At age 11, Destaye, center, marries 23-year-old Addisu in a traditional Ethiopian Orthodox wedding in 2008. Photo by Stephanie Sinclair

Destaye’s wedding wasn’t what she had always dreamed of. She wasn’t celebrating her union with the man she loved.

She was 11 years old, being forced to marry Addisu, a 23-year-old Ethiopian Orthodox priest who had chosen her to be his wife because she was young enough to ensure that she would still be a virgin. That day, she felt ashamed.

“Everyone was telling me I was lucky,” Destaye said in a video interview.

Photographer Stephanie Sinclair said the priest’s choice of Destaye honors the family, and her husband “really is lovely,” but Destaye had wanted to be more than a wife.

“By reading and doing my homework, I hoped it would give me a better future,” Destaye said. “I wanted to become a doctor because it would help me achieve a higher level of education.”

Sinclair, one of the most honored photojournalists today, documented Destaye’s wedding day in the outskirts of Gondar, Ethiopia, in 2008 as a part of her project on child marriage. Sinclair received her third Visa d’Or feature photography award for the series in 2012, making her the first photographer to win it three times.

Captured in these pictures first seen on CNN, Sinclair returned to Gondar in 2012 to see Destaye, who is now 15 and has dropped out of school to take care of her baby.

“She’s mentally settled into that this is her life, but it’s still tough to see that there’s some serious lost potential and opportunity,” Sinclair said.

Sinclair has spent nearly a decade investigating child marriage in India, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ethiopia. Today, the United Nations Population Fund and Sinclair are celebrating the first ever International Day of the Girl Child with the launch of Too Young to Wed, a campaign against child marriage with a multimedia site featuring Sinclair and other documentarian’s works.

When Sinclair sees these girls, it isn’t her marriage that comes to mind. She remembers her childhood.

“What I think about is how when I was that age, how lucky I was to not have the burdens of life on me until I was older,” Sinclair said.

Worldwide, by 2010, about 67 million women 20 to 24 years old had been married before they were 18, according to the Population Fund. Child marriage is found in all regions of the world but is most common in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, both proportionally and in count. Most countries, including Ethiopia, have laws preventing it, but most of them do not enforce those laws.

Sinclair visited and revisited Ethiopia because of its particularly high rates of child marriage: 41% of Ethiopian women between 20 and 24 were married underage.

For a 15-year-old wife and mother like Destaye, it is most likely that she will end up having approximately six risky pregnancies and live births because of the high infant mortality rate, according to a Population Fund representative. Complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the greatest cause of death and disability among girls 15 to 19.

In addition, Destaye will most likely not be able to go back to school, even though her husband had promised when they got married that she could finish schooling regardless of whether she had children.

“Addisu is caught in these intense traditions but wants better for his family,” Sinclair said. Addisu realized that Destaye’s education would improve their lives. But, ultimately, he gave into the societal pressures, making his wife have a child and end her schooling, Sinclair said.

Unlike communities she visited in other countries such as Yemen and Afghanistan, the Ethiopian people are exposed to the global community and have aid programs to prevent child marriage. Sinclair said there is already prevention, but she hopes her campaign will provide more for the girls already married.

“Even though I’ve been working on this for a decade, I feel like there’s much more to do,” Sinclair said. “I believe every girl deserves a childhood.”

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Serial entrepreneur, financial investor and businessman Skúli Mogensen (right) and his training partners relax after an early morning swim outside his oceanfront home in Reykjavik, Iceland. Considered to be the richest person in Iceland, Mogensen’s successful career began by building companies in the telecom and technology sector in Iceland, Europe and North America. Photo by Lauren Greenfield

Just four years after the country’s financial meltdown, a new Iceland has emerged that is recovering at a surprisingly fast rate. A change in moral character has accompanied the economic lift, expressed through a desire to return to Iceland’s cultural roots and historic identity. Although the overzealous attitude and excessive consumption that is referred to as “very 2007” still litters the landscape with paved roads leading to skeleton towns and abandoned buildings, Icelanders are revisiting the core values that have defined the country for decades: family, community, environmentalism, the great outdoors, entrepreneurship, and fish. With a devalued currency, fish is the new gold, offering twice its value. In fact, fish has always been the true savior of Icelandic culture and its traditional source of wealth.

During the economic boom, banking seemed like the only worthwhile occupation and Icelanders felt their spirit compromised, if not corrupted, in the gold rush for money. Icelanders left their roots for a faster, internationalist, and ostentatious identity that revolved around a singular interest: money and material acquisition. Fisherman, entrepreneurs, and musicians—all previously successful occupations for Icelanders—joined the throngs of inexperienced but highly prosperous bankers. With the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subprime crisis, Iceland’s three major banks, which had grown to nine times the country’s entire economic output, found themselves deprived of liquidity. The stock market plunged. Inflation rose to around 20%, unemployment surged, and the Krona, Iceland’s currency, dropped 80%. Shortly after, a new government took control and with little choice, let the banks fail. Iceland experienced the worst banking collapse in economic history.

The silver lining was a kind of creative destruction that allowed Icelanders to start anew, learn from their mistakes, and recreate a society based on more communitarian values rather than individualistic greed. This was possible for them because, unlike Ireland, they were not part of the EU and were able to default on much of their international debt. Though it was a painful transition, they turned inward. They relied on themselves as a highly educated people with vast natural resources of energy and fish.

