His larger-than-life subjects — which include Queen Elizabeth II and singer Grace Jones — might be among the most photographed people in the world, but Levine has a knack for capturing them at rest, as if in the calm of a storm. “Every opportunity I got [to shoot a portrait], I tried to distill it back to just pure essence without any suggestion or iconography or anything,” he told TIME during a recent visit to his studio in Oxfordshire, England, ahead of his solo retrospective show at The Fine Art Society on May 17. “I’m experimenting with that and trying to get stillness in the image.”

He says the challenge as a photographer is to distance himself from the idea of his subject  and focus on the person he has right in front of his lens. In a recent sitting with Kate Moss, Levine says he was determined to ignore Kate Moss, the supermodel, and instead tried “to bring her back, just to Kate – Kate, Kate, Kate.” In doing this, he manages to take one of the fashion world’s most recognizable faces and show it in a new light.

Which may explain why an artist who largely focuses on lights, lasers and holography — as Levine has done since his student days at London’s Chelsea School of Art; his light installations will be included in the retrospective at The Fine Art Society — has made a name for himself in recent years for his portraits. The Canadian-born Brit, now 41, says that he never expected to be shooting icons at this stage in his career. In fact, back in 2004, when he received a call from Buckingham Palace asking him to shoot a portrait of the Queen, Levine initially thought it was a prank. “I thought it was a hoax at first! Seriously, I really did. It just seemed so far-fetched.”

Once Levine was sufficiently convinced that it was not a ruse but a Royal request, he went to work preparing lights and equipment, wanting to put his knowledge of light and holography to use capturing the monarch in a truly modern fashion. Setting up the visual light equipment in Buckingham Palace took Levine about three days – “and it took every second,” he recalls – and the shoot itself took about an hour and a half. However, the resulting images, including Lightness of Being as well as the shot selected for TIME’s cover on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, are arresting and timeless.

“I think [these images] struck such a chord because it’s going somewhere into a more spiritual dimension and into a deeper realm,” he says. ”It’s what we are but people don’t very often connect with it.”

Chris Levine: Light 3.142 is on display from May 17 to June 15, 2013 at The Fine Art Society in London.

Chris Levine is a Canadian born light artist based in the United Kingdom.

Megan Gibson is a writer and reporter at the London bureau of TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeganJGibson.

Since the bombings in Boston, TIME has spent three weeks in Dagestan trying to learn what, if anything, the region’s Islamists had to do with Tsarnaev’s radicalization (to read the article, which is available to subscribers, click here). The search wound through nearly a dozen cities, towns and villages in Dagestan, along the rutted roads of the Caucasus mountains and into the neighboring region of Chechnya. It went inside the local Salafi mosques and the homes and neighborhoods of their congregants. What emerged was the image of a region trapped in a spiral of violence, one perpetuated as much by local security services as by the militants they hunt.

The region’s insurgency and counterinsurgency have killed thousands of people over the last decade and shaped the lives of many more. They also shaped the ideas of jihad that Tsarnaev brought with him to Dagestan last year, as well as the beliefs that he apparently took back to Boston.

Simon Shuster is TIME’s Moscow reporter. Follow him on Twitter @shustry.

Dmitry Kostyukov is a freelance photographer based in Moscow. Kostyukov previously covered conflict in Georgia, Afghanistan and Israel for AFP.

If your answer has to do with cameras or lenses or even light, the photographer Alexander Harrington has a thought experiment for you. His new series Untitled I, which he created in February and has made available on his website, is, he says, “photography that doesn’t have a camera origin.” Rather, each image in the series is generated with computer software (Photoshop, specifically). So what makes it photography?

While you’re thinking about that, Harrington has another question for you: why do you care?

“If you ask most people what the difference between a painting and a photograph is, they would tell you that one is made with a camera and one is made with a brush, but I always think of an inkjet print as being a mechanical grid painting. It’s still pigment in dots, just made by a machine,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you make it chemically or photomechanically or whatever. I would class them as images.”

In Harrington’s view, there is only that single category — images — and trying to name the type of image according to the process through which it’s made is not relevant.

The inspiration for Untitled I came from a conversation with a photographer friend who was experimenting with physical manipulation of her prints to call attention to the flat plane of the photograph. Why, Harrington wondered, was paper necessary to make that point? All dimension in photography is just an illusion of reflections and shadows. Likewise, Untitled I is about an appearance of a surface, created absent a physical surface in front of a physical camera.

But it’s not abstraction, he says. “To me, it is representational: it’s a representation of surface and reflection, or the idea of something coming through a surface,” he clarifies. An image made with a camera in which the thing photographed is blurred or distorted is an abstraction of an object, but in Harrington’s work the image that looks blurred or distorted is the thing that’s being photographed. Likewise, his other recent work also takes apart the components of photography, the way it can make gray appear colorful or flatness appear deep, to make the viewer think about the illusions that are inherent to the format—that are, in his world, the definition of photography.

Or, rather, of images in general. “Sometimes I think the designation ‘photography’ might be just a fad of the past 200 years,” he says, “more than being a meaningful distinction.”

Alexander M. Harrington is a New York-based artist.

Lily Rothman is a writer-producer for TIME.com.

Shared human experience.

That was the driving force behind photojournalist Chris Hondros’ work. Moments of humanity, brought into the light and into the consciousness of the greater public. His images — whether made within the baked-clay walls of a compound in Basra, the mold-blanketed alleys of post-Katrina New Orleans or the quiet glades of a snow-covered Central Park — reflected an innate desire to photograph the human world he saw unfolding around him. His work was deeply empathetic, a quality that allowed him to tell stories that lingered in viewers’ minds long after the page was turned. And Hondros’ staff position at Getty Images amplified his reach — his photos sent on the wire to thousands of publications around the world, with the potential to reach literally billions of eyes.

In April 2011, in the very midst of doing the hard, important work that he loved, Hondros’ life was cut short by a mortar round.

The Chris Hondros Fund, established in his name by his fiancée Christina Piaia and close friends, aims to “continue and preserve Hondros’ distinctive abilities to bring shared human experiences into the public eye.” Now in its second year, the Fund offers financial support to photographers who work in the same vein that Hondros did — with empathy, dedication and humility.

