One year ago, LightBox published Rachel Hulin’s series of whimsical photographs of her son, Henry, magically flying. Henry hovered above a sink, levitated nude in a hallway, and floated through a barn.

Unsurprisingly, Henry went viral.

“The week after the images were published was sort of a hilarious blur,” Hulin told TIME. “CNN called, then the Huffington Post and a lot of other news outlets.” Two days later she was on The Today Show. “It was surreal,” she noted.

Flying Henry

Flying Henry, to be published in March 2013 by powerHouse Books

Hulin was surprised at the reaction, particularly at the rabid interest in how the photographs were created. And not all of the feedback was glowing.

“I was admonished a fair amount for throwing my child by people who took the pictures too literally,” Hulin said.

She kept making pictures of Henry, now 2. Inspired by an interview she heard with lauded children’s book author Maurice Sendak , Hulin started to form a narrative.

“At first it was about clean flights, in beautiful, mostly indoor spaces,” Hulin said. “But after all the hoopla I wanted to really have fun with [the photos] — to go outside, to use props, to give the kid an adventure.”

The project turned into a book, Flying Henry, “about a baby who is rather pleased when he realizes he can fly,” Hulin explained. “He flutters about his home at first, but soon thirsts for adventure and flies the coop.”

The children’s book, published by powerHouse books in March, culminates in Henry’s grand discovery: the real secret to flying.

I asked Hulin what it was like to see her son all over the internet, and now on stranger’s bookshelves and in stores across the country. “I certainly never set out for him to become a celebrity,” she said. “He was just a very good model, and often had availability for shoots.”

“He’s huge in Japan.”

Hulin will be appearing at powerHouse with TIME international picture editor Patrick Witty on Monday, March 11 at 7:00pm.

Today, Liste will be awarded the City Of Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Award, named for the young French photojournalist who was killed on assignment earlier this year in Syria. Liste’s project, Urban Quilombo, is a gritty and intimate look into the lives of dozens of families that occupied an abandoned chocolate factory in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Fed up with the violence that plagued the beleaguered city, the families bonded together at the factory and formed a community—a community that the Spanish-born photographer immersed him within, beginning in 2009. The resulting photographs tell a chilling story of both courage and despair. In one of the most intense images of the series (slide #5), two men square off, splashing in a pool of water—one brands a huge stick, the other two knives.

The day he took the picture, Liste was inside the factory when two men began to argue. They had been playing Bingo for three straight days, trying to make money to rent a van to pick up their belongings as police were evicting families, when they began fighting viciously. “At the beginning I tried to stop them,” Liste said. “they finished the fight by throwing big stones.” Neither man was seriously wounded in the fight, but Liste’s friends  pulled him away, fearing he would be hurt.

Over the years, Liste said, he has given hundreds of prints back to the people of the chocolate factory. The fact that one of these, the family portrait, appears within another photograph in the project is a visual reminder of the time he has put in.

“On my second trip to Salvador de Bahia, I gave a photo album to everyone there,” he said. “It’s quite an interesting process because they started to build a kind of memory of their lives through the pictures I took there.”

Liste said that he’s even found pictures of himself on the walls as if he was a surrogate family member. In documenting this community, he has become part of it. That kind of dedication is the only way pictures like these can be made.

One of Liste’s favorite images from the project was captured was when a 13-year-old girl named Vanessa was reunited with her mother after seven years apart (slide #4). Liste met Vanessa, who had been abandoned at age 6 and had been living at the factory with an uncle. Feeling for the young girl, Liste asked around, hoping to find Vanessa’s mother in the labyrinthine streets of Salvador de Bahia. After months of searching, Vanessa’s mom turned up in the outskirts of the city and Liste was there with his camera to photograph the reunion. “The hug picture is probably the best image I took there,” Liste said. “Both of them were very happy to be together again.”

In March 2011, the Brazilian government evicted the families from the factory, in an attempt to cleanse the city for upcoming international events, including the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

The families have since moved to a new neighborhood called the “Jardim das Margaridas,” where Liste continues documenting their lives.

Receiving the Rémi Ochlik Award means a lot to Liste, who, despite not knowing Ochlik personally, believed they shared similar experiences and ideas about the role of photography.

“We are almost the same age and we are both fighting to bring light to hard and hidden stories,” said Liste. “It’s a big honor to get this award.”

Sebastian Liste is a Brazil-based photographer. In September 2012, he received the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography and the City of Perpignan Rémi Ochlik  Award. See more of his work here.

Patrick Witty: What was happening in Vietnam leading up to the day you took your famous photograph of Quang Duc’s self-immolation?

