Petrushka Bazin Larsen holds Ila, her five month old daughter, while working from home as Program Manager at The Laundromat Project, a non-profit offering art workshops in laundromats located in low-income neighborhoods. Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky

When it comes to motherhood and work, everyone has an opinion.

And at this point, it feels like I’ve read all of them. I know the numbers on paid maternity leave. I know why it’s OK to have one, multiple or no kids. I know why it’s important for all women, including mothers, to lean in, and also the flaws with that concept; that stopping women with families from dropping out of the workforce must involve paying them more; and why we should stop calling women“Mommy.” I am a female, mid-twenties millennial with an Internet connection, after all.

But no one who I have read, heard or watched has approached the topic quite like Alice Proujansky.

When Proujansky, a documentary photographer, had her first child several years ago, she knew her work was going to change. “I wasn’t going to be traveling as much for awhile,” she told me. “These concerns were so overwhelming my mind — questions about work, motherhood and identity, and the way that they can inform each other and support each other but also really conflict.”

So she began seeking out the people all around her who were dealing with the same questions — mothers with careers outside the home who she knew personally, or who were friends of friends. She started asking questions and taking photos.

“Just by watching them and talking to them, I could feel that what I was doing wasn’t crazy, it wasn’t insane,” she said. “It was hard, but it was important and doable.”

Pregnant Assistant District Attorney Lucy Lang talks on the phone outside of her office. Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky

“I wanted to make photos that showed the way I thought, the people I knew who reflected my own experience with it. We love our children and we are engaged with them but we are also engaged with the world. Those things can inform each other,” she said.

By making a wide range of mothers’ work more visible, Proujansky hopes to add more depth to the conversation around parenting, which she said often oversimplifies the role of mothers.

“I think our culture tends to sort mothers into strange and conflicting categories, where we’re expected to be self-sacrificing and put on a pedestal … but at the same time we aren’t supported, we aren’t given paid maternity leave, [and] there is derision in the way people talk about motherhood,” she said. “There are all these conflicting stereotypes about it.”

Painter Marcie Paper breastfeeds her ten-day-old baby, Andi Paige, in the studio where Paper works for a conceptual artist, managing his studio and producing his paintings. Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky

“I think it’s really important to see women and our bodies in a way that’s multifaceted and honest,” she said. “I think that most of the images that we see of women don’t depict us in this wide variety of roles, where we are being physical in our jobs as we’re mothering, and then we’re also exploring our intellectual and creative self. It’s really important to me to present a multifaceted image of women because I don’t see enough of that.”

You can see more of Proujansky’s work below.

Seven months pregnant, Vice President of Programs and Education at Brooklyn Children’s Museum Petrushka Bazin Larsen fixes her daughter, Ila Bazin Larsen’s “Elsa dress” while working on a stressful day when child care had fallen through. Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky

Miki Kamijyo greets her year-old son Oliver as she returns from her job as a lawyer. Her husband Aaron Myers was eager to stay home caring for his son because Kamijyo brought home a bigger paycheck than he did, because she was more passionate about her career, and because both he and Kamijyo were raised by single mothers. Myers teaches DJ classes a few nights a week and gets some help with the baby from Kamijyo’s mother. Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky

Pregnant Assistant District Attorney Lucy Lang checks her work email while trying on a dress to wear to the Frick Collection Young Fellows Ball. She serves on the museum’s Young Fellows Steering Committee and helped to plan the ball. Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky

Kamdyn Moore and her wife Tomara Aldrich check to make sure the breast pump is working as Tomara nurses their four-month-old son, Spencer, and pumps simultaneously before work Photo and caption by Alice Proujansky.

The word “parallax” describes the camera error that occurs when an image looks different through a viewfinder than how it is recorded by a sensor; when one camera gives two perspectives. Parallax is a blog where photographers offer the unexpected sides and stories of their work. Tell us yours or share on Instagram at #PBSParallax.

The post These photos show an honest portrait of working moms in America appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

So, maybe your Instagram pics of #delicious #foodporn never look nearly as scrumptiousas the real thing.

Don't despair — it's not you. It's just that your food is too real.

Professional food stylists use all sorts of cheats to make their dishes appear perfectly delectableon camera — often incorporating completely inedible ingredients. They garnish roasted meat with motor oil to make it glisten just so, redden fruit with lipstick and sub in glue for milk. They stash tampons soaked in hot water behind food to make it appear steaming hot.

In their online series Faking It, U.K.-based art director Sandy Suffield, along with photographer Dan Matthews and food stylist Jack Sargeson, expose and poke fun at some of this trickery. Their photos imagine what lies just outside the frame of the food photos you'd find in glossy magazines and best-selling cookbooks.

"These days, there's a sort of voguish thing for food that looks beautifully disheveled," Suffield says. "So food photographers are perhaps 'faking it' a bit less these days."

But in the days of analog cameras and pre-Photoshop, when photographers depended on big, hot studio lights that would melt or discolor foods, stylists had to get creative to make food look good, Suffield notes. "So for our shoot, we used some of the tricks from that era," she says. "And we even styled it to look a bit '70s."

Suffield researched the kookiest tricks of the trade, and got Sargeson to help her whip up some of the fake dishes featured in the photos. "It's just really funny," Suffield says. "It's funny how amazingly unappetizing some of this food really is."

We asked Suffield to walk us through how she created the deliciously fake foods in the series.

In the old days, food stylists would make fake champagne "out of water, soy sauce and Alka Seltzer— so that's what we did here," Suffield says. "And then you can see we used little plastic blue things for artfully propping up the food."

"Normally, they'd use instant mashed potatoes to make fake ice cream, which wouldn't melt under the hot studio lights — but we actually didn't end up using that method," Suffield says."Instead, Jack made that ice cream out of lard, powdered sugar and food coloring. And where the ice cream touches the glass and begins to melt, he made this substance — I think using just powdered sugar, water and food coloring — that's a different viscosity, it's a bit thinner. And he just painted that in."

"I think the level of detail here makes it all funnier," she says.

"The grapes have a bloom — just that really lovely, blue-ey, dusty look — that's created with talcum powder.You'll also notice lots of exposed toothpicks, and that's just so the grapes look tastefully composed.The fishing wire is there for the same reason."

"Instead of edible gold leaf, we just used spray paint to decorate the cake. And that shaving powder is used to make the cream, which won't melt as readily as real cream."

"The motor oil is used to baste the meat, to make it shiny. And you'll also notice there's some boot polish in the shot — that's used to darken the meat if it looks too red. And then the hairspray is used to give a gloss to the carrots."

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

From the windows of restaurants, grocers and department stores, they beckon: Perfectly swirled ice cream in a cone, elaborately whipped cakes topped with red strawberries, a glistening piece of raw fish atop rice.

They're meant to whet your appetite, but don't bite them: These are plastic display foods, and they're ubiquitous in Japan — designed to advertise the foods available for purchase inside. They're also big business: A fake mug of beer, for instance, can sell for U.S. $150, says photographer Norbert Schoerner.

Schoerner first encountered Japan's intricate display foods during his first trip to Japan in the 1990s. "I not only found it quite odd and surreal, but it also sort of triggered a fascination with the idea of the process and the whole culture that sits behind that," he says.