“This award recognizes and supports photojournalists who bring the news stories of our time into view,” says Piaia.

Today, the fund, in conjunction with Getty Images, gave Chilean photographer Tomás Munita the $20,000 award, citing his “fierce commitment to photojournalism and endless drive to tell a story.” Munita’s portfolio of work, shot in a wide variety of settings and locales, reflects a strong and nuanced grasp of the human condition. His photographs of refugees in Afghanistan, prisoners in El Salvador and daily life in Cuba all demonstrate just how in touch Munita is with the currents (and undercurrents) of life.

“I would like to express my gratitude,” Munita told TIME. “[This award] is not just a recognition. It is the means to keep working on personal projects, which I am definitely going to do.”

Photographer Bryan Denton was selected as a finalist for the 2013 award; the committee cited Denton’s “rare ability to capture both the complexities and daily life of those living in conflict and its aftermath with an unyielding commitment and intellectual curiosity.”

Bryan Denton

Libyan residents of Tripoli stormed through the Bab al-Azizia compound in search of weapons as a structure burned in the background. Aug. 23, 2011.

Previously, on the first anniversary of Hondros’ death after he was killed in Libya in 2011, the fund awarded $20,000 to NOOR photographer Andrea Bruce. Emerging photographer Dominic Bracco received a $5000 runner-up award.

Tomás Munita is a freelance photographer based in Santiago, Chile. He previously photographed Church and State: The Role of Religion in Cuba for TIME.

For more information on the Chris Hondros Fund, visit ChrisHondrosFund.org.

“It was a very spontaneous move,” Cheung told TIME. He arrived knowing very little about the region — when he was still in Canada, he was able to find very little concrete information about the country. But once he arrived, he began relentlessly observing and researching the lives he found around him. This diligence aided him as he crafted a series of photographs that embody much of the United Arab Emirates’ fast-changing landscapes.

It’s not hard to notice the rate at which the UAE is developing and adapting as a country. “In 2008 and 2009, I spent some time taking pictures in Mussafah, an industrial town and a suburb of Abu Dhabi. It was known for its labor camps, home to many of the country’s labor force. A year later, when I returned to Mussafah, once a small, bustling city within a city, full of shacks, low-end restaurants, convenience stores and makeshift markets  — it had completely disappeared. The camp had been demolished and the laborers were moved to better housing,” he says.

Oil-driven development has propelled cities and suburbs through drastic change. Foreigners now make up 85% of the population, people come and go, and with them come radical cultural shifts. Cheung’s approach is interesting and unusual, focusing on rather anonymous objects in sparse environments. Ultimately, his photographs show the strange and beautiful result of two very different cultures — the local Bedouin culture and the international business-oriented culture — as they try to co-exist in one space.

Cheung explains that the absence of men, women and cultural reference points was deliberate, so that he may push the boundaries of the kinds of photos he wanted to make, and take a closer look at the environment and its awkward subtleties. “My focus for the project is space — as a holding environment for human interaction or the remnants of it. People, especially the expatriates, are present in many of the images indirectly as the foreign influence on this evolving space.”

Today, when one searches for ‘Abu Dhabi’ online, there are pages and pages of links detailing countless tourist attractions and activities. Cheung’s series of photographs are an interesting documentation of this change, but also act as a personal reminder of Cheung’s experience there. “Taking these photos was like writing in a journal,” he says. Now, back in Toronto and starting to re-build a home for himself, he looks back on his five year journey.

“Just like all those people coming in and out of the city, it felt like my time to go through the revolving door and head home.”

Philip Cheung is a photographer currently based in Toronto. He has recently returned to Canada after five years in the Middle East where he worked on commissioned and self-initiated projects.

Sophie Butcher is a writer and photographer based in New York.

The two met at Eddie Adams Workshop in 2009, but never really interacted despite both living in New York City for years. Zalcman moved to London in late 2012 and began making multi-layered images that combined her new home with her old one. The result, New York + London: A Collection of Double Exposures, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, also led to the formation of @echosight.

Unlike most collaborations, @echosight has taken shape without the artists ever working together face-to-face. While they’re divided by oceans and continents, Ghitis and Zalcman are free to collaborate on their own schedules and share the results on social media.

In a way, the project is an evolution of each photographer’s personal work. “I’m kind of allergic to my SLRs outside of newspaper assignment work,” said Zalcman, who shot most personal photos on medium format film before exploring phone photography. “One is as old-school as you can get and is slow and laborious,” she said. “The iPhone is just the opposite of that. It’s fast and easy and quick.”

Ghitis said he never had a problem with phone photography, but had not fully explored it until getting an iPhone. “I have this thing and I can carry it around in my pocket and it allows me to take pictures casually,” he said.

@echosight is like a “puzzle game,” according to the pair. The entire process takes place on a phone: Images are uploaded to a Google Drive folder, each pulls photos from the other and creates the final piece in an app called Image Blender. Each photo is uploaded to the Instagram account with a quote, something that Ghitis initiated in order to communicate the feeling being conveyed. “Photos are very abstract and words can be very literal so I didn’t want to go too far in one direction,” he said.

The resulting images are at times elegant and at others chaotic. Some have an edge of darkness, like a nightmare; others are meant to be more lighthearted. Ghitis describes an image of a hippo’s open mouth blended with a beautiful spiral staircase as a joke on their shared architectural backgrounds—both studied it at one point in college. “Daniella was making this lovely comment about architecture and I totally made a joke out of it, but that’s kind of what’s fun,” he said.

The game of @echosight is not limited to two players. In the future, the duo hopes to become a trio, quartet or something larger to create more complex and deeply layered images. As each photographer travels, so does the project—Vietnam has been in the mix during a recent trip by Zalcman.

“It would be great to have someone else join our ‘pictures with friends’ game,” Ghitis said.

Tanner Curtis is an associate photo editor at TIME.com.

“We have a unique relationship where we connect through the camera and through the act of photographing,” says Szwarc. “This is a way for us to spend time together. It brings us close.”

