment. There, overshadowed by big mining companies labour thousand of ninjas.Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the green plastic pans they carry on their backs about 100,000 Mongolians have joined mining industry in the past five years.

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Storytelling - news example

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The nets have helped save millions of lives, but scientists worry about the collateral damage: Africa's fish.

Part of the concern is the scale. Mosquito nets are now a billion-dollar industry, with hundreds of millions of insecticide-treated nets passed out in recent years, and many more on their way.

They arrive by the truckload in poor, waterside communities where people have been trying to scrape by with substandard fishing gear for as long as anyone can remember. All of a sudden, there are light, soft, surprisingly strong nets - for free. Many people said it would be foolish not to use them for fishing.

"The nets go straight out of the bag into the sea," said Isabel Marques da Silva, a marine biologist at Universidade Lúrio in Mozambique. "That's why the incidence for malaria here is so high. The people don't use the mosquito nets for mosquitoes. They use them to fish."

But the unsparing mesh, with holes smaller than mosquitoes, traps much more life than traditional fishing nets do. Scientists say that could imperil already stressed fish populations, a critical food source for millions of the world's poorest people.

Scientists are hardly the only ones alarmed. Fistfights are breaking out on the beaches of Madagascar between fishermen who fear that the nets will ruin their livelihoods, and those who say they will starve without them. Congolese officials have snatched and burned the nets, and in August, Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, threatened to jail anyone fishing with a mosquito net.

"We need a regulation to deal with these people," Mr. Museveni said.

Many of these insecticide-treated nets are dragged through the same lakes and rivers people drink from, raising concerns about toxins. One of the most common insecticides used by the mosquito net industry is permethrin, which the United States Environmental Protection Agency says is "likely to be carcinogenic to humans" when consumed orally. The E.P.A. also says permethrin is "highly toxic" to fish.

Most scientists say the risks to people are minimal, because the dosages are relatively low and humans metabolize permethrin quickly. But with coldblooded animals, it's a different story.

"If you're using freshly treated nets in a smallish stream or a bay in the lake, it's quite likely you're going to kill fish you don't intend to kill," said Dan Strickman, a senior program officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested heavily in malaria research and development. "That's definitely an environmental hazard."

The leading mosquito net manufacturers insist that their products are not dangerous. Still, many nets are labeled: "Do not wash in a lake or a river."

Some labels go even further, warning people to pour any water used in washing a net into a hole in the ground, "away from home, animals and wells."

When asked about this, Egon Weinmueller, a public health executive for BASF, a major netmaker, said, "We want to avoid any form of contamination." He acknowledged that "if it's a small pond, say maybe 10 meters, it could be a problem."

Though experts say that the vast majority of mosquito nets are used exactly the way they were intended - hung over beds - the full extent of mosquito-net fishing is unknown.

"No one is going to come forward in a survey and say, 'That thing you're giving me, we're not using it properly,' " said Seth Faison, a spokesman for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has financed the purchase of 450 million nets.

Yet Mr. Faison and several other public health officials maintained that mosquito-net fishing was "anecdotal."

"In regards to what we face," Mr. Faison said, "it's an infinitesimal problem, maybe 1 percent."

But that would still amount to millions of nets.

One of the few detailed studies on the issue showed that in several villages along Lake Tanganyika, an essential body of water shared by four East African nations, 87.2 percent of households used mosquito nets to fish. When that study was presented at a malaria conference last year, the reception, according to some of those in attendance, was decidedly cool.

"People are very defensive about this topic," said Amy Lehman, an American physician and the founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic, which conducted the study. "The narrative has always been, 'Spend $10 on a net and save a life,' and that's a very compelling narrative.

"But what if that net is distributed in a waterside, food-insecure area where maybe you won't be affecting the malaria rate at all and you might actually be hurting the environment?" she said. "It's a lose-lose. And that's not a very neat story to tell."
Fabric of a Community
An insecticide-treated mosquito net, hung over a bed, is the front line in the battle against malaria. It's also the perfect mosquito-killing machine. The gauzy mesh allows the carbon dioxide that people exhale to flow out, which attracts mosquitoes. But as they swarm in, their cuticles touch the insecticide on the net's surface, poisoning their nervous systems and shutting down their microscopic hearts.

Western governments and foundations donate the money. Big companies like BASF, Bayer and Sumitomo Chemical design the nets. They are manufactured at about $3 apiece, many in China and Vietnam, shipped in steel containers to Africa, trucked to villages by aid agencies, and handed out by local ministries of health, usually gratis. The World Health Organization says the nets are a primary reason malaria death rates in Africa have been cut in half since 2000.

But at the end of the line, in poor areas where little goes to waste, mosquito nets become many other things: soccer balls and chicken coops, bridal veils and funeral shrouds. Mosquito nets are literally part of the fabric of a community.

For many uses, a secondhand net, which has less insecticide on it, will do. But for fishing, it's different.

"New mosquito nets are the best," said David Owich, who fishes on Lake Victoria. "No holes."

When asked where he had gotten his, he smiled.

"At the hospital," he said. "Much cheaper than a real net."

(A "real" net costs about $50, an enormous expense in a place where many people survive on a few dollars a day.)

In Mr. Owich's world, there is no overstating the centrality of fish. His daily catch pays for school supplies and keeps the kerosene lamp lit in his mud hut. All around Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi and so many others, fish are the engine block of the economy and a de facto social security system for landless people.

"You can see it in people's moods," said Said Katensi, a Tanzanian conservationist on Lake Tanganyika. "Whenever there's fish, everyone is happy. When there isn't any fish, like now, everyone is sad."
Dwindling Fish Populations
Out on the Bangweulu flood plains of Zambia, where the swamps stretch all the way to the horizon in every direction, a reed basket used to be the primary fishing technology.

But the other day, when one of Mr. Ndefi's neighbors went to check some fish traps in a few feet of dank swamp water, it was obvious why mosquito mesh had replaced it. A trap made from traditional reeds was empty. The trap next to it, made from a mosquito net, was jumping with tiny silvery fish.

"It's simple economics," said Carl Huchzermeyer, a fisheries manager for African Parks, a conservation organization in Bangweulu. "You could spend two days making a basket out of reeds, or just use a mosquito net."

Recent hydroacoustic surveys show that Zambia's fish populations are dwindling. Harris Phiri, a Zambian fisheries official, blamed deforestation, rapid population growth and the widespread use of mosquito nets.

"They are catching very small fish that haven't matured," Mr. Phiri said. "The stocks won't be able to grow."

Jeppe Kolding, a Danish fisheries ecologist, has challenged the conventional wisdom. He advocates a "balanced harvest" approach that calls for catching more juvenile fish and sparing some of the adults, arguing that mosquito-net fishing may not harm fish stocks as much as widely believed.

"Fish are more like plants than other animals," he said, "in that they disperse millions of seeds."

But even he acknowledges that, for fishing purposes, it would be much better if the nets used were not treated with toxic chemicals.

In many places, fish are dried for hours in direct sunlight on treated mosquito nets. Direct sunlight can break down the insecticide coating. Anthony Hay, an associate professor of environmental toxicology at Cornell University, said fish could absorb some of the toxins, leaving people to ingest them when they eat the fish.

"It's just another one of these 'white man's burdens,' " Mr. Hay said, referring to William Easterly's well-known book critical of foreign aid by the West. "We think we have a solution to everybody's problems, and here's an example of where we're creating a new problem."
Fishermen's Feud
Every morning at sunrise in Antongil Bay, along Madagascar's ruggedly beautiful northern coast, fishing crews drag seines made from mosquito nets through the putty-colored sea. It's a family affair, with spindly grandmothers and 8-year-old boys wrapping their hands around the wet ropes and pulling as hard as they can.

When the nets land on the beach, it's like peering into the stomach of the sea: a squishy mass of sand, seaweed, dead blowfish, dead baby eels and thousands of baby shrimp, their bodies translucent, their tiny eyes black dots no larger than specks of sand.

The Malagasy word for these nets is "ramikaoko," or the thing that takes all things together. The extent of the damage is unclear, but recent surveys show that Madagascar's industrial shrimp catch plummeted to 3,143 tons in 2010 from 8,652 tons in 2002.

Because Antongil Bay is considered a crucial shrimping area, Madagascar recently banned the use of ramikaoko nets there. But the government has been in such disarray since a military coup a few years ago that enforcement of the decree is now up to a group of threadbare vigilante fishermen.

The group calls itself Fearless, and it prowls the pebbly, windswept beaches, looking for mosquito nets to seize.

Be Zocilin, a stocky member with a thick neck and browning teeth, sheepishly held up his left arm to show a half-moon scar - a bite mark.

"We didn't expect war," he said, "but the other side brought war."

Mr. Zocilin explained, and several witnesses confirmed, that he had been attacked and nearly killed by mosquito-net fishermen.

In another village, mosquito-net users crept up to the boats of professional fishermen late one night and cut them loose into the sea. The net users were so furious about anyone trying to take away their nets that they started a boycott of the professional fishermen.

"Even my own sisters didn't sell me rice," said Adrien Labiza, a professional fisherman who has tried, with little success, to persuade friends and family not to fish with mosquito nets.

Clearly, there are no easy answers. In all these places, the people fishing with mosquito nets tend to be those without boats or even tackle, often women and children, the most dispossessed. They work from shore, tugging the nets through shallow waters, precisely where many species spawn, creating another potential problem: the slow, steady destruction of sensitive aquatic breeding grounds.

Dr. Lehman, the American physician on Lake Tanganyika, wonders if there might be better malaria solutions for waterside communities. Specially treated wall coverings? Custom-fit window screens? "Why is this question not being asked?" she said, a bit exasperated. "Is it that we don't really want to know the answer?"

For Mr. Ndefi, it is a simple, if painful, matter of choice. He knows all too well the dangers of malaria. His own toddler son, Junior, died of the disease four years ago. Junior used to always be there, standing outside his hut, when Mr. Ndefi came home from fishing.

Mr. Ndefi hopes his family can survive future bouts of the disease. But he knows his loved ones will not last long without food.

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Meant to Keep Malaria Out, Mosquito Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

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The nets have helped save millions of lives, but scientists worry about the collateral damage: Africa's fish. Part of the concern is the scale. Mosquito nets are now a billion-dollar industry, with hundreds of millions of insecticide-treated nets passed out in recent years, and many more on their way.

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VUâ€™ represents a hundred of authors trough the world : around forty members and sixty associated photographers.

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There's something they say about words and pictures, so we won't belabor this too much. Below you'll find some of the most eye-catching photographs we ran on the site in the last year. Set aside some time to scroll through each one: They're an amazing window onto everything that's happening in the world-from Detroit's collapse and the economic rise of China and the Middle East, to environmental disasters at home and abroad.

And then, less seriously, some great photos of those ridiculous fake tree cell phone towers, hilarious examples of what happens when strangers draw your Facebook photos, and a series of the true residents of Portland, who are crazier than anything you've seen on Portlandia. You'll enjoy them all. And if that's not enough, you can see our favorites from last year here.
1: Beautifully Mashed-Up Photos Show The Glory And Wreckage Of Detroit
The "Detroit Now and Then" project artfully combines vintage photos of the city with images of what's there now, providing a poignant reminder of what the city was, what it is now and-maybe-what it could be again.
2: "Portraitlandia": Photos Of Portland's Most Portland-y Residents
If Portlandia were a photo series, it would probably look something like Kirk Crippens's "Portraitlandia," which features iconic Rose City residents in their natural habitats.
3: Look At These Chinese Workers Carrying Mind-Blowing Amounts Of Stuff 11: These Horrifying Photos Show A Destroyed American Landscape That Agriculture Giants Don't Want You To See
These aerial images of industrial beef farming operations look less like shots of land and more like a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
12: These Photos Of Tiny, Futuristic Japanese Apartments Show How Micro Micro-Apartments Can Be
Micro-apartments are in vogue today. But in Japan, people have been living in the Nakagin Capsule Tower's 100-square-foot housing for decades.
Read more of our best stories of the year in these categories: Top stories, infographics, photography, maps, buildings, design, cities, food, transportation, innovative workplaces, bikes, collaborative consumption, energy, crowdfunding, robots, environment, health, education

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The 12 Most Amazing Photo Essays Of 2013

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There's something they say about words and pictures, so we won't belabor this too much. Below you'll find some of the most eye-catching photographs we ran on the site in the last year.

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Page 2 | Read the latest stories about photo essay on Time

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The pictures of Blanca's life in California look ordinary: relaxing with her parents on the banks of a river, dressed up for her quinceañera, studying at school, moving into her first off-campus apartment. Yet to her - and to thousands of other immigrants whose parents brought them to this country without authorization - the pictures represent lives that reach for the future, aware of the obstacles that could one day take it all away.

The joy that advocates felt last November when President Obama announced broader initiatives to grant legal status to children and parents who are here without authorization has now turned to fear. Republicans in Congress have announced that they plan to undo the president's executive actions. Those moves have already prompted debate and protests where the issues will be put into high relief.

"That's a great way to start the conversation, but it becomes the theater of politics," said Mark Abramson, a photographer who has been documenting Blanca and her family since 2013. "The children start to be seen as lone wolves, but what about the parents that brought them here? I wanted to do a project that encompassed the students in an intimate way, but also the parents, since I don't think that was being addressed."