Malcolm Browne: I had been in Vietnam at that point for a couple of years when things began to look ugly in central Vietnam. I took a much greater interest in the Buddhists of Vietnam than I had before, because it seemed to me they were likely to be movers and shakers in whatever turned up next. I came to be on friendly terms with quite a lot of the monks who were leaders of this movement that was taking shape.

AP

AP correspondent Malcolm Browne in 1965

Along about springtime (1963), the monks began to hint that they were going to pull off something spectacular by way of protest–and that would most likely be a disembowelment of one of the monks or an immolation. And either way, it was something we had to pay attention to.

At that point the monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day.

PW: Tell me about that morning. You certainly weren’t expecting something so dramatic but you felt drawn because of a call the night before?

MB: I had some hint that it would be something spectacular, because I knew these monks were not bluffing. They were perfectly serious about doing something pretty violent. In another civilization it might have taken the form of a bomb or something like that.

The monks were very much aware of the result that an immolation was likely to have. So by the time I got to the pagoda where all of this was being organized, it was already underway—the monks and nuns were chanting a type of chant that’s very common at funerals and so forth. At a signal from the leader, they all started out into the street and headed toward the central part of Saigon on foot. When we reached there, the monks quickly formed a circle around a precise intersection of two main streets in Saigon. A car drove up. Two young monks got out of it. An older monk, leaning a little bit on one of the younger ones, also got out. He headed right for the center of the intersection. The two young monks brought up a plastic jerry can, which proved to be gasoline. As soon as he seated himself, they poured the liquid all over him. He got out a matchbook, lighted it, and dropped it in his lap and was immediately engulfed in flames. Everybody that witnessed this was horrified. It was every bit as bad as I could have expected.

I don’t know exactly when he died because you couldn’t tell from his features or voice or anything. He never yelled out in pain. His face seemed to remain fairly calm until it was so blackened by the flames that you couldn’t make it out anymore. Finally the monks decided he was dead and they brought up a coffin, an improvised wooden coffin.

PW: And you were the only photographer there?

MB: As far as I could tell, yes. It turns out that there were some Vietnamese that took some pictures but they didn’t go out—they’re not on the wires or anything like that.

PW: What were you thinking while you were looking through the camera?

MB: I was thinking only about the fact it was a self-illuminated subject that required an exposure of about, oh say, f10 or whatever it was, I don’t really remember. I was using a cheap Japanese camera, by the name of Petri. I was very familiar with it, but I wanted to make sure that I not only got the settings right on the camera each time and focused it properly, but that also I was reloading fast enough to keep up with action. I took about ten rolls of film because I was shooting constantly.

PW: How did you feel? 

MB: The main thing on my mind was getting the pictures out. I realized this is something of unusual importance and that I’d have to get them to the AP in one of its far flung octopus tentacles as soon as possible. And I also knew this was a very difficult thing to do in Saigon on short notice.

PW: What did you do with the film?

MB: The whole trick was to get it to some transmission point. We had to get the raw film shipped by air freight, or some way. It was not subject to censorship at that point. We used a pigeon to get it as far as Manila. And in Manila they had the apparatus to send it by radio.

PW: When you say pigeon, what do you mean exactly?

MB: A pigeon is a passenger on a regular commercial flight whom you have persuaded to carry a little package for him. Speed was of the essence obviously. So we had to get it to the airport. It got aboard a flight leaving very soon for Manila.

PW: Did anyone from the AP, once the film arrived, send a message to you saying that the picture was being published all over the world?

MB: No.

PW: You didn’t know? 

MB: No, we didn’t know, it was like shooting into a black hole. We learned that it had arrived only after messages began to come through congratulating us for sending such a picture. It was not run by everybody. The New York Times did not run it. They felt it was too grisly a picture that wasn’t suitable for a breakfast newspaper.

PW: I’m looking at the picture now on my screen. Tell me what I’m not seeing —what are you hearing, smelling?

MB: The overwhelming smell of joss sticks. They do make a very strong smell, not a particularly nice smell, but it’s meant to appease the ancestors and all of that. That was the overwhelming smell except for the smell of burning gasoline and diesel and the smell of burning flesh, I must say. The main sound was the wailing and misery of the monks, who had known this guy for many years before and were feeling for him. Then there was shouting over loudspeakers between the fire department people, trying to figure out a way to put him out, put out the flames around him without actually killing him or something. So it was a jumble of confusion.

PW: I read once what President Kennedy said about your photograph. He said, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”

MB: Yeah, that could be, that sounds like an honest quote from the White House.

PW: Would you consider the photograph your crown achievement in journalism?