Perhaps even closer than other daughters-in-law are to their husband’s mothers.

Szwarc’s pictures of Anna—whom she calls by her first name—capture a broad range of emotions. Despite their family connection, the photographer does not always present a rosy picture of Anna’s life; neither does Anna hide from the camera. Szwarc says Anna loves to be photographed and is courageously open. The pictures chronicle moments of joy, as well as instances of loneliness. That juxtaposition of fun and melancholy was manifest in the very first picture in the series: right after Szwarc suggested that they do a project together, Anna picked up a Venetian-style mask and held it in front of her face.

“I think this very much reflects her personality,” says Szwarc. “She likes to laugh, though not all of the pictures show that; she’s a free spirit; she loves costume parties. But for me, as a photographer it brings another layer of significance, thinking about identity.”

Thinking about the idea of masks—which show up several times throughout the series—was one of the ways in which the photographer grew closer to her subject. As immigrants, both Anna and Ilona have had to deal with the decision of whether, and to what degree, they want to blend in or distinguish themselves, to grapple with what it means to be a Polish woman in America. (Or a woman, period: like much of Szwarc’s other work, the Anna photographs also touch on a fascination with other sorts of masks, like beauty and appearance.) Immigration inevitably means that people become physically distant from one another. Although Anna left Poland partly to make a better future for her family, she was not able to arrange for her son—Szwarc’s husband—to join her until he was 19. (He traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Poland several times between then and 2008.) Her husband, who appears in one of the photographs, does not live in the U.S.; she has not yet fully found her place in the community of her new homeland. The process of the family coming back together is still a work in progress, and Anna’s life is often, as Szwarc’s photographs show, a solitary one.

Ilona Szwarc

A snapshot of Anna from the 80's, taken at Liberty Island during one of her first trips to New York.

The immigrant’s story especially stands out in the one photograph in the series that Szwarc did not take, a snapshot of Anna in front of the Statue of Liberty, taken by Szwarc’s husband Bartek Rainski shortly after his mother arrived in the United States. The composition is noteworthy—Anna’s figure and the statue’s seem to echo one another—as is its meaning for Szwarc.

“It represents Anna’s journey to fulfill her dreams and hopes for a brighter future in this country,” Szwarc says.

When it comes to Szwarc’s photographs, Anna is more concerned with the journey than with the destination. She wants to be photographed and to spend time with her daughter-in-law, but Szwarc gets the impression that when Anna sees the pictures of her own life, they seem so ordinary as to be uninteresting. Szwarc feels differently: though her period of intense work on the Anna series has finished, she says it’s an open-ended project and will continue to evolve. Just as their relationship has.

“It’s gone from not knowing someone at all,” she says, “to knowing this person very intimately, in a sense, and witnessing this person’s ups and downs, witnessing her life.”

Ilona Szwarc is a photographer based in New York City. Her work often examines gender, identity and beauty in context of American society.

Lily Rothman is a writer-producer for TIME.com.

The contest for governance, then, has become a battle between two more religiously-inclined heavyweights — former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. Of the duo, Khan’s story is far more interesting. Not long ago, he was known simply as a handsome star athlete with an alleged “playboy” lifestyle. But his subsequent entrance into Pakistani politics as a pious outsider keen to clean up the corrupt status quo galvanized much of the country’s youth and urban middle class.

He has been staging dozens of rallies across Pakistan — a series of which are documented here by Italian photographer Massimo Berruti. On May 7, at a rally in Lahore, Khan was being hoisted onto stage on a forklift when a press of bodies sent him sprawling fifteen feet head-first to the ground. His injuries include three fractured vertebrae, but he is expected to make a full recovery — and may well even go on to win an electoral outcome few thought possible only months ago.

Massimo Berruti is a photographer based in Paris and Rome, represented by Agence VU. In 2010, Berruti was awarded the Carmignac Gestion Prize for his work from Pakistan.

Ishaan Tharoor is a staff writer at TIME and co-editor of TIME World.

The many arguments that have since clustered around punk authorship and, indeed, authenticity only serve to
 cloak the fact that it was an impulse that crystallized into an
 idea and a manifesto in various cities throughout the
 Western world during the early 1970s. A word trace on ‘punk’ 
will take you through gay prison slang and 1950s juvenile 
delinquency to the 1960s garage rock ideal espoused with
 increasing frequency after the 1972 release of Lenny Kaye’s 
groundbreaking compilation Nuggets.

The 1960s were over. It was time for a truly 1970s rock 
music. But what could that be? In Paris, New York,
 Cleveland, San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles and London, young fans,
 writers and activists began to grope toward a definition of a 
new rock age. Their enemy was the spectacle, which had, by the early
 1970s,
 successfully incorporated youth rebellion into its armory of repression.
They
 railed against the tyranny of soft rock, the hegemony of the mellow.
 The forward, unitary motion of 1960s pop modernism was 
gone and in its place came an eclectic, restless, uprooted
 culture. The past was up for grabs: not just the
 history of postwar pop music — already thirty years old — but a gnostic 
tradition
 of outcasts and visionaries that began as far back as the late eighteenth century with the Romantics. 
Anything, as long as it was youthful and sharp-edged, as 
long as it helped the new aesthetic, the aim of which was to hone 
everything 
down to a fine point. 

New York was well ahead of the pack: it was both big enough to 
foster an independent rock scene and open to ideas from Europe. Andy 
Warhol and 
Lou Reed were always at odds with the prevailing late 1960s
 counter-cultural
 rhetoric, and their influence hung heavy: in November 1970, the week  that 
the Velvet Underground’s Loaded was
 released, the performance art/rock group Suicide printed a flyer for a 
small show 
on West Broadway that read ‘Punk Music.’

Ray Hamilton—Camera Press/Redux

The punk movement spread from the UK into the USA. This starry-eyed and safety-pinned girl was pictured in California, 1977.

The city’s biggest hope in the early 1970s was the New York 
Dolls, fashion-obsessed brats from Queens and Staten
 Island. Pop culture mavens and Anglophiles, they adopted 
a wardrobe that fused the wilder excesses of hippie, the
 androgyny of the drag queens, who were omnipresent at Max’s Kansas 
City and in the Warhol entourage, and the glamor of rock and roll: “It
 was more like ’50s gold 
lamé,” said New York Dolls member Sylvain.

