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.

“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.

“I remember how it once was. You wouldn’t find many people on the mountains,” Niedermayr tells TIME, in an email translated from German. “From a spatial point of view, everything is perpetually changing: people and fashions as well, especially in the world of tourism.”

Niedermayr began photographing mountainous landscapes and the skiers who inhabit them in the 1980s. More recently, that work has taken him to Aspen, Colo., and his images of those mountains will soon be available in book form as The Aspen Series (out March 31 from Hatje Cantz). The photographer — who now prefers cross-country skiing to downhill — is fascinated by man-made landscapes and the way they are presented in media images, a process that transforms the ancient slopes into modern resorts. It’s no longer enough for a mountain to be sublime: it must attract tourists. And in Niedermayr’s photographs, those visiting skiers become graphic objects on the man-made planes of the trails, paused in their motions, symbols of human influence on the land.

Not that Aspen and the Alps are one and the same: the arid climate of the Rockies creates powdery snow, and the skiing culture is also lighter, more relaxed. In addition, Aspen’s history as a mining area provided an extra layer of meaning to a body of work that focuses on the way people alter their environments. “The native inhabitants, the Ute people, had a respectful use of the landscape; the miners later on introduced a very utilitarian notion of landscape,” says Niedermayr. “The subsequent decline of mining in the ‘30s paved the way for Aspen to become one of the most modern ski resorts in the world.”

But, Niedermayr says, the mountains have begun to resemble each other. Globalization has made it possible for resorts and skiers alike to model themselves on images they’ve seen from elsewhere in the world, another example of the transformation the photographer has seen in the landscapes themselves. It’s a march toward uniformity — still, his photographs make clear that the landscapes and their inhabitants are not just a clean white background with people-shaped dots, the same all over the world. If you can look at it as Niedermayr does, from “the opposite slope,” you may see something new.

“My work appears to be obvious at first glance, but then there are different levels of perception, jarring elements between the pictures, repetitions, overlapping layers, different perspectives, and temporal shifts,“ he says. “It oscillates between the beautiful appearance of a so-called reality and the reality of the image.”

Walter Niedermayr is an Italian photographer. The Aspen Series is available March 31st from Hatje Cantz.

Lily Rothman is a writer and producer for TIME.

The work to which Fetterman was granted access is now the exhibition “The Eye of the Traveler,” on view at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., through March 16. (A photobook about Riboud’s travels in China, Japan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey, called Into the Orient (Vers L’Orient), was also published in October and was recently awarded the prestigious Prix Nadal.)

“Experience has taught me that many great photographers have incredible gems in their archive, which perhaps they’ve been too close to and can’t quite see the brilliance of,” says Fetterman. The process of applying an objective eye to the archive of a photographer is something Fetterman had done before, with artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastião Salgado, but even though those men knew and worked with Riboud, Riboud and Fetterman had not met before last May.

Riboud, like the other French Humanist photographers in which Fetterman is particularly interested, is the product of a time when the art market for photography was brand new, before there was money in the work, so the travels on which he embarked were a personal one — and one that, Fetterman says, can serve as an inspiration to viewers. (Also inspirational, the gallerist notes, is the fact that great photographers tend to possess such great longevity. “Maybe it’s the chemicals,” he jokes.)

It was immediately clear that Riboud’s archive contained more than expected. Fetterman had gone looking for photographs of France and China, but he found works from India and elsewhere that he loved equally. He had gone looking for familiar, famous images, and he found pictures he had never before seen (like the picture of giraffes in the gallery above). And while Fetterman says that many photojournalists today travel in comfort, the photographs showed that Riboud was “a man of the earth.”

“He’s very curious about people and interested in people and insightful, and you can see a great intelligence and feel a great humanity and empathy,” says Fetterman. “You sense he’s a storyteller and you sense the lives these people are living; he tells us about them, not in a didactic way but in a basic, humanist way.” That emphathy is, Fetterman believes, why Riboud’s photographs are still revelatory a half-centry later: he finds a way to make what’s foreign, what’s seen through a traveler’s eye, seem familiar and intimate.

“You get a sense in way that, clichéd as it sounds, we’re all connected. I don’t want to sound like a ‘60s hippie but we’re all brothers and sisters,” Fetterman says, “and somebody like Marc Riboud, his work just sings that.”

Marc Riboud is a French photographer and the recipient of numerous awards, including the ICP Infinity Award and the Overseas Press Club award. The exhibition Marc Riboud – The Eye of the Traveler is on view at Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., through March 16, 2013.

“I started photographing my mother as soon as I realized I was going to have to move her out of her home in Austin,” says Steber. “She would never let me photograph her before. When her defenses were down—and I’m sure some people will say that’s not right—I started photographing her.”

The project was originally intended as purely personal, a way for Steber to cope during her mother’s illness and a way for her to remember her mother in later days. There was also video, filmed as Madje Steber’s condition deteriorated, which would allow the photographer to remember how her mother moved and sounded. But along the way, says Steber, she realized that the project could be more than something she would dust off and look at when she wanted to remember. After a shorter project created for AARP and then a period of time away from the work after her mother’s death in 2009, Maggie Steber (in collaboration with MediaStorm) made a film, Rite of Passage, which will premiere June 11 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Steber’s film involves photos and video taken at difficult moments and at beautiful ones—moments when Steber says her mother came out of herself and lost her shyness. Her mother’s reluctance to be photographed was, she thinks, a result of her youth and beauty passing; “it was so lovely to have these pictures where she was happy and beautiful again,” she says. The photographer hopes that those transcendent moments will teach viewers that illness comes in waves, that stages will pass and—perhaps most of all—that if you are willing to be a “warrior” on behalf of your loved one, they can have a positive end-of-life experience. Nobody told her how to navigate doctors and medications, and part of her goal is to help others with the research that accompanies a loved one’s death. “If you can stick with it,” she says, “there’s this rather remarkable gift at the end.”

Maggie Steber

Madje Steber naps with her favorite toy, a stuffed kitty, in her room at Midtown Manor, an assisted living facility, in Hollywood, FL. in 2007.

Part of that gift is knowing that you’ve done what you could. Steber says that she was aware from a young age that her mother, the single mother of a single child, would die one day and that she had a responsibility to be there for it. And she was: “I was able to hold my mother while she took her last breath,” she says.

The other part is meeting your parent all over again, with all the barriers down. Steber says that, as her mother lost touch with the past, they lost touch with the mother-daughter relationship. “They don’t recognize you anymore. They fall in love with somebody else. They think the caregiver is their daughter,” she explains. “That’s a little startling, it hurts a little bit, but I started to see her as Madje.” It’s difficult for children to see their parents as individuals separate from themselves, but Madje became a whole woman to Maggie, someone who told marvelous stories, someone who had been a scientist and would have wanted her last days to help ease medical confusion, someone who could have become a friend if they had started out as strangers. “I just fell in love with her,” says Steber. “I know I would have just really enjoyed knowing this woman.”

