Hornstra’s latest book is on the restaurant singers of Russia’s favorite Black Sea resort town of Sochi. Any self-respecting restaurant on the coast has a live house singer to belt out sappy Russian chansons—take a vodka-soaked ballad and drop in a techno beat, all at full volume—from behind an electric keyboard or a laptop. Sochi is the center of the world, as far as this type of live entertainment is concerned, and Hornstra saw it as the perfect metaphor to depict the city and the region, traveling to more than 60 restaurants over 100 miles of coastline in 2011 to make the 37 photos for the book. The pictures mercifully strip away the noise of the music and cancel out the dark rooms and sharp flashing lights with Hornstra’s trademark, even lighting, allowing the viewer to patiently examine every telling detail of the interiors, including the faux Greek, French, Roman, Slavic and American décor.

Sochi Singers is in fact only the latest installment of The Sochi Project, Hornstra’s five-year commitment to exploring the region in the years leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics Games, which Sochi will host exactly two years from this month. Partnering with writer and filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen, who wrote the essay in Sochi Singers, his goal is to paint a more complete picture of the area than the public is likely to see during those few short weeks in 2014. They have already traveled to a Soviet-era sanatorium outside of Sochi and the troubled region of Abkhazia and the Republic of Georgia, located only 13 miles along the coast to the southeast. Next month they plan to travel to the Caucasus mountains to the east, and the infamous breakaway republics of Dagestan, North Ossetia and Chechnya.

As Russia cycles into the news again next month when former president Vladimir Putin will likely be voted back into office, it is Hornstra’s commitment to “slow journalism” that allows audiences to put the headlines in context, as well as to see past the propaganda and pomp and circumstance that will inevitably surround the Winter Games. By examining the stark contrasts contained within the small region of the world, and recording both what changes—and what remains the same—Hornstra’s work reflects something deeper and more historic: Russia’s continuing search for a post-Soviet identity.

Rob Hornstra is a Dutch photographer. Learn more about the Sochi project here. The Sochi Singers series recently won first place for the Arts and Entertainment—Stories category at the World Press Photo awards.

They approached the project with the express intent to “dismantle preconceived notions of the prostitute as sexual deviant,” an idea that Markova-Gold has explored in earlier projects on her own in the Bronx and Macedonia. Dohrmann had previously lived in Morocco, where she learned Moroccan Arabic and had begun writing about her interactions with female Moroccan sex workers. Their method is collaborative and unconventional, pairing Markova-Gold’s impressionistic and occasionally inscrutable photographs with Dohrmann’s narrative and very personal literary style. With time and space, the pair was able to cultivate deep and nuanced relationships with several women, resulting in a complex and holistic story. Working in a developing Islamic country during the Arab Spring allowed the pair to explore how other issues affected the subjects of their project, such as globalization, religion, politics and migration.

A wide-ranging and challenging subject deserves such a patient and extensive approach, and the pair has recently begun to work with their material in earnest. Typically the work for the Lange-Taylor prize is not revealed until the project is finished, but Dohrmann and Markova-Gold agreed to share some of the ideas they are working on exclusively with LightBox.

Markova-Gold shot primarily with film, but also used her iPhone to provide more instant feedback and evidence of the situations she was shooting. The photographs in the series above consist of iPhone photos, processed with the ShakeItPhoto app, which she found to be the closest approximation to her film work.  As the project progressed, she found the images resonated beyond their immediate use and ultimately are relevant to the final project. They are paired with some of Dohrmann’s preliminary writing, which was written in a daily log of their time together, and focuses on one of their subjects, Khadija. The final project, slated for completion by the end of the year, will feature film and digital photography from Markova-Gold, and a long-form essay by Dohrmann.

Editor’s note: All of the Moroccan women’s names published here have been changed in the interest of protecting their safety.

Tiana Markova-Gold is a freelance documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. More of her work can be seen on her web site and her blog.

Sarah Dohrmann is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her work has appeared in Bad Idea: The Anthology, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and The Iowa Review. You can read more of her work on her blog, Und You Vill Like It.

To see TIME’s 9/11 Commemorative issue visit Beyond 9/11:Portraits of Resilience.

The devices used to make the pictures (custom built over several months by Hepner herself, and programmed with the help of collaborators) consist of a spinning strip of eight LED lights that flash different colors and patterns based on the binary code of each character in a given tweet. Each character in a tweet blinks once, and a tweet of up to 140 characters takes about 3.5 seconds to appear. Hepner then uses a medium-format film camera on a tripod to photograph the device.

While each tweet is a unique reflection of the specific data in the tweet, the resulting images are abstracted enough that the language cannot be read or inferred from the content of the image. In the same way that a traditional photographic portraits only captures someone’s likeness for a brief moment, each image from Status Symbols is just one fraction of someone’s virtual persona.