Today, Icelanders are shunning foreign designer clothes in favor of traditional knit woolens. The biggest importer of Range Rovers is now a salmon farmer. A musician from one of Iceland’s well known rock bands left the day job he hated and is back making music, while fishing to make money. He is losing his home but prefers to be “free” than work for the bank. The richest entrepreneur in the country has returned to Iceland to help grow its future, rather than make millions abroad. A farming magnate lost his fortune but has opened an environmentally friendly bike store. Many of his compatriots are spending more time with family and enjoying the outdoors. They have a long journey ahead but are knitting, exercising, and eating good fish with their families in the process.

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“When you are checked in public, it creates a really unpleasant image. I wonder what the passers-by think – whether they really think that I committed a crime or that I really did something illegal – especially when it occurs in the neighborhood where I work…An example that I find particularly striking is when I walk down the street and I pass someone who shifts their bag to the other side – there is no mystery. I also try not to go to stores on Saturdays as I will likely be followed and checked.” – Omer Mas Capitolin, elected official, Paris, France. Photo by Ed Kashi

These images and testimonies explore police profiling in three European countries: The Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom. Through portraits and interviews, Ed Kashi examines the impact felt by immigrants and minorities who must contend with the stigma, legal pressures and exclusion from society that these practices cause for victims of such policies and behavior.

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French soldiers patrol after civilians in the streets of Combatant quarter kill and mutilate two Muslims while bystanders watch and laugh. Photo by Marcus Bleasdale

An escalating cycle of bloodshed has left tens of thousands dead and entire communities displaced in the Central African Republic. Peacekeeping forces have so far failed to stop the terror

The death records of the Bangui morgue in the Central African Republic read like a chapter out of Dante’s Inferno: page after page of people killed by machetes, torture, lynchings, shootings, explosions and burning. The overwhelming stench makes it impossible to stay there for long. On really bad days only the number of dead is recorded – not their names nor the causes of death – before the bodies are buried in mass graves.

The morgue is a terrible symbol of the toll of communal violence in the Central African Republic which has raged for months and claimed tens of thousands of lives, displacing even more. Recently, the Séléka, a predominantly Muslim group of fighters that seized Bangui, the capital, and toppled the CAR’s government in early 2013, have lost some ground – although they continue to terrorise wherever possible. In response Christian forces known as anti-balaka (balaka means ‘machete’ in Sango, the local language) have stepped up attacks against Muslim civilians in places where the Séléka no longer holds the sway it did a few months ago.

In hopes of quelling the situation, international peacekeeping forces are now in the country, and a new president, Catherine Samba-Panza – a former mayor of Bangui nicknamed Madame Courage –was installed in mid-January. She has promised that the country’s security forces will be reorganised to protect Muslims as well as Christians. But so far the violence has continued unabated. On January 29 two Muslim men were hacked to death and their bodies mutilated near Bangui’s international airport as onlookers cheered and filmed the scene.

The violence is escalating. Already many Muslim communities of Bangui and the north-western part of the CAR have been wiped off the map, their residents massacred and survivors forced to flee. For the Rwandan military deployed on the ground here as part of the African Union (AU) peacekeeping force, it brings back dark memories. ‘We remember what happened to us in 1994 when we see such killings,’ one Rwandan commander told me. ‘We are determined not to let that happen ever again.’

In January hundreds of anti-balaka captured a small town named Boyali from the Séléka and began to slaughter its Muslim residents. A few days later a woman named Fatimatu Yamsa was fleeing in a truck that was stopped at a checkpoint by Christian militia members. Knowing she was about to die, she handed her seven-month-old baby to a Christian woman next to her. The baby was saved, but Fatimatu was killed, along with three other Muslim women and their three children, hacked to death with machetes on the steps of a mosque. When I visited the mosque dried pools of blood marked where they had died. Red Cross volunteers were burying bodies and filling in wells where corpses had been dumped, leaving the water undrinkable.

This massacre was the latest horrific chapter in a sequence of tit-for-tat violence in Boyali. In a camp for displaced Muslim residents on the outskirts of Bangui I found Dairu Soba, 25, a survivor of the Boyali massacre, with a festering gunshot wound to his knee. He told me that 200 anti-balaka fighters had attacked Boyali on the morning of January 8 and had shot him. His older brother, Dibrila, had saved him by dragging him into a house. As the wounded Dairu watched, Dibrila, along with his father and uncle, were hacked to death outside. Thirty-four Muslims were killed that day, including the village chief. The same day Séléka fighters returned to Boyali to retaliate and wreak havoc on the Christian population. Some victims were executed on the spot, others shot while fleeing. The Séléka captured the Protestant pastor of the village, Pasteur Gabriel Yambassa, and cut his throat. They burnt 961 homes in Boyali that day.

At one burnt house surviving residents said that Séléka fighters had found Claudine Serefei, 28, a pregnant, physically disabled woman unable to flee. They had tied her hands and feet and thrown her into a fire. Now she lay before us, her hands burnt to stumps, and she was shivering from pain.

The massacres in Boyali are indicative of the Séléka’s waning power. Muslims make up about 15 per cent of the CAR’s population, and tens of thousands have been forced into exile. The tide began to turn against them in September, as anti-balaka began attacking poorly protected Séléka positions in smaller trading towns in the north-east of the country, killing Muslim residents. The French intervened militarily in early December, as the violence increased, with up to 1,000 killed in Bangui in a few days. One month later the Séléka’s self-appointed president, Michel Djotodia, was forced into exile by regional and international powers, and once-strutting Séléka generals now fear for their lives; they want to escape unscathed, while also avoiding justice for their crimes. One Séléka official told me, ‘Now it is every officer for himself. We are all trying to find our own way out of here.’