MB: It attracted a lot of attention, I’ll say that for it. It was not necessarily the hardest story I’ve ever had to cover, but it was certainly an important part of my career.

The brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square was underway and Widener, a photographer for the Associated Press, was sent to the square to capture the scene. “I rode a bicycle to the Beijing Hotel,” Widener says. “Upon my arrival, I had to get past several Chinese security police in the lobby. If they stopped and searched me, they would have found all my gear and film hidden in my clothes.” But there, in the shadows of the hotel entrance, he saw a long-haired college kid wearing a dirty Rambo t-shirt, shorts and sandals. “I yelled out, ‘Hi Joe! Where you been?’ and then whispered that I was from AP.” Widener remembers. He asked to go to the young man’s room. “He picked up on it,” says Widener, “and out of the corner of my eye I could see the approaching security men turn away, thinking I was a hotel guest.”

The young man was an American. His name was Kirk Martsen.

Martsen told Widener that he was lucky to arrive when he did. Just a few minutes earlier, some hotel guests had been shot by a passing military truck full of Chinese soldiers. Martsen said hotel staff members had dragged the bodies back in the hotel and that he had barely escaped with his life. From a hotel balcony, Widener was able to take pictures with a long lens—but then he ran out of film. So he sent Martsen on a desperate hunt for more, and Martsen returned with one single roll of Fuji color negative. It was on this film that Widener captured one of the most iconic images in history, the lone protester facing down a row of Chinese tanks.

“After I made the image, I asked Kirk if he could smuggle my film out of the hotel on his bicycle to the AP office at the Diplomatic Compound,” Widener says. “He agreed to do this for me as I had to stay in the hotel and wait for more supplies and could not risk being found out. I watched Kirk from my balcony, which was right over the area where the security was. In what seemed to be an eternity, Kirk unlocked his bike and started to pedal off, although a bit awkwardly because all my film was stashed in his underwear. Five hours later, a call to Mark Avery at the AP office in Beijing confirmed that the film had arrived and been transmitted world-wide. What I did not know until 20 years later was what actually transpired after Kirk pedaled the bicycle away.”

On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, I wrote an article detailing each story behind the four different versions of the iconic scene on the Lens blog of the New York Times. At the time of publication, Widener wasn’t sure if the young man’s name was Kirk or Kurt. Soon after, Widener says, that changed: “I was on the computer and that familiar ‘You’ve Got Mail’ rang out on AOL. I could not believe who it was from. After 20 years, Kirk had found me because of the article in the New York Times.”

Widener discovered that Martsen encountered gunfire and more soldiers after he left with the precious film and that he became lost trying to navigate back streets to find the Associated Press office. Martsen went to the U.S. embassy and handed over the film to a U.S. Marine at the entrance, and told the embassy to forward the film to the AP office.

“Kirk risked his life,” Widener says. “If not for all of his efforts, my pictures may never have been seen.”

The next day, the image appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world.

Courtesy Jeff Widener

Jeff Widener and his wife Corinna, whom he met while revisiting Tiananmen 20 years after he made the now-iconic photograph.

Years later, the BBC flew Widener back to China to revisit the Square where he made the iconic photo. While walking down Changan Avenue toward the square, Widener met a German teacher sitting on the sidewalk smoking. Widener introduced himself and they had lunch. They were married in July 2010. “If anyone had told me that I would return from that bullet-riddled street 20 years later to meet my future wife, I would have thought them nuts,” Widener says. “Fate has a strange sense of humor.”

Jeff Widener is an award-winning American photographer. See more of his work here.

Exhausted and bored on an assignment, photographer Rachel Hulin, Henry’s mother, thought it would be fun to make her baby fly. So Henry flew.

“The photo was sort of magical in an unexpected way and I wanted to make more,” Hulin said. She posted the photograph on Facebook and soon there was a flurry of comments. “Some people like the cute ones, some people like the spooky ones,” she said. “It’s an interesting litmus test.”

Hovering above a bed in a hotel, through a barn and into a shower, the flying baby photographs transcend cute and slip into the surreal. “I felt like the pictures could show the world that babies inhabit that is all their own,” Hulin said.

While she wouldn’t divulge the exact details of how Henry flies, Hulin did admit that it was more subtraction than addition. “I wanted the flights to feel genuine,” she said. “These are places we are really in everyday, it’s not a cut-and-paste job on random interiors and landscapes.”

Speaking to some of the unusual body positions of her flying offspring, Hulin said, “I never throw him, and I never move him into a place in the frame that he wasn’t in to begin with. I like Henry to fly the way he feels like it, I never pose him in a specific way. Sometimes he’s graceful and sometimes he’s a little hunchback. I think telling you more would ruin it.”