One of Hepner’s two devices is an interactive sculpture that grabs content live from Twitter, and will be in use tonight,  Aug. 26, at the Houston Center for Photography’s annual fundraising party, SPIN7. Send a tweet regarding “the future of photography” during the party (8p.m. to 11p.m. CT) and include the hashtag #status and your Twitter portrait will be seen at the show. Hepner will also be selecting individual tweets to photograph later for a mini portfolio of portraits from the event. Check her site in a few weeks to see if she makes a print of your #status portrait!

Follow @lorihepner on Twitter, and see more of Hepner’s work and purchase prints directly on her web site. Hepner’s work is currently on display at the Houston Center for Photography.  You can read more about her process from the Brooklyn Museum and watch a video of her discussing the early work at TEDx Leadership Pittsburgh. Status Symbols will be part of the forthcoming 14th International Photography Festival in Lishui, China, from Nov. 5-9, 2011. Hepner is also currently an Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny.

TIME commissioned renowned aerial photographer and photojournalist George Steinmetz to document the effects of the drought in Texas, New Mexico, and Georgia. On his journey, Steinmetz quickly found that even in the driest sections of the country, the cliched idea of the bowl of cracked earth and dust was neither common nor representative of the crisis. In many places, green on the ground was simply evidence of the intensity of water usage for irrigation, homes, and recreation. The effect of the drought can only begin to be appreciated when we see the lakes and reservoirs where the water is coming from, or what the land looks like when we are forced to stop watering.

Reporting by Alyson Krueger

There may be no more curious remnant of the Muslim kingdom that Ibn Battuta knew as al-Andalus than the festival of Moros y Cristianos—Moors and Christians. Commemorated in towns throughout Spain, it enlists entire populations into elaborately costumed “battalions” to re-enact the medieval surrender of Spain’s last Muslim rulers to the conquering Catholic kings.

TIME sent photographer Lucia Herrero to photograph the festival in Mojácar, in Andalusia — three days of parades, competitions, music, and performance — where she found that the country’s Muslim past is woven into its present in ways both obvious and subtle.

Lucia Herrero is a freelance photographer based in Barcelona. Her long-term project TRIBES will be screened at the Belfast Photo Festival, and the work will be collected in her first book, coming out in September.

Shot over more than a decade in a wide range of both obvious and unexpected locations, Plumb draws a thread between seemingly disparate settings and subjects, illustrating just how intertwined our lives are. Plumb explores our use of animals for entertainment, companionship, food, and work, and how their images populate our consciousness, our rituals, our myths and symbols, and even our corporate branding. As Plumb shows, many of these relationships are defined by contradiction: we are drawn to the wild nature of animals, we admire their beauty and nobility, we anthropomorphize and even worship them, and yet we strive to control them, to restrict them to the roles we prescribe, to keep them in their place—they are always subject to the whims of our attention and neglect.

Animals Are Outside Today is currently available from Radius Books, and showing at at the Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami, Fla. until June 25.

After studying photography in college, Arnold sought a way to combine those two parts of his life. He eventually found work on a crab boat in Alaska’s Bering Sea, an extremely dangerous and once obscure job, now popularized by the television show Deadliest Catch.

Arnold is transparent about being as much participant as observer in his pictures, and some of the most beautiful images from his seven years aboard the Rollo and the Two Bears are both more collaborative and introspective in nature, documenting the drudgery of the work, reflecting the surreal perception of the world brought about by isolation and lack of sleep during months spent at sea, and exploring the complicated and sometimes violent relationship between humans and the natural world.

Nazraeli Press recently brought the work together in Arnold’s first book, Fish Work: The Bering Sea. Signed copies can also be purchased directly from the photographer.

Corey Arnold is based in Portland Ore., where he is represented by Charles A. Hartman Fine Art as well as in Los Angeles by Richard Heller Gallery. His second book, Fishing with My Dad, will be released by Nazraeli early this summer.

The Haitian Creole word “konbit” denotes the idea of similar talents joining together to work towards a common goal. The founders — a group of photographers, educators, and artists — came up with the idea for Fotokonbit a few years ago to “empower Haitians to tell their own stories and document their community”, but it was the 2010 earthquake that gave the group new urgency. They saw that its greatest purpose could be a unique way to give the Haitian people a voice in the portrayal and documentation of — and advocacy for — their own circumstances during the aftermath of the earthquake, when the need for aid and attention was greater than ever.

About half of the participants in their first workshop for adults were people who had been displaced from their homes in Port-au-Prince by the earthquake.  Fotokonbit also managed to acquire a few digital cameras that participants can use to photograph weddings, baptisms, and other events as a way of establishing a new source of income. The group is currently raising funds to build a photography studio with the same idea in mind.

The images produced by the workshop participants can serve multiple purposes — the most striking ones appear in a traveling exhibition, others become part of a historical archive, and some serve as personal mementos for people who may have lost the majority of their personal possessions in the earthquake.