Sylvain remembered the look: “I was sick and tired of wearing bell-bottoms. . . . then
 there was the whole thing with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,
 and our relationship with drugs, and that fact that we were
 flamboyant. If you wore a little makeup, influenced in any
way by the best of the late ’60s, The Doors and the Rolling Stones, you 
had to
 have sex appeal. Before we started, me and 
[original drummer] Billy [Murcia] used to put on makeup just to go down
 to the supermarket. Getting dressed up to go 
shopping, it was fun to do that. That’s where we were, and
 that’s what it was.”

Punk began with a feeling of frustration and rage and 
turned it into an idea that could be acted upon. Employing
 deconstruction and self-starter empowerment — the
 DIY ethic — it liberated a generation to create its own
 culture. In this, it returned, for a brief while, rock music back
 to its original teenage inspiration and function, which was 
to be critical, rebellious, unpalatable, to tell an
existential truth otherwise denied in the culture, and to envision
 what the future could be.

Jon Savage is a renowned music journalist best known for his history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England’s Dreaming. The excerpt above is republished from the exhibition catalog, Punk: Chaos to Couture, Copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PUNK: Chaos to Couture is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from May 9 – August 14, 2013.

Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image.

Shahidul Alam, Bangladeshi photographer, writer and founder of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, said of the photo: “This image, while deeply disturbing, is also hauntingly beautiful. An embrace in death, its tenderness rises above the rubble to touch us where we are most vulnerable. By making it personal, it refuses to let go. This is a photograph that will torment us in our dreams. Quietly it tells us. Never again.”

Akhter writes for LightBox about the photograph, which appears in this week’s TIME International alongside an essay by David Von Drehle.

I have been asked many questions about the photograph of the couple embracing in the aftermath of the collapse. I have tried desperately, but have yet to find any clues about them. I don’t know who they are or what their relationship is with each other.

I spent the entire day the building collapsed on the scene, watching as injured garment workers were being rescued from the rubble. I remember the frightened eyes of relatives — I was exhausted both mentally and physically. Around 2 a.m., I found a couple embracing each other in the rubble. The lower parts of their bodies were buried under the concrete. The blood from the eyes of the man ran like a tear. When I saw the couple, I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I knew them — they felt very close to me. I looked at who they were in their last moments as they stood together and tried to save each other — to save their beloved lives.

Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too.

They are witnesses in this cruel history of workers being killed. The death toll is now more than 750. What a harsh situation we are in, where human beings are treated only as numbers.

This photo is haunting me all the time. If the people responsible don’t receive the highest level of punishment, we will see this type of tragedy again. There will be no relief from these horrific feelings. I’ve felt a tremendous pressure and pain over the past two weeks surrounded by dead bodies. As a witness to this cruelty, I feel the urge to share this pain with everyone. That’s why I want this photo to be seen.

Taslima Akhter is a Bangladeshi photographer and activist.

Initially, the Foundations’ goals were focused on Eastern Europe and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now, the Moving Walls exhibition encompasses work from around the globe. This year, the exhibition features the work of 5 photographers from China, Russia and Ukraine to Sierra Leone and the countries of the Arab Spring.

“On Revolution Road,” a project by TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev, features work from the uprisings and unrest in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. Shot on assignment for TIME, Kozyrev’s work demonstrates both the collective nature of world politics as well as the individual characteristics inherent to each nation’s unique issues. “In the end, the differences between the aftermaths of the region’s revolutions may be more important than their similarities,” he said.

Katharina Hesse‘s project, “Borderland: North Korean Refugees,” tells the individual narratives of North Korean refugees along the Chinese border. Because they’re classified by the Chinese government as ‘economic migrants’, the refugees are ineligible for official UN refugee status. “After experiencing a world like this, it just didn’t feel ‘right’ to take pictures and move on to the next job,” Hesse wrote. She has been shooting the project for nine years.

“Juveniles Waiting for Justice” is a project by Fernando Moleres shot in the Pademba Road prison in Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, some 1,300 prisoners languished in squalor, lacking proper hygiene and provisions while awaiting trial. “My Sierra Leone prison photography has been published in the European press,” Moleres said, “but I feel that the story has not exposed a broad audience to this tragedy.”

Ian Teh‘s project, “Traces: Landscapes in Transition on the Yellow River Basin,” explores the existential impact the Yellow River has on the more than 150 million people it directly sustains. “My photographs play with the tension between the Yellow River’s place in Chinese culture and history and China’s emergence as a major economic power,” he said. “By using the landscape, I attempt to show what happens when an area that was largely rural becomes increasingly urban and industrial.”

VII photographer Donald Weber‘s “Interrogations” takes a surreal view on the Russian judicial system. Photographing people inside police interrogation rooms, Weber captures “a place where justice and mercy and hope and despair are manufactured, bought, bartered and sold.” Says Weber: “With each image, I was looking to make a very simple photograph of an actual police interrogation, but also a complex portrait of the relationship between truth and power.”

Moving Walls in on view at the Open Society Foundations at 224 West 57th Street, New York City, from May 8 – December 13, 2013. 

The Amsterdam show is comprised of an extensive body of work first published as a book in 2007 — a book that has since become something of a classic among photobook collectors. The majority of images in Canary are utterly fantastical, bordering on the surreal: a giant animal skull in a room lit by mysterious blue light; a fireball writhing in midair; a woman floating above the half-naked body of a man lying in bed. Elaborate and visually arresting dreamscapes, the pictures’ effectiveness is largely achieved through an intriguing interplay between light and color. However, much of the work is also manipulated: relying on analog technologies, some negatives appear scratched while other effects appear to have been produced in the darkroom. The extent of this manipulation varies. As Shiga points out: “I always try to approach the subject in its own way.” The photographer’s methods, in other words, are dictated by the subject of the image, and not the other way around.