His project "Neither Here Nor There" - which includes a short documentary he did with Gabriela Bortolamedi - details the lives of Blanca; her parents, Eduardo and Gloria; and her 10-year-old sister, Sonia, who is the only family member with United States citizenship. The project offers a close, quiet look at Eduardo's long days with the landscaping business he has built up since leaving Mexico and moving to Bakersfield, Calif., in 2000, when he was lured by promises of easy money. Mr. Abramson shows Gloria in the fields, where Blanca, 20, worked as a child. And of, course, it tracks the life of Blanca, whose days are split between her pre-med studies at the University of California, Berkeley and phone calls with her father to help him with everything from translations to accounting.

"The politicians talk about us like we are only numbers," Blanca said. "But we are people, human beings, with families."

Mr. Abramson said he wanted to explore the world of young people like Blanca - commonly known as Dreamers, from federal legislation known as the Dream Act - ever since 2010, when he encountered young advocates in Washington as a video intern at The Washington Post. The legislation failed, but his interest stayed strong. On one level, he could relate, because he was an immigrant himself - his parents were Soviet Jews who had come to this country in 1978, then returned to Moscow shortly after Mr. Abramson was born in 1988. He and his mother returned to the United States 10 years later, after stops in Austria and Spain.

"Why is it that we, as Jewish immigrants, had one way of immigrating and have an easier path, and all these kids had a different experience?" Mr. Abramson said. "I moved around so many times. Why was I so privileged and why do others have a different experience at the southern border?"

He first met Blanca in 2013, after she had just enrolled at Berkeley through a program that allowed immigrants like her to qualify for in-state tuition. She had also - thanks to changes in the law introduced by the Obama administration - been able to obtain a more stable status that let young people like her get a driver's license, open bank accounts and the like.

Although Blanca understood what Mr. Abramson and his partner wanted to do, it took a bit to explain the project to her parents. It helped that he spoke Spanish, did not use their surname in order to protect them as much as he could and, above all, patiently eased in. He would follow Blanca at school, or her father tending to the homes of his client or her mother picking grapes. When he visited the family, he would crash on the floor.

"It's really humbling, this whole experience, for somebody to allow you into intimate quarters," Mr. Abramson said. "It really has been a blessing. They have gotten accustomed to us. It took time, but they started to make us part of their lives, including us in happy moments like family gatherings and baptisms."

When President Obama announced his expansion of immigration policy in November, Mr. Abramson said the family seemed more hopeful than ever. Gloria, Blanca's mother, was especially excited, he said.

"It was heartbreaking," Mr. Abramson recalled. "Gloria said, 'Does this mean I can go back and visit my mom?' I knew she would not be able to. Blanca might be able to travel with a school program, but her parents would not be able to. All they want to do is go back, but what about their daughters? The kids don't know anything else but this country."

Which is why the parents agreed to allow their lives to be documented.

"There is a lot of love and incredible sacrifice," Mr. Abramson said. "Everything is for their kids. They always told me that hopefully this project can help other people. But if it helps their daughters, that is what's most important.

Follow @markabramsonphoto on Instagram, @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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dream act (development relief and education for minors act)

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The pictures of Blanca's life in California look ordinary: relaxing with her parents on the banks of a river, dressed up for her quinceañera, studying at school, moving into her first off-campus apartment.

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Contemporary Issues, third prize stories

September 28, 2017

Donna Tottel (54) and Doug Tottel (55) are unemployed and survive by selling used goods from their porch in Fort Creek, West Virginia. When the electricity to their house was cut off, they installed a generator.

Degrees of rage in three US states: a journey made in the weeks after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was the first gathering of far-right groups from all over the country in decades, held in part to demonstrate opposition to the removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

The photographer travelled through Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland meeting a range of people, from extreme right activists to patriots and those angry at the way the US is governed, in an attempt to understand why white anger has risen to the surface.

Commissioned by
VG, Panos Pictures

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This image is collected in

Norway

Espen Rasmussen (b. 1976) is based at Nesodden, close to Oslo, Norway.

visit photographer website

Espen Rasmussen (b. 1976) is based at Nesodden, close to Oslo, Norway.

Espen Rasmussen (b. 1976) is based at Nesodden, close to Oslo, Norway.

He works as a picture editor at VG Helg, the weekend magazine of daily Norwegian newspaper, VG. He is represented by Panos Pictures

Espen has won numerous awards for his work, including two prizes from World Press Photo, several in the Picture of the Year international (POYi) and 41 awards in the Norwegian Picture of the Year, including Photographer of the Year in 2015 and 2016 as well as the main prize, Picture of the Year in 2004 and 2016.

In 2007, Espen received $60,000 from the Freedom of Expression Foundation to continue his long-term project on refugees and IDPs around the world, which was published as the book TRANSIT in 2011 by Dewi Lewis, as well as a major exhibition.

He is a freelance lecturer in photography and he also frequently gives presentations at photo festivals and for a wide range of other audiences. For the last seven years, he has been one of three editors/mentors at Norwegian Journal of Photography (NJP).

His work has been exhibited at the Nobel Peace Center (Oslo), The Humanity House (The Hague) and the UNHCR headquarter (Geneva) among other places.
Clients include the New York Times, MSF (Doctors Without Borders), NRC (The Norwegian Refugee Council) and UNHCR.

His work has appeared in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, New Republic, L'Espresso, Der Spiegel and the Economist and newspapers such as The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph and New York Times.

Espen Rasmussen on Twitter

@rasermus

Three great days in Amsterdam! Proud to receive third prize in Contemporary Issues stories in World Press Photo and... https://t.co/3rXbJ6Hzq6

RT @TopicsBE: Fotograaf @rasermus ging op zoek in de dalen van West Virginia, waar wapens overal zijn: https://t.co/93QO8TvsrC https://t.co...

Honored to receive a silver in the Print Newspaper Visual Editing category and a bronze in Online News & Issues Sto... https://t.co/st4jOLzri0

Happy to be among the nominees here: RT @WorldPressPhoto: Check out the three #WPPh2018 nominees for the Contempora... https://t.co/31z0NENyc0

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Contemporary Issues, third prize stories September 28, 2017 Donna Tottel (54) and Doug Tottel (55) are unemployed and survive by selling used goods from their porch in Fort Creek, West Virginia. When the electricity to their house was cut off, they installed a generator.

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When We See Photographs of Some Dead Bodies and Not Others - The New York Times

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At War

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The body of a soldier killed in Afghanistan being returned to the United States at Dover Air Force Base in 2009, the first year the ban on photos of these events was lifted. Credit Credit Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

From 2007 to 2016, I taught college courses about photography and war, and my students and I discussed what to make of the fact that we almost never saw images of dead American soldiers in the news media. Dead Iraqis, dead Afghans, dead Syrians - yes, we saw those bodies, blown up and bloodied, buried in rubble, partly covered by sheets, on the floor, on the ground, on a stretcher, in a pile - but not dead Americans. Though we couldn't reach an agreement about whether or not the media should show images of our war dead, my students understood that there was a relationship between the visible images from other countries and the suppressed images from our country. Hiding some dead bodies affects how other dead bodies are viewed.

Under President George H.W. Bush, the Defense Department instituted a ban against photographing flag-draped coffins returning from the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The ban, which lasted 19 years, followed a televised embarrassment for Bush. In 1989, networks covering the American invasion of Panama showed split-screen images: On one side, a military honor guard unloading coffins at Dover Air Force Base; on the other, a news conference where Bush, a veteran of World War II, was joking with reporters. That a policy for the suppression of photographs was prompted by what was perceived to be an inappropriate response to the homecoming of fallen soldiers fascinates me as someone who has been researching ethical responses to photographs of suffering for 15 years. The dead often come to us by photograph - in our morning newspapers, in our social-media feeds, on our computer screens next to advertisements for diamond watches or cruises or yoga pants. And many of us fear that we don't know how to look at them, or what to do in response to what we see. We feel helpless. Useless. And then we feel ashamed. Better not to look at all. Better to avoid images of the dead.
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The Obama administration lifted the ban against images of returning military coffins in 2009, but photographs of our war dead remain scarce. This virtual absence of images of American military casualties has been interpreted in multiple and conflicting ways. For some, policies against publishing photographs of dead American service members is a form of censorship that sanitizes war and obscures the violent consequences of military engagement. The news media's near blackout enables collective amnesia about war and its aftermath, critics argue, and allows the American public to ignore the real costs of the wars we send our fellow citizens to fight. Those who support banning photographs of American military casualties understand the images not just as antiwar but also as anti-soldier. They argue that showing the dead inflames controversy and politicizes soldiers' sacrifices. For them, refusing to publish images of dead Americans is a sign of respect, a way to honor the privacy of service members and their families. War-trophy photography - the practice of taking pictures of the dead enemy and bringing those images home like souvenirs - renders suspect all photographs taken in military conflict: Their dead can be captured by our cameras, while our dead should be shielded from theirs. And it is this distinction between "ours" and "theirs" that haunts how photographs of the dead are viewed. In her book "Regarding the Pain of Others," Susan Sontag argued that showing only photographs of violence that happens abroad generates separation between subjects and viewers. These images imply that tragedy is inevitable and unavoidable - and therefore more acceptable - when it is experienced by faraway people; they create the sense that violence is something that happens elsewhere and to others.

When it's common practice to publish photographs of war casualties from other countries but not to publish photographs of war casualties from the United States, then the very fact of visual access to the dead marks them as "other." Likewise, if the refusal to publish images of dead American service members is a sign of respect, then the willingness to publish photographs of other people's dead bodies can be read as a sign of disrespect. Publishing some images while suppressing others sends the message that the visible bodies are somehow less consequential than the bodies granted the privilege of privacy. Whenever I see a photograph of a dead body in the media, I take a screenshot of the image. It's my informal attempt to keep track of whose bodies are shown and whose are hidden. For years, among the hundreds of images I saved, none showed an American soldier. My screenshots also didn't show bodies belonging to American civilians. But then, in 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., by Officer Darren Wilson, and a photograph of Brown's body appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

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A ceremony at Dover Air Force Base honoring the servicemen killed in the bombing in Beirut and the invasion of Grenada in October 1983. Credit Mark Reinstein/Corbis, via Getty Images

Before I saw Brown's body in the newspaper, I thought nationality shielded some dead bodies from view and made other dead bodies available for people to see. But Michael Brown was American. Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Stephon Clark - all Americans. News outlets not only published photographs of them dead or dying in a car, in the street, in a parking lot, in the grass, in a park, on a sidewalk, in their own backyard; they also showed graphic videos of their deaths.

I understand that photographs of Americans killed during war and photographs of black Americans killed by the police are not the same kind of images. They don't exist in the same numbers, either: In the last three years, the annual number of American service members killed in action has been less than 35, while the annual number of black Americans killed by the police has been more than 220. I am also not an expert in the media policies that shape decisions about publishing violent photographs. But it's not the policies themselves that interest me; it's their effects.

If we are rarely allowed to see photographs of dead American soldiers in the news, then what does it mean that we can routinely view, in every major media outlet, images and videos of black Americans being killed by the police? Images - both those we see and those blocked from our view - send messages about whose lives count, about whose lives should be mourned, about who belongs to us and who doesn't. How do we grieve bodies we aren't allowed to see? Concealing images of soldiers killed in action can be read as suggesting there is something shameful about dying, something that should be hidden from view, as if to see the soldier's body would be a kind of humiliation. By not publishing photographs of our war dead, it seems to me we fail our soldiers by denying what it is we ask them to do and to risk when we send them to fight.

It's challenging to care about what we can't see, but we also don't seem to care about what we can see. "The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and the dying," Sontag wrote. But 15 years later, her words are not quite true. Sontag's sentence could be rewritten: The darker the skin, the more likely we are to have full-frontal views of the dead and the dying, even when those suffering bodies are just across town, down the street, right next door.

I cannot view the images of black men killed by the police without remembering lynching photographs, those pictures taken to record the white mob's savagery - to champion it, not to protest it. Lynching photographs were intended to code black bodies as criminal, beatable, killable, and to code white bodies as purveyors of justice. The images were then turned into postcards and sent around the country to celebrate the racist violence that was being done.

Michael Brown's body on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 24, 2014. Credit The New York Times

A dangerous thing, photography. Sometimes, being seen, being looked at, signals value, importance, rank. Yet, other times, being seen - or being watched - signals objectification, victimization, being stripped of dignity. Racism renders black and brown bodies simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. In 1955, when Emmett Till's lynched and mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wanted her son's body visible, his coffin open so people could see what had been done to him. "Let the people see what they did to my boy," she said. "I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me." But were we? Are we? And if we are, is mourning enough?

Sixty years later, Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, wanted his body covered. She learned that it was her son who had been killed when someone showed her a cellphone picture of him laying in the street. "Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon," Claudia Rankine wrote in June 2015 for The New York Times Magazine. "She wanted him covered and removed from sight. He belonged to her, her baby." When the decision about a body's visibility can be made by a mother or a loved one, it's hard to imagine how it could be decent to intervene in that intimate and painful choice. But on a societal level, as a policy, decisions about whose bodies are seen and whose are hidden matter enormously.

