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.

The 31-year-old Jordanian national is both prolific and tireless. Based in Pakistan, he began working for the Associated Press before his 21st birthday. Now, as a wire photographer in charge of the AP’s coverage of the region, Muheisen’s priorities are to provide photo reportage of designated news events and to ensure appropriate planning and coverage — often involving elaborate coordination of staffers and stringers across a country of more than 180 million people.

Whether at home or abroad, he is out with his camera each morning to catch the early light before his day officially starts. Between assignments and each evening after his job is done, he continues to photograph — where no news is breaking — in search of daily life images that reflect the subtle beauty and of everyday existence.

It can be frustrating process — any wire photographer can tell story after story about their days spent waiting for a scheduled event to begin. But Muheisen doesn’t complain, nor will he, for the satisfaction he gets from each photograph spurs him to continue.

“I spend hours and hours looking for a moment to capture,” he tells TIME. “The picture might not occur on that day, but you keep on the next day and the next. When the picture finally comes, it feels like your day is made — I am fully satisfied with my day. Nothing competes with the happiness of that moment. I can’t wait to show it to the world through the AP wire.”

Muheisen enjoys the full support of the AP to work on his daily life and street photography — not only where he is based but also while on assignment in other countries. Although these images offer another side of life beyond the news, they are informed by Muheisen’s empathy and his personal experience covering conflict.

“I move around from one place to another looking for scenes that we pass by everyday — a quiet scene or a dynamic scene showing the life of people living in conflict or lives not shattered by war,” he explains. “Some of those scenes bring joy, others sadness and issues to be aware of. Even in the middle of the conflict you can see that life goes on.” Muheisen points to his upbringing as a source for his talent. “I was born in a conflicted country [but]there was always a space for joy — I never stopped looking for that through the years spent covering stories in war zones. A smile always appears; a moment that brings joy to your heart and an unexpected image rises up and gives the story other colors. Having the patience and the love of daily life photography open your eyes and allows you to see things differently and deeply, and doing your best to share those moments by shooting the picture and show it to the world.”

Muheisen’s desire to document his surroundings are indicative of his tenacity and passion for storytelling and his passion for photography.

Santiago Lyon, the Director of Photography at the AP, explained Muheisen’s intrinsic knack for finding meaningful photographs. “If you subscribe to the notion that a photographer’s work is often a direct reflection of their own attitude towards their subject, and if a photographer is able to empathize with their subject successfully, that’s what’s going to be reflected back in their photographs. Muhammed does just that — he disarms people with his sincerity. That is something people pick up on — that he’s genuine, sincere, and transparent. He’s honest and he’s not threatening, so he’s able to document people’s daily lives. Because he’s able to put people at ease he’s able to achieve that elusive condition common to superheroes and photographers: the condition of invisibility. Nobody is paying attention to him because he has become part of the landscape.”

This attribute of invisibility is especially important in a region where photographers are often treated with disdain. In Pakistan, cameras draw unnecessary and unwanted attention to the photographers wielding them, making it difficult to avoid impacting the scene by their presence. Muheisen cannot avoid his influence in the scene. But when one examines his photographs — particularly those of children — it’s evident his subjects do not mind his warm presence.

Says Lyon, “A lot of the world as we see it [reflects our relationships to] designated news events. Daily life work documents the shared human condition around the world, as well as the differences in the way people live — an immensely valuable educational tool. It allows people to compare their own way of life with other people’s lives. That’s an tremendously important function of the photojournalist:  to be a window onto other peoples lives.”

Muheisen’s work not only provides a window, but does so in a consistently and distinctive manner.

“Capturing the daily life of people became a part of me. The deeper you go, the more you see, the more you understand the life of those people and how to approach them without invading their privacy. It’s all about trust between strangers — the subjects and the photographer. It’s a trust that is built on a gesture or a positive energy,” Muheisen says. “The news is right in front of you. If you just turn around, you will witness a totally different scene.”

Muhammed Muheisen is currently based in Islamabad as The Associated Press chief photographer for Pakistan. He joined the AP in 2001, covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and major events in the Middle East, Gaza and Israel. In 2003, he started traveling on international assignments and was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2005 for their work in Iraq. He recently attended the prestigious World Press Photo 2012 Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam.

Phil Bicker is a senior photo editor at TIME.