She plans on continuing the series with hopes of showcasing the images in a book or exhibition some day. “I do feel compelled to keep making them,” Hulin says. “It’s funny, I already feel nostalgic seeing how little he was in his first flights.”

Rachel Hulin is a photographer based in Providence, Rhode Island. You can see more of her work here.

Patrick Witty is the international picture editor at TIME. Follow him on twitter @patrickwitty.

This was the beginning of a project that spanned the course of several years, culminating in the book, Las Mujeres Flores, published this month by La Fabrica. The book is an intimate portrayal of women within the isolated Mennonite communities in Nuevo Ideal, in the state of Durango, and La Onda, in Zacatecas, Mexico.

“Gaining their trust was a slow process,” Adorno said. “Little by little, they started inviting me to their houses, to have tea with them, to go for a walk.” The community spoke German, which was a barrier for Adorno, who speaks English and Spanish, so she got to know them through the places where they spend their lives and through family photographs they showed her. “In my own pictures I try to highlight the importance of those details, their objects, the moments and places they cherish.”

That attention to detail is clear in many of Adorno’s photographs – the arrangement of bowls on a table; plaster moldings of teeth on a window sill; a lone magnet of a married couple on a refrigerator. Adorno also focused deeply on portraiture. The first was of a woman named Maria, after she unbraided her hair. “As she stood by the door and stared directly into the camera, I felt a sort of complicity, an acceptance of the camera. It was incredible.”

Adorno said she was heavily influenced not only by August Sander’s portraits and Magnum photographer Larry Towell’s work on the Mennoninte community, but also by the women themselves. “I was amazed by the feminine universe so full of color,” she said.

Eunice Adorno is a freelance photographer based in Mexico City, Mexico. She was part of the 2011 Joop Swart Masterclass. Las Mujeres Flores is available in the Moma and Dashhwood Books.

Patrick Witty is the International picture editor at TIME. Follow him on twitter @patrickwitty.

Early Wednesday morning, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and the European Pressphoto Agency transmitted a photograph from Kim Jong Il’s funeral procession sent to them by the KCNA, North Korea’s state news agency. The image was widely published, and was part of the January 9, 2011 issue of TIME magazine.

But shortly after TIME’s deadline, around 6:00pm Wednesday, the European Pressphoto Agency sent out a “kill” alert on the photo, advising media outlets not to run the image. Earlier in the day, a nearly identical photograph was sent out by the Associated Press, via Kyodo News, an independent Japanese news agency. The two photographs show crowds lining a Pyongyang street as the dictator’s body was driven past, led by a 1976 Lincoln hearse bearing an enormous portrait of the “Dear Leader.” However, in the KCNA version, a camera crew and their power cords on the left side of the frame, as well as a couple of stragglers near them, were removed, a patch of blurry snow in their place. Snow was also cloned to cover two other spots in the photograph.

Associated Press photo editors working in Tokyo saw the discrepancy and alerted Santiago Lyon, the Director of Photography for the AP in New York, who then contacted editors at the New York Times. Lyon told TIME that the AP, which recently opened a bureau in Pyongyang, has had a long-standing photo sharing relationship with Kyodo. Eventually, all of the news agencies that transmitted the photo sent out “kills”. But by then, our issue had already shipped and several other websites had been using the altered image for hours.

The big question is why did the North Koreans alter the image?

Aesthetically, the doctored photograph is tad bit cleaner, lines straightened, but hardly improved. Psychologically speaking though, the clone job adds order to an already tidy scene. In the undoctored version, the people on the left are drifting from the crowd, their attention elsewhere. The snow is less white. Both of those problems were easily solved by Photoshop. I’ve been examining photographs released by the KCNA for years and many are strikingly beautiful—enormous, perfectly-positioned crowds, immaculate and intricately composed. Now we may know why.

Postscript: On Thursday, a zealous Reddit user added to the frenzy by making note of a photo of an extremely tall man watching the funeral procession. The image, taken by a photographer with Kyodo News and distributed by the AP, spread across the internet quickly, with theories ranging from the man being a North Korean basketball star to another bizarre Photoshop slip-up. However, looking at two separate photographs of the same scene taken at slightly different times, I think the man is legit. The background and surroundings differ but the towering Korean remains in the image, so the likelihood he was cloned into two different photographs is slim.

Patrick Witty is the international picture editor at TIME. You can find him on Twitter @patrickwitty. For more photographs from North Korea, click here.

But he kept protesting.

Harara is one of more than a hundred protesters around the world photographed by TIME contract photographer Peter Hapak. From Oakland, Calif., to New York City, across Europe and through the Middle East, Hapak and I traveled nearly 25,000 miles photographing protesters and activists from eight countries.