Despite the risks and contradictions that come with looking and seeing - the tension between witnessing, honoring and responding on the one hand, and gawking, appropriating and violating on the other - I am convinced that the videos and photographs of police violence against black bodies should be made public, that they must be seen, just as photographs of dead American soldiers should be made public. And holding the two disparate cases together - the contrasting policies of hiding our dead soldiers from sight and circulating images of our slain fellow civilians - can make us understand both war and racism better. If we were to put our war dead and our civilian dead in the same frame, might it be possible to see that they are all "ours"?

It is the hierarchy of grief that must be questioned, Judith Butler argues in "Precarious Life," a book written at the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, criticizing the use of violence as a response to loss. Depending on who you are and where you stand, some lives count more than others, and some deaths count more, too. That is why "there are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be," Butler writes. "If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition," a life worth protecting - and that's a value a country doesn't wish to accord to the people it has categorized as enemies or rivals. But these hierarchies of value and grief are not inevitable or immutable, Butler tells her readers. They are learned and constructed, which means they can be unlearned and reimagined.

"Come on," one of my students said when I taught Butler's text. "Of course we're going to mourn our dead more than theirs." "Who counts as our dead?" another student asked. Publishing some images of the dead while hiding others restricts our answers to that question. Keeping images of "our" war dead out of sight signals a distrust of the viewing public, a fundamental misgiving about our ability to view images ethically, to do anything to repair the violence we see. What's more, it negatively affects how we view the images of the dead we are allowed to see; it suggests that those visible dead do not belong to us. Looking brings risks, particularly through the warped lenses of racism and nationalism. But censorship is not the solution to these failures of looking. The remedy is to become better viewers, to learn ethical and constructive ways to view images of people in pain, especially when those suffering bodies have been marked as "other," as "stranger," as not our kin, and especially when those suffering bodies have been hidden from us.

I worry every day that my response to the pictured suffering of others is inadequate, inappropriate, that I turn away too soon, go on with my daily life, absorbed by my to-do lists and my own pressing concerns. But my failure as a viewer is exacerbated by our media's practice of keeping some bodies protected from view while other bodies - be they victims of bombings or natural disasters or police violence - are visible everywhere. My students were right: Hiding some bodies affects how other bodies are seen. But if we were allowed to see all our dead, if we were to stop obscuring some bodies while revealing others, then photographs might be able to teach us to become better viewers, better grievers, responsible and accountable for the injuries we see.

Sarah Sentilles is the author of "Draw Your Weapons." Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

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When We See Photographs of Some Dead Bodies and Not Others

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At War From 2007 to 2016, I taught college courses about photography and war, and my students and I discussed what to make of the fact that we almost never saw images of dead American soldiers in the news media.

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Lens

Soccer moms couldn't always drive their daughters to practice. It took Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in schools, to ensure that girls could play the same sports as boys. Yet even with that, after three waves of feminism - and arguably a fourth, with #MeToo - women are still battling to control their bodies and destinies.

Growing up in the 1950s, Melissa Ann Pinney knew that all too well. She longed to be as important to her domineering father as her five brothers were. Unlike the three girls in her family, the boys were allowed to do sports and were treated as if they were more important.

"Patriarchy was the air we breathed," she said. "So pervasive as to be invisible."

Not invisible enough, though, for Ms. Pinney, a fine art photographer and former Guggenheim fellow: She began working on photographs that explore female identity in patriarchal culture. Her latest exhibit, "Girl Transcendent," which is part of a larger project spanning three decades, is on view at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center in Hawaii until Aug. 16.

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"My interest has always been about female identity and experience," she said. "I want to show women and girls as subjects in their own lives, not as objects, girlfriends, mothers or wives, or roles that are accessories to male roles."

The photographs on view, which represent only a small portion of Ms. Pinney's larger project, are anything but one-note. They show a range of women - different ages, personalities, physicalities - sometimes within the same image.

In one photo, an older woman wearing a blue dress in a 1950s style and a matching hat, and toting a wicker bag, eats an ice cream cone near her granddaughter. On her right, two women appear to be talking, and on her left, two boys in T-shirts play near a slide.

"I thought she looked like women dressed when I was a kid," Ms. Pinney said. "That's her granddaughter at her feet, who's also pretty dressed up, and everybody else looks like they're in their pajamas, which is how we dress now."

Another shows a girl, slouched and wearing a tiara, her phone held up to strands of curled hair. It was her Sweet 16 and Ms. Pinney was there to photograph her preparing for the bash. And, in another, two sisters gaze at the camera with the ocean stretched out behind them. They look almost regal, which is what drew Ms. Pinney to them in the first place.

Other pictures are homages to earlier works in art history. One of her photos shows girls laughing on what looks like a couch. With the photo slightly tilted and the girls so lively, Garry Winogrand's picture of women on a park bench in Central Park comes to mind. In another, two girls have big balloons in their bellies, as if to pretend they are pregnant, which evokes Helen Levitt's image of two women, one pregnant, the other with milk bottles.

But Ms. Pinney's inspiration was not only photographic. As a child, reading was her refuge. Raised Roman Catholic, she found "Lives of the Saints" at her school library.

"I've looked to embody the transcendence and independence that so intrigued me in the stories I read long ago" in "Lives of the Saints," she said. "The importance of ritual and the sacramental view of life I experienced then remain deeply embedded in the way I see now as an artist."

In 1995, Ms. Pinney had her only daughter, Emma, and her project became more personal. Title IX long in place, Emma, who is athletic, could do all the things that Ms. Pinney could not in her youth. She photographed her daughter's games - not the action on the field, but the interactions among girls and parents at the events.

"For 30 years, I have dedicated myself to a photographic exploration of emerging feminine identity," Ms. Pinney said. "Images from this exploration are informed by my own girlhood and that of my daughter, Emma. These images look ahead to older women, then back to girlhood, to see how our dreams and expectations of women are made visible."

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Celebrating Girlhood and Feminine Identity

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Lens Soccer moms couldn't always drive their daughters to practice. It took Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in schools, to ensure that girls could play the same sports as boys. Yet even with that, after three waves of feminism - and arguably a fourth, with #MeToo - women are still battling to control their bodies and destinies.

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Good street photography requires time to roam-a luxury that deadline-driven assignments rarely afford photographers. We contacted three photo editors who have hired street photographers to find out what opportunities there are for street photographers to earn money shooting assignments.

"Street photography happens to do well on VICE.com," says Elizabeth Renstrom, who has assigned street photographers to shoot photos for feature stories and profiles, and has featured portfolios by street photographers on VICE's website.

After she discovered New York City street photographer Daniel Arnold 's work at a book signing, Renstrom hired him to shoot portraits in a loose and candid style: "Go follow this person of interest for a day," she says.

For a feature about the brothers who were the subject of the documentary The Wolf Pack , Renstrom sent Arnold to Los Angeles and had him follow his subjects for a week. "I wouldn't put a street photographer in a situation where they have only ten minutes with the person of interest," Renstrom says.

VICE's advertisers also want candid, spontaneous photography, Renstrom says, and she has frequently recommended photographers she's worked with when sponsors need photographers for commercial assignments and branded content. She recommended Jorge Garcia, a New York City street photographer, to photograph a feature sponsored by American Eagle that explored music venues near Manhattan's Union Square.

These days, commercial clients who are "trying for authentic moments" want photographers who deliver "raw, gritty captures." She adds, "I think there are a lot of applications if you have a street-heavy portfolio."

Renstrom advises all photographers to show her the work they love to shoot-and if that's street photography, she is happy to see it. "If you've invested a lot of time in it and it's your personal work, I'd rather see that than see that you can shoot a more composed, commercial portrait."

Amanda Gorence, photo editor, Refinery29

Refinery29 assigns photographers working in almost every genre, and photo editor Amanda Gorence says she has turned to street photographers to cover events "where we want to feel like we're there." For example, she hired Michelle Groskopf to photograph participants in the 2017 Women's March in Washington, DC, a cheerleading competition, and "the inspirational 'Miss Amazing,' a local pageant in Nebraska for girls and young women with disabilities." Groskopf shot flash-lit frames in the thick of the action-such as a scrum of hugging, exultant cheerleaders.

Gorence also assigned Groskopf to create a fashion story about luxury handbags in her trademark street photography style. "We shot older women in their 70s and 80s in Miami, and knew Michelle would have a blast with it and pull out some real joy," Gorence explains. "Her love of people was the impetus, and that same energy, vibrance and optimism she is known for on the street added such a delightful twist to a fashion story."

In evaluating portfolios from street photographers, Gorence says, "I'm looking at whether or not they manage to find something intimate amidst the chaos of the street, or their ability to make something feel dynamic and energetic even in a dull moment-and then think about applying those qualities to the assignment at hand." She will then hope they can bring "that connected quality" to a portrait assignment or fashion story, she says. "Perhaps it's about having them bring an unexpected level of energy to a quieter topic."

Many of the travel stories Scott Hall assigns offer opportunities to show some street photos, he says, "but it might be one or two on an entire shoot list that includes restaurants, hotels [and] portraits." He rarely gets an opportunity to let a photographer simply explore a place.

For a special issue of on New York City, however, he hired street photographer Gus Powell to shoot an eight-page fashion story. Powell's style suited the idea proposed by the magazine's editor. "His one request was that we not make it just about the fashion," Hall recalls. "We wanted the city to come through." Hall thought traditional fashion photographers "were going to be focused on the models and the clothes," he recalls. "I had Gus's book, , sitting on my desk, and I said you know, maybe Gus would be an interesting choice." The book features Powell's images of pedestrians mixing and jostling on crowded sidewalks.

For the Departures story, Hall hired several models, "then we'd have them in places where crowds of people would be moving around them and Gus would just do Gus's thing." Powell came up with a list of possible locations, and the magazine hired stylists and secured permits. Hall explains, "We just let the models and Gus go while the rest of the crew hung back."

Hall says photographers who specialize in street photography rarely send him work, but he's open to it. "If you don't have a hotel room or a dish in your portfolio, it doesn't mean I can't hire you," he says. If a photographer showed him a book of "top notch" street photography, he says, "I'd talk to you about it and say, 'It would be great to have some of this from the city we're sending you to shoot, but how would you feel if I had to tell you that you had to shoot this museum or interior or this egg dish?' I want them to say,'Yes that's cool.'" Hall adds, "If you're a talented photographer, you can probably pull them off."

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Street Photographers on Success, Methods, Motivation and Overcoming Fear Photographers on What "Street Photography" Means to Them How to Land Work with Refinery29 What Travel + Leisure Looks for in Photographers

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Turning Street Photography Into Paid Assignments | PDN Online

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Good street photography requires time to roam-a luxury that deadline-driven assignments rarely afford photographers. We contacted three photo editors who have hired street photographers to find out what opportunities there are for street photographers to earn money shooting assignments.

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Photographer explains photo of crying toddler at border

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Featured Video

The Great Plow-Up

The grasslands of the southern Plains were rapidly turned into wheat fields. Then following the early years of the drought, storms killed crops and livestock and literally rearranged the landscape. The worst storm of them all was on April 14, 1935—Black Sunday—a searing experience for everyone caught in it, including a young songwriter from Pampa, Texas, named Woody Guthrie.

Full Length 115m 15s

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The Dust Bowl chronicles the environmental catastrophe that, throughout the 1930s, destroyed the farmlands of the Great Plains, turned prairies into deserts, and unleashed a pattern of massive, deadly dust storms that for many seemed to herald the end of the world. It was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

Using seldom seen movie footage, previously unpublished photographs and the compelling interviews of 26 survivors of those hard times, The Dust Bowl is a story of heroic perseverance against enormous odds.

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The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns | PBS

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The Dust Bowl chronicles the environmental catastrophe that, throughout the 1930s, destroyed the farmlands of the Great Plains, turned prairies into deserts, and unleashed a pattern of massive, deadly dust storms that for many seemed to herald the end of the world. Full film now streaming.

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American Photographer

Born: May 26, 1895 - Hoboken, New Jersey

Died: October 11, 1965 - San Francisco, California

Important Art by Dorothea Lange

The below artworks are the most important by Dorothea Lange - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.

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Related Art and Artists

Artwork Images

Reflection of a Man in a Dresser Mirror, from Harlem Document (c. 1938)

Artist: Aaron Siskind

Artwork description & Analysis: Siskind's first pictures show a decidedly more straightforward approach to picture making than the later work for which he became known. Nevertheless, his formalist eye is evident even in this documentary work. Many details make this photograph visually satisfying. Starting at the upper left is a lighting fixture with two "candles," but only one bulb. This part of the image is the beginning of a series of contrasts observable in the rest of the photograph, as the viewer follows the general line of the C-curve from fixture to dress to dresser to man. These contrasts include positive objects and negative space, pictures within pictures (the man in the reflection and the pictures on the dresser are both part of Siskind's "picture,") the contrast of the male figure in the mirror versus the female dress on the hanger, and the presence of the male figure and the absence of the female figure. Although the male figure is a specific individual and technically the focal point, he is flattened in his own reflection against the back wall, pressed into the service of the overall design of the photograph. Instead, the small, but aesthetic, lamp base in the lower center of the picture, with its slightly tilted shade, could be seen as alluding to the additional contrast of the middle class values and aspirations versus the limited opportunity and resources of those living in Harlem.