You might think of these display foods as "artisanal plastic" — that pineapple or pasta dish in polyvinyl chloride was likely hand-crafted by a highly trained artist. "There's quite an intricate craftsmanship that goes into that," Schoerner says.

His new book, Nearly Eternal, co-authored with art director Steve Nakamura, visually explores the questions of reality versus artifice such fake foods raise. "In a way, the book is less about food than about how we formulate our desire," he tells us.

Actually, Schoerner and Nakamura didn't so much author the book as create it: There are no words, save for this inscription from the Bible that opens the book — it's designed to "point people in the right direction," Schoerner says.

"All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied" — Ecclesiastes 6:7

I asked Schoerner for insights into some of the images.

Upon first glance, I assumed this image was set up for the shoot — with someone delicately gripping an egg yolk in between chopsticks. Come to find out, "this piece was not custom made for the shoot. The piece actually exists as a display food," Schoerner told me. It's all one plastic piece.

He says it's meant to mimic the raw eggs that are often dropped into soup ramens and hot broths in Japan to produce a slightly poached egg.

This image, the book's cover art, is "a very powerful image, because the fruit doesn't look artificial at all," he says — until you touch it. "If you actually pick one up, you realize how artificial they are." The praying mantis, on the other hand, looks fake, but it's real. "You'd think it'd be quite hard to wrangle, but it was really, really patient — the praying mantis. The lighting setup and placing the food was more complicated than getting the praying mantis."

"Both [the steak and the toast], I'd say, are classics within the environment of display foods," Schoerner says. "What's important about the image itself is mainly the contrast between those two elements, because they represent very different spheres of a culinary context. What it comes down to is that the toast and butter looks really amazing and really quite tasty, whereas the meat itself, it's certainly retained its artificial quality in the image."

That contrast between what seems real and fake creates tension in the image, Schoerner says. "We showed it to a few people and they go, 'Yeah, what's that? A picture of a piece of toast? What's the big deal?' "

"The product [coffee cup and cream] itself is probably one of the first ones I really noticed," while traveling in Japan, he says. "I don't really know why the culture has created surreal aspects for [the coffee cup product and the pasta product (at top)] because with all the other display foods, they strive for realism. ... Within the book, they very much function as a couple of marker points" to highlight that hey, this is fake food.

"I hate to tell you, that one is real," Schoerner says. In Japan, he says, there's a side culture — "championships and display shows — where people who make the display foods or people who do it as a hobby compare their craft. And within that culture, we've come across a few people who started to create rotten food. I mean, you can find tomatoes with ants crawling all over them, and moldy bananas or whatnot. So it's very odd. There is potential oxymoron contained in this practice [of creating rotten plastic]."

The image, he says, "plays with the notion of beauty, meaning this idea of a beauty ad with the fingernails. There's hardly any retouching in this picture, so the fingernails really look like that. They've got this lacquered sort of chrome-y texture to them. We really liked the contrast with the strawberry. ... It looks quite fake, I think."

"That's the only [plastic food] that we weren't allowed to take away [from the manufacturer]. So we shot that one at the factory. It's too heavy and too expensive and too fragile. I can't remember what the exact price was, but I think you're looking at about $500 of cake. "

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight: Imagine finding a library from the 1940s, a window into the time before the deportation of some 70,000 Jews from what was then Czechoslovakia.

Jeffrey Brown reports on a photographer who learned something about himself in the decades-old bookshelves.

JEFFREY BROWN: At first glance, you might wonder: What is this? What am I looking at? Then it hits you: These are books, fragments of books, in various states of decay.

They were photographed where they’d been left, an abandoned schoolhouse in the town of Bardejov, Slovakia.

Yuri Dojc, a successful art and commercial photographer who’s lived in Canada since 1968, returned to his native country after his father’s death, to learn more about his own Jewish roots.

He came upon the schoolhouse almost by accident, when a man he’d met told Dojc there was something he must see.

YURI DOJC, Photographer: And then he take us across the square. He opened this door. And we were just stunned.

JEFFREY BROWN: You had no idea what you were walking into?

YURI DOJC: I had no clue. But I was stunned by the beauty of decaying books. I wasn’t thinking about history at that moment. It’s the visual effect of these old books was so beautiful.

JEFFREY BROWN: Beautiful, but horrible at the same time, as the sense of history set in, for this was a Jewish schoolhouse, left as it had been in 1942, as Jews were being rounded up and taken by train to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The story is told in a documentary Dojc worked on with another emigre from the former Czechoslovakia, Katya Krausova.

The two began by seeking out and listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors.

So, you went to meet these people, essentially, right? And one led to another.

KATYA KRAUSOVA, Director, “Last Folio”: Yes, exactly.

So, here is a mixture and a selection of some that, by the time I joined him, were dead, and others that we had found together, like this couple.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. Tell me about them.

KATYA KRAUSOVA: They’re very important to the whole story, because we heard about them in another town. And she didn’t want to even let us come to the house.

And, eventually I said, “Can we just come and have tea?”

And once we were there, she said: “I might as well tell you my story. Maybe nobody will ever come again to ask.”

And so she told us her story, a very strong woman who talked about how they were betrayed and how, when they were taken to the camps, they actually believed that they were going to work.

And she said that: “None of us realized once we got out of the truck that we would never be able to say goodbye to anybody again.”

JEFFREY BROWN: Almost all of these people are now gone. In “Last Folio,” the two try to capture what remains.

So these are books literally sitting on the shelves as you walked in?

YURI DOJC: Yes, but I focus on this particular group.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why?

YURI DOJC: There is something like a rhythm here. There’s colors, a chance this color to this color to this. So there’s a beautiful — look at this. The shades of color, they are just stunning.

JEFFREY BROWN: First an aesthetic experience, and then more, the books standing in for, almost becoming, the lives of the people who’d held them in their hands.

YURI DOJC: I changed as a photographer on this project.

I only started understanding what it’s all about. Until then, I was just — I had fun. I understand certain aesthetics. But I was missing something. And I realized that you don’t take art pictures with your eyes. You take them with your brains, and I didn’t know that.

JEFFREY BROWN: What does that mean, to take it with your brain?

YURI DOJC: You try to express something which was — which is more than just what I see. This is a process of showing you what happened to those people. Like, I’m projecting really people and this whole pain and all that is lost into the pictures.

JEFFREY BROWN: And there was one more shock for Dojc and Krausova when they visited another abandoned building that contained books from all over Eastern Europe, including, incredibly, one that had belonged to Dojc’s grandfather, who died at Auschwitz.

YURI DOJC: That was a miracle, just pure, pure miracle. And then I was thinking if this whole journey’s not a miracle.

KATYA KRAUSOVA: So, nothing new under the sun, but very important to be outraged.

JEFFREY BROWN: For Katya Krausova, there’s more: important echoes to the destruction of people and culture still going on today.

KATYA KRAUSOVA: You know, what is happening right now in the Middle East is very tragic, because libraries are being burned, and monuments are being destroyed.

And that is our heritage, and we need to somehow do everything to preserve it. So, when I say privileged to have worked on this, it was a privilege to learn people’s lives and their stories. And I think we need to go on telling it to each other and to others.

JEFFREY BROWN: From Washington, D.C., I’m Jeffrey Brown for the “PBS NewsHour.”