Perhaps because most of the images in the Canary series were produced at night or in dark, interior spaces, the work at-once possesses and exudes an unsettling, ambiguous aura. The viewer’s sense of stumbling upon another’s intensely personal dreamscape is heightened even further in the photos where the identity of the subject is disguised.

In “Restaurant Surtaj,” for instance, the details of a restaurant interior recede before the eerie presence of a woman whose face is obscured by a ghostly black presence. The photograph has the palpable sense of a half-remembered dream. The dreamer struggles to give shape to a dream — perhaps even recalling the table number in a restaurant — but can not bring into focus the face of her dinner companion.

Shiga’s work is strongly reminiscent of the black and white photography of Masatoshi Naito. In his classic project, Tono-Monogatari, from 1983, Naito interrogates the complex relationship between mysticism, spirituality and Japanese folklore in a striking series of nocturnal landscapes and portraits. By manipulating the photographic negative or print, however, Shiga also points to the inherent vulnerability of the human body. If not suspended, as it were, in Shiga’s imagination, many of her subjects would fall, collapse or drown, simply as a consequence of the laws of physics.

The emphasis on the body perhaps relates to Shiga’s past experience as a dancer, which she practiced before teaching herself photography. Rather than depicting or documenting a recognizable physical world, however, Shiga instead employs photography as a means of choreographing an emotionally and psychologically complex inner landscape.

Lieko Shiga is a Japanese fine-art photographer.

Marco Bohr is a photographer and writer based in London. He maintains the Visual Culture blog.

Luigi Ghirri came to photography in 1970 with an interest in the conceptual side drawn from his training. One pursuit was the paradox of photography itself and uniting the real and the artificial, visible and invisible in the single image. Photographs in general, Ghirri believed, whether “art” or advertising, create a vast labyrinth of images to navigate daily through which it is difficult to decoding our true surroundings.

‘The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… to the point at which we might merge with them… The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.’

That, for me, is interesting to ponder philosophically but are the works in Kodachrome, in the words of essayist Francesco Zanot, “powerful devices for the re-education of the gaze?” This seems a modest collection through which many things can be projected, but without the textual introductions of the edition laying out the intent, or at least providing guidelines for reading, I don’t see the photographs alone enabling the task. A small handful of the 92 images compel me to try — but most have me grappling just to keep my attention.

The qualities of the photography in Kodachrome call into question for me why this book seems so universally revered among the writers of photobook history. The major developments in color photography in general seem so often boiled down to the Americans “William Eggleston and Stephen Shore,” whereas post-war European color photography books seem to get scant attention — even though one of the first true pioneers of color work was the Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen with his 1948 book 122 Colour Photographs. Then the historical timeline of European photobooks continues along mostly in black and white until 1978 and the publication of Kodachrome? Are there no other landmark books between 1948 and 1978 that could also act as balance to the historical dominance of Eggleston’s color?

Being that I approach most photography, my own and that of others, knowingly comfortable to be trapped within the labyrinth of illusion, aesthetics, style, and photography as the language of metaphor — Kodachrome is a deck stacked against me. It stands as the antithesis to my own practice where the visual component compels you to explore the relationship to the image before you.

Luigi Ghirri’s Kodachrome was reissued by MACK in November, 2012. Twenty-five vintage color prints from the series were recently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Jeffrey Ladd is a photographer, writer, editor and founder of Errata Editions.

Alessio Romenzi

Alessio Romenzi: Aleppo: Scenes from a City of Ruins (TIME) Italian photographer Alessio Romenzi has been chronicling the Syrian civil war for months. The following pictures of his are from a few days in mid-April spent in the battle-scarred city of Aleppo. They include a glimpse of a rebel fighter encamped in the famed Great Mosque of Aleppo, built nearly a thousand years ago by the once mighty Umayyad dynasty.

Andrea Bruce: Syrian Prisoners Talk, as Jailers Look On (NYT) Syrian officials say the civil war is driven by Islamist extremists from across the globe and poses a threat not just to President Bashar al-Assad but also to Americans. To prove it, they picked these prisoners, who arrived blindfolded, to meet journalists from The New York Times.

Lars Tunbjörk for The New York Times

Lars Tunbjörk: The Largest Falcon Hospital in the World (NYT magazine) Abu Dhabi

Newsha Tavakolian: Through Story, a Look into Iran (LightBox) Portraits of declining Iranian middle-class.

Oded Balilty: Jews in Red Army (AP Big Story) Few know story of Jews in Red Army

Natalie Naccache: No Madam (CNN Photo blog) Lebanon’s ‘uncomfortable’ maid culture

Tomas Munita: The Egyptian Revolution’s Transformation of Cairo, Block by Block (NYT)

Tara Todras-Whitehill: A Growing Egypt (NYT)

Brendan Bannon: Outside Nairobi, the Only Track for 3,300 Miles (NYT Lens)

David Guttenfelder / AP

David Guttenfelder: A New Look at North Korea (LightBox)

Guillaume Herbaut: China: Wedding Studios (Institute)

Sim Chi Yin: Chinese River’s Fate May Reshape a Region (NYT) Plans to harness Chinese river’s power threaten a region

Michele Palazzi: Mongolia In Flux (NPR)

Kuni Takahashi: Rapid Growth Creates Cities Within Cities in India (NYT)

Abir Abdullah: Death Trap: Tragedy in Bangladesh (Photo Booth)

Gazi Nafis Ahmed: Bangladesh Garment Factories (Guardian)

Maria Turchenkova: The Hidden War in the Caucasus (LightBox) While Chechnya emerges from a decade of conflict, Maria Turchenkova photographs the hidden guerrilla war in the republic of Dagestan – the largest, most heterogeneous and, today, the most violent republic in the North Caucasus region.

James Hill: Caught Cold When Sochi Freezes Over (NYT Lens) James Hill’s Photos of Sochi, Russia, Site of the Winter Olympics

Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit: Remnants of glory in former Olympic cities (CNN Photo blog)

Laura Lean: Camouflage in Afghanistan (BBC)

Philippe Schneider: Paga Hill, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (Foto8)

John Moore / Getty Images

John Moore: Border Patrol (NBC News) Border patrol faces new challenge with surge in rural Texas border crossings

Samantha Appleton: Hidden from View (Photo Booth) Migrant labor in the agricultural heartland of Florida

Tim Hussin: Resurrecting a Texas ghost town (CNN Photo blog) In the desert surrounding a mercury mining ghost town, an ambitious band of misfits have built homes and cultivated a modern wild west. It’s a group brothers Noah and Tim Hussin felt drawn to during their two-year bicycle journey across America.