We photographed protesters representing Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy the Hood, Los Indignados of Spain, protesters in Greece, revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt, activists from Syria fleeing persecution, a crusader fighting corruption in India, Tea Party activists from New York, a renowned poet turned protester from Mexico and a protester from Wisconsin who carries a shovel, topped by a flag.

We set up makeshift studios in hotel rooms, apartments and people’s homes, inside a temple in rural India and an anarchist headquarters in Athens — even in the courtyard of the home of Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Tear gas wafted into our studio in a hotel room overlooking Tahrir Square — the same room where Yuri Kozyrev made a now iconic photograph of the crowd.

Each time, we asked subjects to bring with them mementos of protest. Rami Jarrah, a Syrian activist who fled to Cairo, brought his battered iPhone. He showed me some of the most intense protest footage I’ve ever seen. A Spanish protester named Stephane Grueso brought his iPhone too, referring to it as a “weapon.” Young Egyptian protesters brought rubber pellets that had been fired at them by security forces. Another brought a spent tear-gas canister. Subjects carried signs, flags and gas masks (some industrial ones, some homemade, like the one belonging to Egyptian graffiti artist El Teneen — his was made from a Pepsi can). A trio of Greek protesters brought Maalox. (Mixed with water, it was sprayed on their eyes to counter the harsh effects of tear gas.) Molly Katchpole, the young woman from Washington, D.C., who took on Bank of America — and won — brought her chopped-up debit card. Sayda al-Manahe brought a framed photograph of her son Hilme, a young Tunisian killed by police during the revolution. El Général, the Tunisian revolutionary rapper, brought nothing but his voice — he rapped a cappella for us (we have video). Lina Ben Mhenni, a blogger from Tunisia and a Nobel Peace Prize contender, brought her laptop. She spoke Arabic, yet we understood the words Facebook and Twitter.

Each subject was photographed in front of a white or black background — eliminating their environments but elevating their commonality to that of “Protester,” a fitting setup for a group of people united by a common desire for change.

“They were all unhappy. They wanted change, and they wanted a better life,” Hapak said. “Everybody is out there to unite their power for one common cause, one common expression: to get a better life.”

Witty is the international picture editor at TIME.

Hapak is a contract photographer for TIME, who most recently photographed Tilda Swinton for the Dec. 19, 2011, issue.

MORE: See the entire 2011 Person of the Year package here

Danfung Dennis has been documenting war for years, first with still photographs, then in motion, culminating with the award-winning documentary Hell and Back Again. Still, he found himself unsatisfied, feeling that coverage of war was becoming “mundane, almost ordinary,” he says. “Society was numb to the images of conflict.”

An idea was born: Condition ONE, an app to provide a new form of storytelling. Dennis says it combines “the power of the still image, the narrative of films and the emotional engagement of tactile experiences to create a new language that is so immersive, it will shake viewers out of their numbness to traditional media and provide them a powerful emotional experience. Instead of opening a window to glimpse another world, we are attempting to bring the viewer into that world as an active participant.”

Condition ONE, under development for the Apple iPad and other tablets, uses a custom camera system developed by Dennis that “fuses the ethics, method and aesthetics of photojournalism with the tradition of cinematic filmmaking with virtual reality,” he says. “The entire human field of view is captured on these camera systems, and the stories are edited specifically for the tablet application to create a truly immersive experience.”

He continues, “Once viewers enter a video experience, they can move the tablet in any direction and see the corresponding field of view. The traditional two-dimensional, rectangular frame is shattered as viewers step inside the frame and experience the stories as the protagonists.”

Patrick Chauvel / Condition ONE

An example of how Condition One would appear on the iPad.

One photographer is already working with the specialized camera system: longtime conflict photographer Patrick Chauvel. Currently in Libya, Chauvel writes that when Dennis described the idea for Condition ONE, he was immediately tempted to try it. “Before, when I was shooting,  my camera only showed what was in front of me, the action. It was frustrating because often what happens just at your right is part of the story. Now it is like having five cameras. One more at your right, your left, up and down,” Chauvel writes. “It’s not easy to use; you have to watch not to get your shoes in the frame or your shadow or your face … But the result is worth it. You bring your story with more images all around and more information, so you are a better witness. Now people can feel the story.”

Unai Aranzadi

Anton Hammerl at work in Brega, Libya.

Last week, a fundraising website, Friends of Anton, was launched in an effort to raise money for Hammerl’s family. Renowned photographers, including João Silva, David Burnett, Kenneth Jarecke, Bruno Stevens, Yunghi Kim, and Todd Heisler, have donated prints in support of their fallen colleague. The photographs can be purchased through the Friends of Anton website.