The post Seeing Holocaust survivors’ stories in the books they left behind appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Olivia Bee started taking pictures at 11 when she meant to enroll in a video course but ended up in a photography class. She became obsessed with the medium, and started posting her photos online — which is how teen style blogger Tavi Gevinson discovered her. To Gevinson, Bee perfectly captured a teenager’s sense of incredible longing.

When Gevinson started editing the online magazine Rookie, she knew she wanted to work with Bee. But Gevinson wasn’t the only one. When Bee was 15, she shot her first ad, for Converse. Since then, she’s shot for brands like Hermes and Apple and publications like "W" and "The New York Times Magazine." Her first book, “Kids in Love,” just came out.

“Pre-Kiss” from “Olivia Bee: Kids in Love” (Aperture 2016)

( © Olivia Bolles)

The two have since become good friends, and Gevinson and Bee sat down in Studio 360 to talk technique, working as artists while still being teenagers, and some of the downsides of social media.

Tavi Gevinson: You’ve talked about pictures that feel like memory. How do you use technique to evoke that sense of nostalgia?

Olivia Bee: Evoking nostalgia has a lot to do with technique — with the colors you use, or using grain. But I think you have to be a really good editor. You take five rolls of film and you pick one. Which one evokes that emotion that you’re trying to go after? Which one has the composition but also the intention and the memory behind it?

People are always asking me if I feel I missed out on being a teenager because I was documenting it. Do you feel that way?

I get asked that all the time. No, I don’t think I could have just been there. I would have freaked out! I have to make stuff out of what I’m doing or else I just can’t live my life.

You and I were talking recently about changes we’ve made in how we use social media and how healthy these changes have been. Talk about what you’ve started doing and why, and the effect it’s had.

Every time I post an Instagram, I delete the app off my phone. And then I download it again when I need to post an image for my photo account. I think having followers is this perspective that’s maybe not super-healthy. I don’t want to see what everybody’s doing all the time because it takes me out of my own zone. I don’t want to read the comments about something that’s really close to me. Part of making work and giving it away is having it live in the world, and people will have an opinion on it. But I don’t really want to read these things all the time. It’s so much noise.

“4th of July (The Family You Choose)” from “Olivia Bee: Kids in Love” (Aperture 2016)

(© Olivia Bolles)

“Untitled (T-shirt Weather Heaven)” from “Olivia Bee: Kids in Love” (Aperture 2016)

(© Olivia Bolles)

Laurie Simmons began taking pictures professionally as a young woman in the 1970s. She shot homey scenes— kitchens stocked with food, living rooms with sofas and TVs. Except really tiny, because she only photographed doll furniture. Critics connected Simmons’ work with that of her friends Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth, fellow photographers who were also subverting outmoded feminine ideals.

Guest host Molly Ringwald

Since then, Simmons has continued to use the camera to question our strange relationship with gender: she’s photographed accessories like watches and handbags dancing on human legs, Japanese love dolls in states of ennui, and women with realistic eyes painted on their closed eyelids.

Simmons’ daughter is Lena Dunham.  Before the TV show “Girls,” Dunham’s breakout film “Tiny Furniture” was inspired by her mother’s art.  Simmons also plays the artist mom in the film — a crabbier version of herself.

For our special episode of artists talking with artists, Simmons sat down to chat with Molly Ringwald about her career as a pioneering artist — and being directed by her daughter.

Molly Ringwald: I couldn’t help but notice when we played that clip from “Tiny Furniture,” I think you blushed and you grabbed your face in horror.

Laurie Simmons: I find Siri to be an excruciating character. I give a lot of credit to my daughter to get me to go to that place. People who saw the film assume that’s who I am. I do feel sort of embarrassed. I don’t know how I did that.

I read somewhere that you don’t really like dolls that much. How did your work with dolls happen?

My assumption was the camera could tell lies. I tricked myself into thinking that the small-scale rooms could be confused to human-scale rooms. When I was buying all this dollhouse furniture, it would come with people who I would toss into a corner of my studio. So one day I just picked one up and started using it. Everything changed that day.

There weren’t that many female photographers doing what you were doing. You must have really wanted it.

I sort of sneaked into art school. Because somehow my parents saw that I could potentially be someone's wife with artistic talent and I could show my paintings in the PTA show. My mother said, "You can go to art school as long as you get a teaching degree so you have something to fall back on." Which is what mothers always said. You needed a fallback, in case you got divorced. So I did go to art school, but managed to never get the teaching degree. My daughters will always say, “How did you make it happen?” They give me a lot of praise. But as you know, when you're in the middle of it, you're not thinking about how special you are. You're thinking about how you're going to make it work. 

“Day 30/Day 2 (Meeting)” from the series “The Love Doll” (2011)

(Courtesy Laurie Simmons/Salon 4)

“Day 31 (Geisha)” from the series “The Love Doll” (2011)

(Courtesy Laurie Simmons/Salon 4)

“Woman Listening to Radio” from “Early Black and White” (1978)

(Courtesy Laurie Simmons/Salon 4)

“Moonwalk Apollo II,” from the series “Tourism” (1984)

(Courtesy Laurie Simmons and Salon 4)

“Ajak (Turquoise)” from “How We See” (2015)

(Courtesy Laurie Simmons/Salon 4)

Part 5 of the TED Radio Hour episodeCrisis and Response

About Kitra Cahana's TED Talk

Photojournalist and conceptual artist Kitra Cahana describes how her father dealt with a stroke that left his body completely paralyzed, and how his experience of "locked-in syndrome" opened a world of unexpected opportunities for him.

About Kitra Cahana

Kitra Cahana is an American photojournalist and conceptual artist who immerses herself in the societies she documents.

She was born in 1987 and was raised in Canada and Sweden. She has a B.A. in philosophy from McGill University and a M.A. in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universitat in Berlin. In 2014, Cahana became a TED Fellow.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Before cellphone cameras and Instagram, there was Polaroid. That funky-looking camera took hold as a social phenomenon nearly as quickly as the little, instant photographs they brought to life.

For portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, Polaroid has meant something more. For the past 25 years, from her studio in Cambridge, Mass., Dorfman has photographed thousands of intimate moments — from anonymous families to illustrious figures like Julia Child and Errol Morris.

But if you're thinking she uses those small, portable cameras most people know as Polaroids, you might be a little off-base. Hers is actually a specially designed, large-format 20-by-24-inch Polaroid, which is taller than she is.

When she first encountered the camera in the mid-1970s, she knew she'd found something remarkable in the 6-foot box on wheels.

"You don't fall in love with how it looks so much as you fall in love with the pictures and Polaroid film," Dorfman says. "You pull the film out of the camera from below, you guide it out. There's something about that gesture that I've always said reminded me of delivering babies. But it was the color of the film that was so gorgeous. And anything can go wrong, so every one is like a miracle."

But before she discovered her life's work as a photographer, growing up in a quiet Boston suburb, Dorfman hadn't even considered the artistic life as a possibility.

"I was born right here in Boston in a Jewish neighborhood," she says. "It was a real sort of shtetl, where everybody knew everybody else and everybody knew everybody's business."

There weren't artists or countercultural types.

"The way I was brought up, the expectations were very low, and they were all about who you would marry and when you would get married, the younger the better," Dorfman says. "And I was a rebel. What were they gonna do with me? I think that was what was whispered behind my back. I was the kind of little girl who couldn't keep their white shoes white."