Gelatin silver print - George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

Winter, Fifth Avenue (1892)

Artist: Alfred Stieglitz

Artwork description & Analysis: Winter, Fifth Avenue shows the busy New York street in the midst of a snowstorm. Stieglitz stalked Fifth Avenue for three frigid hours waiting for the perfect moment. He had to wait for the ideal composition - unlike a painter, who could manufacture it. Trails in the snow lead the eye up this vertical composition to its focal point - a dark horse and carriage that is swallowed by the snowy atmosphere. The snow blurs the details of the urban surroundings, lending the photo an Impressionistic appearance. This depiction of man - crudely mechanized - and pitted against the violence of the natural world, shows Stieglitz's inheritance from 19 th century Romanticism.

Photogravure - The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Artwork Images

The Staircase (1930)

Artist: Alexander Rodchenko

Artwork description & Analysis: This is one of Rodchenko's finest photographs. Often credited with devising the key principles of modern photography, Rodchenko is praised for his use of unusual angles and perspective. Here, he juxtaposes the motif of a woman with a child against the stern geometry of the man-made environment. The position of the camera at a peculiar angle provides for an innovative, yet carefully balanced and flowing composition. Compositions such as this were an important influence on New Vision, the modernist photography movement that gripped Europe in the 1920s and '30s.

Gelatin-silver print - Private Collection

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Dorothea Lange Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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American Photographer Born: May 26, 1895 - Hoboken, New Jersey Died: October 11, 1965 - San Francisco, California The below artworks are the most important by Dorothea Lange - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.

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Taken in a pea-pickers' camp in the Nipomo Valley, Migrant Mother was enormously successful in bringing attention to the plight of California sharecroppers. Upon the image's publication and submission to the government, the Roosevelt Administration sent 20,000 pounds of food to the settlement. Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in Lange's photograph, embodied American ideals of hard work, and the photograph also suggested the promise of a still-extant (white) nuclear family that would push a shaky nation into a brighter future.

Not commonly known, however, is the fact that Thompson was 100 percent Cherokee, born on American Indian land in present-day Oklahoma-or that her first husband, with whom she had six children, had died five years before Migrant Mother was taken. Thompson had remarried and borne a seventh child.

The triangular composition of Migrant Mother recalls classic representations of the

, suggesting a celebration of the traditional family-even leading Thompson to be referred to as a "New Deal Madonna." The reality, however, is that the children under Thompson's arms are known to be from different fathers. Lange's straightforward documentary approach captured a much more complicated set of truths about itinerant life in the Depression.

Despite their fame, it would seem that little effort was made to preserve Lange's original images. A print of Migrant Mother was discovered in a box, among other Lange prints, in a dumpster behind the San Jose Chamber of Commerce in the 1960s, leading to the eventual "rediscovery" of several of her works.

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6 Things You Didn't Know about Dorothea Lange

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Taken in a pea-pickers' camp in the Nipomo Valley, Migrant Mother was enormously successful in bringing attention to the plight of California sharecroppers. Upon the image's publication and submission to the government, the Roosevelt Administration sent 20,000 pounds of food to the settlement.

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Synopsis

During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange's first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early Years

One of the preeminent and pioneering documentary photographers of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, was a lawyer, and her mother, Johanna, stayed at home to raise Dorothea and her brother, Martin.

When she was 7, Dorothea contracted polio, which left her right leg and foot noticeably weakened. Later, however, she'd feel almost appreciative of the effects the illness had on her life. "[It] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," she said.

Just before Dorothea reached her teen years, her parents divorced. Dorothea grew to blame the separation on her father and eventually dropped his surname and took her mother's maiden name, Lange, as her own.

Art and literature were big parts of Lange's upbringing. Her parents were both strong advocates for her education, and exposure to creative works filled her childhood.

Following high school, she attended the New York Training School for Teachers in 1913. Lange, who'd never shown much interest in academics, decided to pursue photography as a profession after a stint working in a NYC photo studio. She went on to study the art form at Columbia University, and then, over the next several years, cut her teeth as an apprentice, working for several different photographers, including Arnold Genthe, a leading portrait photographer. In 1917, she also studied with Clarence Hudson White at his prestigious school of photography.

By 1918, Lange was living in San Francisco and soon running a successful portrait studio. With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two sons and settled into the comfortable middle-class life she'd known as a child.

Change of Focus

Lange's first real taste of documentary photography came in the 1920s when she traveled around the Southwest with Dixon, mostly photographing Native Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines.

In the early 1930s, Lange, mired in an unhappy marriage, met Paul Taylor, a university professor and labor economist. Their attraction was immediate, and by 1935, both had left their respective spouses to be with each other.

Over the next five years, the couple traveled extensively together, documenting the rural hardship they encountered for the Farm Security Administration, established by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Taylor wrote reports, and Lange photographed the people they met. This body of work included Lange's most well-known portrait, "Migrant Mother," an iconic image from this period that gently and beautifully captured the hardship and pain of what so many Americans were experiencing. The work now hangs in the Library of Congress.

As Taylor would later note, Lange's access to the inner lives of these struggling Americans was the result of patience and careful consideration of the people she photographed. "Her method of work," Taylor later said, "was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it, and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until... they were used to her."

In 1940, Lange became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Final Years

Following America's entrance into World War II, Lange was hired by the Office of War Information (OWI) to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1945, she was employed again by the OWI, this time to document the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.

While she battled increasing health problems over the last two decades of her life, Lange stayed active. She co-founded Aperture, a small publishing house that produces a periodical and high-end photography books. She took on assignments for Life magazine, traveling through Utah, Ireland and Death Valley. She also accompanied her husband on his work-related assignments in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam, among other places, documenting what she saw along the way.

Lange passed away from esophageal cancer in October 1965.

While Lange sometimes grew frustrated that her work didn't always provoke society to correct the injustices she documented, her photography has endured and greatly influenced generations of documentary photographers.

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During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange's first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Among the eight portfolios included in Moving Walls 17, the Open Society Institute's latest documentary photography show, the most improbably delightful has to be "Bureaucratics," by the Dutch photographer Jan Banning. "It started with the most horrible assignment I ever had," Banning told me when when he dropped by our office yesterday. The job was in Mozambique: Banning's editor had asked him to shoot pictures for a story on the decentralization of the administration of Dutch development aid. "That's not something that makes your heart beat faster as a photographer," he noted. To make it interesting for himself, he decided to shoot portraits of the bureaucrats themselves. Little did he know that this would be merely the first leg on an absurd odyssey that would take him through thousands of government offices, a world tour of what he calls "the shop windows of the state."

Content dictated form. "What is bureaucracy?" Banning asked. "First of all, it's square, so I used a square format. Second, it's straight lines, and in the middle of that grid you've got this round being, this human being. And the camera is a metaphor for the local citizen who enters that space. So I always put myself directly in front of the desk or at ninety degrees to the desk, to get that Mondrian structure."

The element of surprise was crucial. Given any warning, the bureaucrats would try to tidy their workspaces, but Banning wanted to see each office in all its cluttered glory, just as an everyday citizen would encounter it. It helped, he said, to have a collaborator, the writer Will Tinnemans. Together Tinnemans and Banning took an ambush approach: after wrangling permission from some top bureaucrat to roam the halls, the pair would walk in an office unannounced, and, if Banning liked what he saw, Tinnemans would immediately start interviewing the resident bureaucrat while Banning set up his gear. Before the bureaucrat knew quite what was happening, the shoot was over. (In the Netherlands, the project has resulted in two books: one, called "Everyday Power," emphasizes Tinnemans's reportage about bureaucrats; the other is a photobook called "Bureaucratics," which has also been released here, by Nazraeli Press.)

The opening reception of Moving Walls 17 is tonight, at 400 West 59th Street. And the full series of "Bureaucratics" is currently on display at the University of Chicago, fifty-seven images in all. Here's a selection. (Captions are from "Bureaucratics.")

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Among the eight portfolios included in Moving Walls 17, the Open Society Institute's latest documentary photography show, the most improbably delightful has to be "Bureaucratics," by the Dutch photographer Jan Banning. "It started with the most horrible assignment I ever had," Banning told me when when he dropped by our office yesterday.

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The August 2015 Tianjin explosion claimed 173 lives, and the 24-year-old firefighter Pang Ti was one of them. That disaster at a chemical warehouse, caused by mismanagement and lax oversight, put his parents Pang Fangguo and Fang Zhiying among the more than one million " shidu" families in China. Shidu means "losing the only," and refers to the loss of only children-many of whom were born during the 36 years of China's one-child policy. Since their son's death, Pang and Feng, both in their late 40s, have not been working and have been living off government compensation from the explosion. In late 2015, they decided to try in vitro fertilization (IVF) despite its high cost and low rate of success.

Changjiang Daily photographer Jia Daitengfei began following the couple in early 2017 as they tried and failed multiple times to conceive. "You could feel the pain in their home buried underneath quietness," Jia says. "The television volume was low, they talked quietly, they walked quietly, and when they cried, they cried in silence."

In May, Fang got pregnant with twins, and she gave birth in December. In February 2018, Jia photographed the twins next to their deceased brother's uniform. Jia said he would take the same family photo next year as well. -

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The August 2015 Tianjin explosion claimed 173 lives, and the 24-year-old firefighter Pang Ti was one of them. That disaster at a chemical warehouse, caused by mismanagement and lax oversight, put his parents Pang Fangguo and Fang Zhiying among the more than one million "shidu" families in China.

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From a portrait of Yassmin Abdel-Magied to a professional kangaroo shooter posing with his catch, the works of the 116 semi-finalists in this year's Moran contemporary photographic prize capture the spirit of Australian life. The judge, Cheryl Newman, says the images encapsulate 'the political and the poetic, the intimate and the everyday'. The winner of the award will be announced on 8 May, with a prize of $50,000

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Moran contemporary photographic prize 2018: snapshots of Australian life - in pictures

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From a portrait of Yassmin Abdel-Magied to a professional kangaroo shooter posing with his catch, the works of the 116 semi-finalists in this year's Moran contemporary photographic prize capture the spirit of Australian life. The judge, Cheryl Newman, says the images encapsulate 'the political and the poetic, the intimate and the everyday'.

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Robert Mapplethorpe: the male gaze – in pictures | Culture | The Guardian

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Robert Mapplethorpe: the male gaze – in pictures | Culture | The Guardian

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The American photographer's work altered perceptions and pushed boundaries in relation to the male gaze upon the male body. Charting his personal involvement in New York's gay scene, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs demonstrated a compelling perspective on the underground queer culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, now showing at Art Gallery of New South Wales, showcases a broad selection of his work, from portraits of his contemporaries, including Patti Smith, Cindy Sherman, Debbie Harry and Philip Glass, to self-portraits, floral still lifes and erotic imagery.

* Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, is showing at Art Gallery of New South Wales until 4 March 2018

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Captions by Isobel Parker Philip, Curator Photographs, Art Gallery of NSW

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Robert Mapplethorpe: the male gaze - in pictures

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The American photographer's work altered perceptions and pushed boundaries in relation to the male gaze upon the male body. Charting his personal involvement in New York's gay scene, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs demonstrated a compelling perspective on the underground queer culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

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Apply for Getty Images Editorial Grant and view past years' winners. Five awards of $10,000 each.

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Who is telling the world's visual stories?

"There has been much hand-wringing this year over the persistent lack of diversity in photojournalism, an issue that has become even more urgent in a time of a racial and ethnic tension," noted The New York Times in a recent report about a new effort to promote diversity in visual storytelling. The work is being undertaken by five photo organizations that have joined forces in an umbrella group called Reclaim.

The organizations that have come together in this loose affiliation are Women Photograph, The Everyday Projects, the new photo agency Native, Majority World and the yet-to-be-launched publication Minority Report, noted PDN.

Tara Pixley, a photographer and a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, who studies diversity in photojournalism, told The Times that there is a lack of understanding and a dearth of usable data about the backgrounds and experiences of photojournalists.

"All of a sudden everyone's had this realization that there's a problem and everyone's talking about it, and it's kind of wonderful, random, but wonderful," Pixley said. "But we need detailed information about who gets into photojournalism, who stays and who succeeds, as well as what are the advantages and disadvantages that certain groups have in the industry."

To that end, Pixley has joined with Reclaim to circulate a survey to examine issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation in photography. Shahidul Alam, founder of the Majority World agency and the photography school Pathshala in Bangladesh, tells The Times that issues of representation are important because the world is diverse. "It makes sense to come together and work in concert to include a more accurate cross section of our planet," added Daniella Zalcman, the founder of Women Photograph, an advocacy group for female photographers.

Pixley, who is working with Shaminder Dulai to launch Minority Report - a magazine that will highlight "the lived experience of and work produced by people of color" - has also asked World Press, Pictures of the Year International and other photo organizations to help circulate its survey.

Here are some of the other photo stories we spotlighted recently:

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1. Latin American Photography in Americas Quarterly Magazine

What is it like to be 18 years old in Latin America? To look for answers to that question, Americas Quarterly magazine asked four reporters and four photographers to follow four young adults from different countries over a period of eight weeks. The photographers - Cale Merage, Ulises Ruiz Bazurto, Salvador Melendez, and Nicolas Villaume (a former Latin American Fotografia competition winner) - brought back images portraying a youthful generation that, noted AQ, "believes anything is possible." We featured the story on Tuesday.