Hammerl, 41, a former picture editor and photographer for The Saturday Star in Johannesburg, South Africa, is survived by his wife Penny and their three children: Aurora, 11; Neo, 7; and 6-month-old Hiro.

Weston, a photographer with the London-based WENN photo agency, had heard that there were fires in the Church Street area of Croydon and headed that way. “By the time I drove toward it, I could already see the fires from my windscreen,” she says. “There were six or seven people screaming and crying outside, and they looked like they lived at the flats that were burning. A man in a white shirt was screaming that a girl was at the window and that she was ready to jump. He ran toward her, but riot police had appeared and pulled him back, and they went to her instead.”

Weston then made the photograph that quickly went viral on Twitter and landed on the front pages of many major British newspapers on Tuesday morning.

“As soon as she dropped, the crowds pushed back and there was no way to see what happened to her. I remember hearing people screaming that there were more people in the building,” Weston says. “The crowds started getting angry with each other, with one group blaming another group for starting the fire.”

Weston says she feared for her safety after taking the dramatic photograph. “I couldn’t get to my car, so I had to walk, wrapping my camera in my clothes to avoid being mugged.”

Only a junior in high school in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Franko made the photograph in the summer of 2010. “I felt the shot instantly,” he said. “I first saw the swans in wonderful proportions. The little girl was standing there and it was like she was a part of them.”

Franko started taking pictures when he was 14 and won his first award when he was 16 with a moving series of photographs of his newly widowed grandmother. The series was awarded “Best Reportage” by the jury of the Slovenian Press Photo competition in 2010.

Jošt Franko

A photograph of Franko's from the prize-winning essay about his grandmother and her life after the death of her husband. He shot this when he was 16 years old.

Matej Leskovsek, organizer of the annual competition for Slovenian photographers, said the jury was stunned when they discovered Franko’s age. “When the jury saw the widow series they immediately knew it was one of the best entries.” Leskovsek said. “It was a big surprise to the jury.”

He won again this year, with an essay documenting the lives of shepherds in rural Slovenia. Franko, who listed Larry Towell‘s book, ”The Mennonites“, as a huge influence, didn’t have a driver’s license, so he had to be driven to the countryside each morning. “My mentor Peter helped me with that.” Franko said.

After high school, Franko, who turned 18 in March, said he looked forward to devoting more time to photography. “I would love to just start working and traveling around the world, covering conflict areas and doing all sorts of different projects.” he said. “I would prefer that over studying.”

Along with photographers Kael Alford, Newsha Tavakolian, and Anastasia Taylor-Lind, I was invited to be an instructor in the workshop, held earlier this month at the Amna Suraka, the national genocide museum in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. The workshop, the brainchild of Stephanie Sinclair, Sebastian Meyer and Kamaran Najm, was sponsored by IREX International and organized by Metrography, Iraq’s first (and only) photo agency.

Najm, founder of Metrography and one of the organizers of the workshop, said it was important for Iraqi photographers to broaden their horizons and focus on more in-depth stories. “Without this workshop, Iraqi photographers would only know how to shoot wire images. Stories would disappear only to be told by foreigners. This workshop means that Iraqis will have the skills to do it themselves,” he said.

Meyer, who runs Metrography with Najm, added, “This is a new era of Iraqi photojournalism.”

Students came from all across Iraq and while several of them had been working for years as freelance photographers for wire services, many were newcomers to photojournalism. One of my students, Bashar Abdulah, hosts a television show for children in Mosul and another, Asaad Zwain, is the official photographer for a mosque in Najaf. Gona Aziz, one of two female students in the workshop, is a high school teacher.

Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian was Aziz’s instructor. “She had never made serious pictures before,” Tavakolian said. “Very amateur. She didn’t know how to use her camera, didn’t have a portfolio to show.” Tavakolian guided Aziz on how to use her camera then suggested she take pictures of the women in her family. She was surprised by the results.

“She came back with amazing pictures,” Tavakolian said. “They are all hungry for learning. When you give them opportunity, they really use it in a good way.”

“Every single one of them without fail made huge steps,” said Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a British photographer based in Beirut. One of Taylor-Lind’s students, Ahmed Husseini, spent days photographing at a hotel where day laborers lived, capturing intimate aspects of the workers’ lives. “I’m a changed photographer now because the workshop made me live with the story, something I’ve never experience before,” he said. “Before I just took pictures for AP, but now it’s different.”