The arrival of French military forces, known as the Sangaris, was initially met with optimism. The French peacekeepers often seem stunned by the violence around them, and don’t appear to be doing much to stop it. Their original mission was to disarm the Séléka fighters, and they now face the much more difficult task of dealing with the Christian anti-balaka militias that are everywhere. On several occasions French officers have told me, ‘We cannot be seen to choose sides.’ However, there is a strong feeling that they could intervene to prevent some of the barbarity.

Since December defenseless Muslim communities left to face the wrath of the anti-balaka and the Christian civilians have been mercilessly slaughtered. In Bangui entire Muslim neighbourhoods face destruction. On January 28 residents fled the Muslim neighbourhood of PK13 (Point Kilometre 13). Hundreds of anti-balaka fighters arrived soon after, chasing away remaining inhabitants. Homes were systematically looted and dismantled. The main mosque was destroyed by a crowd of machete-wielding fighters shouting, ‘We do not want any more Muslims in our country. We will finish them all off. This country belongs to the Christians.’

In another Muslim neighbourhood, PK12, those who have survived massacres are preparing for the long and hazardous journey to refuge; their destination is Chad. Tensions are at a boiling point. After a Muslim man was recently lynched, anti-balaka fighters opened fire on his funeral with automatic weapons. Enraged Muslims began protesting against the French troops. One was shot by the troops, and another wounded, and the anger then turned on us, with a menacing crowd shouting that it was time for us to leave. As we made our way out, a Christian worker chased by a Muslim lynch mob ran for his life past us.

I requested a meeting with Colonel Dieudonné Oranti, one of the founders of the anti-balaka movement. He claimed that his men don’t kill civilians, then launched into a tirade against Muslims, saying that they had betrayed their country and sold it to terrorists, and so no longer belonged within its borders.

The anti-Muslim violence unleashed by the anti-balaka – and the Séléka’s response – has proved difficult to contain. Simply put, the underequipped AU troops and the 1,600 French troops are insufficient. Only a UN peacekeeping mission with some 6,000 to 10,000 soldiers would have a chance of stabilising the country. Such a mission would also bring police to patrol the streets, human rights monitors to report from the ground, and a political component that could help to re-establish order.

Pastor Koudougeret, a Baptist priest in Bangui, is looking after the orphaned baby of the woman killed at the roadblock in Boyali. For 10 years his church has supported the education of some 2,000 Muslim children, and he vigorously shook his head when I asked him if there was a religious war unfolding in the country. ‘The ultimate cause of our instability is not religious but political, because whoever comes to power makes his entourage commit abuses to stay in power,’ he said. ‘They treat the country as their private money-making business. We need a real democracy with politicians who have a vision to look after the needs of everyone.’

Amid the horror, there are small signs of hope. In the Séléka’s wake some Christian villages that were abandoned last month are slowly returning to life. Destroyed homes are being rebuilt. Unexpected bonds are also being formed, with examples of courage amid the carnage. In the town of Boali Father Xavier-Arnauld Fagba personally brought more than 700 Muslims who were under attack in his town to safety at his Catholic church in mid-January. He held Sunday Mass surrounded by the belongings of Muslims, including Korans that he had brought inside for safekeeping. He led his followers outside to exchange handshakes of peace with their Muslim neighbours. ‘We cannot be silent and cower in the face of injustice but must have courage,’ he preached. ‘To be a Christian is not just about being baptized, and true Christians live a life of love and reconciliation, not bloodshed.’

The world must act, and send more support to the CAR. And we must also hope that Father Xavier-Arnauld’s message is heard.

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Miners eat lunch from a communal bowl in the mining town of Pluto. Photo by Marcus Bleasdale

The eastern Congo is a landscape of lowland forests, fertile savannahs, chain lakes, and plentiful minerals. It is also a place where civil war rages—despite a 2009 peace accord—in a repeating nightmare of massacres, rapes, conscription of child soldiers, and plundered national parks. In February 2012, the horrific violence erupted anew as the Congolese army launched an attack against a notoriously brutal rebel group led by Bosco Ntaganda a warlord indicted by the International Criminal Court, setting off a multi-fronted battle for territory, money, and power. In 2013, the number of refugees trying to escape the violence in the DRC is believed to be 2 million—the highest level in three years. And yet the latest conflict has received little international attention.

What fuels the violence? Minerals. The North and South Kivu provinces of eastern Congo have high concentrations of the tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold that are essential to the manufacture of the cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, and gaming systems that the whole world desires.  In the early 2000’s, as mineral prices soared, armed groups including the armies of Rwanda and Uganda quickly realized they could profit from their extraction. And so the region has become a grim crossroads for roving rebels seeking minerals and revenge. The mines are almost exclusively under the control of various armed groups—the Hutu and Tutsi paramilitaries, the Mai-Mai fighters, and a brand new militia called M23—each descending on local villages in a macabre rotation, one after another, month after month, in a wave of mayhem. As anthropologist Stephen Jackson has noted, “Minerals both finance violence and provide an incentive for it.”