Steber’s photographs and videos were made in order to preserve just one woman’s memory of a mother, but she says she hopes that her decision to share will help other people decide to look for those gifts of memory. “It doesn’t come easily, but it’s worth it,” she says. “You have to live with that for the rest of your life and I just think if you can live with the happier memories, the discovery and seeing somebody blossom even as they’re disappearing right in front of you, you have that to hold onto. And maybe it is the best thing you’ll ever do.”

Maggie Steber’s Rite of Passage premieres June 11 at Galapagos Art Space, along with Phillip Toledano’s A Shadow Passes, another film from MediaStorm about the loss of a loved one. More information about the event is available here.

The three artists chosen by Musi and Griffin to be this year’s INSight Artists—the featured photographers who, Griffin says, must be people who have made a significant body of work and can inspire other photographers—are Stanley Greene, Donna Ferrato and Alex Webb. Masters talks will be given by Ernesto Bazan, Hank Willis Thomas, Lynsey Addario, Bruce Gilden, Robin Schwartz and Camille Seaman; David Doubilet is this year’s TREES Artist, whose work will be hung in trees along Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall.

Although the festival does not have an explicit theme, Musi says that a documentary slant is strong in all of the featured work. “We also have this crossover because advertising and the fine-art world are really stepping up and doing a lot of what journalism used to do,” he says. And it goes both ways: he cites Hank Willis Thomas as someone who is using journalistic forms outside of the world of journalism. “The common thread,” Musi says. “is that everyone is very excited to have a foot in each world, but the work is very documentary in nature.”

Griffin echoes that sentiment, citing the aesthetic vision evident in Alex Webb’s work as an example of great journalism that “hits that beautiful spot” that touches the art world. He says that this year’s LOOK3 will place a heavier emphasis on individual shows for the speakers’ work, so that guests who attend the talks will be able to see the pictures discussed. There will be more than a dozen hours of onstage programming and a dozen print shows hung, which is more than in previous years.

Both curators agree, though, that the artists who present are not necessarily the highlights of the festival. “This is building a community and sustaining it, so that people go from one side of the stage to the other and back again,” says Musi. That community is made up of artists who attend as viewers, give talks a later year and then maybe teach a workshop some other time.

And artists who just hang out: “There’s a coffee house and it’s right outside of one of the hotels, and I just remember walking out each morning and David Alan Harvey would always be sitting out there having a cup of coffee,” Griffin says of past festivals, “and there’d be Martin Parr sitting with him or Jim Nachtwey, and you’d just walk up and sit down and start talking with a person. That’s one of the really cool things about the festival.”

More information about this year’s LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph, which will take place in Charlottesville, Va., from June 7-9, is available here.

Neil Harris

UPDATE: In the first lot of the evening, the framed Robert Capa print pictured above sold for $4,500 to bidder #313, reports TIME’s Neil Harris, who was present at the event. He says that the evening was partly surprising—contemporary photojournalism at Christie’s is unprecedented—and partly somber, as Hammerl’s widow gave a speech and read a letter from their middle child to his father. Once the live auction began, “the mood became quite energized and people started bidding real money for serious pictures,” Harris says. “The first three lots together broke $10,000, which was exhilarating on all levels.”

On Tuesday evening, Christie’s will hold its first-ever auction of contemporary photojournalism prints at its New York City auction house. The event, which will be hosted by news anchor Christiane Amanpour, will benefit the family of the late Anton Hammerl. Hammerl, who had been a photographer and photo editor for outlets from the Associated Press to the The Sunday Star in Johannesburg, was killed in Libya last April. He had traveled to Libya as a freelancer to cover the conflict in that country. He was 41 years old and had three children, ages 11, 8 and 1. His remains have not yet been found.

The auction was the idea of a group of conflict journalists who originally got together, via Facebook, to sell prints to help their colleague’s loved ones. The transition from on-demand sales to planning an auction, under the banner “Friends of Anton,” happened about a month ago, and some of the most recognizable names in photojournalism have signed on to participate: João Silva, Platon, Bruce Davidson, Alec Soth, Susan Meiselas and many more.

The auction, says David Brabyn, one of the organizers, demonstrates the sense of community among photographers who put themselves at risk for their work. “It’s been quite highlighted recently,” he says, “after all the deaths of reporters, both photographers and print.”

But one of the most important prints up for bid was not a donation from someone in that community. Robert Capa’s photograph of American soldiers landing in France on D-Day is perhaps the most familiar picture in the bunch; Capa was killed by a land mine in 1954. The donation comes from the International Center of Photography, where his work is archived. (The winning bid will also include a personal tour of his archive.) ICP was founded by Capa’s brother, Cornell Capa, and the print comes from his personal collection.

Even though neither Capa brother is alive to bestow his friendship on Anton Hammerl, it’s a fitting donation, says Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa Archive at ICP. Cornell Capa, she says, was generous with his prints during his lifetime—and this is a particularly poignant cause. “His brother and Anton both died while photographing overseas, doing a job they felt compassionately about. They were both committed to bringing back real stories about what was happening in the world and what they saw,” says Young. “Cornell founded ICP in part to educate people, not only about photography, but that through photography we can learn about political situations, and consequently make social and political change.”

And the picture, beyond its historical significance, has its own measure of poignancy, she adds: “It seemed like an appropriate image, one of great courage both on the part of the American soldiers and of the photographer.”

More information about the Friends of Anton auction—including ticketing and absentee bidding information—is available here.

“I think a lot of photographers feel this,” he explains, “but it was just out of that general sense of obligation.”

Reed noticed that, while his fellow photographers often spoke of that urge to give back, they lacked a platform to do so in an organized and sustained fashion. In 2008, he and some art- and business-minded friends founded Nuru Project—“Nuru” meaning “light” in Swahili—to fill that void. The business now has relationships with well-known photojournalists, including TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev, and the group is looking to grow with an upcoming Kickstarter drive aimed at funding a marketing campaign. Reed says that response to the project has been positive, but he’s aware of the deeper questions of journalistic integrity that are raised by his brainchild.

“Most photojournalists get into journalism because they think there are stories that are important to tell and they want to make a difference,” Reed says. Nuru helps them do so, but it also re-introduces the frequently discussed matter of whether the journalist’s job is to make that difference or to record things as they are.

NURU Project

Each NURU print comes with a handwritten "backstory" from the photographer, such as this one explaining Espen Rasmussen's print from Balakot, Pakistan.