I was deeply moved by the heart and determination of the students. The first photographs taken during the workshop by Abdulah, the television host from Mosul, were pretty dismal – out of focus and poorly exposed. But despite being detained four times by police (a government building was across the street from the magazine stand he was photographing), he kept going back to shoot more and eventually captured some strong images. Another student, Ari Mohammad, made pictures during the workshop with a huge bandage on his hand. I discovered later that he had been shot while covering protests in Sulaymaniyah in March. His photographs of Sulaymaniyah at night are filled with mood and capture a side of the city rarely seen.

Kael Alford, who has been working on and off in Iraq since 2003, said she never imagined she would be back teaching a photography workshop. “I was really happy to have at least one Iraqi woman in my class.” she said. “I would be so excited to see more women photographers in Iraq. We would begin seeing things from this country we haven’t see before.”

Alford inspired one of her female students, Bnar Sardar, an NGO worker, to begin to pursue photography as more than a hobby. “I used to take photographs as a hobby but now I realized that there is so much behind photography, not just pointing and shooting. You have to think. You have to be human. You have to deal with people. You don’t stop. You have to keep thinking.”

I stressed to the students that I wanted them to show me a side of Iraq that a tourist wouldn’t see, a side of Iraq that a western journalist couldn’t discover. I wanted them to show me their Iraq. And they did, beautifully.

Organizers Najm and Meyer said they hoped that the workshop would become a fixture in Iraq. “Perhaps we can turn it into a festival in a few years,” Najm said. “There’s so much potential here in terms of photographic talent.” Meyer added, “It exceeded expectations. I had no idea they’d pull off the work they did.”

Tavakolian said she was equally moved by the students work. “It’s so beautiful to see the country through the eyes of the local people.”

Bzhar Boskani

Students, instructors, and translators gathered on a tank for a group portrait.

“When I first saw a monkey with a rubber baby doll’s head stuck over its head as a mask, it immediately struck me as horrifying and beyond weird.” Wray said. “Something about the combination of the doll head – which I think is scary looking to begin with – and a long tail just struck a chord in me.”

Shocking to many Westerners, it’s a common sight on the streets of Jakarta. Most Indonesians pass along unfazed or mildly amused and a few give the handlers money. “Whether they feel more sorry for the monkey or handler, I don’t know.” Wray added.

Wray decided to venture past the sidewalk performances and explore where the monkeys lived and how they were trained. “Initially I was purely interested in the masked monkeys,” Wray said. “But once I saw the village and the condition in which the people there lived alongside the monkeys, another grim layer was added to the pictures and to my thinking about the monkeys.”

“The idea came to me that the disturbing image of the monkeys wearing the masks is a visual distillation of the kinds of horrible things that happen when people are driven to desperation by poverty.”

Wray said he was going to continue with the project, adding, “One thing I would definitely like to concentrate on is how the monkeys get to the city from the jungle—the commercial process that brings them into urban areas as pets or performers.”

Stefanie Gordon, 33, was on a flight from New York to Palm Beach International Airport this morning when she was awakened by an announcement from the pilot. “I was at the Yankees – Red Sox game in the Bronx last night so I didn’t get much sleep,” she said in an interview over the phone this afternoon. “The pilot said, ‘If you all look out to the east you can see the space shuttle.’”

“I guess I woke up at just the right time,” she added.

Gordon, who happened to have her iPhone in hand, took a couple of photographs and a short video as the Space Shuttle Endeavour climbed through the clouds. She then uploaded the photograph to Twitpic and sent out a tweet. NASA retweeted her photo and media requests began pouring in.

“All of the sudden, it was all over the place,” she said. “BBC just sent me a tweet asking if they could use my photo, and of course I said yes!”

“It’s very overwhelming, I honestly did not expect this to blow up the way it did — I can’t keep up with it.”

As of 2:00pm, Gordon’s photographs of the launch had been viewed nearly 200,000 times on Twitpic.

See more photos of Endeavour‘s final launch.

Through a mesmerizing series of fades and transitions, pans and movements, the photographs appear to come alive. Backgrounds blur, move slightly, then disappear into white. De Luigi’s images, which is also a book and exhibition, depict the affect and treatment of blindness in 14 countries – from schools for the blind in Bulgaria and India, to diagnosis and treatment in Vietnam and China.

Stefano De Luigi—VII Network

A young student sits at the Nguyen Dinh Chieu School for the Blind in Hanoi, Vietnam in June 2006. He suffers from a total absence of eyes from the consequence of the use of Agent Orange by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War.

To create Blanco, De Luigi approached RAT Creatives, a multimedia design studio in Rome, proposing they create a piece to accompany the exhibition. Annalisa D’Angelo, a director at RAT Creatives, said the inspiration for the production, which she refers to as “e-motion” as opposed to “multimedia”, was Fernando Meirelles’s film, “Blindness.”