Gerd Ludwig: Sleeping Cars (Institute) There are more than seven million registered vehicles in Los Angeles County, California/USA. Images of traffic jams are omnipresent. But where do all those cars go to rest? These photographs examine where LA cars are spending their nights.

Jehad Nga: The End of Horse Racing (LightBox) In its heyday, horse racing had it all. It was the speed and danger sport before NASCAR came along; movie stars and gangsters rubbed glamorous elbows; and a couple sawbucks on a winning long-shot could put you on Easy Street. Jehad Nga’s photographs show that, as with all nostalgia, the reality could never match the legend.

Mark Peckmezian: Half-Wild Cats (Photo Booth) On the growing trend of crossbreeding domestic cats with their more feral cousins in an effort to create a feline that looks exotic but is tame enough to cohabit with humans. Photographs from A1 Savannahs cattery in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

Nolan Conway: The People You Meet at McDonald’s (NYT magazine)

Maria Scheinfeld: Resorts Reborn in Decay  (NYT Lens) Photos of Dilapidated Resorts in the Catskills

Cédric Gerbehaye / Agence VU

Cédric Gerbehaye: Winter in Sète (Photo Booth) This year, Cédric Gerbehaye spent December and January photographing in Sète, France, the sixth photographer to do so as part of an artist-in-residency program. Accustomed to working in conflict zones, such as Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan, this experience presented Gerbehaye with the opportunity to photograph in a different way.

Andrea Gjestvang: Utøya massacre survivors (Guardian) Photographer Andrea Gjestvang’s poignant portraits of survivors of the Utøya massacre in Norway

Stefano de Luigi: On the Gondola (Photo Booth) Venice

Irina Werning: Back to the Future 2 (burn magazine)

Rodrigo Cruz: Mexico’s Porous Southern Border (NYT)

David Alan Harvey: Livin’ La Vida Rio (NYT Lens) Harvey’s personal photo project from Rio de Janeiro

Meridith Kohut: A Spotlight on Crime in Santa Cruz, Bolivia (NYT)

Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand : A Historic Community Dismantled In Peru (NPR)

Articles

Bernat Armangue / AP

2013 Overseas Press Club Winners Announced (LightBox) Since 1948, the Overseas Press Club of America has recognized photographers and photojournalists for exceptional photographic reportage. On April 24, the OPC announced the four winners of the organization’s annual prizes.

Fabio Bucciarelli Wins Robert Capa Gold Medal Award (PDN)

Sebastião Salgado: to the ends of the earth (FT) Sebastião Salgado says his latest show is a ‘love letter to the planet’

A Tribute to David Goldblatt, ICP’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Honoree (PDN)

The Dude Abides on the Other Side of the Lens (NYT Lens) Jeff Bridges honored by International Center of Photography

Trailer : “God’s Ivory” (Reportage by Getty Images) “The ivory trade of today is all about power and elitism,” says Reportage photographer Brent Stirton. Together with filmmaker Andrew Hida, Mr. Stirton and National Geographic contributing writer Bryan Christy examine the institutions that continue to sustain the world ivory trade. Full 14-minute video can be seen in the latest issue of Reportage’s online magazine here

Behind the Walls With Argentina’s 1 Percent (NYT Lens) The Sub Cooperative’s photos of wealthy Argentines

Mexico Points the Camera at Itself (NYT Lens) A new book pulls back Mexico’s masks

Capturing a Vanishing New York (NYT Lens) Photography by Sid Kaplan, a master printer, emerges from obscurity

Joy, Compassion and Fulfillment: Kitra Cahana’s Spiritual Transformation (LightBox) 2013 Infinity Award for Young Photographer honoree

Alfred Eisenstaedt / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Behind the Picture: Goebbels Glares at Eisenstaedt, Geneva, 1933 (LIFE) The unsettling image of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, glaring at photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt during a League of Nations conference in 1933 remains, 80 years later, one of the signature — and certainly one of the most unflattering — portraits ever made of any high-ranking Nazi figure.

Front Row Seat: Eric Draper on George W. Bush (LightBox) President George W. Bush’s official White House photographer Eric Draper has a new book, Front Row Seat, A Photographic Portrait of the Presidency of George W. Bush, published by the University of Texas.

Birmingham’s civil rights crusade, 50 years later (CNN Photo blog) On May 3, 1963, escalating racial tensions came to a violent head when black activists clashed with city authorities in Birmingham, Alabama. Bruce Davidson of Magnum Photos was among the photographers on the scene.

John Karales’s Photo of the Civil Rights Era (NYT Lens)

Women Unveiled: Marc Garanger’s Contested Portraits of 1960s Algeria (LightBox)

Paul Kwilecki’s Photos of Decatur Country, Ga. (NYT Lens)

A Major Case of ‘the Mondays’: Photographs of Office Life (LightBox)

Ashley Gilbertson / VII

The Guide: May 2013 Edition (LightBox) Monthly round-up of the best books, exhibitions and ways to experience photography beyond the web—from the Reportage Photography Festival in Sydney and a new Mitch Epstein book to Martin Parr’s ‘Life’s a Beach’ at Aperture in New York and an André Kertész show in London. Above Ashley Gilbertson photo from a new book: Photojournalists On War: The Untold Stories from Iraq. University of Texas Press, May, 2013.

The month in photography – audio slideshow (Guardian)

Lee Miller: war, peace and pythons | Lee Miller: intimate moments of a 20th-century muse – in pictures (Guardian) Lee Miller, muse to Man Ray and pal of Picasso, was a celebrated photographer who captured the spirit of 20th-century life. Her archive – showing her various turns as war reporter, society snapper and fine-art photographer – went online at leemiller.co.uk on 23 April, on what would have been her 106th birthday

René Burri: A Study of Color (CNN Photo blog) His iconic black-and-white photographs have become part of history. However, his latest book, “Impossible Reminiscences,” offers a never-before-seen journey in color from the perspective of the great photographer.