Nuru Project has so far raised $150,000 for its nonprofit partners, often organizations that work directly with the communities that appear in the photographs it sells. Originally conceived as a group that would organize exhibitions, Nuru transitioned to an e-commerce model in October 2011. Reed now manages the business full-time, seeing it as an extension of the social entrepreneurship he used to practice as a photographer, he says. Nuru sells prints in low-cost, numbered but unlimited editions; half the money goes to an affiliated nonprofit organization that can be selected by the buyer at checkout and the other half is divided evenly between the photographer and Nuru Project.

“I really like creating something that is dedicated to putting photojournalism to some sort of social purpose beyond telling the news, and I think that’s a controversial idea within photojournalism,” Reed says. “On our Facebook page, when we post relevant stories, we’ll get comments that say this is not what journalism is supposed to be about—and then we usually get a lot more comments that are very sympathetic to what we’re doing.”

Nuru Project is not the first group to link photojournalism and social advocacy. Cornell Capa, founding director of the International Center of Photography, introduced the idea of the “concerned photographer” in the mid-20th century and maintained that cameras could catalyze necessary change rather than just preserving an image of the situation that needed it. More recently, VII Photo has sold prints to benefit Doctors Without Borders. And Reed says that he’s noticed a general trend toward socially aware photography.

“There’s this idea that photojournalists should be objective and not have opinions,” he says. “I think the reality is that’s nonsense and we’re all very subjective beings and that photojournalists bring that to their work.”

But several of the points made by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) code of ethics seem to imply that such subjectivity ought to stay out of that work. The code asks that photographers, while maintaining respect for their subjects, “avoid political, civic and business involvements or other employment that compromise or give the appearance of compromising one’s own journalistic independence.”

John Long, who is the Ethics Chair of the NPPA, says that this directive does not mean photographers must not be involved in social action—merely that they must be very careful. He recounts a story from his own career at the Hartford Courant, when an editor asked him to resign from the board of a homeless shelter or refrain from shooting stories about homelessness: in that case, the simultaneous action in both spheres would have been a conflict of interest. “You can have beliefs and you can have a great dedication to your organization that you’re trying to promote on that score,” Long says, “but when it comes time to deal with your journalism you have to remember that the master you’re serving at this point is not the organization but accuracy.”

The philosophy of the concerned photographer is very consistent with NPPA ethics, he adds: as long as the photography happens from a journalistic standpoint, and then the social action happens separately, then the photojournalist is doing his job. And the impulse that drove Reed to found Nuru is, Long says, one that is necessary for good photography to be possible.

“You can’t bring your advocacy to your work but you can bring your humanity,” says Long. “If you don’t bring a passion for people and a concern for the welfare of people and society, if you don’t bring a love of mankind to your work, your work is going to be very hollow to begin with.”

Nuru makes a convenient middle-man, allowing photojournalists to participate in social advocacy without actively giving to the causes involved, especially as the photographs currently for sale were not taken with Nuru in mind. But if Nuru evolves from one-off deals with photographers to extended relationships—as J.B. Reed hopes it will—the organization will butt up against the question of whether journalistic objectivity is in fact possible or desirable in the first place.

LightBox welcomes your thoughts on the matter in our comments section below.

Matthias Fiegl, one of the original founders of the 20-year-old, pinhole- and fisheye-loving, Vienna-based company, recently visited New York City. He sat down with LightBox at the company’s Greenwich Village store— where signs proclaim the “prophecies of the analogue future” and the walls are papered with photographs—to discuss why its competitor’s success is good for business.

“People have tried out filters on Instagram and now they want to do the real thing,” says Fiegl. “We hear that all the time in the shop.”

Lomography started as a way to buy the Russian Lomo cameras that Fiegl and his friends loved, and now sells a variety of cameras, accessories, film, clothing and books. Fiegl says that people are often surprised that the Lomography website sees up to 8,000 images uploaded daily and about 2 million unique visitors each month. It’s a tiny sum compared to sites like Flickr but, Fiegl notes, users tend to be more selective when they need to develop and scan their photos. “Lomography is a niche,” he says. “From that perspective it’s a huge community.”

Lomography

The Diana F+

According to Lomography USA’s general manager Liad Cohen, Lomography benefits from blending online and live communities. Lomography’s website has sharing capabilities, and the stores host photography workshops and exhibitions. One such exhibition is a traveling world tour of a collection of vintage 1960s and ’70s “Diana” cameras (Lomography sells a model) amassed by the award-winning photographer Allan Detrich. The exhibit, which also features camera customizations by local artists at each stop it makes, returns to the U.S. on May 10 and will spend about a month in San Francisco before going on to Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago and New York City.

Fiegl theorizes that people who are interested in making art in a novel way want to do something unusual: “The younger the people are, the more they want to do analog,” he says. Lomography once considered selling a digital camera, but a survey of customers revealed that “Lomographers” were more interested in new analog cameras instead. And even if digital filters can achieve Lomography-like looks, Fiegl thinks that users who see themselves as artists, rather than snapshot-sharers, are drawn to his company because it encourages users to keep and come back to older work, whereas the streaming format favored by media platforms like Instagram makes it hard not to just look at what’s most recent.

Even though new customers often have to be taught how to load film and reminded that they can’t see the photos right away, Fiegl says that amateur photographers for whom digital is normal see something appealing in old-fashioned technology—and unlike larger and older photo brands, Lomography has grown alongside digital photography and has not had to struggle to reorient itself in that landscape.

“Maybe the technology is redundant,” says Fiegl, “but it’s opening up new possibilities.”

The Diana World Tour returns to the U.S. on May 10, opening at the Lomography Gallery Store in San Francisco. The show will then travel to Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago and New York. Information from past stops the show has made is available here, and more information about Lomography is available here.

According to Jay Stanley, who runs the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) project on photographers’ rights, the rising number of arrests is not in photographers’ imaginations: hostility between photographers and the police actually is becoming more common, even though American law guarantees the right to photograph in a public place. Occupy protests have been a consistent source of that tension.

Photojournalists, particularly freelancers, can encounter an extra layer of scrutiny. Mickey Osterreicher, a lawyer on the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) advocacy committee, says that professionals with obviously high-quality equipment can be targeted, even though the press legally has as much of a right to be in and photograph public places as everyone else does. Especially since the 2011 federal case of Glik v. Cunniffe, in which the court found that a Boston man was not guilty under anti-wiretapping statutes for having videotaped an arrest with his cellphone, the right to photograph the police has been firmly established. Although whether or not the police can look at one’s photos is in the process of being tested in court, police cannot seize a camera without reason. But those legal rights don’t necessarily translate to smooth experiences on the ground.