One of the most innovative uses for the photographs has been as documentary evidence for aid organizations.  During three recent workshops for teenagers and younger adults living in tent communities, participants were asked to photograph aid efforts that they thought were successful, and to demonstrate needs that had not yet been met.  Fotokonbit’s partnership with the American Embassy helped to get the work seen by the international aid community in Haiti.

At a time when the world’s attention has moved away from Haiti, Fotokonbit is giving Haitians themselves an opportunity to represent themselves photographically, and finding original and compelling ways to use photography to call attention back to Haiti and its struggles.

More than 50 pictures by Fotokonbit workshop participants will be exhibited in the SHOTS slideshow at the Charlottesville Pavillion at 9pm on Friday, June 10th, as part of the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Va. This event is free and open to the public.

For information about supporting Fotokonbit’s photography workshops, please visit their donations page. 

Verbal and written accounts of the destruction of Hiroshima by atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 are well known, but photographic images of it have always been relatively rare. While the U.S. government attempted to control the circulation of any such images following the end of World War II, the irony is that it was also the source of the largest body of photographs of the aftermath of the event. That work, made in 1945 for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey — initially classified and subsequently lost for more than 40 years — is the basis for a new exhibition at the International Center of Photography called Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945, and an accompanying catalogue from ICP/Steidl.

Photographers in the Physical Damage Division of the Survey were tasked with documenting the broad extent and mundane detail of atomic destruction for later analysis by architects and civil engineers. The images they made helped form the basis for civil defense architecture in the U.S., especially in the early part of the Cold War, from the design of bomb and fallout shelters to suburbanization.

Much like the pictures in Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence, these photographs are removed from their original “useful” context, and presented as both historical documents and art objects. They also open up a new avenue of understanding of the scope of violence and destruction at the original “Ground Zero.”  Sixty-five years of obscurity have not robbed these literally post-apocalyptic pictures of any of their emotional power, nor their tragic beauty.

Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 is on view from May 20 to August 28, 2011 at the Museum of the International Center of Photography.

The exhibition opens today, May 14, at Fovea’s gallery in Beacon, N.Y., and will feature work by TIME contract photographer Dominic Nahr, Christoph Bangert, Shiho Fukada, Donald Weber, James Whitlow Delano, Adam Dean, Ko Sasaki, Carlos Barria, and Q. Sakamaki, among others.

While his primary goal was to make aesthetically pleasing photographs, Fair aims to exploit that attractiveness for his unabashedly activist mission, explicitly stating his intention that “the viewer will come away with an innate understanding of [his or] her complicity and a will to make a difference.” The images in the book are complemented by a handful of essays written by prominent authors, scientists, and environmentalists, including climate scientist James Hansen.

Traveling from Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico, and to many locations in between, Fair relies on complementary charter flights from two volunteer-based environmental aviation organizations, Lighthawk and Southwings, to make his signature images. From their small aircraft he is able to get close enough — but not too close — to the toxic processes and wastes associated with the extraction and production of oil, gas, coal, aluminum, fertilizers, paper, refrigerants, and more.

At the end of this week, Fair’s work on fossil fuels will also be exhibited in Landscapes of Extraction: The Collateral Damage of the Fossil Fuels Industries, part of a three-day Earth Day event at Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

That day, Edmonds had been photographing the president giving a speech inside the Washington Hilton Hotel, and after the speech was over, he rushed outside to get a shot of the President waving to the crowd before getting into his limousine. “That day was the first day I was going to cover him where he was President of the United States,” Edmonds says. “I’d photographed him thousands of times getting in and out of a limousine, but never with a Presidential seal.”

Edmonds had the camera to his eye when the President started to wave, and as would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr., fired his gun, Edmonds made the famous sequence of three images that would be published around the world. “Sometimes you make your own luck, and I just happened to be at the right place at the right time and ready when this happened,” he recalled. “The most important job is to watch the President. I did everything I was supposed to do.”

As an AP staff photographer, Edmonds did not own the negatives or the copyright to the photographs he had made. “I have never seen all of the negatives. I couldn’t tell you how many outtakes there are.” So unlike some freelance photographers at the scene, Edmonds did not make much extra money from his employers. “I got a $50 a week merit raise,” he says.

Initially, Edmonds was convinced he had upset his employers because he had failed to get a picture of Hinckley. When Edmonds returned to the office, he was told to call the head of the AP, and he assumed the worst. On only the second day of his six-month probation as a new hire, he feared he would be let go. Instead he was told, “You nailed it, kid,” and “We’re lifting your probation — we’re going to keep you.”

Edmonds won the Pulitzer Prize for news photography as well as many other awards that year.

We interviewed him after the shoot and asked him to compare his experience and the pictures he made in 2001-02 to the ones he made for TIME.