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Holocaust survivor Lazar Eliezer is seen at home in Tel Aviv while in the process of writing his memoir, May 2012. Photo by Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Unprecedented numbers of Holocaust survivors are coming forward to publish their memoirs, many prompted by grandchildren urging them to share their stories before they pass away. In Israel, Docostory LTD is assisting survivors in recording their experiences and emotions for subsequent generations. The company was founded by Miriam Dubi-Gazan, herself a Holocaust survivor from The Netherlands. Through Docostory, Dubi-Gazan has given hundreds of individuals a way to share their stories of survival, transforming their indelible experiences into rich memoirs.

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Maxime stands next to his cottage on the pillar. Photo by Amos Chapple

Maxime the monk lives on a pillar. When he wants to step down out of the clouds, the 59-year-old scales a 131-foot ladder, which takes him about 20 minutes.

After living on Katskhi pillar for 20 years, Maxime’s climbs have slowed, but having worked as a crane operator in a past life, he’s never feared heights.

Photographer Amos Chapple heard about Maxime while working in the country of Georgia, and when he first arrived and asked to go up, he was told no. Only priests and some of the troubled young men learning from Maxime and living in a monastery underneath the pillar were allowed to go up.

Chapple stayed with the men at the base for four days before he was told he could ascend the pillar. He participated in prayers seven hours a day, including four-hour night prayers from 2 a.m. to sunrise. When he was finally going up to Maxime’s home, rain clouds rolled in and the sun was setting. The iron ladder was “very dicey,” Chapple said.

“I put so much time into getting permission that I said it was too late to be scared,” he said.

While with Maxime at the top, Chapple said he was worried he would run out of light for the climb down and that it would start raining, but as he looked out at the clouds at eye level and the distance between he and the ground, he appreciated the quiet of the elevated home.

“You could feel one with the weather,” he said.

Maxime said he needs the silence of the top of the pillar.

“It is up here in the silence that you can feel God’s presence,” he told Chapple in Russian.

Stylites, or pillar saints, began after Simeon Stylites the elder in Syria first moved atop a pillar in 423 to cut himself off from worldly temptations. Stylites were most common in eastern Europe during the latter part of the fifth century, but the practice has since been abandoned.

Katskhi pillar had sat idly since the 15th century when the Islamic Ottomans invaded Georgia. No one had even been to the top for centuries until an alpinist climbed it and found the remains of a chapel and the skeleton of a Stylite in 1944.

Maxime told Chapple he “drank, sold drugs, everything” as a young man. After serving time in prison, he decided he needed a change.

“I used to drink with friends in the hills around here and look up at this place, where the land met the sky,” Maxime told Chapple. “We knew the monks had lived up there before, and I had great respect for them.”

Maxime took monastic vows in 1993 and climbed the tower to start a new life. For the first two years, he slept in a fridge to protect himself from the elements. He now has a bed inside a cottage where he sleeps.

“It’s more about the isolation than suffering,” Chapple said.

Followers send supplies up to Maxime with a winch, and the monk comes down once or twice a week for night prayers with the men staying at the monastery.

His climbs have slowed, and once Maxime is no longer able to move up and down the ladder, he will stay at the top until he dies.

A crypt holding the bones of a Stylite who lived and died at the Katskhi pillar lies under the chapel.

When Chapple asked Maxime if his bones would be stored in the same crypt, Chapple said the monk stretched out his arms in his charismatic way and said, “Of course!”

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Female members of a village committee in South Kivu dance around a women’s center. Photo by Lynsey Addario

Photographer Lynsey Addario had visited eastern Congo several times to cover the conflicts and plight of the women who live there.

She always came back with the same story – they had been raped and beaten, and it was hard to see anything positive in their lives.

But she recently returned to tell another story, a story of redemption.

With the help of the International Rescue Committee, women in villages in South Kivu have moved on from their oppressive pasts to support each other and financially support themselves.

“As a woman, I loved seeing women taking control of their lives,” Addario said.

The women come from different villages in South Kivu that have seen relative stability in the past few years. The names of the villages have been omitted to protect the women.

The International Rescue Committee started microfinance programs to help the women bring in funds through group farming, sewing, soap-making, and other small businesses. They also started community education and literacy classes.

With their financial independence, the women have earned more respect.

“Before they started receiving the microfinance payments, they weren’t even able to speak up at village meetings,” Addario said. “Now, because they have a profession, they have a voice.”

U.N. Special Representative Margot Wallstrom called the eastern Congo the “rape capital of the world” in 2010 because of the prevalence of sexual violence in the country.

Addario covered the fighting in 2006 and 2007, and she conducted interviews in 2008 for a project about women who had been victims of violence.

This time around, she was pleasantly surprised by their determination to move on.

“A lot were focusing on their present lives, which I hadn’t seen before,” she said.

Addario, who has covered wars in Syria, Libya, Congo and Iraq, has been a victim of war violence as well.

In 2011, she was held captive for six days in Libya with three other journalists while covering the conflict for The New York Times.

All of them were physically abused, and Addario was sexually assaulted regularly over the six days. That, however, didn’t come to mind when she spoke with the Congolese women.

“I have been covering women in the DRC for seven years and have always found them incredibly resilient and tough, but I didn’t think of my own experiences when I was covering them,” she said.

Eastern Congo is still plagued with violence, particularly in North Kivu. A total of 967,000 people are displaced throughout North Kivu as a result of years of conflict, and sexual assault has been on the rise, according to the U.N.’s refugee wing.

There were 705 reported cases of sexual violence in the region since January, compared to 108 cases during the same period in 2012, the U.N. reported.

Addario also documented the daily misery.

“They’re not in position to take control of their lives and begin their transformation,” she said.