Beyond knowledge of the law and professional conduct—which means not breaking any other laws, such as trespassing statutes—there’s not much a photographer can do in advance to prevent that kind of hassle. “If you’re arguing with somebody who’s got a badge and a gun, usually you’re going to lose that argument right then,” says Osterreicher, who notes that a photographer’s best recourse usually comes later, in court—which is why it’s helpful to continue to record audio and video, if possible, to preserve a record of one’s interaction with the police.

There are several resources available for photographers who encounter trouble with the law. Here are just a few:

• Websites like Carlos Miller’s Photography is Not a Crime keep track of the latest developments and news about the topic.
• NPPA photographers who encounter trouble with the law can reach out to the association’s legal advocacy committee.
• The ACLU maintains an extensive website to help photographers stay aware of all their legal rights and options—and they also helped with the video posted below.

Osterreicher and the NPPA are working with law enforcement agencies to educate officers about photographers’ rights, with particular attention on avoiding conflict at this year’s upcoming political party conventions. Stanley is also hopeful that, with education, the relationship between police officers and photographers can become a productive one. “I’m optimistic that professional police officers around the country will come to understand that this is a necessary check and balance, and a necessary freedom in a free society,” he says.

The Occupy Wall Street photojournalism exhibition is on view at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City through July 8.

Getty Publications

Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis

Southam says that when the panel met together to narrow the list of books down to five, and then to one, after spending weeks on their own with the nearly 200 contest submissions, the process—meant to take two hours—took five. “Each book that we shortlisted, each of us could have happily stood by it as a winner, and each was an utterly different kind of project,” he says. But the Kraszna-Krausz award has a very specific criterion for recipients, that they make a significant contribution to scholarship in the field, and with that standard in mind the Watkins book stood apart from the rest.

“One of the things that this book has done is bring an immense amount of labor to create a catalogue raisonné the likes of which, for a 19th-century photographer, I’ve never seen,” says Southam. He says that many of the judges were of a generation for which the 1975 New Topographics exhibit at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., was an important event, and—at least for European photographic scholars—the first time they were introduced to landscape photographers from Watkins’ era, a category that Southam says is still under-examined. This book, Southam says, will be the resource to which future generations of scholars turn when they are writing essays about Watkins and his compatriots—and, as such, the book fulfills the prize’s mission.

The book also accomplishes a scholarly task by showing Watkins’ work in great volume. “He was solving photographic problems for the first time,” says Southam of Watkins’ work from the Yosemite Valley, in which the photographer confronted a landscape that had never before been photographed. “You develop an understanding [with a book] of the photographer’s process that wouldn’t be possible with one print.”

Nevertheless, Southam cautions any photographer against making a book that is intended to do well in competitions. “I’m not very keen on judging. Books aren’t made to be judged,” he says. But it helps when a book is as much of a stand-out as the one in question this time around. “One of the things that one’s looking for is an object that’s captivating as an object, that has presence, that the hands and the body and the mind get a pleasure from the holding and the turning and the looking at, that the whole has an integrity that comes from the vision of the author. This book, every page you turn to is as engrossing as the next.”

The Sony World Photography Awards Exhibitions and World Photo London takes place April 27 – May 20. An exhibition of the winning and shortlisted books from the Kraszna-Krausz book awards 2012 is at Somerset House, London, during that time. More information is available here.

“As soon as I saw the swirling clouds, I knew it was going to be something cool. I went ahead and took the left turn instead of the right turn, just to chase it down and see if it turned into anything,” he says. “It ended up being a pretty big tornado that unfortunately messed up a lot of peoples’ homes.”

Ruiz de Velasco followed the storm for what he estimates to be about 15 miles, up I-35 toward Route 20, getting in front of the storm, before he did a u-turn. As always, he had his camera with him. He took a photo.

He didn’t end up making it to work. After submitting his picture to the Dallas Morning News via the paper’s website, the young photographer was called into the office, where he would spend the rest of the evening dealing with requests for the image. By the next day, the picture would have appeared on the front pages of 17 newspapers from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post to papers in Montreal and Buenos Aires—and it will appear this coming week in TIME.

“They were pretty mad at me,” he says of his carpentry employers, to whom he had to make excuses on the day of the storm, “until this morning when they saw the newspaper.”

Ruiz de Velasco had never experienced a tornado before—and his home and family made it through yesterday unscathed—but he says he wasn’t scared, just excited, an excitement that persists even now that the weather in Texas is sunny and clear.

“It was pretty stupid. I had a lot of adrenaline going on,” he says. “It’s the crazy power of nature. I really wanted to capture that.”

More: Tornadoes Rip Through Dallas-Fort Worth Area

Parrish Ruiz de Velasco is a Dallas-based photographer and designer. Check out his Facebook page here.

Some of the subjects of the book have fallen out of touch with the photographer, while others he leaves alone, for now at least, feeling that it would be an intrusion to contact them before they want to be contacted. Still, others are still very much involved in the afterlife of the project. Richards knows that one combat medic featured in the project, suicidal at the time, has started law school and is doing well. Another of the subjects, already confined to a wheelchair, has seen his health deteriorate further in the months that have passed. And in one situation, Richards’ involvement with his subjects has gone past keeping tabs. Carlos Arredondo, featured in War is Personal as the father of a deceased soldier and as an antiwar activist, recently lost another son, Brian, to suicide. Because the Arredondo family was in financial trouble, and because the self-published War is Personal sold better than Richards had expected, the photographer and his team—along with the Nation Institute, which had given Richards a fellowship to work on the project—helped defray the cost of Brian’s funeral. The photographs in the gallery above were taken in the days around that event.

Eugene Richards

Carlos Arredondo holds a photograph of his son Alex. From Eugene Ricards' September 2010 book War Is Personal.

“The grief really took over Brian,” Arredondo told Richards. “But it’s not only those people who kill themselves who are suffering, but los familios.”

Richards, who already began two new projects in the past year, says he tries not to revisit stories after he finishes them. “I think all journalists try not to,” he says, “but then they come back to you, again and again and again.”

On one level, they come back as people, like the Arredondo family. On another, the stories come back as a consequence of the photographer’s immersion in the subject. Following an idea for long enough to create a large project about it means that the facts and emotions of its world become so familiar that, Richards says, they start to seep into every aspect of life. Something only tangentially related to a photograph taken a year or two years or twenty years ago can provoke the old perspective. “Suddenly you’re back to where you were at a different time,” says Richards.

Richards hasn’t taken any other additional photographs of the families from War is Personal, but he says he will probably return to the subject of war’s impact. Richards says he can’t turn away from people who are open to his journalistic curiosity and his camera’s presence. After all, there is no shortage of reasons to continue to snap away, no shortage of families affected by the country’s evolving military situation.

“This is the next round of response now that the declaration of war here is over, and perhaps people will come back from Afghanistan,” he predicts. “Concerns are going to grow and grow.”