Briton Bert Hardy captured the drama of war, and of daily life (CNN Photo blog) Bert Hardy, who would been 100 this year, was a renowned photojournalist. His photos are on exhibit the Photographers’ Gallery in London.

In Revealing Self-Portraits, Body Image Is Front and Center (Slate) Jen Davis’s self-portraits

From Above and Below: Man and the Sea – in pictures (Guardian) In a stunning new book of photographs, aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, founder of the Good Planet Foundation, and underwater snapper Brian Skerry have teamed up to observe our relationship with the sea.

Emilio Morenatti / AP

Photographer Emilio Morenatti’s loss offers hope for Boston wounded (AP Big Story blog) Photographer who lost a leg to a road side bomb while covering the war in Afghanistan for the Associated Press, offers words to the maimed victims of the Boston bombings

How the AP verified photo of Boston bombing suspect leaving scene (Poynter.)

The Multiplier Effect and the Role of the Photograph in Boston (LightBox)

Boston Marathon runner who fell in photo joins the ranks of history’s sudden icons (Washington Post)

Boston Bombings Focus Attention on Caucasus, And Photo Projects on the Region (PDN)

I’m A Photo Editor for a News Organization and I Looked At Every Single Photo Taken At The Boston Marathon Bombing (Xojane)

When the line blurs between sport photography and photojournalism (Guardian)

Boston and Lower West: How Two Disasters Stack Up in the Media Eye (BagNewsNotes)

When pictures save lives (AFP Correspondent blog) Sometimes a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words.

Nick Turpin

Olivier Laurent: Protecting the Right to Photograph, or Not to Be Photographed (NYT Lens) Protecting Privacy, Limiting Street Photography

NPPA Sends Letter Opposing Proposed Anti-Paparazzi Statutes in California (NPPA)

Appeals Court Overturns Previous Ruling, Rules Fair Use in Richard Prince Case (PetaPixel)

Richard Prince Wins Major Victory in Landmark Copyright Suit (Art in America)

The N.P.P.A.’s Best of Photojournalism (NYT Lens)

12 photographers selected for 2013 World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass (BJP)

Snapshot: ‘By An Eye-Witness’ by Azadeh Akhlaghi (FT) The Iranian photographer reconstructed scenes of the deaths involved in the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s

Featured photographer: Isabelle Eshraghi (Verve Photo)

Featured photographer: William B. Plowman (Verve Photo)

Featured photographer: Lindsay Mackenzie (Verve Photo)

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin—To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light (Aperture)

Roger Ballen’s “Asylum of the Birds” (Photo Booth)

Infinite possibilities (FT) From the Venice Biennale to the Hayward Gallery, photographer Dayanita Singh is having a big year

Interviews and Talks

Fabio Bucciarelli / AFP

Fabio Bucciarelli (AFP Correspondent blog) Syria offers grim bounty for photojournalists

Sebastião Salgado (TED) ‘The silent drama of photography’ | Gallery of photographs

Elliott Erwitt (Nowness) ‘At Home With Elliott Erwitt’

Alec Soth (American Photo)

Alec Soth (PDN) Alec Soth on Wandering, Storytelling and Robert Adams vs. Weegee

Ian Berry (Vice) Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

David Guttenfelder (National Geographic) ‘Live! From North Korea, It’s AP Photographer David Guttenfelder’

David Guttenfelder (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner for Photojournalism

Anne Wilkes Tucker (LA Times Framed photo blog) In conversation with WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY curator Anne Wilkes Tucker

Santiago Lyon (World Press Photo)

Santiago Lyon (NYT Lens Facebook page) Santiago Lyon, director of photography at the Associated Press,  on how to assemble a portfolio

MediaStorm

David Goldblatt (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner, Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement

Sebastian Junger (Now Toronto)

Platon (Wired Rawfile photo blog) Ego-Wrangling the World’s Most Powerful Leaders for a Portrait

Kitra Cahana (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner for Young Photographer

Sebastian Meyer (Thuraya) Moments on the frontline: A photojournalist’s perspective

Aaron Eckhart and Peter van Agtmael (Capture) Aaron Eckhart and Peter van Agtmael join Mark Seliger to discuss the paths that led them to photography, the welcome you must earn as a photographer and capturing the intersection of fashion and the street

Jeff Bridges (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award, Special Representation

Joel Sartore (PetaPixel) Nat Geo Photographer Talks About What it Takes to Lead ‘a Photographer’s Life’

Kevin Kunishi (A Photo Editor) ‘How to make a photo-book’

Mishka Henner (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner for Art

David Goldblatt in Conversation with Broomberg & Chanarin (Ahorn Magazine)

Benjamin Lowy (Archetype) ’Award-winning iPhone photojournalist, on how to make tremendous art with your iPhone’

Rena Effendi (Open Society Foundation YouTube channel)

Pete Muller (Open Society YouTube channel)

James Mortram (Tiffinbox)

George Georgiou (Open Society Foundation YouTube channel)

Mikko Takkunen is an associate photo editor at TIME.com.

For this year’s awards, ICP commissioned the award-winning interactive design studio MediaStorm to produce short films about each award recipient, screened during the ceremony to more than 500 attendees. LightBox is proud to present each winner’s film above.

The 2013 Infinity Award Winners:

• Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement: David Goldblatt
• Photojournalism: David Guttenfelder
• Applied/Fashion/Advertising: Erik Madigan Heck
• Art: Mishka Henner
• Young Photographer: Kitra Cahana
• ICP Trustees Award: Pat Schoenfeld
• Publication: Cristina de Middel, “The Afronauts“
• Special Recognition: Jeff Bridges

Read more about the International Center of Photography.

As with all nostalgia, the reality could never match the legend. But there was a current of excitement and passion around horse racing back in the days of fedoras and two-toned shoes. Perhaps the popularity of racing was as simple as the fact that Americans used to grow up around horses and knew them as personalities.