She adds: "I knew I wanted an unusual life, a creative life — even though God knows I didn't know the word creative. But I know I didn't want a plain old life."

The opportunity to escape her suburban beginnings came when she graduated from college and decided to take the leap to New York City. She went to work as a typist at Grove Press, a publishing house where poets and novelists often dropped by to copy their manuscripts on the in-house empico machine, a Xerox prototype.

"I was the girl who ran the empico machine, and I would answer the phone in those days," she recalls, "and then I would say, 'Oh, hi, James Baldwin.' "

One day, a visitor came to the office, someone Dorfman hadn't heard of before — a poet named Allen Ginsberg.

"So I was sitting at my desk in the middle of everything, and Allen had just come back from San Francisco. And everybody was just buzzing. He said, 'Where's the can?' So that was how I met Allen."

After her stint at Grove Press, Dorfman moved back to Cambridge, floating between various jobs, but nothing seemed to stick.

"The way Google is a San Francisco company, Polaroid was a Boston company," she says. "In Cambridge, if you were young, you kept on meeting people who worked at Polaroid."

It was one of those people who tipped Dorfman off about an experimental, large-format camera the company had developed. When she saw it for the first time, she knew she'd found her photographic calling. But she needed to get access to that rare camera.

"I thought, 'How am I gonna get Polaroid to help me?' And I thought, 'I can tell them I can get a picture of Allen Ginsberg!' " she says. "So actually I did, in February of 1980. Allen was coming to Boston, and I got the guy from Polaroid to give me 10 free pieces of film."

And they ended up being the very first photographs she got published.

"I guess it all came back to Allen. Allen was definitely my big break," she says. "And I wasn't such a bad break for Allen — because after all, we were friends for almost 50 years."

As part of a series called My Big Break, All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Golden” from photographer Andy Yeung’s “Look Up” series, for which he photographed architecture in several countries from a dramatic perspective. Photo by Andy Yeung

Photographer Andy Yeung’s message is simple: just look up.

Growing up in Hong Kong, where he is still based, Yeung saw geometric repetition and patterns of light hidden in the sky-high structures of the city. He began photographing these elements of the high-rises and skyscrapers he saw; the result was “Look Up,” a series that he hopes will make people reconsider their everyday surroundings.

I asked him about the hidden textures that he finds in skyscrapers and how he chooses his subjects.

How did you begin photographing these buildings, and why did you choose this perspective?

I’m a born-and-raised Hong Konger who’s keen on architecture and landscape photography. I developed a passion for photography at an early age when I received my father’s old camera as hand-me-down. I believe that a great photograph can speak to people’s emotions and make people stop and think, and that’s what I’ve been trying to achieve. For the past decade, I’ve been traveling to different parts of the world trying to capture the beauty in both architecture and nature.

Hong Kong is a crammed city with lots of high-rises and skyscrapers. It’s smaller than New York in terms of size, but its skyline, made up of 7,000 skyscrapers, is longer than that of New York. I notice that commuters in Hong Kong go in and out of these high-rise buildings every day with their noses buried in their phones, not noticing how interesting these buildings look. As a born-and-raised Hong Konger, I’m deeply concerned that people are so wrapped up in their own lives that they just don’t take notice of the beauty around them. I decided to put together a series titled “Look Up,” hoping people can put down their phones, look up and appreciate the beauty of architecture that they see every single morning.

“Black Hole,” a photo taken in Shenzhen, China. Photo by Andy Yeung

How do you decide what buildings to photograph? What qualities of a building are you attracted to?

I choose buildings with unique appearances or interesting textures. I’m also intrigued by those old public housing buildings in Hong Kong with repetitive geometric patterns. My favorite site in the city is Victoria Harbour.

What is your process of composing a photo?

I usually don’t rush to take building shots right away. I first take a close look at the outside of the building and take time to think about the possible good angles according to the building structure and texture. I don’t think I should try to include everything I see in one single image. I like to keep it simple. In terms of the shooting time, I prefer the “magic hours,” when the light is most beautiful.

The message I’m trying to send is that people should start to pay attention to the buildings they see and spend time in everyday. The focus is on buildings not the people, hence the no-people choice.

“Compact City #02,” a photo taken in the Quarry Bay area of Hong Kong. Photo by Andy Yeung

What is your favorite photograph that you have produced? Can you tell me about the process of creating it?

“Compact City” – Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. This is one of locations where “Transformers: Age of Extinction” was shot. I love the fact that the building is rich in colors. It looks like a disaster area at first glance, but when you look closer, you will see it’s not that chaotic. This is very characteristic of Hong Kong architecture.

I took the picture, then edited it with image enhancement techniques like color correction and selective color adjustments and image retouching techniques, removing other objects from the photo.

You can see more of Yeung’s photos below.

“Four Seasons in the Clouds,” a photo taken in Guangzhou, China. Photo by Andy Yeung

“Taijitu #03,” a photo taken at Hong Kong’s Nina Tower. Photo by Andy Yeung

“Belief,” a photo taken in Vienna, Austria. Photo by Andy Yeung

“Follow the Light,” a photo of the Lai Tak Tsuen public housing project in Hong Kong. Photo by Andy Yeung

The word “parallax” describes the camera error that occurs when an image looks different through a viewfinder than how it is recorded by a sensor; when one camera gives two perspectives. Parallax is a blog where photographers offer the unexpected sides and stories of their work. Tell us yours or share on Instagram at #PBSParallax.

The post These photos prove you should look up on your daily commute appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Tributes continue to flood in for celebrated Malian portrait photographer Malick Sidibe, who died of complications from diabetes in Bamako on April 14, at 80.

Mali's culture minister, N'Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo, says Sidibe was a national treasure and an important part of their cultural heritage, whose loss the entire country is mourning.

Nicknamed "L'Oeil de Bamako" — the "Eye of Bamako," his capital city — the slim man with the big smile, kind heart and twinkling eyes had a gift for detail encapsulating the exuberance of his country and compatriots, reflected in a lifetime of lyrical, feel-good photographs.

Sidibe's distinctive and timeless black and white images, from the 1960s and '70s — the photos he's best known for — remain fresh and exciting more than half a century later. Often with a touch of humor, his pioneering portraits captured the spirit of newly independent Mali, relishing its freedom and having fun.

Admirers praise Sidibe for showing a different face of Africa, recording a moment in Mali's history and swinging the spotlight on local popular culture and the innocence that era represented. It is a far cry from Mali today, battling extremist violence and fundamentalism, preceded by a military coup in 2012.

Sidibe's modest and popular studio in Bagadadji, in Bamako, was a magnet for young people and families who wanted to show off their treasures — be they stylish sunglasses, a new pair of belted, flared pants, a psychedelic shirt, a guitar, a motorbike with a mother, father and child posing upon it, a new braided hairdo or simply a smile.

Even in recent years visitors continued to gravitate toward "Studio Malick" to have their portraits taken. Sidibe seemingly had time for everyone.

Couples dancing were a clear favorite. Sidibe was a master at capturing motion, as Malians embraced Cuban and Congolese rumba, rock 'n' roll, the twist and James Brown.

He was known to travel across Bamako, attending parties and snapping photos of smiling young people in their finery.