The photos were originally published in the British style magazine, i-D, and it’s tempting to dismiss them as “merely” fashion pictures. But the photographs are as much an empathetically anthropological portrait of British youth at a particular time and place (East London, 1990) as they are an illustration of specific “types.” There is no professional styling here; instead Shafran documents the subjects as they were.

The street portraits shot against a white wall and the accompanying color environmental shots capture discrete details — how the individuals wear their hair and clothes, for example — that help shape identities. At the same time, the images document the conflicting states of innocence and disaffected rebellion that, in a large sense, define the charged and heightened teenage years.

The book’s cover, meanwhile — suggested by Shafran’s long-time collaborator and friend, Paul Elliman — mirrors the signage of retail posters and, in its lack of pretension, suggests a welcome (and welcoming) accessibility.

Shafran’s work was hugely influential on a generation of fashion photographers, and although he still works commercially he withdrew from the world of fashion soon after the Precinct images were made. Over the past 20 years he has, instead, created work of a more personal and often domestic nature. He has self-published several books, with an intimate focus on members of his immediate family and their environments: Ruthbook (about his partner), Dad’s Office (his father) and Flowers for ___ (his son). He also produced a series of beautiful photographs on the mundane subject of washing up.

Made a decade before the turn of the millennium, Shafran’s Precinct pictures mark a time before the ubiquity of cell phones and social media reshaped teen lives as thoroughly as anything since the advent of rock and roll. As such, these portraits might be interpreted as dispatches from a simpler time. Shafran’s stripped down, straightforward approach to his work, however, was unusual — even radical — in an era when so many photographers preferred to distort or embellish reality. Far from chronicling some mythical, halcyon past, his Teenage Precinct Shoppers comprises a particular, honest and engaging document of a decade wholly unlike our own, yet deeply familiar and, in its own way, as fraught as anything teens (or any of us) face today.

Nigel Shafran is a photographer based in London. Shafran’s book is published by Dashwood Books.

Phil Bicker is a senior photo editor at TIME.

Lauded professionally, and in his private life married to a beautiful dancer, Allegra Kent, with whom he had three children, Bert Stern seemingly had it all.

As the decade drew to a close, he opened and outfitted the first photo super studio where he made photographs for prestigious editorial clients and advertising campaigns — conveyer belt style — working on as many as seven shoots a day. He also began to experiment with his own self-funded “art” projects.

But by the early Seventies Stern’s exhausting, Blow-Up-like lifestyle — fueled by amphetamines and shadowed by overhead costs—had drained him. He was hospitalized; his marriage crumbled. Broke, he left New York for Spain. He had lost virtually everything.

On the theatrical release of a remarkably candid and revealing feature-length documentary on his life, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, TIME sat down with Stern at his New York apartment to talk about his passions (women and photography), advertising, inspiration and Marilyn.

Stern grew up in Brooklyn. At the age of 16 he started work in the mail room at Look magazine. “I loved that job,” he says — but he was destined for bigger things.

At LOOK he met Stanley Kubrick, the magazine’s youngest staff photographer. Stern and Kubrick shared “a mutual interest in beautiful women” and formed a close and lasting friendship. He also connected with art director Hershal Bramson and, although he had no formal design training, became his assistant.

Stern left to take a position as Art Director at Mayfair magazine, before reuniting with Bramson at the newly founded Flair magazine.

While at Mayfair Stern bought a camera, learned how to develop film and make contact sheets.

“Since I was the art director of the magazine I figured I might as well shoot some of the pictures — [so] I became the Art Director and photographer.”

Stern’s trajectory was interrupted by the Korean War. In 1951 he was drafted into the U.S. Army. But Stern never made it to Korea: instead, at the recommendation of an old friend who was already stationed in Tokyo, Stern was diverted to Japan and assigned to the photo department. He learned to use a film camera and made motion pictures of news events for the army while taking stills for himself.

After being discharged from the service at war’s end, Stern was undecided whether to pursue art direction or still photography. Flair had closed and Bramson now worked for a small advertising agency, Lawrence C. Gumbinner. He invited Stern to experiment with him on a campaign for Smirnoff vodka. The company wanted to switch from drawings to photography. Stern shot test stills for layouts — which were approved — and when Irving Penn turned down the job Stern was awarded the campaign.