As a photojournalist who has been in war zones around the world, Addario felt she needed to tell the stories of the now strong, independent women in South Kivu.

“We look for stories of empowerment, of overcoming hardship … we look for some happy ending, and often we don’t find it, especially with war,” she said. “If we can find those pockets of success, it’s important to shed light on it.”

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A group of seven friends, dressed as their favorite princess, have made it an annual tradition to run in Disney’s Princess Half Marathon at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. Photo by Lauren Greenfield

Every little girl’s dream is to be a princess when she grows up. But fairy tale has become hobby, pastime, and obsession for a new generation of women in their 20’s and beyond, as well as a multi-billion dollar business for Disney.

Since she was three years old, Courtney knew she wanted to be a princess. Now, 8, dolled as Rapunzel, Courtney is a princess, “I dress up and I get my hair done and I’m very kind like them.” She knows you can get married at Disney and already dreams of a princess wedding. That dream has become a reality for Christina Alaniz, soon to be Mrs. Torres, when she steps out of Cinderella’s horse drawn coach, moments before walking down the aisle in a Cinderella inspired dress and her modern day glass slippers, a pair of bejeweled high heels, at Disney’s Wedding Pavilion. Her fairy tale wedding followed a Disney World proposal “package” that included a ring in a glass slipper.

It is the capacity of the Princess brand to attract adults that has brought a record 36,000 participants, mostly grown women, to Disney World to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon, dressed in tutus and tiaras. The princess fantasy seems to have as strong an attraction for grown women as it does for little girls. Consequently, the eleven princesses that make up the Disney Princess franchise, Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, and Merida have become an empire, creating $300 million in revenue in 2001, $3 billion in 2006 and today, a $4 billion gold mine that has retailers from Alfred Angelo, Sephora, Dooney and Burke, and DSW designing Disney Princess lines of wedding gowns, handbags, glass slippers, and more.

For many women, the weekend allows for a break from being a mom and an escape from their everyday lives, where they don’t always get to feel like a princess. For others it is about camaraderie and personal commitment, like Kara Peters, who two years prior was 54 pounds heavier and couldn’t run half a lap around a track without doubling over with exhaustion. Meanwhile, at Disney’s Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique salon, the seed is planted for the fantasy that, if Disney has their wish, will last a lifetime. Little girls, between 3 and 12 years old, line up to get a $200 dollar princess makeover where they transform from ordinary child into princess of their choice, with the help of a cadre of fairy godmothers, full length gowns, hairstyling, nail polish, make-up, glitter, and a splash of fairy dust. As parents look on and take memorable snap shots, one mother requests that Disney “come out with the adult version of the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique salon…I think mothers like to be princesses too.”

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Robyn. Photo by Manjari Sharma

he best way to get a subject comfortable during a photo shoot, Manjari Sharma found, is to get the person into the shower.

Sharma started her shower series about four years ago with her subject Anastasia.

At the time she was photographing people in her bathroom. She didn’t know Anastasia well, and it was a bit awkward.

She had Anastasia get in the shower, and as the water fell on her, Anastasia relaxed and opened up, both in her demeanor and in her conversation.

Standing in that private place, where typically only a lover or child would join a person, Sharma has heard about the emotional journeys of a number of people.

“The shower creates this confessional-like space,” Sharma said.

She started the series soon after moving to New York City.

Looking back, she says during shoots she found those substantial conversations that are hard to find in a city of strangers.

“I enjoy getting to know people and find content that’s not just skin deep,” she said.

She would start the conversation with general, light questions, such as ‘Do you shower in the morning or at night?’ or ‘How’s our mutual acquaintance doing?’ Then she asked tougher questions that might not have been entertained in another setting – but here, people opened up.

“It was like Russian dolls, and it became more and more personal,” she said.

Sharma thinks the strongest photos are those where, during the shoot, the person was comfortable and reflective both physically and in the conversation.

But even those who didn’t relax created intriguing images.

“Every once in awhile a photo was successful even if a person wasn’t fully open,” she said. “That was the charm, that they didn’t let me all the way in.”

The body of work is a mix of people who were really open and people with barriers to break through. Those who wouldn’t make eye contact with the camera were the most difficult to get to open up.

One friend, Amelia, has cancer, and wh[d!i^[ arrived for the shower shoot, Sharma hadn’t seen her since she was diagnosed a year before. They sat on Sharma’s sofa and talked, but their difficult and powerful conversation didn’t come until they were in the shower.

“She talked about connecting her previous life to her current life and what it’s all meant to her,” she said.

“I think ultimately, it’s about finding a moment of spirituality. Sometimes it’s in a large temple with bells, and sometimes it’s alone in the shower.”

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A young resident looks inside her family’s home in Largo do Tanque, a favela in Rio de Jainero. Photo by Lianne Milton

For tourists, Rio de Janeiro conjures images of panoramic views, stunning beaches and the famous Carnival celebration. What tourists won’t see is the swift demolition of homes in Rio’s favelas as the government pushes through a major highway project.

Photojournalist Lianne Milton got a firsthand look at one of the neighborhoods being cleared for construction. She and activist Theresa Williamson toured the area together and captured the devastation of the people who lived there.

“Favelas are not shanty towns,” Milton said. “They have kitchens, water, tiled floors. The people there have spent years there building community. It was very traumatic watching people lose their homes.”

Largo do Tanque is one of many neighborhoods being torn down to build the Transcarioca highway, which will facilitate traffic flowing to Olympic sites for the 2016 Summer Games.