All posed enthusiastically, immortalized by Sidibe's large Rolleiflex cameras — in and outside the studio.

As a visual social commentator, he chronicled daily life, and nightlife, in the capital, in vibrant studio and street scenes, and in portraits in people's homes or at public venues and functions.

He'd crisscross the city to catch relaxed young people or teens in swimwear along the banks of the River Niger or children giving an impromptu acrobatics display.

He inspired generations of Malian, other African and foreign photographers, who admired his simplicity, humility, humor, encouragement and kindness.

Global recognition took time. Sidibe's first exhibition in Paris, in 1994, organized by his friend, gallery owner Andre Magnin, brought him almost instant international fame. His work appeared in galleries and museums in the U.S., France, Britain and beyond, as well as in Africa.

Magnin described his friend as an "author of thousands of images of tenderness and beauty."

Sidibe loved to travel. A 2001 profile in Paris-based Liberation newspaper refers to an invitation from Harvard University. "I wasn't intimidated," said Sidibe. "The amphitheater was impressive and the interpreter was the one trembling!"

The Jack Shainman Gallery, in New York, which has represented Sidibe since 2002, is currently holding an exhibition — what has become a retrospective — of his oeuvre.

"There's an amazing turnout of people from all different places coming to see his work," said Shainman.

Sidibe was not destined to become a photographer. As a boy he tended his family's sheep in their village, Soloba, about 200 miles west of Bamako.

He told Liberation "even before I picked up a camera, I was deep into images." Sidibe remembered from his childhood a sunrise that "blocked out the hill in a manner that reminded me of Napoleon's hat."

After attending French school, he went on to study jewelry-making and art in 1952 at the Ecole des Beaux-arts, then known as the Maison des Artisans Soudanais.

French photographer Gerard Guillat met Sidibe and hired him as an apprentice. In 1962, two years after Mali's independence from France, Sidibe opened Studio Malick.

Sidibe received numerous accolades. He was the first African photographer to win the coveted Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and also the first to be awarded the prestigious Hasselblad prize in 2003.

Dozens of people flocked to the Bagadadjistudio after Sidibe's death was announced on Friday. Many others took to social media.

Paris-based Malian singer Inna Modja tweeted a photograph of her mother, grandmother and herself taken in Sidibe's studio, titled, "We won't sit down and shut up."

The portrait is part of Modja's 2015 music video "Tomboctou," shot in Sidibe's studio with its distinctive, stripey fabric backdrops. A camera shutter is a central feature of the song.

His death marks the end of a remarkable era in African and world photography.

But as Sidibe himself said — "I believe the photograph is the best way to live on, after death."

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Polar explorer, journalist and award-winning photographer Sebastian Copeland has captured breathtaking images of the North Pole. In Arctica: The Vanishing North, he hopes that the photographs illustrate the natural beauty of the landscape and raise alarm about the effects of climate change on the arctic environment.

Event: Sebastian Copeland will be speaking at the Strand Bookstore (828 Broadway & 12th Street) on Friday, April 22 at  7:00 p.m. for an Earth Day panel discussion. 

Wearing a black coat and holding a cane in his right hand, Movses Haneshyan stands in front of a life-size canvas. He stares at a winding road, a fir tree, distant mountains and a deep blue sky. He approaches the image slowly, and begins to cry, "My home. My Armenia."

Haneshyan says he last saw his home a century ago. As a 5-year-old, he was forced to flee during what Armenians call Medz Yeghern, the "Great Crime" of 1915 — the systematic murder by Ottoman Turks of Armenian people in their historic homeland, which now lies in modern-day Turkey. The total number killed has been estimated at between 800,000 and 1.5 million. To date, more than 20 countries have officially recognized the killings as genocide, but Turkey is not one of them.

Today, more Armenians live outside their country than inside. I am one of them. I was born in Moscow to Armenian parents, and was raised in California. For most of my life, I struggled with my Armenian identity, partly because of the history I inherited. I was separated from my father as a child, while he stayed back in Armenia. It took me 15 years to make the journey back to Armenia to find him. I was 23.

A year ago, I began to research the remaining survivors of the genocide as part of an IDeA Foundation-commissioned project. I took on this project because I wanted to connect. I wanted to learn about the history in a deeper way. Ages can be hard to confirm, but I perused Armenian voter registrations online to see who was born before 1915, and then traveled across Armenia to find them.

I met 10 survivors along the way. Among them were Movses Haneshyan, Yepraksia Gevorgyan and Mariam Sahakyan— who all, according to those records, have lived past their hundredth year.

All three fled the now-Turkish territory with their families after the mass killings. None ever returned. The stories they told me were traumatic — from the violence each lived through as a child to the lengths their parents went to get them out safely.

Gevorgyan, now 108, escaped by crossing the Araks River to what is present-day Armenia. She described seeing Turks kill her father, throwing him into the water, which she described as "red, full of blood."

Sahakyan, 102, was taken into a Kurdish family home, where her family members became servants. She and her relatives later escaped to Syria. She recalls her mother telling stories of how the family hid in grass and walked at night for three days to flee Ottoman soldiers.

Her memories have now been passed down to her two sons, who are proud that their family comes from Sason, a region in southeastern Turkey that holds particular historical significance for Armenians. It's the setting for an Armenian national epic from the 8th to 10th centuries and it tells how Armenian fighters, led by a legendary ruler named David Sason, repulsed repeated Arab invasions.

When I met them, it had been nearly a century since the survivors had seen their home. I wanted in some way to reunite them with their homeland. Based on the childhood memories they shared with me, I traveled to Turkey, took an image of what remained and brought it back to them.

When I told the survivors I would be going back, each one asked me to fulfill a wish.

Movses Haneshyan drew a map of his village and asked me to find his church and leave his portrait on the footsteps of what are now ruins.

Yepraksia Gevorgyan asked me to help her find her older brother, from whom she was separated after 1915.

Mariam Sahakyan requested that I bring back soil for her to be buried in.

I never found Gevorgyan's brother. But I returned with a story for Haneshyan, and a container of dirt for Sahakyan. When she opened it, she touched the land and thanked me. "You've brought the smell of my village to me,"she said.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

As a celebrated portrait photographer, Platon Antoniou (who goes professionally by his first name) is well known for his close-up depictions of the powerful. He has aimed his camera at the faces of celebrities and world leaders ranging from Vladimir Putin and Moammar Gadhafi to Willie Nelson and Woody Allen.

"Sometimes," he says, "you look in their eyes and you see angels. And sometimes you see demons."

Platon's 2011 book, Power, featured photos of more than 100 world leaders. In Service (Prestel Publishing), the British-born photographer turns his lens on U.S. military personnel and their loved ones.

"I have a rather strange perspective on the times we're living in," he says, "because I've had very intimate moments with heads of state, and yet I've also had these very powerful moments with the people who have to play out the policies that our leaders put forward. It leaves me as someone in the middle."

The book results from a project that began back in 2008, an assignment Platon took on after he was appointed as Richard Avedon's successor as staff photographer at the New Yorker. (He now dedicates much of his time to The People's Portfolio, a nonprofit organization he founded to highlight under-reported stories around the world).

First, he spent time with troops while they trained in a simulated Iraqi village at the U.S. Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, before they were deployed. Then he waited for them to return. When it was possible, he photographed them again — or the loved ones who survived them.