“I bought new a car from the GI Bill of Rights and drove to the white sands desert of New Mexico to photograph Hershal’s ‘Driest of the Dry’ concept.”

Stern’s first Smirnoff picture won an award. His photo career was launched.

“I liked advertising. There was an opportunity to try different ideas. And we tried to shoot pictures that had never been seen before in ads.”

Walking on 5th avenue with a Martini glass filled with water, for inspiration, Stern noticed the Plaza hotel was inverted in the glass that acted like a lens and turned the image upside down. “I came up with the idea to photograph the Pyramid of Giza upside down in the glass — but I would have to go to Egypt to do it.”

The pyramid photograph is emblematic of Stern’s groundbreaking work and the creative explosion that marked advertising in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Eleanor Mostel © Bert Stern Studios

Bert Stern, Egypt, 1955

In 1962, when he had begun shooting personalities as well as ads, a call from Twentieth Century Fox to photograph Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra took Stern to Rome.  Stern was afforded the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. “I didn’t shoot set pictures,” he told TIME. “I tended to want to shoot portraits. Richard Burton — who I had already shot in my studio in New York — was playing Marc Anthony and they [Taylor and Burton] began an affair. I became friends with the two of them and began to hang out with them off set — I would shoot more candid, fun pictures.”

For Stern, taking photographs was like making love — an intense, emotional experience. “I fell in love with everybody I photographed,” he says today.

Around the same time as the Cleopatra shoot Stern received a call from Glamour with an offer to shoot for them. “I really had my heart set on working for Vogue,” he says, but made a deal with the art director. “If I shot for Glamour I could shoot for Vogue.”

“At Vogue I had signed a contract [that stipulated] I had a certain amount of pages where I could do whatever I wanted. I realized Marilyn Monroe had never been photographed for Vogue. I didn’t want to shoot fashion so they sent me to the accessories department and gave me a little suitcase with scarves and jewelry. I thought we’d adapt one of the large suites at the Bel-Air Hotel.”

As Stern writes in The Last Sitting: “There were two Bert Sterns. One was the Bert Stern who had been accused of playing it close to the edge… Who had married his first wife with his fingers crossed…who thought his second, real marriage was over six months after it began…who had an appointment with blond destiny. That Bert Stern would gamble everything he had for a night with Marilyn Monroe. The other was Bert Stern, husband father, provider photographer who was going to get the picture, get out of there, go home to his wife and baby, and live happily ever after.”

“After I set up the studio [at the Bel-Air] the front desk rang ‘Miss Monroe is here’ I decided to go down and meet her. I met her [for the first time] on the pathway to the suite. She was alone wearing a scarf and green slacks and a sweater. She had no make up on. I said ‘You’re beautiful,’ and she said, ‘What a nice thing to say.’”

“[In the suite] she looked at what was there and asked about makeup. I said I didn’t think we needed any makeup, but how about a little eyeliner? She picked up one of the scarves, which was chiffon, you could see through it. She looked [at it] and said, ‘Do you want to do nudes?’ So it was her idea.” The photographs were taken during a 12-hour session, which ran through the night until dawn. “She was very easy to work with.”

“I brought the film back to New York and showed them to the the art director, Alexander Lieberman, at Vogue, who thought they were wonderful.” Shortly after Stern received a phone call telling him they loved the pictures so much they wanted him to go back and shoot some fashion.

Stern returned to LA and photographed Marilyn for two more days. This time it was much bigger production with a fashion editor and Stern found it difficult to make the same spontaneous pictures. But once Marilyn tired of dressing up Stern got everyone else out of the room, leaving he and Marilyn alone — to make more photos with his original intent. The images from that assignment remain some of the most iconic and intimate celebrity portraits ever made.

© Bert Stern

Bert Stern and Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Stern submitted his pictures — this time shot in black and white, as opposed to the earlier color pictures — and Vogue made the layout with the second sitting only, none of the color nudes were used. “They called me up to see the layouts,” Stern recalls. “There was something haunting about them. That Monday, she died.”

Vogue had sent Marilyn the photos from the first day for approval—it was not usual practice but for Marilyn they had made an exception. “A lot of the pictures she had put markings on with magic marker, directly onto the transparency [to indicate images that didn't reflect her own self-image]. I thought it was interesting but I didn’t think I would use them. Then the art director Herb Lubalin heard about [the crossed out frames] and said they would like to use them in a new magazine they were starting, called Eros. They talked to her PR people and they had no objections.”