Eugene Richards is an award-winning American photographer. See more of his work here.

Watch LightBox’s video about War is Personal here.

© 2010 Extreme Ice Survey

Rappelling into Survey Canyon, looking down at moulin channel dropping meltwater 2,000 vertical feet into crevasses through the Greenland Ice Sheet. EIS director James Balog is shown.

Between equipment unable to withstand the icy conditions and a faulty timer in an early camera, the project had a difficult start. “I thought I was going to buy off-the-shelf parts and I was naïve about the hardware. I ended up designing custom stuff,” Balog says. “We had a lot of money on the line, we had a lot of plans on the line, a lot of people on the line.”

It took months of trial and error, but their system of Nikon D200 DSLR cameras, solar panels, batteries, heavy-duty tripods, waterproof cases and wind-proof anchors is now reliable. Some of the cameras are checked on and their images downloaded only once a year.

Balog’s initial attraction to the ice was one of aesthetics—“the sculpture, the beauty, the light, the form, the color,” he says—and a forthcoming photo book from EIS will showcase those facets of the glaciers. But the technology innovated by Balog and his team doesn’t just allow EIS to take those pictures: the Survey aims to put them to good use. Balog, who had been a skeptic about climate change until about 20 years ago, says that seeing the evidence of climate change may make a difference where human stubbornness otherwise persists. He takes a zen perspective on change, believing that whatever landscape is underneath the glaciers, to be revealed by their melting, will also be perfect in its own way, but says he is disheartened by the extent to which people refuse to recognize their place in causing that change and its inevitable climatic, political and military consequences.

“The deeper I got into it, the more I realized that our aesthetics were the pathway to communicate the science effectively, the knowledge base that the scientists had,” Balog says. “The visual information can only be part of the puzzle but that’s the piece of the puzzle that I know how to put in the board.”

© 2007 Extreme Ice Survey

James Balog hangs off a cliff by Columbia Glacier, Alaska, to install a time-lapse camera.

The footage from Chasing Ice dates back to the very beginning of the project. At the time, Balog predicted he would want to have it on film but had no definite plans in mind. It was not until 2009 that Jeff Orlowski, who had begun as an unpaid assistant cameraman for EIS, asked Balog for the rights to put the video to use. The resulting film, directed by Orlowski, was given the Excellence in Cinematography Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and has been acquired for TV broadcast by the National Geographic Channel.

Although Balog was not involved in the film’s production, he sees it as a part of the larger mission of EIS. “I hope this becomes part of the wake-up call that will jostle people out of their intellectual hibernation,” he says, “and at the same time, if you stand back from all of that and you just look at the incredible beauty of what we’ve been shooting the past six years, it’s mind-boggling.”

Chasing Ice is playing at South by Southwest on March 15 and March 16. Find out more here.

James Balog, founder of the Extreme Ice Survey, is a recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence, International League of Conservation Photographers Award, North American Nature Photography Association “Outstanding Photographer of the Year” award and others. Read more about him and the Extreme Ice Survey on their websites.

If a war photographer is awarded a Peace Prize, furthermore in a city once devastated by a war, then he must be a very special person and a truly extraordinary photographer. And he must have something to oppose to war.

For it is the nature of war to engage and take in everything, to occupy and appropriate,  without exception. Which war film, for example, isn’t, deep down, a glorification of war, even against better judgment, and often even in spite of the best intentions?

And: It is in the very nature of images to represent what they depict. “What you see is what you get.” That’s exactly what makes them so very powerful. It’s almost like trying to square the circle if you want to dissociate yourself from what an image presents and conveys, let alone try and tell the opposite of what it shows.

War is a huge, infernal industry, the largest one on this planet. It seems presumptuous for one man to attempt to stand in the way of this machinery. Once war has broken out, everything spirals out of control almost immediately, turning even the armies and the soldiers who fight in it into helpless onlookers, victims of their own hubris. Who would dare then to oppose it and put it into perspective with mere… photographs. Who would seriously deploy cameras against tanks?

Just make the effort and visualize it for yourself! After all, almost all of us take pictures today. Even your cell phones don’t come without a camera any more. Or perhaps you have one of those small, convenient digital devices. Or you may even own some  professional equipment… Just imagine going to war with that! And imagine doing so just to take a picture to undeceive the entire world and tell them what’s going on there. Yes: a photo that would influence the outcome of the war or even end it! Right. That would be sheer madness!

All right then, imagine just this: You want to change the life of ONE person with a  photograph. That alone is an enormous challenge, if you think about it. The short moment when you look through the viewfinder or at the tiny display, as you point the camera at something, and finally press the shutter button… that second is supposed to achieve something, to capture something and thus captivate, and thereby move somebody, or more so: even shake up the world?

How can that be possible? Who do you have to be to attempt such a thing? How… would you possibly go about it?!

James Nachtwey’s images give us an accurate idea of how he “goes about it,” in the true sense of the word: where others “just want to get out of here,” that’s where he goes. He travels, in principle, in the direction of places that other people are only desperately leaving from, or have already left in a hurry, or can’t leave anymore.

It is with that first movement that he’s already opposing war: With himself. With his safety, his life, his affection, his conviction. All of the above are captured in his images.

“Wait a minute!” you may object. “Perhaps he gets a kick out of this going-to-war thing, or maybe he is some kind of thrill-seeking tourist. After all, there are people who climb up skyscrapers or walk tightropes at dizzy heights or hurl themselves out of planes or jump off bridges—things which none of us would do, but which a few others apparently like to do. Couldn’t Nachtwey be one of those?”

If he were, he surely wouldn’t win a Peace Award, he would just win some medal as an action hero. This James Nachtwey may have the same first name, but he certainly isn’t a James Bond type. Who is he then?

I don’t think you have to know a photographer’s biography to understand who he is. That’s what he shows us in each of his pictures. Each photograph contains a second one, invisible at first, that doesn’t reveal itself immediately. It’s a “reverse angle,” if you will, a “counter-shot.” That reminds us that taking photos is also called “to shoot pictures”… Yes, the camera is shooting back, is literally “backfiring!” The eye that looks through the lens is also reflected on the photo itself. It leaves a faint, sometimes shadowy trace of the photographer, something between a silhouette and an engraving, an “image” not of his features, but of his heart, his soul, his mind, his spirits. Let’s stay with the first and simple word for a moment, “the heart.”

The heart is the real light-sensitive medium here, not the film nor the digital sensor. It is the heart that sees an image and wants to capture it. The eye lets the light in, sure, which is why we also call it a “lens,” but it doesn’t “depict the image,” it doesn’t “depict”  anything. Nor does the retina nor the nerve cords that transmit the information. The “image” is created “within.”