“Stefano had given us a fundamental keyword we kept in mind throughout the whole process: ‘white’” she said. “Before starting the actual video we made a precise storyboard we proposed to Stefano. He accepted it and the work started.”

A composer, Simonluca Laitempergher, created the original score while watching the nearly-completed film. D’Angelo said the ring tone heard throughout the piece is a reference to Meirelles’s film, “This sound, almost pure, is the musical correspondent of white. It has an organizational function both from a dramaturgical point of view and a symbolic one,” she said. ”It is a reference to purity. “

De Luigi said working on Blanco was a unique experience, adding, “What I am most happy about is that Annalisa and Ippolito, the directors of Blanco, have deeply understood what drove me all these years working on blindness.”

The winners will be announced May 7 at the World Press Photo awards ceremony in Amsterdam.

Seven photographers – TIME contract photographer Dominic Nahr, James Whitlow Delano, Jean Chung, Adam Dean, Keith Bedford, Paula Bronstein and Shiho Fukada – donated their work to the project, curated by Yumi Goto.

Images from seven more photographers, including David Guttenfelder, Pieter Ten Hoopen, Jake Price, Giulio Di Sturco, Ko Sasaki, Guillem Valle and Ryo Kameyama, were added to the app in an update released in late April.

In addition to biographies of the contributors, there is a brief audio message to the people of Japan from each photographer. James Whitlow Delano, who is based in Tokyo, said, “I saw order where there was chaos, but most of all I saw hope.”

Walker Evans, Bruce Davidson, Nobuyoshi Araki, Luc Delahaye, Christophe Agou and numerous others have produced important bodies of work from subway systems around the world. And many other photographers, from William Eggelston and William Klein to Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter, have drifted beneath the surface at one time or another to capture telling images.

Gilles Sabrie, inspired by much of this work, produced a series of dreamlike images of commuters in Beijing. “I was thinking how similar people’s mood in the subway can be, wherever you are, be it Beijing, New York or Paris,” Sabrie said. “It’s a very vulnerable, intimate state and very public at the same time. We let go, don’t pretend anymore. I was wondering how to capture this very peculiar moment.”

Sabrie said he made several photographs without expecting much. Only later did he realize what he had captured. “By pushing the contrast of the image, the faces of the passengers would appear almost like a photo in the developer bath in a darkroom,” he said. “It was magical.”

Originally from France, Sabrie moved to Beijing five years ago, inspired by the drastic changes happening there. “I still feel I am on the moon here,” he said. “Each day brings more questions than answers. This sense of being lost is exciting, inspiring.”

The result, a dark and menacing portrait of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, appears on the cover of TIME this week. Platon captured the cold stare of the dictator in 2009 during the U.N. General Assembly while shooting a portfolio of world leaders for the New Yorker magazine.

Gaddafi, surrounded by a sea of female bodyguards, approached Platon, who had a small studio set up next to the stage. President Obama had just begun his speech and oddly, Platon said, this was when Gaddafi wanted to be photographed.

“It was scary,” Platon says. “He’s walking slowly towards me, like some kind of King. It was hellraising.”

Platon motioned towards the chair and Gaddafi stopped, considered it for a moment, and then nonchalantly sat down. “Everything was in slow motion, you could hear a bloody pin drop,” says Platon. “I’m whispering to him, ‘chin up,’ guiding him with my fingers. I’m so close it’s ridiculous.

“He was wearing this beautiful chocolate robe and his crazy wild hair is tamed by this sort of black pork pie hat,” Platon said. “And his eyes are just black slits, really hard to read anything. He’s either the smartest guy in the room or he’s the craziest guy in the room. It’s intimidating.”

Platon, who has photographed his share of daunting subjects that include Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Gaddafi was different. “He was vacant. There was no emotion, there was no spirit. It was void of something. When you come face to face with that it’s overwhelming, and that’s what I was trying to get in the picture.”

After the shoot, Platon said, “He put his hand on his heart to say thank you, and I did the same. And then, elegantly, he walked away.”

Platon then caught a glimpse of Gaddafi’s speech. “It was written in red crayon, in giant letters, like a six-year-old kid would write it. And it was written on about twenty pieces of tatty paper torn out of a book, in Arabic. It felt like notes of a madman.”

An earlier version of this story was posted at Global Spin.

Last year, Addario, a contributor to TIME and MacArthur Fellow, photographed the compelling story of Mamma Sessay, a young woman who died after giving birth in Sierra Leone.

Read the latest account of their time in captivity at the New York Times.