The same year, 1962, also saw the release of Lolita, directed by his old friend Stanley Kubrick. He asked Stern to take some publicity shots for the film. Stern took then 13-year-old actress Sue Lyon and her mother to a five-and- dime store in Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island, to make the pictures. “I walked into the store and saw all these sun heart-shaped sunglasses and candy canes and other fun stuff that became the props for the shoot. I had not seen the movie but I underlined passages in Nabakov’s book that would make picture ideas. I always work with words that become pictures.”

Stern, it seemed, could do no wrong. “I was having a great time. Life was all work, work was all life.” But by the late Sixties, things began to unravel.

As Stern writes in The Last Sitting: “The Sixties were the best and craziest decade, not only of America’s life but of mine. Those were the years of the jukebox, and the big sound, and the big bucks, and the swimming pool, and the three children, and the townhouse, and the houseboy, and the black library with the Picasso over the door, Dr Feelgood, and the crystal blue Stingray, airplane trips to Fire Island, and the fantasy house with the wishing well, the herb garden, and the eight-foot tall roses Allegra grew while I photographed American beauties in New York”.

His marriage collapsed, as did his health and his finances. “I was broke. I shipped everything I owned into a twenty-foot container and went to Spain to stay with a friend.” His marriage was irreparably damaged, but he returned to New York and set to work, trying to rebuild his life.

Inspired by the PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) he conceived The Pill Book — a photographic compilation of different pills which he shot as simple still lifes. The book, of which there are now more than 18 million copies in print, put Stern back on track, and by the late 1970s he was photographing portraits and fashion again.

In 1982, the twentieth anniversary of Monroe’s death, Stern published the The Last Sitting, a comprehensive edit of his Marilyn pictures, the overwhelming majority of which had not been seen. Vogue ran a 12-page story and this time included some of the images that Marilyn herself had crossed off.

A year later a friend introduced Stern to Shannah Laumeister, a 13-year-old girl he photographed, after which he simply filed away the photos. Four years later, they reconnected for a second shoot. Over the past three decades the two have built a close bond. “Our whole relationship has been sourced through a camera … and has grown closer and closer [until we know] each other’s souls,” Laumeister told TIME.

Six years ago, Laumeister turned the tables — and her camera — on Stern and began to make a documentary of his life.

The resulting film, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, is a candid and revealing portrait of the photographer — in Laumeister’s words, it’s “an imperfect movie … dealing with the controversial nature of who people are. We are all contradictory, and if you turn a camera on anyone’s life they’ll have plenty of reason to hide.”

Laumeister and Stern’s relationship — one of muse and mentor — is intimate and complex, and this unconventional film reflects that. “I wanted to try to keep it that way [intimate, just the two of us], because I felt that would make it special. It mirrored how he got such great pictures — he got everyone out of the room so he could get that personal connection” with his subjects, Laumeister says.

A 50-picture exhibit at Staley-Wise, curated by Laumeister, will coincide with the film’s release.

“He took the quintessential pictures of Marilyn Monroe,” Laumeister says, “and that work can sometimes trump [everything else he's done]. There are so many more photos, even of Marilyn, and the show is representative of his wider work and ideas.”

As a new season of Mad Men premieres, it’s perfectly fitting that the original mad man, Bert Stern, is receiving the accolades that his remarkable life and career deserve.

Bert Stern is a New York-based photographer famous for his ‘Last Sitting’ photographs of Marilyn Monroe and his groundbreaking advertising photography.

‘Bert Stern: Original Mad Man’ opens in New York on April 5, 2013. A gallery show coinciding with the film opens on April 4 at the Staley-Wise Gallery, New York.

Phil Bicker is a senior photo editor at TIME.

Busse, 46, grew up as an only child on a small farm in Northern Germany and traveled widely in Europe and Morocco as a teenager before settling in Madrid, where he became interested in photography.

“Making art for me is like being on the road, except that the [artistic] journey is an inward one,” he recently told TIME. The work in Fauna and Flora, meanwhile, mirrors that travelers’ sensibility, emerging from a process Busse describes — like a road trip — as “full of surprises and spontaneous decisions.”