2. How a Stunning Viral Eclipse Photos Was Taken
3. 16 Years of War in Afghanistan, Recorded in Photos 4. Here's How Much Food an iPhone Charger Is Worth

Lots of people took pictures of the total solar eclipse that darkened skies over a swath of the U.S. on August 21. But two of the most viral images were captured by photographers Ted Hesser and Andrew Studer, noted PetaPixel, which featured a four-minute video showing how Hesser and Studer managed to get their photos of climber Tommy Smith silhouetted against the total solar eclipse. The photos were taken at the Monkey Face of Smith Rock in Oregon, the "birthplace of sport climbing."

5. Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary

Recently, President Donald Trump announced a new strategy for the 16-year-long war in Afghanistan, bringing with it a possible increase in troop levels and a seemingly open-ended commitment to American involvement. The New York Times offered a look back at the war that has already outlasted a dozen American military commanders and vexed Trump's two predecessors in the White House. Among the images featured is Damon Winters's 2010 shot of an American troop transport preparing to land in Mazar-i-Sharif.

In 2009 photographer Stefen Chow and economist Hui-Yi Lin created "The Poverty Line," a widely praised photo project showing how much food $1.25 would buy in various countries. The latest series by the married couple, noted Wired, is "Equivalence - 100:1." Begun three years ago, the work juxtaposes small purchases like phone accessories, makeup and handbags with the amount of common foodstuffs people in different countries could buy for comparable prices.

Tina Modotti's art and life had little to do with the photographer Edward Weston, but her brief but poignant apprenticeship and affair with him has overshadowed much of what we know of her, wrote Rena Silverman at The New York Times. A Modotti biography by Margaret Hooks, first published in 1993 and recently reissued - Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary - sorts out the myths surrounding the artist, who, notes Silverman, was a major contributor to the Mexican Renaissance.
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At top: From Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary

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AI-AP | Pro Photo Daily " What We Learned This Week: Making Photojournalism More Diverse

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Who is telling the world's visual stories? "There has been much hand-wringing this year over the persistent lack of diversity in photojournalism, an issue that has become even more urgent in a time of a racial and ethnic tension," noted The New York Times in a recent report about a new effort to promote diversity in visual storytelling.

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Leukocyte accumulations and platelet aggregations | 2017 Small World In Motion Competition | Nikon's Small World

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The Lower Omo Valley in southwest Ethiopia is home to more than 200,000 people, living in villages along the shores of the mighty Omo River, which meanders for 500 miles through the central highlands and empties into Lake Turkana on the border with Kenya, the world's largest desert lake.

The region is one of Africa's last frontiers, unconquered by European colonists, where tribal body-painting and coming-of-age scaring rituals today draw tourists in search of the kind of African experience that has disappeared elsewhere on the continent.

And it may be vanishing in the Omo as well. Starting in 2008, construction of the Gilgel Gibe III Dam on the river upended that life for subsistence farmers, cattle herders, and fishermen, who depended on the Omo's natural flow to sustain their livelihoods. Now they face a severe shortage of food and government-sponsored modernization that is encroaching on their tribal lands.

The dam is 800 feet (240 meters) high and is Africa's tallest, and its hydroelectric power plant has doubled Ethiopia's electricity production. Opened in October 2015, the dam also slowed the Omo's flow and ended the twice-yearly flooding that nourished river-bank agricultural land and cattle pastures with deposits of nutrient-rich alluvial sediment-and diminished the region's resilience to drought. Cattle herders have been forced to migrant elsewhere to find suitable grazing pastures, and local agriculture has fallen on hard times.

Drought in the past two rainy seasons has worsened the hardships. The dam also threatens water levels in Lake Turkana, further harming local fishing grounds.

Once the dam was complete, the Ethiopian government leased large swaths of tribal lands to foreign companies to build large, irrigated sugar and cotton plantations. Four sugar-processing plants were scheduled to begin production this year. Some tribes are being resettled.

The plantations and factories employ few of the Omo villagers. Most of the workers have come from outside the valley.

Fausto Podavini, who lives in Rome, photographed the gallery above over five years, between 2011 and 2016.

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See a Massive Dam's Big Impacts on Tribal Communities

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The Lower Omo Valley in southwest Ethiopia is home to more than 200,000 people, living in villages along the shores of the mighty Omo River, which meanders for 500 miles through the central highlands and empties into Lake Turkana on the border with Kenya, the world's largest desert lake.

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Catherine Leroy was 21 when she arrived in Vietnam in 1966 with only a hundred dollars, a Leica M2 and a limited professional portfolio. Over the next three years covering the war, she built an exceptional body of work: surviving and documenting a capture by the North Vietnamese Army, parachuting in combat operations with the 173rd Airborne, and being published on the covers of major magazines, including Life and Paris Match.

She was also the only female photojournalist then working in Vietnam, after the death of Dickey Chapelle, who was killed by a grenade in 1965.

Ms. Leroy wrote over 100 letters home during her three years in Vietnam, one almost every 10 days, and they show how she was processing her experiences and navigating professional challenges. They are candid and revealing, attesting to her resiliency, exposing insecurities, and showing her in moments of triumph, despair, optimism or courage.

Despite her many strong images, Ms. Leroy had remained relatively unknown, partly because she wasn't a self-promoter, and partly because women photographers have often been excluded from the medium's history, especially war photography. Now a selection of those letters are featured on a new website, accompanied by some of her archive and details from her life. It will be followed by the documentary " Cathy at War " by the writer and filmmaker Jacques Menasche.

Most of the letters are to her mother, Denise, focusing at first on topics that read like holiday postcards - gifts she hoped to send home, people she met, her tan. To her father, Jean, she wrote mostly about business - publications that bought her work, logistics and future plans. She frequently reassures them, noting in one letter to her mother that "if anything happens to me, you'll be informed within 24 hours. So don't worry if I sometimes leave you without any news."

Her tone changed over time. In the early letters, she was unsure whether she should stay or go home, even as she felt less insecure about her technical skills. She spoke of the relationships she was forming with the military and about daily life. On Sept. 4, 1966, a few months after her initial arrival, she wrote to her mother:
I celebrated my 22nd birthday at the Da Nang press office in the company of lots of Marines. I had left Saigon a few days earlier with an AP reporter for an operation near the DMZ. On this occasion he opened a bottle of French champagne when we got back. I only got back last night, Saturday, very tired...I'm getting an iron reputation with the marines. I'm very proud of it. I'm leaving tomorrow, Tuesday, morning for the Delta. Subject: a village a few days from the election. The war seems to be calming down, as always happens just before political events. The Delta is the key region. I'll stay there two or three days. After that, I don't know. I'm preparing a few photos of me taken in various locations and will send them to you. I haven't forgotten your wig, I'll take care of it too. Don't be angry with me. I'm always away: back in Saigon for two days, get something cleaned, tidy up, wash, everything is dirty.
As her confidence grew, she wrote about her professional successes. But the letters also showed low moments, like being unable to get the pictures she wanted in the field or leaving an envelope of her best prints in a taxi after fending off a robbery attempt from the driver.

The letters testify to the challenges women encountered in the field. While there were female journalists in Vietnam, Ms. Leroy was the only woman photographer after Chapelle's death, and faced resistance from the military and male journalists. Robert Pledge, president of the board of the Catherine Leroy Fund, a not-for-profit organization in Paris dedicated to her work, said many prominent photojournalists questioned why a young woman wanted to cover war.

She wrote about how people were nice when they first thought she was an unintimidating, five-foot-tall, pigtailed girl. But when they realized she was a serious photographer, their opinions changed. "Many were very, very negative and very nasty with her," said Mr. Pledge, who is also co-founder and director of Contact Press Images.

Writing to her father on May 13, 1967, after noting her successes in being published in leading magazines, she marveled how "I'm getting telegrams from people who I didn't know existed for years, while at the same time I'm hated more than ever by known and unknown enemies in Saigon, American civilians, as well as servicemen in Saigon."

One photographer told Mr. Pledge that the male photographers "were really nasty chauvinistic pigs." That same photographer, who now is a filmmaker, called her late in life to apologize.

Still, she found the opportunities available to her in Vietnam surpassed anything back home in France. Like parachuting with the 173rd Airborne Brigade - the 85th jump she had taken in her life, after receiving her parachuting license as a teenager.

"I am the first woman to jump in Vietnam during this first operational jump by American parachutists since the war began," she wrote to her father on Feb. 23, 1967. "I'm very proud to have jumped with the Americans here, it's a big professional success in every way. I now know that I will be able to work in the United Sates one day without too much problem." She wrote how she planned to submit her work to major competitions. "I've always thought I should succeed because I never gave in," she continued.

Many consider Ms. Leroy as the most daring of all photographers in Vietnam, and she most likely spent the most time in combat because she needed the money. Being broke meant traveling with soldiers, sharing rations and sleeping in the countryside.

As Mr. Pledge noted, "If Robert Capa was saying that it's not good enough because it's not close enough - she was very close."
Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.

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In Her Own Words, Photographing the Vietnam War

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Catherine Leroy was 21 when she arrived in Vietnam in 1966 with only a hundred dollars, a Leica M2 and a limited professional portfolio. Over the next three years covering the war, she built an exceptional body of work: surviving and documenting a capture by the North Vietnamese Army, parachuting in combat operations with the 173rd Airborne, and being published on the covers of major magazines, including Life and Paris Match.

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I'm a 31 years old photographer from Bucharest, Romania but I spent most of the last 4 years traveling in different countries of the world. My father is a painter so since my childhood I was...

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The Swapper is a story about the internationally-acclaimed British documentary photographer David Hurn; it is a story of a dyslexic, Welsh schoolboy written off as being "a bit thick" and an extraordinary "succession of bizarre coincidences" which would propel him into the ranks of photography's elite.

A fixture of Sixties London and the Hollywood inner sanctum, his images of Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Sean Connery as James Bond, and the Beatles on the set of A Hard Day's Night, became icons of the 20th Century.

But they are mere window dressing on a body of work so influential that recognition by him is now regarded as something of an anointing of careers.

David Hurn is a luminary of Magnum Photos.

Magnum is the stuff of legends. Being invited to join its hallowed ranks - there are only 62 working members in the world - is notoriously difficult; think of it as a kind of SAS, Harvard, an Olympics gold medal of photography.

It is one of the most revered and exclusive organisations in the world which has documented life on virtually every corner of the planet over the past 70 years. That one famous photograph that sticks in your mind? Chances are it is a Magnum shot.

Its photographers have informed generations with some of the most indelible, mind-blowing, thought-provoking, disturbing, entertaining and curious images of our time.

Once nominated by existing members, you run a rigorous four year, three-stage gauntlet of continually proving your worth. Only the chosen few survive to be voted in as fully-fledged members.

"One of the first emails any new nominee will receive, on being accepted by Magnum, is from Hurn, inviting them to exchange," says Martin Parr, out-going president of Magnum Photos.

"Everyone always willingly agrees; they select their favourite Hurn image and vice versa."

To swap with David Hurn is a flattering entrée into the big time for photographers both inside and outside Magnum, young, old, established and lesser-known.

It is continuing a tradition started by Hurn in the late 1950s. Just as then, whenever a photographer's talent catches his eye today, he approaches them to swap a print.

His collection - now a 700-strong who's who of photography - is the subject of a major exhibition entitled 'Swaps, Photographs from the David Hurn Collection' in his native Cardiff.

It heralds the realisation of a long-held dream of Hurn's - the opening of the first permanent gallery dedicated to photography at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, where he has recently donated his entire £3.5m archive.

The museum is of deep significance. His mother, perhaps recognising something in her dyslexic son whom teachers had written off, would take him there on weekly visits. The marble-floored halls of Rodin statues and Brangwyn paintings ignited an insatiable curiosity that continues to fuel his work today.

The following sets out a selection of swaps from the exhibition which illustrate influences on his life, a selection of his own work along with the story of the "succession of bizarre coincidences" that shaped his extraordinary career as a self-taught photographer and educator.

And how aged 83, David Hurn has a new quest - to harness the phenomenon of the selfie to inspire photographers of the future.

In 1963 Hurn was given the ultimate stamp of cool when a film by Ken Russell about his life work entitled Watch the Birdie was broadcast by the BBC.

It illustrates the versatility and diversity of Hurn's repertoire - a photo-journalist scaling a brick wall to escape a guard dog one minute, a meticulously-lit fashion spread for Harper's Bazaar the next.

Then it cuts to him dropping in on Little Sisters of the Assumption in Notting Hill Gate to document their work tending to the sick and destitute before roaring off in his custom-built sports car to Joey the Soho stripper who performs 30 times a day, an example of his signature radical and ground-breaking (for the time) black and white photo essays on London's alternative lifestyles or subcultures, drugs, transvestism etc.

"That was thanks to the example of Elliot Erwitt I'd met a few years before and who was another big influence on my work," Hurn says.

Erwitt, an American advertising and documentary photographer renowned for his quirky and immensely funny take on the absurdity and comedy of everyday life, is described as a master of Cartier-Bresson's so-called 'decisive moment' - that special moment that "transcends the subject and place and can be looked at for years to come" - to the layman it's identifying the exact split second to press the shutter.