"I had done so many portraits of leaders," he says. "And what is great leadership? We have seen it being about confidence, charisma, strength, decision making. We all know that side. But there's another side that's far more complicated – that's the idea of service. I wanted to find out what happens when you're asked to do something and you do it – and it's very dangerous, and the sacrifices you make. This is where I learned about the other side of leadership, which is service."

In the waning weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign, the New Yorker published several of Platon's images. One, showing a grieving mother at Arlington Cemetery embracing the headstone of her son — a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq — caught the eye of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who highlighted it as he announced his endorsement of Barack Obama, who he hoped would be a unifying figure as U.S. president.

"The picture of the mother is the big question of our time: What is it to be American, to be patriotic, to give good service?" Platon says. "Unfortunately, the reason why the [image of the] mother was so powerful — that terrain is even more heightened now. I'm left with this sadness. Did we learn nothing?"

What did you first set out to do in this project?

We had an election coming, as we do now. We had this idea: how do we do a large-scale photo essay that provokes and stimulates respectful debate? I was interested in looking at poverty in America, but other issues came up and the U.S. military was one of them.

We focused on America's role militarily, and slowly, it morphed into this idea of service — it became less about war and was more about the human story behind the war. We wanted to avoid politics. We had this idea not to photograph anyone famous. This is really about ordinary men and women and families who all give great service. It was certainly an emotional roller coaster and it pushed me so far.

Describe the training camp you spent time in.

It's 100 square miles in California, in the desert, where they built Iraq. [The simulated Iraqi village] was called "Medina Wasl." The soldiers called it "The Suck." They were sent there for the last two weeks before deployment to really get their heads in the zone. There's tanks tipped over on fire. All the signs are in Arabic. They had a Humvee which was exploded five times a day on routine patrols with IED explosives. It was more and more disfigured as the demonstrations continued.

You feel like you're in Iraq, it's 105 degrees. [The soldiers] are ambushed by role-playing terrorists, people are screaming. They use amputee role players coming out screaming, holding part of their foot.

I was allowed to photograph all this. I built a small studio and invited [people] in.

They called this street [at the camp] "Trauma Lane," and that was the working title of the book for a long time. As the project shifted to the return home, I realized there was something more than just trauma here. There was tenderness, feelings, love and compassion. So it shifted to something more universal, which became Service.

The conditions sound challenging, not your usual studio photography.

It was a godforsaken place. I've never been to war, I've never experienced anything like that. I was suddenly put in this hellhole of a place, and that wasn't even the real thing. It felt a bit like Apocalypse Now. Things start to get a bit warped. The Hasselblad, the camera I use, has this leather on the side glued onto the metal, and it was so hot, the glue was melting. All the casing started to come off.

We worked 15-hour days in the heat for four or five days. There was nowhere to shower. At night, you could hear explosions going off, but after awhile you'd fall asleep because you were exhausted.

You had a rude awakening one night, right?

I remember I felt this pressure between my eyes, and I woke up and there was a gun — I don't know what kind of gun because I'm not a gun kind of guy — but it was one of these machine gun things pointing right between my eyes, with night vision. The guy looked like some version of Robocop – I nearly had a heart attack. He just whispers as he presses the barrel more and more into my flesh, "Don't. Move."

It was a [simulated] nighttime patrol mission. I just lay there. He steps over me and just carries on walking. I wanted to say, "But I'm a New Yorker photographer! I'm just here doing portraits!" But obviously you daren't speak.

I actually found the guy who did it the next day. I wanted to show everyone what it felt like – "would you help me do that?" He said sure. And he points the gun right at the camera. It's not the same, because it was nighttime and I was half-asleep. But the feeling of that giant looming over you with perspective, the gun literally coming into your face, was the nearest I could get to it as a portrait photographer.

You met some of the soldiers when they returned.

Yes, they were deployed. Then they come back and it's all different. I waited with the families. I waited with this young lady [Beth Pisarsky]. The Humvee pulls up, [Airman First Class Christopher Wilson] steps out, and when these guys come back, they are built like rock — not just physically, but emotionally.

[Pisarsky] charged at him like a team of wild horses and almost knocked him over. And it was almost like an attack of love. I remember having to tilt the camera because I wasn't expecting it, it surprised me. It was the beginning of emotion — now I'm not just seeing a sense of bravado, I'm now seeing what did it take to be a good servant. What price did you have to pay? You know he's come back different.

There's another shot of a soldier hugging [a loved one] and there's a tear rolling down his face that isn't just happiness. It's complicated. And from now on, it's going to be really complicated. He's seen things you can't unsee. And she hasn't. But she's experienced that they had a relationship that's now going to be fundamentally changed.

So it became really human. It stopped being about the military and war, and turned into this human story that I never really expected it to be. I ended up taking pictures of love in the second half of the book.

Tell me about the portraits you shot at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

I did a portrait of [Jacquelyne Kay] with her arms around [husband Sgt. Tim Johannsen] in a wheelchair. And it became what I saw as this transference of power. She's his wife and saying, "I've got him home now, no one is going to hurt him anymore." The picture is divided into two halves. I remember thinking consciously, do I show his legs cut off? Maybe I should be more sanitized about it. Then I thought, no. You have to acknowledge both — the love and tenderness, and the brutality, danger, pain and trauma that's also there.

He closed his eyes in her embrace. It was the most powerful thing. For him to show a sense of vulnerability, it made him all the more tough for me.

You also photographed people grieving in Arlington Cemetery.

I was photographing many bereaved families I had appointments with. And I was dreading that day. I was worn down. I also read the weather reports and they said in D.C., there were going to be terrible thunderstorms and wind and rain. I use strobe lights, it's a whole operation, and on top of that, I'm dealing with the most acute sensitivities you can imagine. I am literally treading on sacred ground here. I was really nervous.

As the rain faded away, I noticed at the far corner of the cemetery a woman I didn't have an appointment with. She brings a foldout picnic chair and would sit and read [at her son's grave] every day. It was such a powerful and tender thing to witness. The dialogue between mother and son continues even after his passing. I went over and asked permission to take her picture.

She puts the book at the bottom of the headstone and goes behind it and cuddles the headstone as if she is cuddling her son. And then she closed her eyes. I was standing on the wet ground, where her son is buried, and I was so aware of the delicacies of my body language, and I was really looking at her face and hands and her mannerisms. I had no extra attention left over to notice that the book was the Quran or that the name on the headstone was a Muslim name. I thanked her and asked her name and she said, "Elsheba Khan." I still didn't think.

I took the pictures back to the magazine. When we were doing the edits, it was [New Yorker editor] David Remnick who said, "Look at that." We thought, "Oh my goodness." We ran it in the photo essay with all the other pictures [in September 2008].

And shortly thereafter, that photo came up when former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Obama for president on Meet the Press. He warned against divisiveness and said, "I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine."

He went on to describe exactly my picture. I'm sitting there with my mouth open.

That picture was described as a game-changer, but it was not [a photo] of anyone powerful. I had worked with all the power players. But it wasn't any of those that shifted people's hearts and minds. It was an ordinary person, dealing with the one thing we have in common — we all love and lose. We're all united by that. I received a letter from [Powell] that said, thank you for showing me in a very painful way what America really is all about.