There, it is matched with many other signals that are coming in at the same time. Some of these are related to formal or aesthetic criteria, like to composition, focus and contrast, or to the overall impression and to details. Other signals are of an ethical or moral nature. What’s going on here? What’s happening to the people in front of my camera? What does their dignity consist of? Or rather: what is violating that dignity? What is that image telling us? Which history leads to this moment, and what continuation does it suggest? How do I react to it as the one who is seeing it, as the witness with the camera? Am I sure I’m free of prejudices or, worse, cynicism? What is it about this image that touches me? Do I have the right to show it to others? How will it affect other people? Could what I see be possibly misinterpreted? How can I prevent that from happening? Would it help if I took a step forward or to the side? If I stepped back a little more? If I left this or that out of the frame?

There are a thousand signals and messages arriving simultaneously, all of which have to be processed within a fraction of a second. The hands are already part of the thought process as they correct the frame, the finger already knows what’s coming and presses the shutter button.

What I’m trying to say is: The photograph that’s just being created includes all of these thoughts, processes them as another kind of light, “an inner light,” depicts them and “contains them” at the same time that it deals with “the outer light” and the outer events, thus producing next to the objective picture the invisible portrait of the photographer himself, that “counter-shot” I mentioned earlier.

And all of this isn’t happening at a birthday party, or on a football field, or at a rock concert, but in a war. Everything is raw, tense, loud, cruel, out of control, insane, incredible, awful, unfair, perfidious… But that’s exactly why the photographer has to be just as precise, quick, careful, considerate and dependable as if he were at a wedding or on a red carpet. No, that’s not true: he has to be even more precise, quicker, more careful, more considerate and more dependable. In war, often enough, you don’t get a second chance.

The photographs exhibited in the Dresden Museum of Military History represent a small selection of the many pictures that James Nachtwey has taken in over thirty years as a traveler and documentarian. They were taken in Afghanistan, in the Balkans, in Rwanda, Chechenya, Darfur, at Ground Zero in New York and in Iraq. This list could easily be extended to include images from Sudan, from Northern Ireland, from Romania, and so on, and so on.

James Nachtwey was in “The Heart of Darkness,” to quote the title of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel. If ever someone actually was there, it’s him! One might think that this darkness shows through, that its grim, depressing reflection makes its way through the photographer’s eye, weighing down his heart, his soul, his mind, his spirit.

And indeed, very often that’s exactly what we feel watching TV documentaries, or seeing newspaper or magazine images: that the atrocities we see depicted have hardened the photographer’s or cameraman’s heart. We can often tell that he was already looking the other way while he was taking the picture, was already done with all that death, starvation and fear around him, was only thinking about himself, his own salvation from all this hell, was no longer really WITH the subjects in front of his camera, and no longer really willing to watch death at work. Taking a picture can be a form of no longer wanting to see.

In all of James Nachtwey’s images we can also perceive (at the same time, in that reverse angle) that he didn’t want to look the other way, that he wanted to endure the sight and watch exactly what was standing or lying there before him, that he knew he owed it to the people, the dead, the starving, the sick, the entire situation in front of his camera, that he’d see and show it as exactly as possible, wide awake and with wide open eyes.

If someone’s dignity has been violated James Nachtwey doesn’t violate it a second time, as a voyeur would—but he makes an effort to restore it. (Oh yes, photographs can do both!)

Now, am I just making this up, or do I have something to back up my impressions?

I believe that all we really have to do is take a closer look. All we have to do is train our eyes to see not just the PHOTOGRAPH itself, but the ATTITUDE of the eye and the heart that took it.

Every look represents a certain attitude or state of mind, your gaze just as well, at any given time. Interest, boredom, disgust, indifference, sorrow, love, surprise, curiosity, hatred, cynicism, affection, respect, aversion, exhaustion, frustration…whatever guides our eyes is depicted along with the subject when a camera is lifted to the eye. There is no picture that wasn’t taken with an attitude of some kind or other.

And nowhere is this more necessary than when you stare death in the face, when you’re confronted with violence, despair, the abyss, the darkness. You can make out and decipher in each and every one of his photographs the attitude of James Nachtwey. It is no secret.

I’m just picking an image of his from this exhibition that at first glance isn’t all that “warlike”: Three children, little girls, are standing behind a tree. They’re covering their eyes with their hands. Some distance away a helicopter is landing or lifting off, clouds of dust swirling around. We immediately recognize these helicopters. There are usually guns protruding from the fuselage, and indeed, there they are. These roaring bumblebees are bringing troops, weapons, bombs… in short, war from above, out of the blue, and just as quickly as they came, they’re gone. You immediately hear the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Apocalypse Now.

The children are everything but Valkyries. Their colorful clothes, the slippers on their feet, or the little one’s innocent best Sunday shoes and socks, all tell us how ill-prepared they are for what is coming their way, inevitably, or what is leaving them behind, possibly, like astronauts would arrive or leave on a distant planet. A few moments ago the girls were scampering around, laughing, without a care in the world…and then came the invasion of the foreign gods.

The photograph invokes what may happen next or what might just have happened. Whichever the case, these children will remember this moment as long as they live. The caption that I’m turning to, after I have tried to decode the picture myself for a long time, says: “El Salvador, 1984. The army evacuates wounded soldiers from a village football  field.” Well, this explains it a bit.

Still the message of any photograph is only the photograph itself. In museums, you might have noticed, many people pounce on to the caption, before they even look at the picture. It’s as if they were trying to protect themselves from the image. Reading creates distance, you’re not really concerned any more, the information lets you stand above the things that might otherwise trouble you.

I ask you urgently: First read the photographs closely, also here, in this extraordinary Museum of Military History. Then you will realize, in the case of this picture we just looked at: There’s a lot of tenderness in it! This photo was taken by someone who was more interested in the children than in the troops and their business. It’s not a subject you would expect to see in a picture taken by someone who went there to photograph the war. To see (or find) this, you have to be on the children’s side. You can’t cover your own face with your hands and try to protect the lens of your camera from the dust. You have to do the opposite: open your eyes wide and risk the dusk in your face and your lens.

I’ll move on to another image, almost the opposite to the one before. The Balkan Wars.

A serbian infantry attack near the village of Rahic, outside Brcko, was succesfully repulsed by Bosnian forces. The Serbs who where killed in action were collected from the battlefield and taken behind Bosnian lines. They were dumped in a farmyard, identified, and returned to their comrades the following day.

It shows a truck unloading its horrific cargo: dead bodies are sliding down from the bed. The driver is leaning out of the window of his truck so he can see where he is dumping his load of dead men. Among the bodies there is a wheelbarrow, in a moments it will also come crashing down… The dead are all fully dressed. The way they’re sliding down the tilted surface, with their heads dangling, shows that rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.