"Meeting him was wonderful because he put into my head that you can actually do commercial photography as well as do the work you really want to do," Hurn adds.

"He worked in advertising but he never muddled that up with the fact that he carried a Leica camera with him at all times and shot his own pictures separately to the commercial work he was doing.

"So thanks to him I never had this hang up about 'selling out' by doing commercial work. It's the practise of doing things to your best ability, regardless of what you're doing."

To supplement his income and free him up to work on his preferred documentary or 'eye witness' photography, Hurn accepted invitations to photograph the film sets of countless films - El Cid, Bond, Alfie - after being introduced to a Hollywood film agent Tom Carlile through his late friend Richard Johnson, the distinguished actor who turned down the role of James Bond.

And on the subject of Bond, Hurn, who worked on the set of the first four 007 movies, shot the iconic film poster for From Russia With Love at his flat in Bayswater's Porchester Court, a creative hub and landmark destination for photographers the world over during the 60s.

An entourage including Hollywood producer Cubby Broccoli, descended along with Sean Connery. But there was one problem.

"The film's publicist came up to me and said 'I don't know what we're going to do. I've forgotten the gun'. To drive back out to the film studios would have taken hours. It happened that I enjoyed target shooting with an air pistol. It was a Walther and had a beautiful box with Walther written on the outside of it. Bond's pistol was a Walther PPK.

"I said 'Look, although it's an air pistol and has this great, big long barrel and Bond's has a small barrel, nobody here will know. The mere fact it's got Walther on the box they'll think it's the right one'.

"I said all you've got to do is make sure when they come to do the poster that the long barrel is cut off and it will be ok. But when it came to do the poster art they forgot. So if you look at any of those Bond posters, there's Mr Macho brandishing his air pistol."

Soon after Hurn was introduced to the Beatles film director Dick Lester who asked him to follow the group around for the six weeks of filming for their first film A Hard Day's Night.

He liked Ringo Starr the best but it was the "exceedingly shy" George Harrison that Hurn would have the biggest impact on by introducing him to his future wife.

Hurn's friend, fellow photographer Eric Swayne was dating Pattie Boyd at the time.

Swayne was keen to meet the Beatles and Hurn somehow persuaded Dick Lester to allow them onto the set and Pattie became a film extra.

Harrison, who would later write the love song Something about her, was transfixed.

"I introduced her to them all," Hurn says.

"I had no idea that the one had goggled at her more than the others. Of course, I wasn't the greatest friend of dear Eric Swayne from then."

A Hard Day's Night had cemented the Fab Four's place at the forefront of the British Invasion - the storming popularity of British music and culture into the US.

Hurn, who became an associate member of Magnum a year later in 1965, had played his part in that but it was two years later in 1967 in an altogether more cosmic invasion that he was to become better known.

The New York Times described Jane Fonda as the leading lady in the cult sci-fi movie Barbarella as "the most iconic sex goddess of the 60s". But that might never have been the case had it not been for Hurn.

The young Fonda, insecure about her looks and who hated being photographed, was giving film producer Dino de Laurentiis a tough time over the publicity stills and had rejected them out of hand.

"The publicist Tom Carlile phoned me up and explained what was going on," Hurn says. "He said 'Look David, come over to Italy and see if you can sort it out for me and try and calm her down'.

"The moment we met we got on extremely well. She said she felt her face was lop-sided 'like a squirrel with one cheek full of nuts'. I managed to make her laugh and somehow won her confidence.

"We became very good friends and I ended up spending nine months with her and her then husband Roger Vadim on the set and at their home. She's still a friend. We met up in LA a few months ago."

The Barbarella images graced the covers of 126 magazines around the world.

Newsweek reportedly achieved both its greatest news-stand sales and its highest number of subscriber cancellations when it published pictures of a naked Fonda on its cover under the headlines Anything Goes, The Permissive Society.

By this stage Hurn's hero and inspiration Henri Cartier-Bresson had actually visited his famous flat to personally examine his contact sheets shortly before he was voted in as a full member of Magnum in 1968. "It was like seeing God," he says.

Hurn led a rarefied life; an internationally-successful career, a beautiful wife, accomplished and celebrated friends, and an Aston Martin parked outside the front door.

The dyslexic schoolboy from Cardiff had done pretty well for himself.

But just over a year after Barbarella hit the screens, Hurn had left London, his marriage had broken down and he was living in a VW camper van on the banks of the river Severn near Newport, south Wales.

Cr edits

Author
Ceri Jackson

Web production
Philip John, Sophie Mutton, Ceri Jackson, Gwyndaf Hughes

Video production
Philip John

Cover photo
Brian Carroll, Ffoton

Photo credits

Magnum Photos, Getty Images, International Center of Photography, Oakland Museum of California, Ella Murtha,
Eva von Oelreich

Built with
Shorthand

Date 29 September 2017

All images subject to copyright

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The Swapper is a story about the internationally-acclaimed British documentary photographer David Hurn; it is a story of a dyslexic, Welsh schoolboy written off as being "a bit thick" and an extraordinary "succession of bizarre coincidences" which would propel him into the ranks of photography's elite.

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Bureaucratics

Bureaucratics is a project consisting of a book (ISBN 978-1-59005-232-7, now sold out) and a traveling exhibition that has so far been shown in museums and galleries in some twenty countries on five continents. The book and the exhibition contain 50 photographs and are the product of an anarchist's heart, a historian's mind and an artist's eye. Bureaucratics is a comparative photographic study of the culture, rituals and symbols of state civil administrations and its servants in eight countries on five continents, selected on the basis of political, historical and cultural considerations: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen. In each country, I visited up to hundreds of offices of members of the executive in different services and at different levels. The visits were unannounced and the accompanying writer, Will Tinnemans*, by interviewing kept the employees from tidying up or clearing the office. That way, the photos show what a local citizen would be confronted with when entering.

The photography has a conceptual, typological approach reminding of August Sander's 'Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts' ('People of the Twentieth Century'). Each subject is posed behind his or her desk. The photos all have a square format (fitting the subject), are shot from the same height (that of the client), with the desk - its front or side photographed parallel to the horizontal edges of the frame - serving as a bulwark protecting the representative of rule and regulation against the individual citizen, the warm-blooded exception. They are full of telling details that sometimes reveal the way the state proclaims its power or the bureaucrat's rank and function, sometimes of a more private character and are accompanied by information such as name, age, function and salary. Though there is a high degree of humour and absurdity in these photos, they also show compassion with the inhabitants of the state's paper labyrinth.

Jan Banning
* Will Tinnemans - a dear friend who died 2014-10-28.
The project Bureaucratics has been made possible with financial support from the Foundation for Democracy and Media, Stichting Fonds Anna Cornelis, NCDO and SBKU Utrecht (Committee for the Promotion of Visual Arts).

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A photo series of the bureaucracy in eight different countries all over the world: tax officers, clerks, police officers and other members of the executive. The photos show symbols of state power and elements related to their work, such as huge piles of files and papers, but also material from private life of the state employees.

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The Vietnam War: The Pictures That Moved That Most

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The Vietnam War: The Pictures That Moved That Most

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The vietnam war Pictures That Moved Them Most

While the Vietnam War raged - roughly two decades' worth of bloody and world-changing years - compelling images made their way out of the combat zones. On television screens and magazine pages around the world, photographs told a story of a fight that only got more confusing, more devastating, as it went on. As Jon Meacham describes in this week's issue of TIME, the pictures from that period can help illuminate the "demons" of Vietnam.

And, in the decades since, the most striking of those images have retained their power. Think of the War in Vietnam and the image in your mind is likely one that was first captured on film, and then in the public imagination. How those photographs made history is underscored throughout the new documentary series The Vietnam War, from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The series features a wide range of war images, both famous and forgotten.

But few people have a better grasp on the role of photography in Vietnam than the photographers themselves, and those who lived and worked alongside them. With the war once again making headlines, TIME asked a number of those individuals to select an image from the period that they found particularly significant, and to explain why that photograph moved them the most.

Here, lightly edited, are their responses.
-Lily Rothman and Alice Gabriner
Don McCullin- Contact Press Images

My picture of the U.S. corpsman carrying an injured child away from the battle in Hué is a rare occasion to show the true value of human kindness and the dignity of man. The child was found wandering the previous night between the North Vietnamese and the American firing lines. His parents had probably been killed.

They took the child into a bunker, cleaned him up and dressed his wounds under candlelight. These hard Marines suddenly became the most gentle, loving persons. It was almost a religious experience for me to record this extraordinary event.

The following morning, this corpsman took the child to the rear of the battle zone where he could be handed over for more medical attention. He carried the child as if it were his own, wrapped into a poncho, because it was quite cold. A naked limb is hanging from the poncho. Looking back today on this picture I took so long ago I can see that there is an echo here of the famous Robert Capa image of the woman whose head had been shaved at the end of WWII because she was considered to be a Nazi collaborator and had a child - whom she hugs to her chest - with a German soldier. I didn't think of Capa when I pressed the shutter, but I believe both images share an emotional impact because they involve children. Though Capa's illustrates cruelty, my corpsman illustrates humanity, almost saintliness - a man carrying a child away from the sorrow and injuries of war.

Young guerrillas wear grenades at their belts, preparing to fight the encroaching Viet Minh forces in the Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1954. Howard Sochurek-The LIFE Picture Collection
Tania Sochurek, widow of photographer Howard Sochurek:
The conflict in Vietnam spanned almost 20 years. Howard was a staff photographer for LIFE in the early 1950s, when he was first assigned to cover the fighting in what was then Indochina. He was there on the ground for the brutal - and historic - fall of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of the French involvement in the region.

It's insane to think that these three young children with grenades were going off to fight the Viet Minh army. Sadly, they probably died quickly in the war. This is a photo that Howard felt was very powerful.

In 1954, Howard was again on assignment in Vietnam when he was called home to Milwaukee to be with his mother, who was terminally ill. The acclaimed photographer Robert Capa came in to take his place and cover the fighting. A short time later, Capa was killed by a land mine while out on a mission with the U.S. troops. Over the years, Howard would often tell this story and recall sadly that Capa had died covering his assignment. He was immensely proud to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for "superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad" from the Overseas Press Club in 1955.
Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images:
Who is the enemy here? The soldier, seen from the back, facing a Vietnamese woman hugging a baby, with a half-naked boy by her side? Or is it the young woman and her two children being confronted by an American GI? Are there not always two sides to a coin?

We are in a small hamlet near Dakto late in 1967, barely two months away from the Têt Offensive. The turning point of the five-year-old war, the offensive by elusive Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces failed in military terms but constituted a political victory in the arena of international public opinion. America was losing the war at home; David was defeating Goliath.

Gilles Caron's atypical vertical image of a face-to-face encounter exposes deep cultural divide and distrust. Fear, tension and uncertainty are visible in the contained defiance of the mother and the awkward posture of the young warrior clutching his automatic rifle. Other locals and American military are nearby; the anxious glance of the child indicates as much. The contact sheets from that day reveal that the straw roofs would be set ablaze and the hamlet burnt down because of the suspicion that the villagers were harboring communist guerrilla forces by night.

In 1970, Caron would be captured by the Khmer Rouge, in neighboring Cambodia, never to be seen again. He had just turned 30.

Still images rarely give straightforward answers but they do offer illuminating clues for those who take the time to delve into them. Caron's career in photography was very short - 1966 to 1970 - but his exceptional talent, intelligence, commitment and ubiquity leave us with an unmatched visual legacy.
Philip Jones Griffiths-Magnum Photos Fenella Ferrato, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:
Philip Jones Griffiths was born in a small town in the North of Wales in 1936, before the start of the Second World War. When American GIs landed on British shores they exuded generosity to their allies, giving away candy, nylons and cigarettes. I remember him telling the story of being lined up in the playground and being handed a Mars bar by a tall GI. He was instantly suspicious. A Mars bar was a very special thing indeed. Why were these uniformed men just giving them away?

This was Philip's first glimpse into the efforts of an American army trying to win over "hearts and minds." When he got to Vietnam he instantly recognized the same tactic being used there. This image perfectly shows the seductive and corrupting influence of consumerism on the innocent civilians of Vietnam.
Katherine Holden, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:
Philip Jones Griffiths-Magnum Photos

This picture was taken by my father, Philip Jones Griffiths, in Vietnam in 1968 during the battle for Saigon. This is not a normal "war" photograph. It is not often you see "enemies" cradling each other. However, the American GIs often showed compassion toward the Viet Cong. This sprang from a soldierly admiration for their dedication and bravery - qualities difficult to discern in the average government soldier.
Hal Buell, former photography director at the Associated Press, who led their photo operations during the Vietnam War: Henri Huet-AP
This particular Viet Cong had fought for three days with his intestines in a cooking bowl strapped onto his stomach. Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by this image that he included a scene in his 1979 film Apocalypse Now with the famous line, "Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from my canteen any day."

In all wars, the battlefield medic is often the stopgap between life and death. AP photographer Henri Huet, under heavy enemy fire, saw that role through his lens and captured the uncommon dedication that medic Thomas Cole displayed in this memorable photo. Cole, himself wounded, peered beneath his bandaged eye to treat the wounds of a fallen Marine. Despite his wounds, Cole continued to attend the injured in Vietnam's central highlands in January, 1966. This photo was only one of several Huet made of Cole that were published on the cover and inside pages of LIFE magazine.