Unlike the celebrities and power players you've photographed, here you were dealing with people often in a state of vulnerability. How did you establish trust with them?

It's the difficult question — how do you do that. I wish I had a gimmick, I wish I had a trick. Trust means you have to be courageous first, with all your emotions open and so respectful and humble that there's no room for your ego in this space. I am your servant and I am here to tell the world what happened to you. I can't do it alone. I need you to be courageous with me. And if you really mean it, if you're 100 percent committed, you can't bullshit that. You can't fake it. It's called authenticity.

And of course, that's very traumatic. It's very traumatic for me. Before a shoot, I don't have a storyboard. I don't know whether this person will be angry at the world – or maybe at me – or if they will break, how to deal with vulnerability. You have to be ready for the whole human condition to play out. You go in so raw. You just have to make very quick emotional decisions.

And sometimes I get it wrong.

How so?

I went to a lady's house. Her name is Jessica [Gray]. Her husband wrote an op-ed criticizing America's policy. Shortly after that, he was killed in Iraq. They'd recently had a little girl.

I'm setting up my studio in her living room. I'm dealing with a woman's pain and courage, facing a new life that's going to be difficult. That becomes consuming. I saw the flag they'd draped over his coffin and I said, "Would you be prepared to hold the flag?" She said of course and took the flag out of the box.

I asked her, how would you feel wearing a piece of his clothing in tribute to him? She said, that's a good idea. She had received a box of his clothing, it was at the base of the bed but she had not yet had the courage to open it. All his clothes, his army T-shirts were in the box. She said, maybe now is the time to open it.

And then I thought, oh – what am I doing here?

She undid one latch. I undid the other. And as she lifted the lid, she burst into tears.

I felt so ashamed. I really blew it. I thought, for the sake of a photograph, you went too far. I said, "I feel so ashamed. I didn't want to hurt you. Let's not do this. This was a bad idea."

She said, "You don't know why I'm crying. I've just realized they washed his clothes and I wanted to smell him again." She said, "The pain is there whether I open the box or not. Now the box is open and I think I would like to wear his T-shirt."

This is not the look of a victim. This is the look of a woman trying to pull all her strength together to face the future.

Have you stayed in touch with Jessica Gray or any of the other people you photographed for this project?

Most were deployed; a few I did have some contact with. In putting together the book, in some cases, I found out some passed away or changed completely. I very rarely seek to have a friendship with the people I work with. Sometimes it happens accidentally. All my attention and affection goes into the work. And my subject knows that. When I'm actually taking the picture, that's the moment. I know there's a good chance I'll never see this person again.

I've done some emotional projects before, but not at this relentless pace, day after day. The way I work is, I'm very subjective. I'm not the objective journalist who doesn't get involved. I'm not the "observer." How the hell can you be objective when you're in a widow's house and she's standing there in front of you and she's crying? You can't. You're in. You find yourself becoming part of the story in a weird way.

The picture is a complete collaboration between me and the sitter. There's no stolen moment. It's a discussion – a visual lesson they are teaching me about life, and I'm just learning it and recording my lessons on film.

This interview has been condensed and edited. Learn more about Platon's work here:http://www.thepeoplesportfolio.org/

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

One photo of a pensive Congolese woman in her distinctive makeup could be mistaken for a Renaissance painting. Another, of a coal plant sending smoke plumes over a town in China, looks like a still from a 1950s propaganda film. And another, of a little girl yawning during an Indonesian festival, will just make you smile.

The images from the ninth annual Sony World Photography Awards, the largest photo competition in the world, come in many styles and flavors. More than 230,000 photos, taken from the past 12 months, were submitted by photographers in 186 countries. The World Photography Organization announced the grand prize winners for the 14 categories, ranging from sport to travel, last week.

The top award, the L'Iris d'Or Photographer of the Year, along with a $25,000 prize, went to a sobering subject: acid attack victims, documented by Iranian photojournalist Asghar Khamseh in his heart-wrenching series "Fire of Hatred."

The winning and shortlisted photos are on display at the Somerset House in London until May 8. We selected a few featured entries that show the faces and places we cover on our blog.

Editor's Note: Viewers may find the last image in this sequence disturbing.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the#NPRreadshashtag. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories.

From national security editor Philip Ewing:

Some of the most promising potential homes for life away from Earth are the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. NASA and researchers want to "visit" them all — but given the cost, time and distances involved with sending missions to the outer solar system, they must think very carefully about picking their shots, as Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine reports.

When scientists do reach the point of planning a mission, spaceflight challenges don't get much tougher: The radiation and gravity forces are brutal. Plus some potential missions require inventing whole new techniques for astro-amphibious-underwater exploration. A future mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, for example, could involve sending a probe across the expanse of space, then having it drop a robot submarine through the crust of ice on the surface to explore the liquid ocean below. Another proposal calls for sending a spacecraft to Saturn's Titan — a moon larger than our own, and larger even than the former planet Pluto — which would launch what I insist be called a Space Boat to sail on its lakes of methane.

Air & Space also details the case for life on Saturn's moon of Enceladus, and makes clear that exploration in the coming decades may determine whether life in the universe is unique to Earth or whether — just as probably — it's abundant.

From business news intern Naomi LaChance:

When Toronto-based photographer Zun Lee started taking the "orphaned Polaroids" of African-Americans that he'd bought secondhand and uploading them to Facebook, he found that they were not so orphaned after all. Facebook's facial recognition system gave him suggested tags of people he had never met, but whose memories he held in his hand.

Lee is an artist, but at his computer he had waded into a whole new territory.

Teju Cole explores this artist's responsibility, the responsibility to protect intimate moments, with great tact and poise in his new essay in the New York Times Magazine, The Digital Afterlife of Lost Family Photos. Cole writes: "Black Americans, for most of their time in this country, were named, traded and collected against their will. They were branded — physically tagged — both to hurt and control them."

In a time of mass data collection and widespread surveillance, Lee's conundrum faces new urgency, one that finds its ideal home in the writing of Teju Cole. If you have family photos or use a computer, you should read this piece.

From executive producer for editorial franchises Tracy Wahl:

I came across this piece in a typical way — I saw it on social media from an old friend at the Dallas Morning News, Mike Drago.

I had never heard of the writer and didn't care very much about the Johnny Manziel story. But once I started reading, I was hooked.

A reminder: Manziel is a free-agent quarterback, most recently with the Cleveland Browns. A Dallas County grand jury indicted him on a misdemeanor assault charge brought by his ex-girlfriend.

Commentator Father Joshua J. Whitfield, a priest at St. Rita Catholic Church in North Dallas, ultimately asks us to think of Manziel as a man who can change.

Whitfield pushes all of us to ask about our own role in creating a sports celebrity that tolerates domestic abuse. But it's not as if we can just examine one moment in the process of creating a superstar.

Check out this incredible writing about Manziel:

"His is a story of family history and upbringing: of an East Texas wildcatter, cockfighting sort of history. An upbringing by overly-driven parents of a child never given a chance to grow up into a man. It's a story of the cult of sports and the cult of the child, woven together and raised almost to the status of religion, a religion become abuse in some families, a religion of constant, endless, physically harmful year-round sports shoved down the throats of children for the sake of dreams typically shattered by the age of 18."