The Brazilian government says while the Olympics and the 2014 World Cup are the catalyst, the demolitions will bring needed improvements and have a long-term beneficial effect on the city.

Residents who are asked to leave are offered varying amounts of money, and in many cases they say it is not enough to buy a comparable home.

“The government is forcing residents from their homes with very little compensation,” said Williamson, director of Catalytic Communities, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to de-stigmatizing Rio’s favela communities.

As a result, some will move in with relatives; others will try to save up to buy another home. A small number of them receive higher-quality compensation housing, but they complain because these homes are far from health and educational facilities.

Despite their indignation, Williamson says people in the community are remarkably resilient.

“The general spirit of the people is to accept what has happened and rebuild elsewhere the best they can, avoiding looking back too much,” she said. “This is a coping mechanism that’s vital for people who feel powerless in the face of authority.”

Meanwhile, Milton says she worries about what the future holds for the residents of Largo do Tanque. She hopes her images help bring more awareness about their plight.

“They’ll survive, of course, but it will take a long time to settle into a new community again,” she said. “Imagine yourself being forced from your home and community of many years.”

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Bob and Tissheama Pizzimenti in the cafe of the community center. Photo by Pavel Prokopchik

Pavel Prokopchik traveled to the United States in summer 2012 in search of the American dream. He wanted to debunk it.

Prokopchik was born in Russia, raised in Latvia and now lives in the Netherlands. He believes the United States presents itself as a wealthy, unflappable superpower, but he was sure he would find a different story among people – that Americans would have their own fantastic, contradictory, far simpler dreams.

His journey wound through the Deep South, into Appalachia and the Midwest. Near its end, he came to Detroit. The city was only on the brink of bankruptcy then, but its troubles were legendary: the plunging population, the shaken automotive industry, the lawlessness and deterioration.

He’d seen photographs of the city’s feral buildings and emptied factories, and people he spoke with believed it was a ghost town.

“They had an idea there are no people at all, that it’s a desolate location with no people, just dogs passing by,” he said. “I wanted to do something different.”

He began to shoot photos around one street north of downtown, Goldengate. There were collapsed buildings and potholed streets, but residents, squatters, families, criminals and artists had begun to live in some sort of ragged harmony.

“It’s something that I noticed a lot of other places where things are not going so well,” Prokopchik said. “People are gathering in communities to survive.”

From one town to another, he said, it might be a club, a convention or a social scene. In Detroit, it was as a neighborhood.

Goldengate was anchored by the Innate Healing Arts Center, a holistic healing center that includes a chiropractic clinic and vegetarian café. Squatters, some of them tied to the Occupy Detroit movement who had been ousted from downtown’s Grand Circus Park, claimed and rebuilt empty homes nearby. Artists moved in from faraway places, seeking a cheap place to play and create.

People snagged materials from other vacant homes, fished food from supermarket Dumpsters and planted seeds in empty lots. They shared rides and split firewood to warm themselves in a cold snap. They lived simply, but not always in peace.

Even as community members came to each other’s aid, there were drug addictions, break-ins and fights. People came and went, injecting new personalities and conflicts into the culture of the street.

“I would not say it’s a happy-go-lucky kind of place. It’s tough,” Prokopchik said. “It’s a different attitude. It’s opposed to the idea of the American dream, where you need to work hard your whole life.

“They’re turning it around. You don’t need much to live a happy life.”

In the months since Prokopchik visited, the community has continued to change, said Bob Pizzimenti, founder of the Innate Healing Arts Center. Dr. Bob, as he’s known around the city, said some of the squatters Prokopchik met are still there, but many have moved on. The gardens are bigger. There’s a community bike shop now, Red Planet Bikes. Solar panels have been installed on some houses. There are still drum circles every week, and couch surfers visit almost constantly.

The abandoned buildings, drugs and fights are still there, too, but “some of the bad guys have left, or they’ve gotten better,” Pizzimenti said. “It’s pretty anarchic, pretty dynamic and organic, and here in Detroit, you can get away with murder, in a way.”

Nobody seems to be stopping anybody. Maybe, Prokopchik said, it’s because it works. It doesn’t line up with every other dream around the country, but shows “your expectations are adjustable, according to the situation you’re in,” he said.

“If you’re really attracted and attached to the city, this is the only way to survive. Just get together. I just don’t see any other way.”

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A prostitute tries to catch the attention of a potential client on the riverfront. Photo by Luca Catalano Gonzaga

Cyclones, floods and monsoons. These cyclical natural disasters had originally drawn photographer Luca Catalano Gonzaga to Bangladesh, where he quickly discovered another native pattern of devastation: sex for sale.

At $1.50 USD per client and a high worker-to-client ratio, he saw that competition at the Bani Shanta brothel has no boundaries.

“The violence, anger and rage of the girls, fighting to grab a man as if he was an object” is a sight Gonzaga will never forget. “I had to pay a prostitute to protect me from the assault of the other women,” he said.

“It is a sad profession that tradition dictates is passed on from mother to daughter,” Gonzaga said, recounting his experience on the sandbar island that hosts the brothel. This is the only profession they know and the women he talked to feel they have no alternative, he said, adding that their education is nonexistent.

Situated along the Ganges, one of the largest river systems in the world, the island is home to many prostitutes, who wait for sailors like sirens, luring them in from the sea.

Gonzaga described the girls’ behavior as ladylike in appearance but wolf-like in manner when men arrive on the shores.