(MORE: Twilight at the Track)

And they are personalities. Some are born with loads of talent, but won’t do the hard work to become a champion. Some love a challenge, and won’t stop working until they win. Some are playful; some are mean. Some are smart; some aren’t. Such traits seared the names of great racers into the public consciousness as deeply as the names of some presidents and some billionaires: Gallant Fox, War Admiral, Citation, Seabiscuit.

The glory days endured through a golden age of racing in the 1970s, when Affirmed battled Alydar to join Seattle Slew and the incomparable Secretariat as winners of the Triple Crown. Since then, a long twilight has settled over the Sport of Kings. Attendance, wagers, purses, and new foals all are in decline. Such storied tracks as Hialeah in Florida, Bay Meadows in California, and Garden State in New Jersey have padlocked their stables and turned out the lights for good.

The causes are many. Competition for the gambling and entertainment dollar is more intense than ever. But even more damaging is the widespread culture of doping in the racing business, and the high rate of fatal breakdowns that goes with it. As these photographs make clear, amid the fading memories of glamor and excitement, the beating heart of the sport is, and always will be, the horse. Whoever wants to save racing must first care about that.

Jehad Nga is a photographer who lives in New York. LightBox previously featured Nga’s Memories of Libya and his Green Book project. 

David Von Drehle is an editor-at-large for TIME, where he has covered politics, breaking news and the Supreme Court since 2007. He is the author of four books, including Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, published in 2012, and Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.

Cahana, born in Florida, raised in Sweden and Canada, was introduced to photography at a young age. “I started taking to photography around the age of 12,” she told TIME via email. “My father, realizing my interest in art, began giving me assignments to photograph through a positive lens. He would say: ‘This month focus on ‘joy’ or ‘compassion’ or ‘fulfillment.’ It began to shape the way I perceived my environment.”

After high school, Cahana traveled to Israel and began working professionally as a photographer. She balanced academic studies at Hebrew University with an internship at Ma’ariv, a daily Israeli newspaper, tagging along with the other photojournalists in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

“I went to Gush Katif, the Israeli bloc of settlements, in early summer of 2005. I was 17 and too young for a press pass, so once I was past the military checkpoint, I didn’t leave for two and a half months. I wasn’t photographing for anyone in particular, but submitted a few images to the EPA wire for consideration.”

On the first day of the Israeli Disengagement that year, one of Cahana’s photos was used on the front page of the New York Times.

“I realized my ability, recognized my medium, and decided that, as challenging as it is to study and work professionally, I would try.”

Cahana returned to her former home, Montreal, to study philosophy at McGill University. There, she came to realize that really seeing issues and maintaining a strong ethical code were equally important aims. Throughout her studies, she periodically took short assignments and internships and devoted her summers to photo projects.

Since taking up photography full-time, Cahana’s nomadic way of life has strongly echoed that of her upbringing; her family moved frequently, to communities where her father served as a rabbi.

“My siblings and I spent much of our childhoods traveling with our parents. They kept us in backpacks and kept us asking questions, opening up our sense of the grandeur and complexities of every community we encountered.”

Another important family influence was her grandmother, Alice Lok Cahana, an artist and Holocaust survivor whose work, Cahana says, has informed her own vision.

“Her paintings are layered, textured and deeply symbolic. They weave the light with the dark, the broken with the divine. That has always been a quality I strive for in my photographs.”

Cahana’s earlier work dealt with various themes — Jewish identity, gender identity, spiritual identity.

“In many ways, I came of age by photographing and discovering, learning about myself as I was learning about my subjects.”

The one major body of work that Cahana created specifically on assignment was in Austin, Texas, for National Geographic, where she embedded in a suburban high school for two and a half months.

“I’m interested in creating documents that rely as much on the written word as they do on the photographic image. But in order to do that, one really has to embed in others’ lives. Within a month and a half of being at the high school in Texas, I had made friends with most cliques.”

On and off over the past three years, Cahana has been documenting and living among nomadic youth in America.

“Documenting within the punk nomadic world is different. There, I feel more like I’ve joined my tribe — a different way of life, but I also feel very much at home there.”

Ultimately, Cahana is often drawn to stories about relationships, which are (or become) personal and intertwined with her own history.

For instance, “the Ben Baruchs are a religious Jewish family living in Safed in northern Israel, a town where my father’s family lived since the 18th century. They had their own child with Down Syndrome, adopted another, and took in and raised several others with Down Syndrome. The images of their lives follow the evolution of a love story between their own son, Avichai and one of the adopted daughters, Kirin, from their early teenage years to their wedding and the beginning of their home-making together.”

This past year Cahana has been living between Ramallah and Jerusalem and working on stories about everyday Israelis and Palestinians who manage to foster relationships with each other.

“I look for stories that are nuanced. I grew up with both extreme right- and left-wing propaganda around me. The rhetoric is exhausting; it makes caricatures of the people living on the land, and excuses corrupt and self-interested leaders.”

Recently, Cahana has grappled with a poignant, personal project in Montreal. Two years ago, her father had a brain stem stroke that left him totally paralyzed with the exception of eye movement, but with total cognitive capacity.

“I spent four months living with him in the Neurological Institute in Montreal. He communicated his thoughts through a blinking system, slowly, tenderly communicating whatever he wanted to say. We spent hours each day deep in communication. I documented much of his recovery — his first breath, my sister tending to his atrophying limbs, my mother and father kissing, but the images were not communicating the spiritual transformation we were all going through. I needed to find a different aesthetic vocabulary. The resulting images are just the beginning of this exploration. This work is about the mind’s endless search for its body and vice-versa.”

“When I was 12, my father would say: ‘Focus on the word ‘joy’ or ‘compassion’ or ‘fulfillment’.’  And for a month, I would photograph through a lens of joy or compassion. It forced me to begin practicing each of those attributes, allowing my own inner being to deeply change.”

Her father’s words have become her mantra. Cahana continues to grow — emotionally, spiritually, artistically. It’s difficult to believe she is just 25 years old.

Kitra Cahana is a documentary photographer. In 2013, she was named a TED fellow.

Phil Bicker is a Senior Photo Editor at TIME.