Powerful stuff.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Alma Haser’s portraits are conventionally stylish and slick — until you look at the face. Or what’s left of it. Her series “Cosmic Surgery” disguises portrait subjects behind a geometric origami mask that’s both beautiful and discombobulating.

“There is something quite alien about the manipulated faces, as if they belong to some futuristic next generation,” Haser writes in her artist’s statement.

(Alma Haser)

(Alma Haser)

To render the kaleidoscope-surgery effect, she prints about 90 smaller versions of the original photograph. Then she spends hours, sometimes days, folding the photos into intricate shapes inspired by the Japanese Kusudama origami. As a finishing touch, she layers the origami of dissected eyes, noses, and mouths across the face of the original portrait.

(Alma Haser)

(Alma Haser)

(Alma Haser)

(Alma Haser)

Haser started out as a self-portrait artist, but has since switched gears, photographing friends and strangers. She's now added a nifty feature to the “Cosmic Surgery” website that lets you create your own cosmic facelift by uploading your portrait and choosing one of two origami shapes to deface your face.

The Studio 360 interns gave it a go…

(Danielle Fox )

(Afi Yellow-Duke)

(Kate Essig)

These are snapshots of America's collective unconscious.

Cindy Sherman grew up in the era when old movies filled our late nights. She wrote about going to a dinner party with her parents when she was a child, and ending up in the basement watching “Rear Window” alone. As an artist in the 1980s, she began taking self-portraits in costumes and settings that called those old black-and-white movies to mind — they were “stills” for films that didn’t exist, but might have. She would change in the back of a van and emerge on the street as an ingénue, a movie star, a soon-to-be murder victim. In a media-saturated age, “Untitled Film Stills” suggested that Sherman's identity as a woman was constructed from other people’s narratives. They influenced a generation of artists who play with identity as a kind of performance. Photography curator Eva Respini sees her influence extending beyond the art world — to basically anyone who has ever taken a selfie. “The selfie is not about who you really are,” Respini says. “It’s about how you look best in the camera to your friends, creating a narrative of what you’re doing.”

(Originally aired October 11, 2013)

A selection of photos from Cindy Sherman's original series:

Untitled Film Still 21, 1978

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 34, 1979

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Untitled Film Still 25, 1978

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Cindy Sherman's latest self-portraits are on view at Metro Pictures gallery in New York through June 11

Untitled 578, 2016

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

Untitled 577, 2016

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

Untitled 574, 2016

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

Untitled 579, 2016

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

Untitled 564, 2016

(Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

If you have a favorite sports photo from the past 60 years, it's very possible Neil Leifer took it: There's Muhammad Ali standing victorious over Sonny Liston ... Or there's Baltimore Colt Alan Ameche plunging over the goal line in 1958 to beat the New York Giants in the so-called Greatest Game Ever Played.

Working for the likes of Sports Illustrated and Time, Leifer has collected many stories with those memorable shots into a new book called Relentless. He says sports journalism is part luck, but, he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "what separates the top photographers from the run-of-the-mill photographers is that when you get lucky a good photographer doesn't miss."

Interview Highlights

On how he became a sports photojournalist

I was a very good student and of course, my parents, being typical Jewish, Lower East Side, uneducated [parents], they thought they had a budding doctor or lawyer. I really, quite honestly, never knew there was a profession called photojournalism. Photography was a hobby. I was a huge sports fan. I lived and breathed the Brooklyn Dodgers. ... I thought it was just going to be a passing hobby that I grew out of. And one day I woke up and in fact I realized you could make a living doing this.

On his famous shot of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston (which you can see here)

I have no doubt that when my obit is written one day, the Ali-Liston picture is the picture that everyone is going to see. ... It's without question my best-known picture. I like to think that it's a wonderful photograph, but there's a whole lot of luck in sports photography. And one always sounds very modest when you throw around a word like luck ... but in this case it's really true. I was clearly in the right seat. The photographer between Ali's legs was looking up at his rear end.

On how the Ali-Liston photo has taken on more meaning and significance over time

This picture — which at the end of the century people were calling the greatest sports photo of the century — didn't even make the cover [of Sports Illustrated]. I think it really grew as Ali's legend grew. ... What the picture shows is the young Ali, this handsome, beautiful athlete and as he got older and as his career moved along. This picture is him at his best, at his very best, and it's the way people want to remember him. ... It wasn't considered that important the week that it happened.

On his favorite photograph, which is actually a different Muhammad Ali photo (you can see that photo, titled Ali-Williams (Overhead), here)

I love it because it's the only photograph I've taken in my entire career where I can't see a single thing I would do differently.

On challenges sports photographers face today

The big competition today is not the other photographers. ... Television does such a good job. ... How do you come up with original pictures? When I started out, you put a camera in the hockey net — you were the first person to ever do it. Today, both nets in the Stanley Cup and every game have cameras in [them]. ... Today there are four cameras on the [basketball] backboard. ... You're competing with a visual that people are seeing instantly on television. ...

How do you give people something that's worth waiting for when the magazine comes out four days later when they've seen it instantly when it happened on television? ... By Wednesday when you get your Sports Illustrated, what is there to look forward to? The job that a Sports Illustrated photographer has today is to make it worth waiting for — and I think they do a pretty good job of it ... but it's hard. To be a photographer today at Sports Illustrated is a whole lot harder than it was when I was there.

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Paul Fuentes' pop art mash-ups combine familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. In his pastel-backed photos, this Mexico City-based graphic designer puts beards on balloons, turns limes into LPs, and wraps sheep in sushi rolls. The result is the photo version of seeing your third grade teacher at the supermarket: out of place, but intriguing. 

Take, for example, this image below. While your eyes expect a picture of a sandwich, the delectability disappears when you realize it'd mean biting into a snake. But if, instead, your first glance says it's a picture of a serpent? It seems much less murderous when you realize it's a meal. 

Paul Fuentes' mash-ups combine items you don't usually see together (hopefully)

(Paul Fuentes Design )

Regardless of what you see in Fuentes' work, you'll want to see it. His Instagram account is full of surprising and devious delights, like a mash-up turning a bar of soap into a Popsicle, or lipstick emerging from a bullet. My favorite image is of a pair of delicious-looking doughnut handcuffs, allowing the wearer to be just 4 bites (and some very sticky wrists) away from freedom.  

Doughnuts make handcuffs in this pop art mash-up by Paul Fuentes

(Paul Fuentes Design )

Fuentes' inspiration for making these mash-ups came from seeing typical pictures of food in his Instagram feed. "I decided to do the same but with a nice twist," he writes via email. "Trying a little bit to change the meaning of food."

He said he likes to think that each object has a perfect match for its mash-up, and it takes some time to decide what the perfect pairing might be. But once he finds the perfect match, Fuentes allows his audience to decipher what, if anything, it means. "Every viewer can decide what they want," he writes. "That's what art is supposed to be — a different interpretation for everyone."

Pop art mash-up by Paul Fuentes

(Paul Fuentes Design ) 

Lipstick turns sinister in this image by graphic designer Paul Fuentes

(Paul Fuentes Design ) 

A pop art mash-up by graphic designer Paul Fuentes

(Paul Fuentes Design )

Paul Fuentes' pop art mash-up of a burger and cake

(Paul Fuentes Design )

A pop art mash-up of a sheep and sushi by Paul Fuentes

(Paul Fuentes Design )