In 1991 Busse relocated to New York, working initially as a studio assistant. By 1995 he was receiving commissions as a fashion photographer for magazines like Paper, Interview and Visionaire and portraiture for the New York Times Magazine, Harpers Bazaar and more.

Dietmar Busse

Memories of early childhood, 2010

He soon became disillusioned, however, with the constraints imposed when working for others.

“I had always secretly hoped to become an artist,” he says, “so I attempted to free myself from any outside demands.”

He withdrew from the world of commissioned photography to pursue his artist’s vocation. In 2006 he began inviting people he found visually interesting — people in art and fashion, for the most part — to visit his Manhattan apartment, converted into a little studio, to have their portraits taken for a project he calls Visitors. The result: an impressive portfolio of black and white portraits.

“I like having people over, rather than going on location. The sitter enters my world, and that way it is so much easier for me to get to know them and for them to relax.”

Dietmar Busse

Terence Koh, 2008

Dietmar Busse

Rose Wood, 2007

The one exception to this comfortable, intimate approach has been annual visits to his native village in Germany where, for years, Busse has photographed residents, animals, landscapes and, until recently, his stepfather, Fiddy, a constant companion on those month-long explorations of his homeland.

“My father was very good with the local people and always made sure that I had access to anywhere and anyone I wanted. We were like little kids, up to no good and we had so much fun.”

In March 2012 Fiddy was diagnosed with cancer; he died within a month of the diagnosis. Busse spent almost the entire year with his mom — driving, shooting and continuing the project in Fiddy’s honor.

“He came into our lives when I was ten years old,” Busse says of his stepfather, “and rescued me and my mother from an impossible situation. He was like an angel to us. We miss him terribly.”

Dietmar Busse

Heimat and the last days with my father. (Fiddy as a flower in his garden, 2012)

Dietmar Busse

Heimat and the last days with my father. (My father the gardener 2012)

Today Busse remains very much in the analog world, shooting film and making his own darkroom prints — a hands-on process that helped release him from the constraints of traditional picture-making.

“About six years ago,” he recalls, “I made a ‘mistake’ in the darkroom and double-exposed some paper. I pursued these double and triple exposures, mixing images from my homeland with portraits of people in New York. I liked bringing these two worlds together.”

Busse began painting (with photographic developer) on his prints. The resulting images so artfully meld the otherwise quite distinct media that they appear to coalesce — creating, in a sense, a new medium.

“There are all kinds of variables when you draw on the prints before they are fixed, and it’s a relief not to worry about spots or imperfect exposures anymore. I embrace the ‘accidents’, the unforeseen, the spontaneous. I never quite know where things will lead me: it’s like an expedition into unknown territory. There is a lot more freedom there, and that is more reflective of who I am as a person than trying for a perfect print.”

Dietmar Busse

Terence Koh with poppies, 2009

With no formal art training, Busse was long intimidated by the idea of painting. But in the last few years he began extending his experimentation even further, applying photographic retouching colors and inks to his prints.

“Having a strong foundation in photography,” he says, “somehow gives me the courage to explore. The photograph serves as the foundation for the painting, capturing something about a person’s energy and spirit the way only photography can. The painting starts where photography can not go.” It is these co-mingled pieces that comprise Fauna and Flora.

“I did not set out to [focus on those concepts]. These were just the images I found myself making — and it made sense, for fauna and flora are what I grew up with, and what I relate to.”

Two years ago Busse’s friend, the collector Scott Newkirk, commissioned him to make a portrait and also requested that Busse integrate his painting process into the images. “I was insecure about the drawings so I did forty pieces in three days, [thinking] he would maybe like two or three and buy them. I hung all forty up together and it was a completely new way for me to look at my work.”

Newkirk ended up with a 20-piece installation, and Busse with a new methodology. “With twenty variants on two images, there is repetition of the same image throughout the installation as well as a uniqueness about each piece. The installation becomes one big story and the viewer is invited to go on a journey and explore.”

Busse is currently working on another installation, Soldier, Soldier, which combines many of his experimental processes.

“I don’t feel like I have completely resolved it, but [the series] is on my studio wall right now. I’m just looking at it before I make the next move.

Dietmar Busse is a German photographer based in New York.

Phil Bicker is a senior photo editor at TIME and TIME.com.