A hand is held up in the foreground, partially covering the lens. We see the palm of the hand, the thumb pointing down. This is the right hand of a man who is standing with his back to the photographer. This isn’t someone trying to stop the photographer from taking pictures; he’s just motioning with his hand to direct the truck driver to the pit that we know must be there, just outside the photo… The most horrifying thing about this scene is that it feels just like an everyday building site.

Do we even want to know which war this is?

A woman who had ventured out to buy supplies was killed by a mortar shell. Her neighbor discovered her lying in the street.

Yes! The caption explains it: “Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bosnian army has successfully held off a Serbian infantry attack near the village of Rahic. The bodies of Serbian soldiers who fell in the battles have been brought from the battlefield behind the Bosnian lines on a truck…”

James Nachtwey is extremely precise. He is a witness, (the word “eye witness” is fitting more than ever) and he takes this responsibility very seriously. He is someone who not only wants to describe what he has just saw, but also wants to record it with words as precisely as possible so that it can be used as evidence.

We can see that the image wasn’t taken at eye level. The photographer didn’t look through the lens, it was “shot from the hip,” so to speak. As quick as a flash, before the man who raised his hand could turn around. If he had turned around, the image would have been a completely different one, in fact, might have become impossible.

As with most of Nachtwey’s photographs, the lens is a slight wide-angle. With such a lens, the photographer has to be right where it’s happening. To be able to take photos such as this, you have to get close to the scene. You can’t just easily zoom in from a distance. The photographer himself has no distance, he is there. And therefore we are, too, no matter if we are sitting in our living room, stand in a museum, or hold a book or a magazine in our hands.

These are pictures by someone who has a strong desire for justice in the face of the horror unfolding right before his eyes, someone who puts a lot on the line for this. Even if the photo is being taken within the fraction of a second by lifting the camera just a little more—he still instinctively finds the right angle at the same time, as if his hands were able to see…With all his senses he is present! With his body and his mind and his heart he really is where his photo takes place! The picture is a part of his own existence.

Or let us look at a third image taken during the Chechen War in the mid-nineties. A village road, a singed wooden barn in the foreground. On the snow-covered road in front of it lies a dead woman, wearing a simple winter coat. Beside her on the ground, a purse. We see the sneakers and her thick socks, her left foot strangely and unnaturally twisted. Is it broken, was she shot at?

Around the corner comes another elderly woman, cautiously, almost looking at the sight with curiosity, “the neighbor,” as the caption tells us, a peasant scar wrapped around her head. She stops in her tracks and stares at the frozen body in the snow. You can almost see her thought: “That could be myself lying there!” There’s a hint of surprise in her stopping short, looking at the scene. The simple, one-story houses in the background bear witness to the place’s poverty. There are shingles missing, or is that damage caused by the war, too?

Actually, we can’t help thinking or perhaps it’s more of a vague feeling than a conscious thought: this photo is “just altogether impossible!” There’s something about it that we can’t quite get into our heads. In a movie, OK, we could accept a scene like this… And then we realize what it is that we think is so “impossible” about it: it’s the fact that the photographer was present that he was part of it, at this very place, that he captured the neighbor right at the moment of recognition, as if she were all alone at the scene, as if there couldn’t possibly be another person with a camera who’s not only watching, but creating evidence of the moment as well.

We are totally at a loss to explain the photographer’s attendance here. How could he make himself invisible like this? Unless he wasn’t there as a photographer in the first place, rather as someone who had just rushed to the scene as well, a fellow human being who was just as shocked, just as astounded… Someone who has become so much as one with his camera, that it indeed has become invisible to other people.

I’m also beginning to catch a glimpse of something else in each of the three images that I just instinctively picked out, almost arbitrarily: I can’t quite put the finger on it, but it seems to me that in these pictures the photographer doesn’t just see for himself! And this is something you can not at all take for granted!

Actually, the act of photographing is a very lonely job. You are mostly left to your own devices, especially when war is raging around you or hunger and death are haunting the land. But these photographs here all have one thing in common, an “attitude,” a point of view, the photographer’s awareness—whatever we call it—of standing where he is for others, of seeing on behalf of others, of exposing himself, and of giving testimony, for others.

Who are these “others” on whose behalf James Nachtwey goes to war, so to speak? Are they just the subjects of his photos, the starving, the dying, the dead, the perpetrators, the sick, the injured, the sufferers, the horrified? Or don’t these “others” also include us, the viewers, the very moment we begin to get involved with one of his images? When he makes himself a witness, and stands by this task, doesn’t he call us to the witness box as well?

If this is indeed the case, then James Nachtwey creates a community between the subjects of his photographs and us, a community that we can’t get out of so easily. He turns us into one humanity, not more and not less: Common humanity. The word “compassion” takes on its original meaning. (In German it literally means “sharing the suffering.”) It doesn’t connote condescension or “pity,” “the pitying smile,” but real empathy, when the suffering of others becomes ours as well.

Nachtwey manages to see things on behalf of both sides of humanity, the victims and the viewers, because his work is not only directed AGAINST something, against war, arbitrary violence, injustice or inequality, it is, above all, intended FOR (and dedicated to) the people he encounters in wars and in suffering, as well as for us.

I am aware that the word I’m going to use is somewhat antiquated, and it’s probably difficult to translate. This man is a “Menschenfreund,” a lover of humanity, and therefore an enemy of war.

And when he goes right to the heart of the war he does so on behalf of us, in order to force us to look closely, but also on behalf of the victims, as the eye-witness who wants to testify in their favor and belie war and its propaganda.

Maybe James Nachtwey is not just a photographer, but has a lot of professions.

He is also sociologist who doesn’t just dutifully record the phenomena and symptoms, but who wants to understand what caused them; a minister who knows that it is not consoling that gives consolation, but most of all being there for someone else; an archeologist who doesn’t just hastily burrow down into the dirt, but who carefully uncovers stone by stone; a poet who knows that he must never name things in plain words, but only invoke them in the reader; a philosopher who’d rather encourage people to think for themselves instead of self-righteously doing the thinking for them; a teacher who commands our respect because he respects everyone, including himself; a gardener who knows that you have to get to the roots when you want to pull out the weeds; a surgeon who knows that it won’t do just to operate on the fractures, but that you have to lay bare the trauma inside.

In short: a man who is able to look life and death in the eye, not because he is more courageous than we are, but because he lets himself get carried by all of those for whom he does it.

And because James Nachtwey is all of the above, because he has never stopped believing that there is reason behind his work, because he has never stopped believing that his images have their greatest possible effect only if the eye and the heart behind them have an unfailing faith in humanity and its ability for compassion.

For all of these reasons and many more we should stop calling him a “war photographer.” Instead, look upon him as a man of peace, a man whose longing for peace makes him go to war and expose himself… in order to make peace. He hates war with a passion, and loves mankind with even more of a passion.