“Girls grab men and push them around – shouting and forcing them to get into their corral.” But the men are not innocent either; they play their own game of prodding and degradingly inspect the women’s bodies.

The living conditions: daunting. The lack of basic hygiene: dour, though the women clean up well for their suitors in a kaleidoscope of colors, jewels and gems. Their faces: caked with lustrous powders, their eyes: majestic blues and fire-tip yellows, their costumes: exotic and alluring. They appear as the geisha of Bangladesh. Yet their feet, in plastic rain boots to shuffle around the muddy, squalid streets, are physical reminders of their poor conditions.

Yet according to Gonzaga and other reports, girls who have yet to reach their teen years are working alongside their mothers and sisters in these call-houses. UNICEF estimated that as many as 10,000 underage women earned a living in 2004 by selling their bodies in Bangladesh, with some estimates as high as 29,000.

Known for his work in developing countries photographing local cultures, human rights issues and climate change, Gonzaga is used to the unusual and the depressing. Yet as he disembarked from the ferry onto Bani Shanta, Gonzaga was completely unprepared for the “hunt” that was about to take place.

It is a game of exploitation, difficult to distinguish who is taking advantage of whom.

“The role of victim and perpetrator switches many times,” Gonzaga said. He saw the men exploit the women’s bodies, just as the shordani (female owner of the brothel) exploits the men for more money, just as the girls exploit the men as if they were “goods.”

A 15-minute appointment with a girl generally costs anywhere from 100 to 300 taka, or about $2-$4, depending on the age and beauty of the prostitute, Gonzaga said.

Not much to wrestle over, yet with a fierce competition between the women for a meager amount of money, the girls must use all the prowess they possess, or as Gonzaga deemed it, “abusive” behavior toward one another. “It was as if they were acting out publicly the violence they had to endure sexually.”

If a prostitute gets pregnant, often the father of the child will come live with her. However, according to Gonzaga, he does not contribute financially; he lives off the woman’s earnings.

Stepping outside the role as witness and photographer, Gonzaga felt trapped. He got to leave at the end of his trip; the prostitutes did not.

“How is the next generation going to break this awful cycle? How can we help? Is this the only destiny for these children?”

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Skinner with trophy zebra, south Africa, from the series hunters. Poto by David Chancellor

‘He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time, it might have been five seconds, I dare say, he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One would have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upwards like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further’ Shooting an Elephant, George Orwel.

In many instances whilst documenting hunters what I was presented with was the opportunity to explore the animal quietly and calmly before the madness resumed as skinners arrived, this work is included here. The madness is also included.

Then of course the beasts have to be reconstructed by expert hands to look as if all is well and the period between life, and death, has not occurred at all, now they live in another plain reborn to live forever.

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Myrna Whiteshield, 47 and her boyfriend Richard Jackson, 46. at their friend’s home where they currently reside. Myrna lost her own home 10 years ago to a fire accident and has been homeless ever since, living out of various households on the reservation. Photo by Rena Effendi

Located in an isolated and economically languishing area of North Dakota, Spirit Lake is a Sioux Indian reservation home to some 6,200 inhabitants. Tribe members struggle with crippling social problems, among which are poverty and high unemployment rate, staggering at 39%, endemic alcoholism and poor nutrition. Medical conditions such as cirrhosis and diabetes are very common on Spirit Lake and mental health has deteriorated. Inordinate alcohol consumption, depression and neglect lead to abuse, death from overdose or accidents, and finally suicide with rates among the highest in America. But the most chilling statistic on Spirit Lake is this: for every 163 residents on the reservation, there is at least one registered sex offender and native children account for 30% of all child abuse cases in North Dakota. According to the tribe members, a vast majority of the child abuse crimes on the reservation, to this day, continue to be neglected by the law enforcement and remain unpunished. These facts are gruesome in Spirit Lake and while people struggle to protect their children from the horrors of abuse, the family union is strong. People persevere and even as they barely make their ends meet, they take care of their own children and those of their relatives. While in Spirit Lake I met Jada Longie, a 39-year-old single mother of two. Subsequently, I photographed her family of about 80 people – her parents, her many siblings and their children and children’s children. Headed by “mom and pop” Mary and Frank Lovejoy, the family elders, the portrait of this expanded Spirit Lake clan is a reflection of both the community’s soulful wounds and its healing with familial bonds.

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A man and a girl are having a drink in Moloko, Rosebank, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo by Benedicte Kurzen

The first time we met Sibo and Pamela, they explained us how their long nails were pleasuring men, and therefore totally worth investing in. In hip-hop slang Pamela and Sibo are “Gold Diggers”. Geared up in mini skirt and high heels they hit the dance floor, looking around for a man, a rich man of course.

With the end of apartheid, everyone has access to wealth just walking across the street. If you are not rich you can still pretend you belong there, even for one night, even for one man. The generational gap is massive: for Sibo’s mother to own a house is already a luxury, but for Sibo it remains a house in the ghetto. The real social promotion is to actually leave the township and move into the old white-only neighborhood, just like Motsilisi, former Miss Soweto. She is just waiting for her boyfriend to give her permission to move her dresses into the cupboard.

Soweto, the largest township in South Africa is emblematic of the aspirations of this new generation. The historical township is still very poor and yet became a hype place, where youth dream of wealth, success and beautiful cars. If you made it, it needs to show: hummers, champagne and expensive clothes.

This is bling culture, a way to catch up with the oppression of the past.