A year later Huet was seriously wounded and was treated by medics until evacuated. In 1971 Huet died in a helicopter shot down over Laos.

It was Larry Burrows who had to teach me how to load my first Leica M3; I got it as a perk having just had this image run as a vertical double truck in a 5-page spread in LIFE in the fall of '65.

At the same time that Hello Dolly opened at Nha Trang airbase, a company of 173rd Airborne had walked into an ambush in Viet Cong base zone, known as the Iron Triangle. The sign had read "American who read this die."
Dirck Halstead-Getty Images
A class of prime youth shredded in seconds.

The dust-offs started coming within 30 minutes. I got a ride back to Ton San Nhut and was downtown in Room 401 of the Caravelle in another 30. Mostly, I remember carrying a badly wounded grunt whose leg came off and he almost bled out. The shot was made one-handed as we carried him out of the fire cone.

We rarely see images of Armies in full retreat.

Generally, the photographers who might have shot some of those images have long since bugged out, or have been captured or killed.

In mid-April of 1975, a small group of American journalists were invited to fly into the small provincial capital of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, 35 miles north of Saigon, by commander Le Minh Dao. A siege by a massive North Vietnamese force was about to take place. The helicopter Dao sent to Saigon to pick us up deposited us just outside the town. Neither we, nor General Dao, had expected the tide of advancing communist forces to so quickly and completely surround the town.

General Dao, however, was full of vim and eager for the battle. Slapping a swagger stick along his leg, he quickly loaded the two journalists who had accepted his invitation, myself and UPI reporter Leon Daniel, into a Jeep and barreled into the town. At first, we thought it was deserted. Then slowly, and one by one, South Vietnamese troopers began to stick their heads out of foxholes they had dug in the streets. Dao yelled that they were prepared to fight the enemy, come what may. However, we noted with more than a little trepidation that none of them were budging from their holes as Dao led us down the dusty street. Suddenly, a mortar shell landed in the dust no more than 10 feet from us. It was followed by a barrage of incoming automatic weapon and artillery rounds.

Dao wisely called an end to his press tour. We tore back to a landing zone that we had arrived at less than an hour later. Dao called in a helicopter to evacuate us, but suddenly, the ARVN troops who had been seated alongside the road broke and ran for the incoming helos. In less time than it takes to tell, the panicked soldiers swarmed into the helicopter, which was to be our only way out. Crewmen tried to turn them back, but the helicopter lurched into the air with two soldiers hanging from the skids.

At that moment, Leon and I had a sinking feeling that we were going to be part of the fall of Xuan Loc. For us, the war looked like it was about to be over.

However, Dao had one more trick up his sleeve, and he called in his personal helicopter behind his headquarters. As we made a run for it, the General grabbed me by the arm, and said, "Tell your people that you have seen how the 18th division knows how to fight and die. Now go - and if you are invited back, don't come!"

Joe Galloway-UPI/Getty Images

I snapped this photo at [the Battle of la Drang], LZ X-Ray, on Nov. 15, 1965. At the moment I hit the button I did not recognize the GI who was dashing across the clearing to load the body of a comrade aboard the waiting Huey helicopter.
Russell Burrows, son of photographer Larry Burrows: Larry Burrows -The Life Picture Collection
Later I realized that I had shot a photo, in the heat of battle, of my childhood friend from the little town of Refugio, Texas. Vince Cantu and I went through school together right to graduation with the Refugio High School Class of 1959 - a total of 55 of us. The next time I saw Vince was on that terrible bloody ground in the la Drang. Each of us was terribly afraid that the other was going to be killed in the next minutes.

When my book about the war, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, came out in 1992, Vince Cantu was driving a city bus in Houston. His bosses read the papers and discovered they had a real hero pushing one of their buses. So they made Vince a Supervisor and all he did from then to retirement was stand in the door with a clipboard checking buses in and out.

A story with a happy ending.

The fraction of a second captured in most photographs is just that: a snapshot of a moment in time. Sometimes, even in war, that moment can tell a whole story with clarity, but it can be ambiguous too.

The photograph that ran in LIFE in late October 1966 of Gunnery Sergeant Jeremiah Purdie, bleeding and bandaged, helped down a muddy hill by fellow marines, didn't really need a caption. The written account around the photograph and a dozen others that brought Operation Prairie to LIFE's readers told of infiltrating troops and of efforts to thwart them - of hills taken and given up. The detail not given was that Gunny Purdie's commanding officer had just been killed on that hill, the radio operator "cut in half." Neither did the article mention that the CO had called in artillery fire on his own position. Purdie was being restrained from turning back to aid his CO.
David Hume Kennerly
A few frames later, Larry Burrows took another photograph: Purdie is still being held back, but in front of him is another wounded man and Purdie's arms are outstretched. The scene is as wretched as the other. Purdie, wounded for the third time in the war, was about to be flown to a hospital ship off the Vietnamese coast and leave that country for his last time. This photograph has come to be known as "Reaching Out."

My father, Larry Burrows, selected that frame himself, but it wasn't until more than four years later, after he was shot down and killed, that it was published for the first time. The composition of the photograph has been compared to the work of the old masters, but some see it more cinematically: as if you could run a film backwards and forwards to view more of the story. Exhibiting museums have found in it Christian iconography. And at least one psychiatrist treating war veterans has used it in his practice.

My father didn't know that Jeremiah Purdie had enlisted in a segregated Marine Corps 18 years earlier, that cooking in the mess and polishing shoes were the limits placed on his service. He didn't know that before Purdie's persistence finally earned him a transfer to the infantry, he had taken courses at the Marine Corps Institute, confident that the transfer would come and he would be ready. Unknowable then was also the life Purdie would live after his 20 years in the Marine Corps, or how important to him faith would become.
Bernice Schutzer Galef, widow of photographer Paul Schutzer:
At Jeremiah Purdie's packed funeral, there wasn't a man or a woman with a story to tell that didn't mention how, in some way, he had reached out.
David Burnett-Contact Press Images
Long-forgotten photographs sometimes leap out at me and I am stunned by certain moments that I documented that were so routine when I made them, but are now infused with new emotion and meaning. This picture of a haunted-looking young American GI taking refuge under a poncho from monsoon rains in the jungles outside of Da Nang while on patrol in 1972 is one of them. The soldier's eyes reveal, and you don't need a caption to explain it, that he most likely experienced hell along the way.

During the time I spent with him and his platoon they didn't come into direct contact with the enemy, but there was always a common undercurrent that ran through them, a palpable anxiety and fear about what could come their way in a split second. These men had seen buddies cut in half by shrapnel from an incoming round, or watched a friend's head explode from a bullet between the eyes that earned him a one-way ticket home in a body bag. Many had that intense blaze of realization when a comrade was suddenly, violently, unexpectedly gone, and marveled at still being left intact. Some experienced a flash of guilt when in a starkly honest millisecond they thought, "Glad it was him, not me." That big ugly candid moment was immediately pushed down, but it would creep back every now and then, especially back in the world when they gave a hug to their new child, the one their dead buddy would never have.

This image of the sheltering soldier is particularly compelling to me for what I don't know. What was his next act, and what happened after he returned from Vietnam? The photo didn't win any prizes, might not even been published, but as a flash forward it represents every soldier who returns from any war after the battles were history, guns silenced and the odds of getting killed beaten.
Catherine Leroy-Dotation Catherine Leroy Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the School at ICP:
Paul Schutzer-The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Paul got carried away with all the emotions that happen in war, and he was right in there with the soldiers in battles. He saw everything; he saw the fatigue of the American soldiers, their fear, the prisoner's fear. There was one photo of prisoners being guarded by an American soldier about 18 years old. The captives were young children and old women and one woman is nursing her baby. Unfortunately the young soldier was later killed but this image conveyed the senselessness and horror of how the human condition was playing out. The soldiers were very sympathetic to the civilians and one medic befriended them. The last photo in the photo essay shows the medic and a child walking away together, holding hands, and the child's head is burned from napalm. It was the first time that Americans saw and learned that we were using napalm. Paul received many letters saying "thank you for what you showed us."
Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Sal Veder-AP
In the days before "embeds" - this generation's enforced melding of photographer and military unit - there was a certain sense of freedom we owned as photographers, being able to go directly to where the story was. In Vietnam in the early 1970s, the only real limitation was finding a ride. But nearly until the end of the U.S. war, if a helicopter or truck had a seat available, they would take you along.
Nick UT-AP
We would often "embed" ourselves with a platoon or squad, but it was more of a gentleman's agreement than any kind of official policy, based in the main on the idea that we, the photographers, were there to tell their story, and they, the soldiers, realized that unlike them, we didn't have to be there. It was by choice. It created a sense of mutual respect that in many ways is challenged by the new "embed" ethos. That said, it was often a world of anonymous photographers spending time with anonymous soldiers. So while we would talk with the troops about what was happening that day, there were many moments where in the course of making photographs, I would just keep moving along. I usually knew the unit but looking back now, so much I wish I had noted was simply never written down. It was forever a search for a picture, and you never knew, sometimes for weeks, whether you had that picture or not. My film had to make it all the way to New York before it could be processed and edited.
Pete Souza, former White House photographer for Presidents Reagan and Obama:
One morning near the end of the unsuccessful Laos invasion of early 1971 (an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail), I wandered into a group of young soldiers who were tasked with fixing tanks and track vehicles which were regularly being rocketed by North Vietnamese troops just down the road. This soldier and I exchanged pleasantries the way you would in the dusty heat. He went back to work after reading a letter from home, and I moved on to another unit. But for that fraction of a second, in his face, his posture, was all the fatigue and despair of a young soldier who is surely wondering what in the hell he's doing there, so far from home.
(Translated from the French)
There is something both surreal and strikingly sad in this photograph by Catherine Leroy. An empty helmet - is its owner still alive? - is shown front and center, resting on the ground in the soft gray light like a discarded soup bowl or a cleaved skull. It is photographed as if forming the center of a broken compass, one without arms, pointing nowhere. In the fairly rendered background a soldier, probably wounded, is seen surrounded by comrades who, somehow, form an awkward Pietà. The violent spectacle has temporarily receded, and the reader, in this previously unpublished photograph, is given its remains, both the sacred and the partly absurd.

Leroy went from France to Vietnam in 1966 at the age of 21, with a single camera, no assignments and $150 in her pocket; she would stay until 1968. She managed to get accredited by the Associated Press, covered numerous battles, was seriously wounded by shrapnel that would remain in her body, parachuted into combat (small and thin, she was weighed down so as not to be blown away), was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese (which she used as an opportunity to produce a cover story for LIFE Magazine), and remained obsessed by the war until her death in 2006.

Consumed by a ferocious anger at the hypocrisies of politics at various levels, in her last years Leroy created a website and then a book, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam, paying homage to her colleagues 40 years after the war had ended.
Excerpted from a 2013 interview with Art Greenspon by Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
I had photographed POWs returning home time and again, and been in Vietnam on two tours myself, as a photographer. On that day, There were 30 or 40 photographers boarded on a flat-bed, including TV. I was photographing a different family and out of the corner of my eye saw the action and turned. I was lucky to get a break. It was a great moment for Americans! The joyousness of the reunion and the coming together of the family as a visual is outstanding because it was the end of the war. We were glad to get it over with. I'm thankful that this is my picture. I feel it's symbolic, but I'm conflicted about it, knowing what I know. The picture is there and it comes back up again. There is no way to avoid it.

My older brother Huynh Thanh My, who was killed covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, always told me that an image could stop the war and that was his goal. I was devastated when he died. I was very young. But there and then, I decided to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission. A few years later on that fateful day in 1972 on the Trang Bang road, my brother's goal was accomplished. No one was expecting people to come out of the bombed-out burning buildings, but when they did, I was ready with my Leica camera and I feel my brother guided me to capture that image. The rest is history.

This is truly an incredibly intimate picture. The caption provides pertinent information about the circumstance: the who, what and where. But I'm fascinated by the photograph because of the man behind the camera: Yoichi Okamoto. The first civilian hired as Chief White House Photographer, Okamoto also became the first one to truly document the Presidency for history. It's obvious looking at this photograph that he had unfettered access to LBJ and that everyone was comfortable with him being in the room - even when the room was the President's bedroom.

After I photographed the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was very turbulent and contested, I wanted to photograph the future President. I worked for a little cooperative French agency, Gamma, which we had created a few years earlier. I arrived from Miami on the press plane that accompanied the candidate. We were positioned at a little airport in Sioux City. It was the morning. It was windy. Nixon left the plane.
Alice Gabriner, who edited this photo essay, is TIME's International Photo Editor. Lily Rothman is the History and Archives Editor for TIME.
I almost did not make the photo - the man with the flag and Nixon on top of the aircraft stairs. It was too much.

Art Greenspon-AP

"As the first medevac chopper hovered overhead I saw the First Sergeant with his arms in the air. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. I have got to get all this in one picture, I thought. My heart was pounding. Was 1/60 fast enough? Screw it. Shoot pictures. I got three frames off, and the moment was gone.