I can’t think of anyone who would deserve this award, in this city of Dresden more than James Nachtwey.

Wim Wenders

Feb. 11, 2012

Wim Wenders is an award-winning German director whose film Pina is nominated for Best Documentary—Feature at this year’s Academy Awards. He is also the author of Emotion Pictures.

Keep up with James Nachtwey’s work on his Facebook page.

Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James, the team behind HBO’s The Loving Story, were secretly hoping to get a little more material when they went to show an early trailer of their documentary to the family of the movie’s subjects in the summer of 2010. The film tells the story of Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Loving, the serendipitously named couple behind the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, who were exiled from Virginia for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation laws. (The case overturned all such laws, making interracial marriage legal nationwide.) Buirski, the film’s director and writer, and James, her co-producer, already had a treasure trove of video footage of their subjects, but they thought a few more family snapshots would provide a nice touch.

Peggy Loving, the couple’s daughter, was impressed by what she saw. She told Buirski that she did have some family photographs, left the room and returned carrying 70 10-by-13 prints taken by photojournalist Grey Villet in 1965 for LIFE magazine.

Buirski, who has worked both as a photo editor at the New York Times and as the director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, immediately recognized what she saw. “Elisabeth and I just looked at each other,” she says, “and I think we might have even had tears in our eyes.”

It’s not unusual for a documentary film to rely on photographs to illustrate history, but The Loving Story demonstrates a unique way of doing so. Because Buirski had unearthed Villet’s photos, she was able to use the work of a single photographer to tell the story. And, for the most part, the photos used in the film are scans of the actual vintage prints owned by the Loving family. Buirski says that consistency allowed her to escape from the constraints of documentary style: rather than show a picture to go along with a specific point in the narrative, she was able to set a consistent mood and even, in some cases, to let the images speak for themselves without help of a voiceover.

The photographs also allowed the filmmakers to show the human side of the Lovings’ story, something that was not as present in the video footage. Most of the video used in The Loving Story was filmed by Hope Ryden, a cinema-verité filmmaker who had taken an interest in the case. The Lovings were initially reticent to participate. They were living in Virginia illegally and, rather than attempt to cast themselves as Civil Rights heroes, they were, as Mildred Loving puts it in one of Ryden’s interviews, just “trying to get home.” The couple was convinced by their lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, that Ryden was trustworthy; even so, Buirski feels that the Lovings put up walls when confronted with movie cameras and microphones.

Not so with Villet’s still camera. “A photojournalist like [Villet] tends to be able to disappear in a story like that,” says Buirski. As such, the photographs he took are more intimate than the video was. Rather than answer questions about legal matters, the Lovings kiss, hold hands and play with their children.

“[The photographs] opened up a window on their love,” says Buirski.

The Loving Story premieres on HBO on Feb. 14, at 9 p.m. ET.

An exhibit of Grey Villet’s photographs of the Loving family that were discovered in the course of filming is also currently on view, through May 6, at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

With that criterion in place, Ledner found that shooting pairs of animals was no more difficult than shooting them one at a time. Like human models, the animals brought their own personalities to the set and Ledner was able to capture the interplay of those forces. Also like human models, the animals brought entourages (a.k.a. trainers) who kept the stars focused on the task at hand—and who conveniently stepped aside when Ledner wanted to let her subjects off the leash, so to speak.

But unlike human models, the animal managed to make the group shots look effortless. “If you’re shooting a group of people, you have an agenda of who you want looking in the lens and who you don’t,” Ledner says. “To get everyone to look good at one time is harder than it is, I think, when you have a bunch of animals.”

Which is not to say that the photographer’s sessions with her animal models were all fun and games. Ledner—who owns three dogs, two cats and four rabbits, but does not frequently photograph her own pets—says that animal photography requires putting cuddliness aside. While people may get relaxed and happy with background music and a festive mood, quiet is important to help a dog (or a bird or a rabbit, as the case may be) maintain his concentration. Luckily, almost all of the animals that participated in TIME’s cover shoot were seasoned professionals. One dog named Billy had sat for Ledner twice in the past. The only non-professional at the session was the rabbit, who was, in fact, a real friend of Billy’s. “The rabbit was so docile. It would let the dog put its head smack dab on top of it. There was just total trust between these animals,” says Ledner. And the photographer was hardly upset about shooting an amateur model: “The bunny’s only six weeks old—and how can you be a pro bunny?”

Catherine Ledner is an American photographer based in California and author of two books: Animal House and Glamour Dogs. See more here.

Read more in the magazine: The Science of Animal Friendships.

This year’s winners are:

Evgenia Arbugaeva for Tiksi, the Far North
Rena Effendi for Capturing Coptic Life: Egypt’s Sectarian Struggle
Eric Gottesman for Baalu Girma
Sebastian Liste for The Brazilian Far West
Benjamin Lowy for iLibya: Libya’s Growing Pains
Justin Maxon for Murder That Goes Unsolved and Unheard
Donald Weber for War is Good*
Paolo Woods for Poor Rich

The eight grantees were selected from a field of nearly 100 photographers nominated by ten professionals (including, in the past, TIME’s own director of photography, Kira Pollack). The winners will receive, along with funding, editorial guidance and research support to continue their work, which explores such diverse topics as peasant works in China and violence in the Pennsylvania projects.

The Emergency Fund, which was founded to counteract the shrinking of opportunities for long-form, socially-conscious photographic storytellers, is now in its third year of granting prizes. The program continues to grow, says Emma Raynes, the Emergency Fund’s program director. “We’ve been able to put more energy into helping photographers put depth into their work,” she says. Increased integration of social media has also made a difference; the Emergency Fund had already used Kickstarter to add to its power to help photographers, but the organization has expanded its presence on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Raynes says that this year’s winners tended to step away from traditional documentary and photojournalism styles and put a new emphasis on creative visual language. Benjamin Lowy, for example, made use of the Hipstamatic iPhone app in his photographs of Libya. “We wanted to invest in projects that were incredibly ambitious,” says Raynes.

In addition to funding the work of established photojournalists, the Magnum Emergency Fund awards scholarships to emerging photographers from nonwestern countries, for them to attend a 5-week summer program about documenting human-rights issues.

The 2012 Human Rights Fellows are:

Poulomi Basu, 29, of India
Arthur Bondar, 28, of Ukraine
Liu Jie, 30, of China
Pooyan Tabatabaei, 28, of Iran

And for all its support of photographers, the Emergency Fund aims to do more than help them do their work. The Foundation wants “to reach beyond the photography community into communities that are concerned about the issues,” says Raynes. “The main goal of our program is to get the work seen.”

Read more about the Emergency Fund on LightBox here.