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Re-enactment of a crime scene at Tijuana University, Tijuana. Photo by Jerome Sessini

In 2008, two years after a crackdown on drugs was announced in Mexico, photojournalist Jerome Sessini was drawn to “the wrong side” of the U.S.-Mexico border.

He had been to the country before; his first trip was in 1995. He met his wife there 10 years ago. But it has become a different place since then, he said.

From 2008 to 2011, over the course of six trips, he spent about nine months covering the impact of violence on society in Culiacan, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.

During his first stay in Juarez, 70 people were killed, he says in his book on the subject, “The Wrong Side: Living on the Mexican Border,” published by Contrasto s.r.l.

At least 47,000 people were killed in drug-related violence from December 2006 to September 2011. Sessini estimates even more.

“You know it’s violent, but when you’re in the field, it’s totally different,” the French photographer said. Media may exaggerate some things, but “in the case of Mexico, there’s more violence than what the media says.”

For local journalists, it’s almost impossible to cover the situation. Cartels may put pressure on them, threaten to kill them or even follow through with their threats. And anyone can be involved, he said, so it’s hard to know who can be trusted.

It’s not like Libya or Iraq, where you know who and where the enemy is, Sessini said. In those countries, you can typically avoid certain areas and remain safe. In Mexico, death could be at your doorstep, at the bar or in the car next to you.

“I knew by experience it was dangerous,” he said. “But you don’t feel danger. There are no signs of danger.”

Locals have accepted their “destiny to live in a violent country.” In Juarez during the early years of his project, the streets would empty by 5 p.m., leaving the city “like a ghost town.” In 2011, it was almost back to normal, he said.

He hopes his project will provide a new perspective for people to see a different aspect of the drug war.

“I sensed nothing there but despair, resignation and fear,” he says in his book. “I could never do anything for them. I ended up by accepting this. This book is my only contribution.”

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A woman screams to the crowd as she is driven away from a peaceful protest by people believed to be undercover police. Photo by Andreas Bro

Azerbaijan may rarely make headlines in America, but in 2012, the country’s visibility popped in Europe thanks to “Eurovision,” the annual live-song contest show.

With all eyes on the small country that borders the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus region, Danish photojournalist Andreas Bro was able to enter Azerbaijan and document another side of the country.

Bro said he struggled at first, arriving with the idea of covering the recent economic boom and who benefited from it.

“I quickly realized that there was quite a big cover-up from the Azeri government to show them as a nation with good intentions, a democracy on the way but not quite there yet when in fact it seemed like it was in reality an autocracy or dictatorship,” Bro said.

He felt it was a large issue that required a range of subjects, which was different for him since he said he typically focuses on a small group of people to tell a story.

Though democratic in appearance, Bro said Azerbaijan has a dark side that limits basic rights and creates “a toxic environment of paranoia and fear of the leaders.”

In 2011, authorities in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, demolished the privately owned office of human rights organization the Institute of Peace and Democracy despite a court injunction that prohibited it. The U.S. Embassy in Baku officially expressed its concern over the August 11, 2011, incident.

Bro says he saw the paranoia firsthand when trying to climb a small apartment building to get an overall shot of the city. A tenant kindly asked him and his local contact to leave, not because they were being a nuisance but because “she also had to take care of herself and be careful with her life.”

Bro came back with the feeling that in a country where the government is almost always watching, anything out of the ordinary could lead to problems.

The issues became even more real for Bro when he said his contact was arrested at a protest despite not even participating in it.

He said his contact and 10 protesters were driven by police outside the city and left there, forcing them to find their own way back into town.

Bro’s initial story of the effect of the economic boom played a role in showing how divided the country is.

“Widespread corruption is a massive problem in the country’s administration,” Bro said in his story’s introduction. “This makes it very hard for ordinary people to make a decent living without bribing someone or work directly for the government.”

“The economy is tied up in natural gas and oil and is dependent on that,” he said.

Despite the wealth to be gained from the abundant oil fields, workers on the ground with whom Bro spoke were only earning $450 (in U.S. dollars) a month working 12-hour days up to six days a week.

Everything that Bro said he learned on the ground in Azerbaijan became a haunting photo story showing both the outward beauty and oppressive shadow of a country so new to freedom.

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Zoh Enestin and her daughter Fungwi. Cameroon – 2012 . Photo by Gabriele Galimberti

Cameroon has an extremely high infant and child mortality rate: almost one out of eight children dies before reaching the fifth year of life.

Children die for illnesses generally linked to precarious hygienic and social conditions, the main killers being diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia. Tetanus too used to pose a big risk, especially for newborns, since it could easily be transmitted during delivery in an unhealthy environment. Nevertheless, the grim picture has also a good angle: in 2012 Cameroon has been declared “tetanus free” thanks to the many health centres which have been dysplaying a tremendous effort in order to establish a vaccination programm involving mothers and children. We’ve visited some of these centres and have conducted interviews with nurses, mothers, pregnant women, social workers, village chiefs. Beside the antitetanus campaign, we have witnessed how vaccinations and antimalarial drugs are being made available to the poorest. It’s far from enough to make drugs economically affordable: the real challenge is to bring the mothers and children to the health centres, and the health centres to the mothers and children. One has to persuade the community (especially women) that vaccines are useful and health centres are worth being visited. How to do it? Sometimes with words, sometimes with pictures, sometimes with some gospel music.

In Cameroon you often cannot be a health worker without being at the same time a kind of social performer.

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