I knew what was in the camera, but when I went to wind back the film, I couldn't. The film in my Nikon had become stuck to the pressure plate from all the moisture. My Leica was soaked, too, and I wasn't sure what kind of pictures it was producing.

The weather closed in again. I had given all of my food away so I didn't eat for two days. I wrapped my cameras in a damp towel and put them in my pack. I guarded that pack like a mother hen.

I flew out with the second chopper loaded with body bags. A kid headed out for R&R and a floor stacked with KIAs [killed in action]. War sucks."

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The Vietnam War: The Pictures That Moved Them Most

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The vietnam war Pictures That Moved Them Most While the Vietnam War raged - roughly two decades' worth of bloody and world-changing years - compelling images made their way out of the combat zones. On television screens and magazine pages around the world, photographs told a story of a fight that only got more confusing, more devastating, as it went on.

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Photo essay: Wildlife competition highlights diversity and threats | China Dialogue

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Photo essay: Wildlife competition highlights diversity and threats | China Dialogue

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This year's entries feature a seahorse hitching a ride on a plastic cotton bud and circling seals beneath Antarctic ice

A new national park in China's north-east provides hope for two endangered species, says Feng Limin

Trafficking of fish maw has become 'more lucrative than cocaine', reports Ryan Kilpatrick

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Funding is needed to support the search for the last of the world's giant turtles, writes Steven G Platt

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Prices of raw ivory in Vietnam have fallen, which traders are linking to China's ivory ban announcement , writes Naomi Larsson

September will bring two crucial global conferences on the urgent issue of how best to protect endangered species, writes John Scanlon

Over the coming year, the Guardian with the support of chinadialogue will report on efforts to stop the decline of this unique and sensitive animal

Tiny pollution particles can penetrate brain tissue causing severe damage, new research reveals

Even as more species are found, biodiversity in Southeast Asia is under serious threat, writes Alice Catherine Hughes

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As the Year of the Monkey draws to a close a new study reveals that the majority of their species are now in decline, writes Jo Setchell

International negotiators have agreed to measures to restore eco-systems, improve conservation and track biodiversity targets, writes Mike Shanahan

Chinese activists are taking matters into their own hands to stop the rising trade in rare birds, reports Liu Qin

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China's environmental film-makers have watched Disney's latest successful wildlife drama and seen a new market, writes Liu Qin

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Temptation to invest in Turkey's coal sector will test President Xi's commitment to climate leadership

Kathmandu is at the centre of China and India's dispute over the New Silk Road, reports Ramesh Bhushal

A 'cosmopolitan' approach to climate justice is needed, with a focus on individual human rights

This year's entries feature a seahorse hitching a ride on a plastic cotton bud and circling seals beneath Antarctic ice

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Photo essay: Wildlife competition highlights diversity and threats

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This year's entries feature a seahorse hitching a ride on a plastic cotton bud and circling seals beneath Antarctic ice A new national park in China's north-east provides hope for two endangered species, says Feng Limin Trafficking of fish maw has become 'more lucrative than cocaine', reports Ryan Kilpatrick 1

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Brigitte Grignet is a Belgian photographer focusing in a more personal type of documentary photography.

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International award winning photographer Emily Schiffers' work focuses on the intersection between art, audience engagement, and social change.

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Diana Bagnoli Photographer, reportage, portraits, editorials and fine art. Story about Shamans and Curanderos. Magazine, corporate events and studio portraits

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Luther Photo+Video | Commercial photographer

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Luther Photo+Video | Commercial photographer - Editorial

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Photographer | commercial - advertising - editorial - industrial

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Luther Caverly: Picturing Dark Matter | Wonderful Machine

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Luther Caverly: Picturing Dark Matter | Wonderful Machine

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Luther Caverly: Picturing Dark Matter | Wonderful Machine

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Luther Caverly's photos of the SNOLAB research facility for Carleton University.

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Photographs from emerging and established photographers.

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A Drag Queen for the Dearly Departed | ChinaFile

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A Drag Queen for the Dearly Departed | ChinaFile

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In the good old days, about three thousand years ago, people really knew how to mourn the dead. That was back in the Zhou dynasty, when there was no laughing in the dead person's house, no sighing while eating, and no singing while walking down a country lane.

By Confucius' time, about five hundred years later, all of those bad practices were common enough for the sage to feel he had to rail against them in the Book of Rites, adding a slew of other admonishments: avoid a happy expression at a mourning rite; don't laugh when holding the rope slung under the coffin; don't play on the graves. You might want to do those things but at least try to control yourself: "Hence the superior man is careful to maintain the proper expression of his countenance before others."

Of course no one seemed to listen. By the 12th century CE, when the great neo-Confucian Zhu Xi wrote "Family Rituals," a handbook on proper domestic conduct, he included a section on how to mourn. Bereavement was to be dignified with grief expressed quietly. And yet the backsliding continued. In 1540, the editor of a gazetteer in the central Chinese city of Xuzhou was one in an endless line of officials who tut-tutted at how locals "followed bad practices" at funerals, such as playing music and having feasts.

Official dissatisfaction continued after the imperial system collapsed in 1911. The Republic of China launched the New Life Movement, which simplified funeral services to rid them of what was seen as costly, wasteful, and superstitious practices, while their killjoy successors, the Communists, simply banned any sort of traditional practice. Their big death idea was cremation, making the utilitarian argument that graves are a waste of space and funeral practices a waste of money.

And so we come to today and the boisterous funerals that are now common in rural China. What to make of these images of funerary cross-dressers captured by Tomoko Kikuchi? Our initial feelings may be mirth or revulsion or a feeling that China is a weirder place than even the sadomasochistic-sounding foreign policy initiative "One Belt, One Road" makes it seem. And in some ways it is: why put on a drag show at someone's funeral? What's the point?

That's a hard question to answer. Or an easy one: Why put someone in a box and bury them underground? Why dress in black or white or grey and cry? Or try not to cry? Or try to cry? Or try for some in-between contortion that Confucius would have liked? Why have a wake? Why get drunk? Why tell stories about the dead?

We feel we can sensibly answer those: to be with friends and remember the person. But hiring professional cross-dressers?

How about this sociological answer: funerals are a reflection of a person's status in society. In some parts of Chinese society, status has been achieved through the centuries-whether at a funeral or a fair or a wedding-by having a big raucous party: something renao, or hot and noisy, in Chinese. What's more renao than a stage full of drag queens belting out songs or wailing for the dead person?

Unprecedented? No. Since the 1980s, many rural Taiwanese have had strippers at their funerals. The dead like to have fun. They liked strippers while alive and so they get strippers after they've died-with a hole cut in the coffin so they can peek out at the girls as they doff their clothes. In 2011, the documentary filmmaker Marc L. Moskowitz made the film "Dancing for the Dead" about the phenomenon. He noted that highers-up-like officials over the millennia-were embarrassed about the practice, seeing it as bad publicity for Taiwan, while locals carried it on as, in their views, part of "tradition."

What tradition? The ethnomusicologist Chiung-Chi Chen wrote about this in a 2006 doctoral thesis, "From the Sublime to the Obscene." She wrote that half the temple fairs she observed in Taiwan and many funerals included strippers as a kind of super renao catalyst. She posits that ghosts are kinds of hooligans. Hooligans like strippers so ghosts must too. Another idea is that funerals are places where social constraints are loosened and people can do what they usually can't.

But this is a debasement of all things proper! That depends on how narrowly we define things. In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer wrote that fear of the dead was behind all mortuary rituals in almost all cultures. Ghosts were dead people and they had to be controlled. Chinese definitely believed this, seeing the dead as a force to be placated-hence the major festivals on the Chinese calendar for the dead.

Traditionally, one way to deal with the dead was to expose parts of one's body: baring one's breast is known in the West, in Korean shamanistic practices, and it also has a history of millennia in Chinese culture.

But what does it mean? Here one has to be careful in making massive generalizations. It's not that all rituals don't have intrinsic meaning, but in Chinese culture it's probably fair to say that the ritual is sometimes more important than the content. At Chinese funerals through the ages, performers have sung and danced. In recent decades, the name for these groups were zhentou, or performing groups like dragon or lion dancers. With time, these were "modernized" by local people to include strippers and drag queens.

It's important to remember, though, that this isn't a sign of enlightened views toward transvestites or transgender people. The idea is to have a good time and attract a crowd to give status to the family hosting the event. It isn't a sign of respect to people with different sexual orientations or gender identities, but rather part of a spectacle-it's more akin to the bearded lady or the fat man in a Western circus of days past.

But I also don't think it implies a complete marginalization of these performers. Gender identity in China, as elsewhere, is in flux. We read in the media of gay marriage celebrations that attract many happy friends and families, even if the couples can't legally marry.

Instead, the key is that all of this-the partying, the mourning, the tears-is part of how people envision doing things properly. This doesn't mean a word-for-word recreation of an ancient rite (although these are coming back too) but a broader idea of respecting the dead and their living family members by putting on an appropriately big show. In his classic formulation, anthropologist James L. Watson writes that "orthopraxy"-the orthodoxy of practice-counts for more. The idea is to send the deceased over to the other side in a manner very broadly consistent with funerals for centuries, with performers, songs, banquets, and a big boisterous leave-taking.

What struck Watson was that this insistence on ritual was what held China together. The details might change but the overall idea-of a "proper" funeral, for example, based on certain principles (of wanting to keep the dead placated, or wanting to have a big loud event to mark the person's passing)-were what unified this vast empire that had spread across different geographic regions with different dialects.

So besides their intrinsic beauty, these photos also show something deeper about Chinese culture. At first disorienting, they are a classic example of a unifying Chinese culture thread: broad respect and fear of the dead, who have to be sent off in a way that honors them and gives face to those left behind.

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In the good old days, about three thousand years ago, people really knew how to mourn the dead. That was back in the Zhou dynasty, when there was no laughing in the dead person's house, no sighing while eating, and no singing while walking down a country lane.

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A Witness to Youth Culture in Burkina Faso

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Visual representation

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In most places, colorblindness is rare.

But the Micronesian island of Pingelap isn't most places.

Known as the Island of the Colorblind, the tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean has a high concentration of people presenting achromatopsia, a genetic trait that causes severe colorblindness. Typically, the trait occurs in fewer than one in 30,000 people. More than five percent of the population of Pingelap is affected by the hereditary condition.

The islanders have many theories as to why, notes the British Journal of Photography: "According to one, the disease came from Dokas, wife of the 19th century ruler Nahnmwarki Okonomwaun, who had two achromatopic children said to have been fathered by the god Isoahpahu. Another myth references an angry missionary, who cursed Nahnmwarki Mwahuele; yet another warns pregnant women off walking on the beach at noon, lest the blazing sun partially blind their unborn children."

Another tale told of a typhoon that killed all but three islanders, one of whom was colorblind, adds Dazed.

When she heard about the Island of the Colorblind, Belgian photographer Sanne de Wilde became fascinated. "I was invited onto a radio show to talk about my project Samoa Kekea, about albinism on the Polynesian islands of Upolu and Savai'i," she tells BJP. "Afterwards I was contacted by Roel van Gils, a Belgian man who has achromatopsia, who said 'I have a story for you.' I met him and was immediately very interested. I felt I had to do it."

In 2015 de Wilde traveled to Pingelap explore a single question, adds Dazed: How does someone who can't see color experience it? Her resulting work is on view now at the Arles photography festival and in a new book.

"Sometimes an idea sparks your mind and lingers, glowing in the dark in the back of your head, like a shiny thought-sparkle," writes de Wilde in the afterword of her new book, The Island of the Colorblind. The project, notes Dazed, takes its name from the neurologist Oliver Sacks's bestselling 1996 book chronicling his investigation into the lives of Micronesian achromatopes. When she began her project, de Wilde reached out to Sacks, who was unable to respond because of illness: He died of cancer the week that the photographer left for the island.

In her earlier series on albinism, titled "Snow White," de Wilde used bleached-out colors to suggest her subjects' coloring. Her images from Pingelap, on the other hand, are surreal scenes filled with pinks and pastels. "The scenery of the island appears more nuanced, it's subtleties are emphasized in varying velvetine shades," notes Dazed. "As de Wilde says, 'Lush green, the jungle vegetation, is what they are surrounded by most, they love the way it looks. They love the color-tones of the trees and plants although they cannot see green. That's why you'll see plants and trees being very present in my pictures.'"

The photographs reveal how the colorblind people of Pingelap perceive their world with an acute appreciation of pattern, tone, luminance, and shadow. "The work she produced there, in the course of an almost monthlong visit, meshes a social-documentary approach with a sort of experiment in point-of-view photography," writes Max Campbell at The New Yorker. "In each component of her formally adventurous project," Campbell adds, "de Wilde twists the medium of photography into a metaphor for the boundaries of vision."

"I'm very interested in how our physical identity is created - what it means to be born into a particular body or to transform yourself into something else," de Wilde tells BJP.

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AI-AP | Pro Photo Daily " Exhibitions: The Island of the Colorblind

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In most places, colorblindness is rare. But the Micronesian island of Pingelap isn't most places. Known as the Island of the Colorblind, the tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean has a high concentration of people presenting achromatopsia, a genetic trait that causes severe colorblindness. Typically, the trait occurs in fewer than one in 30,000 people.